What to do with the European Union?
The European Union is certainly a topic that has been discussed to death, so I decided to dig it up just to slam another couple nails into the coffin.
The European Union, founded in 1992 in the Dutch town of Maastricht as a way to build on the already existing European Community. Since then it’s grown to cover the majority of the continent, with 520 million citizens and the second biggest economy on earth, it certainly is one of the strongest forces on earth.
It’s also one of the most complex states of history and can be a confusing mess at the best times and completely beyond understanding at the worst times. European Council, Council of Europe, Council of the European Union… It’s a bureaucracy that makes the Chinese Empires or Egypt look like anarchist utopias.
Yet all of this means opportunity and a constant barrage of questions for anarchists and socialists all over the world and intense debate about WHAT the right approach is to this multicultural international half-democratic bureaucratic semi-state. In this essay, I will explain my likely imperfect answer to this huge question for the European left.
NOTE: This essay will include a lot of jargon and confusing EU things. Before reading this, I recommend watching some videos or reading about the European Union to understand the basics of it’s functioning. I will post some videos on the subject below:
How DOES the EU function? by Avery Thing
The European Parliament explained by Ciceroni
The European Commission explained by Ciceroni
The Council of the European Union explained by Ciceroni
First of all, it’s probably a good thing to explore some of the victories and failures the EU has given to the left and leftist principles in general.
In terms of victories, the by far biggest victory the EU has achieved is that it’s one of the greatest triumphs of internationalism and consensus democracy. Not only has it shown that consensus democracy can work on massive scales, it has shown it can be done internationally. Yet, this also shows one of the weaknesses of consensus democracy; it’s horrifically centrist. This is one of the big reasons why the EU is so neoliberal.
Another victory of the EU is labour rights. The EU has laid minimums for labour rights that have improved the standard of living across the continent. One of the examples of this being the EU-wide implementation of parental leave for both parents, which has increased paternal leave in countries like the Netherlands from 3 days to 6 weeks.
The EU has also delivered us massive victories on consumer rights, such as the ending of roaming charges inside the common market, the great pushes for privacy laid out in the General Data Protection Regulation and possibly in the future, the right to repair. It has fought monopolies and oligopolies like Apple and Google.
Freedom of movement of people has shown that a world without borders can work and even prosper. Being able to live, work, study and enjoy the culture of all over the EU is a great thing in many cases, but it also has had downsides in terms of labour rights and competition inside the common market. Not something that can’t be fixed! It’s a shame there is an outer border though…
And lastly, the EU has been a massive victory for peace and cooperation inside the continent. It’s one of the main contributors to the relative peace in Northern Ireland and has largely avoided the wars that have riddled Europe since for millennia. It has worked on peace in the Balkans, for minority rights and for womens’ and LGBT rights inside and outside the Union.
Yet, it has has had and is having massive failures. It indeed has a big democratic deficit in general and is neoliberal to a fault. This is due to the consensus based democratic system in most cases. To get all states inside the EU to agree to a policy, it has to be really centrist in general. However, this is not to say it wouldn’t work in leftist circles; it’d just find the centre of the leftist solution in those cases.
Another reason why is because of capitalism. The EU is truly a lobbyists paradise, and not the good kind of lobbyists such as unions and low-level government either… they’re almost exclusively corporate lobbyists. There are almost 30.000 lobbyists in Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxemburg City; compared to some 779 European parliamentarians and commissioners. That’s almost 20 lobbyists for every MEP and Commissioner. Only Washington D.C. is a bigger circus of lobbying.
The European Union has also been one of the biggest participants in (neo)colonialism and imperialism around the globe, inside and outside the Union itself. From the massive austerity measures forced on Greece to keep up the interest gains for Western-European banks as the German industry out competes Greek industry, to dumping via the since then abolished export subsidy and adjusted Common Agricultural Policy. Indeed, it’s one of the biggest issues with the EU that every leftist should care about.
It also has been unable to fight the tide of fascism inside the EU, burgeoning in countries such as Italy, Hungary, Poland and Austria. Not out of lack of trying though; but out of lack of power the union has. These four countries back each other and defend each other from consequences as liberal democracy is broken down and people are facing so-called Slave laws.
What is to be done? Considering all this, it’s hard to come to a conclusion about what the EU is to the left. Is it another tool? Is it another obstacle? Can it be salvaged and turned to something anarchist, or is it something that will be abolished under any such system?
An Alternative Europe is possible?
Can we, as anarchists, build an alternative Europe? It’s complicated.
The European Union, as it exists now, has many issues. To call it anywhere near democratic would be an insult to democracy; even imperfect liberal democracy. However, it’s not completely undemocratic either. For reform, there are possible routes one could take inside the European Union. However any such attempt would require unanimous approval of all current member states; thus, it would inherently require a seizure of those states. This isn’t a very anarchist route, but it’s a possible route to take if we want to try a reformist route of implementing anarchism.
This, in theory, would be a possible route to take. Yet it has many issues; such as anarchism not having a state at all, for one. However, they might be willing to recognise an anarchist confederation of communes as a member “state”, if the union is already leftist enough, that is. This seems super unlikely however.
Building dual power and then rebuilding a new EU based on anarchist principles could be an option, yet that seems like throwing out a lot of the good the EU has achieved and reversing decades of progress in internationalism. This is something we shouldn’t want as internationalists and socialists.
It seems that the only possible way of preserving the European Union is reformism. I’m not going to go into the debate on if reformism works or is a valuable tactic, but if we assume it works, it would be the best way turn the European Union into an anarchist project.
However, there is a middle way I want to propose. Radical centrism, if you will. As we as anarchists build dual power and work to weaken and compete with the state, we could use parliamentary methods to influence it. Parliamentary action is something we should participate in as anarchists, even if we think it ineffective, because at least it weakens our opponents and gives us more visibility. It gives us a voice. Rather us than the christian democrats, after all!
If we do this across all of Europe and participate in European Elections we could get a voice inside Europe, and x/751th share of a veto. We would have influence on approving the European Commission and get influence on approving their proposed laws. As the EU becomes increasingly pressured by the far-right, they will look for alternatives and for alternative coalitions; and we could play a role in those. Of course, we wouldn’t be able to get everything we’d ever want but we would be able to push through democratising reforms and other reforms in accordance with anarchist principles. We could use the EU as another organ of power to safeguard dual power, minority rights and anarchist experiments.
Any such plan for reform would include having to somehow get into a leftist coalition on a national level as well, so we get influence in the council of ministers, the European council and the commission. After all, those are elected or made up by the national level politicians.
This would not mean reforming the EU is possible by just doing this. But it would be a valuable first step towards any of such colossal undertakings. It’s worth a shot, I suppose. It’s hard to imagine it’ll work. But salvaging what we can from one of the greatest experiments at internationalism in history is worth a shot. An Alternative Europe being possible might be a long shot, but it’s one we should take. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll hit our target.
Love, Ina.
