What Europe Meant To Me
I used to be a great supporter of the European idea, aka the European project -- "an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe", to be arrived at through social, political, diplomatic, economic and other means. In the 1980s, European Nuclear Disarmament's manifesto for a "nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal” -- for a Europe "beyond the blocs, whole and united" -- seemed to embody this idea in rather more concrete terms than the drier, more bureaucratic language of the Treaty of Rome; and the implosion of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe at the end of the decade gave many of us cause to think that END's goals might even be realised in our lifetimes.
But it was not to be: the early optimisim soon soured in the face of the triumphalism of Western politicians, treating the newly liberated Eastern European countries as giant laboratories for the imposition of neo-liberal economic ideas regardless of their social costs, and eventually driving Russia (a country which in the early 1990s was open to and ready to learn from Western Europe) back into its current isolation. (But for the likes of John Major and George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin might still be a low-level KGB functionary.) The idea of a "Europe of the regions", floated in the early 1990s as an option for the future organisation of the EU, was gradually sidelined (the UK's vociferous opposition to and deliberate misrepresentation of the word "federalism", and its addiction to a centralised Parliamentary model, was partly to blame). The idea of a "social Europe", developed by Jacques Delors as a means of co-opting trade unions and socialist and social democratic parties into support for managed capitalism, was similarly sidelined as the EU's institutions, the Commission and the Parliament in particular, were captured by corporate interests with a wholly-pro-business agenda. Recently, these interests have been pushing for the watering down or even repeal of environmental directives because they allegedly interfere with business growth, and for the adoption of such monstrosities as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which will effectively destroy environmental, health and food safety standards and subordinate national Parliaments to secret arbitration tribunals run by corporate lawyers. This is most definitely not the EU we wanted, the EU we dreamed of.
And then, of course, there's the alleged austerity crisis, which since 2008 has been managed solely in the interests of bankers and financial arbitrageurs, has crippled economic activity and resulted in soaring youth unemployment in several Southern European countries, and has now reached the point where certain countries are being told that their government's popular mandate is less important than a position paper from a Brussels bureaucrat. But I hope that the Greeks, this coming Sunday, have the courage to vote "no" to the further austerity measures Brussels wishes to impose on them, irrespective of the considerable short-term pain that will result. Firstly, it will show that small countries are standing up to the bullying of larger ones; secondly, it will give heart to the anti-austerity movements in other EU member states, Spain and Portugal in particular, and help promote wider resistance to the ECB's addiction to deflation, debt repayment in full, and an end to government borrowing; and, thirdly, it might, just possibly, force the likes of Mario Draghi and Jean-Claude Juncker to pause to reconsider their actions. But I say "might" and "just possibly" because their history has shown over and over again that they and other EU leaders are unable to grasp the consequences of their actions until after they have occurred, when it is too late to rectify the damage they have caused. But if their arrogance and stupidity is unchanged, then it's not just the eurozone that some EU member states will be leaving; we'll be looking at the start of the break-up of the EU itself.
But it was not to be: the early optimisim soon soured in the face of the triumphalism of Western politicians, treating the newly liberated Eastern European countries as giant laboratories for the imposition of neo-liberal economic ideas regardless of their social costs, and eventually driving Russia (a country which in the early 1990s was open to and ready to learn from Western Europe) back into its current isolation. (But for the likes of John Major and George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin might still be a low-level KGB functionary.) The idea of a "Europe of the regions", floated in the early 1990s as an option for the future organisation of the EU, was gradually sidelined (the UK's vociferous opposition to and deliberate misrepresentation of the word "federalism", and its addiction to a centralised Parliamentary model, was partly to blame). The idea of a "social Europe", developed by Jacques Delors as a means of co-opting trade unions and socialist and social democratic parties into support for managed capitalism, was similarly sidelined as the EU's institutions, the Commission and the Parliament in particular, were captured by corporate interests with a wholly-pro-business agenda. Recently, these interests have been pushing for the watering down or even repeal of environmental directives because they allegedly interfere with business growth, and for the adoption of such monstrosities as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which will effectively destroy environmental, health and food safety standards and subordinate national Parliaments to secret arbitration tribunals run by corporate lawyers. This is most definitely not the EU we wanted, the EU we dreamed of.
And then, of course, there's the alleged austerity crisis, which since 2008 has been managed solely in the interests of bankers and financial arbitrageurs, has crippled economic activity and resulted in soaring youth unemployment in several Southern European countries, and has now reached the point where certain countries are being told that their government's popular mandate is less important than a position paper from a Brussels bureaucrat. But I hope that the Greeks, this coming Sunday, have the courage to vote "no" to the further austerity measures Brussels wishes to impose on them, irrespective of the considerable short-term pain that will result. Firstly, it will show that small countries are standing up to the bullying of larger ones; secondly, it will give heart to the anti-austerity movements in other EU member states, Spain and Portugal in particular, and help promote wider resistance to the ECB's addiction to deflation, debt repayment in full, and an end to government borrowing; and, thirdly, it might, just possibly, force the likes of Mario Draghi and Jean-Claude Juncker to pause to reconsider their actions. But I say "might" and "just possibly" because their history has shown over and over again that they and other EU leaders are unable to grasp the consequences of their actions until after they have occurred, when it is too late to rectify the damage they have caused. But if their arrogance and stupidity is unchanged, then it's not just the eurozone that some EU member states will be leaving; we'll be looking at the start of the break-up of the EU itself.