A New Hope
From the ashes of the EU arises an alternative vision for the future of the continent
“The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way.” So begins Charlie Chaplin’s soaring speech in The Great Dictator, a must-see if you have not already had the pleasure. Speaking in 1940 against fascism, Chaplin’s words, most regrettably, ring as true today as they did in his own time. How has this happened?
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the west promised justice, liberty, and prosperity in order to defeat communism. Since communism’s failure, however, we have seen throughout the world a slow retreat of these ideals towards authoritarianism, which, in comparison to democracy, better serves the interests of the socioeconomic elite. This is the global context that has shaped the emergence and evolution of the EU over the past several decades. The origins of the failure of the EU have their roots in the body’s conception and formation, but, focusing on more recent history, it is clear that the EU was seriously wounded by the unresolved Greek debt crisis. European citizens came to the startling realisation that bonds and bureaucracy, not just bullets, could destroy systematically the prosperity of a member nation and subvert the will of its People. Then, out of the blue, Brexit delivered a body blow that left Brussels more bloodied than bruised. In the present moment, failure to act in Cataluyna has cost the EU whatever iota of legitimacy it had left in the eyes of democrats around the world. Like the hare in the headlights, EU leaders, for want of a better word, are paralysed in suicidal bewilderment as the fascist Spanish government prepares the most blatant attack on natural rights seen in a western country in living memory.
This is the world we are living in, one in which it is necessary to link the definition of natural rights when using the term, so that the loud and violent stampede of authoritarians may understand (or, more likely, ignore) the ideals that are at stake. A world where ignorance of the first principles of ethics pervades every strata of society, to the point where Theresa May mindlessly repeats Spain’s unconscionable position that the law has primacy over justice, despite the former being a derivative of the latter. A world where the BBC does not think twice before giving a platform to the Spanish Foreign Minister so that he can lie through his teeth, practically unchallenged, claiming that police violence in Catalunya is fake news, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. A world in which Angela Merkel sacrifices Germany’s dignity and special duty to combat fascism because the status quo enriches the average Steuerzahler, and where French fears over the future makeup of their fatherland, or perhaps concern for the steady supply of Brussels-based jobs for SciencesPo graduates, keeps Emmanuel Macron missing in inaction.
Just as some members of the Democratic Party of the United States are making valiant attempts to reform their deeply corrupt party, so too are Europeans who, firm in their commitment to seeing democracy, prosperity, and peace flourish on the continent, believe a better EU is possible. DiEM25, led by Yanis Varoufakis, is such an attempt. The movement’s manifesto lays out the core of the argument against the current iteration of the EU,
For all their concerns with global competitiveness, migration and terrorism, only one prospect truly terrifies the Powers of Europe: Democracy! They speak in democracy’s name but only to deny, exorcise and suppress it in practice…
…At the Heart of our disintegrating EU there lies a guilty deceit: a highly political, top-down, opaque decision-making process is presented as ‘apolitical’, ‘technical’, ‘procedural’ and ‘neutral’. Its purpose is to prevent Europeans from exercising democratic control over their money, communities, working conditions and environment.
The DiEM25 manifesto argues that, “Two dreadful options dominate: retreat into the cocoon of our nation-states, or surrender to the Brussels democracy-free zone. There must be another course. And there is! It is the one official Europe resists with every sinew of its authoritarian mind-set: a surge of democracy!”
The manifesto continues, laying out the movement’s priorities as follows,
Our immediate priority is (A) full transparency in decision-making (e.g. live-streaming of European Council, Ecofin and Eurogroup meetings, full disclosure of trade negotiation docusments, publication of ECB minutes etc.) and (B) the urgent redeployment of existing EU institutions in the pursuit of innovative policies that genuinely address the crises of debt, banking, inadequate investment, rising poverty and migration.
Our medium-term goal, once Europe’s various crises have been stabilised, is to convene a constitutional assembly where Europeans will deliberate on how to bring forth, by 2025, a full-fledged European democracy, featuring a sovereign Parliament that respects national self-determination and sharing power with national Parliaments, regional assemblies and municipal councils.
The truth is that the forces against democracy are powerful, entrenched, and unrelenting. Just as progressive Americans plan for a future without the Democratic Party, while simultaneously seeking and hoping for its reform, the movement for democracy in Europe must learn to chew gum and walk at the same time. DiEM25’s success is not inevitable, so we cannot limit our efforts simply to recapturing the EU from bureaucracy, protectionism, and monopoly using the existing framework. We must also pursue different means to the same end of democratising Europe, so that our strategy becomes multi-pronged, thus opening up multiple avenues to victory, and providing a more complex resistance for the powers that be to counter. Although there is indeed a third option that avoids retreating into the cocoon of our nation-states, or surrendering to the Brussels democracy-free zone, there are a number of ways in which a surge in democracy might manifest itself.
The new proposal is simple: if the EU is not reformed, it must be destroyed so that it can be rebuilt.
Catalunya has offered the world a clear blueprint of how grassroots activism can sweep a nation to independence, raising the possibility that other regions will secede in turn. We have already seen in the past week overwhelming support for greater autonomy in referendums held in a couple of key Italian regions. Veneto and Lombardy are only two of six regions in Italy in which there are formal, politically-organised secessionist movements, the others being Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Sardinia, Sicily, and South Tyrol. It is a similar picture elsewhere in Europe: Flanders and Wallonia in Belgium; Brittany, Corsica, Savoy and Occitania in France; Gavaria, East Frisia, Frarnconia, Lusatia, and Schleswig-Holstein in Germany; Andalusia, the Basque Country, the Canary Islands, Castile, Galicia, and Valencia in Spain; and, of course, Scotland and Wales, even London itself, in the U.K. There is hardly a country in Europe that is not facing greater calls for autonomy, if not outright independence, from core regions within their territory. No doubt this is why the current EU powers have an interest in seeing Catalunya fail. Their inevitable disappointment will be savoured.
Throughout Europe, and indeed the west as a whole, there is a common realisation that has slowly crept into the public mind, namely that our governments, supported and strengthened by the anti-democratic nature of the EU, do not represent the interests of the People. Whether this is a function of the scale of modern day states, or our institutions’ susceptibility to corruption, or other causes, is open to debate. There are reasons to believe, however, that moving away from the current nation-state model of the present EU towards a city-nation-state model could have significant advantages. A government responsible for a smaller, more ideologically homogenous population is in a better position to administrate and adapt to the will of the People. Moreover, localised government does not necessarily have to give up the positives of a globalised economy to achieve greater democratic representation, and a city-nation-state could in fact be in a better position to mitigate the negatives of economic policy due to its more responsive nature. Furthermore, a smaller, more local government is more easily held to account, making it less susceptible to corruption, which is also easier to rectify when discovered. And, most importantly, such an EU would be an experiment in democracy, and a demonstration of the Tiebout hypothesis, which holds that people vote with their feet by moving to jurisdictions that provide the best public goods and government policies. Governments would therefore come under immense pressure to offer policies in line with natural law, growing the tree of justice from which we may pick the fruit of prosperity. Such a dynamic policy environment would make infinitely more feasible those policies, such as Georgism, that are of overwhelming importance precisely because they threaten to disenfranchise the monopolies that have captured our complex and often-distant political systems. You can imagine London, Paris, Berlin, Sicily, Corisca, Scotland, Brittany, Tatarstan, Aragon, Catalunya…each it’s own nation, it’s own People, governed by its own laws for its own interests, while maintaining the interconnectivity and multicultural vitality that we have come to love as Europeans.
The points above are not intended to be detailed argument or comprehensive analysis, but rather should serve as food for thought pending further refinement and debate. Too often today it seems as if our world is framed by a false dichotomy between two choices—Republican or Democrat, Brexiteer or Remainer, separatist or unionist. We suffer from a lack of imagination on a range of issues, and it is no different when it comes to the debate on the future of the European Union. The simple analysis is that either the EU will fail, or it will reform and succeed, but there is a whole world of other outcomes worth exploring that have been made possible by the extraordinary moment in time in which we find ourselves living. We must seize the moment and push back against the machine men with machine minds and machine hearts, against the brutes who despise us, who treat us like cattle or cannon fodder, against the dictators who enslave us in order to free themselves, and against the men who by the promise of justice and prosperity have come to power, but who have abandoned their morals and Peoples one after the other so that they may build a more imperfect model of political and economic repression suited to their own ends. The European Union these men have built is quickly becoming ash in the wind, but Europe will rise like a phoenix, built by those of us “who believe in peace and freedom — you know who you are. We are unity, and we are unstoppable!”
Citizens, then in the name of democracy, let us all…unite!
Edit 8PM GMT 23/10/17. As if on cue, Juncker just said, “I don’t want the European Union to be made up of 85 states tomorrow.”
