Of course there should be a United European Federation, with a common market and equitable living standards, a common currency, a progressive international policy and the ability to call together armed forces to defend itself.
Global questions necessitate at least continental answers. World poverty; imperialism and the international repercussions of war leading to the mass movement of whole peoples, famine, global warming, the meretricious, criminal, utterly self seeking behaviors of the super wealthy and their control of the banks, the corporations and the world's capital, all of it and more, requires at least a continental wide response.
All this is absolutely and objectively obvious but, it might be argued, fatally abstract. After all, look at the main obstacles in the way of progress towards a European Continental Federation based on meeting the concerns listed above! Front and centre is the current EU itself, its apparatus, leadership, its policy and structure and the totally compromised political and financial class that holds the stinking edifice up. Then there are the proto-reactionary nationalist movements and parties in individual European countries that recognise the weakness of the current EU but who promote the entirely utopian and reactionary view that individual nations can somehow isolate themselves from the worse effects of the predominant global social and economic system of late, rapacious capitalism. The idea that any version of the current EU structure, or, alternatively, the 'winning back' of some sort of spurious national independence from Europe can open up the possibility of the Europe that the mass of Europeans, not to say the rest of the world need, is simply absurd.
It is therefore not that the goal of a united Europe based on an alternative to the tail end of a vicious, out of date and poisonous social system that is abstract - in the classic sense that it has no connection to real life - on the contrary such a Europe was never more required. Rather it is the utterly abstract ideas that either the reform of Europe's current structure or simply that falling back into the nation state, have ever offered any sort of means to get there that are the abstractions, that are completely remote from real life. Of course there will be EU reforms and, conversely national upheavals on the way to the united Europe that is needed. But without the goal of an utterly different united Europe, committed to a social transformation, in this epoch solely nationally based efforts in that direction will all fail and all die with horrible consequences and in short order.
It is the question: should we get out or should we stay in the EU that is, today, the most dangerous abstraction. In Britain, the ruling Tory party have launched a referendum along those lines. The Tory leaders' goal is to try and re-cement the party's social and political base. And despite the new right, represented by UKIP with its 4 million votes in the last General Election, claiming that the referendum vote is the most important vote that the British will have in 'in their lifetimes', in reality either outcome will change very little. The core of the current Europe, the Eurozone, is already without Britain. And in Britain itself the economic dominance of 'the City of London' and the big international corporations remains untouched.
Most of the new left in mainland Europe are still struggling with the idea that the EU as it stands cannot be reformed. The treatment of Syriza and Greece was a sharp lesson in that regard. Even Podemos in Spain, which has argued in the past that it will win the reforms that the Spanish people need from the EU because of the larger weight of Spain, is reviewing its approach to the EU's structure. Europe's new left were already committed to an international view of their struggle, which was one reason offered why a section of the old Syriza leadership made the potentially disastrous decision not to launch their own currency when threatened over debt. It is a paradox but nevertheless an essential paradox to grasp as Greece shows, that while there is certainly no road for any single European nation to get to a socialist society on its own, the route to a socialist Europe may pass through nationally based initiatives which then can become a centre of an alternative to the existing European structures.
To get away from the abstraction, 'inside or outside the EU' and instead to begin to develop the real transitional measures towards a genuinely progressive Europe, an 'alternative' Europe has to be built. In the intense revolutionary days of 1905 and 1917 Russia, soviets or councils were directly established by soldiers, workers, peasants and their parties, which grew in their popular legitimacy and created a dual power in Russian society. Many practical steps have been taken by different sections of the new left in Europe to build initiatives that echo the idea of a popular alternative to the rigmarole of Europe's current proto-state structures. Today, with huge left surges into mainstream political life and even government in Greece, Spain and Portugal, with projected left developments in Ireland and a new mass Labour party with left leadership in the UK, there are new and much more prominent platforms to begin the construction of an alternative Europe. This might start with a European debt conference, focused initially on Greece who have called for it and which issues a new programme to the whole of Europe for fair and progressive debt relief. We shall then see how the popular legitimacy of such measures contrasts with that garnered by the decaying institutions of the current EU as the left begins its work towards a popular new European Constitution.
And the British referendum? It is not a turning point for Britain's future. It is not a new 1975 and has much more in common with a second 2011. It is a vote preeminently about local concerns and British politics. British voters afraid or appalled at the prospects of more immigrants will vote 'no'. And most left or progressively minded people (with the exception of those influenced by the politics of the 'British Road to Socialism' and the British Communist Party) will probably vote to stay in the EU in order to prevent what would, and will, be seen as a racist (and not an anti-capitalist) victory. What matters is what happens before and after the ballot.