by
Dimitris Konstantakopoulos
Fukuyama, an
ex-official of the State Department, with very poor intellectual
capacities, became world famous in 1990 with his idea that History
has ended. Now History is back, in full steam.
One may
agree or disagree with Brexit. But he has to admit that here we have
to do with a clear anti-estabishment revolt of the British, a revolt
with clearly national but also clear class characteristics. Look for
instance the pattern of the vote. City voted overwhelmingly to remain
in the Union, the popular, de-industrialized and agricultural regions
of the country, the “lost of globalization”, very much for
Brexit. (As has happened in many cases, during the collapse of the
Soviet Union, nationalism was not the only direct reason of the quest
for independence of the Republics, antagonisms for power and property
were very much the reason, still it was the national idea which
offered a ready basis of legitimacy for the break down).
The result
represents also an enormous historic defeat for Dr. Scheuble and the
whole German leadership, it understands or not (as so many times has
happened in German history).
The
question is not Britain, the question concerns all Europe
It is not
only that Britain is exiting the EU. The Union itself has entered a
process of a probable collapse as a structure. This process will
leave nothing unaffected. Internal equilibriums in various national
states, the European economic order and geopolitics. It is not only
the neoliberal (under German co-domination) EU which will probably
leave the scene of history. It is all the European “ancien regime”
which is prepared to leave. At least the one consecrated with the
adoption of the Maastrich Treaty and the triumph of neoliberalism.
(Indirectly also with the political choice to go on with NATO
enlargement, of which the EU enlargement was the political-economic
part).
Let us hope
that the collapse of post-national neoliberalism will not lead also
to the collapse of the fundamental achievements of European peoples
after 1945. From now on we enter a “chaotic” period, in the
mathematical sense of the word, with very different positive or
negative possibilities.
An
unacceptable Union
They will do
and say everything to reinterpret, to diminish and to distorde the
meaning of the British vote, still the verdict is unequivocal and its
significance explosive.
The European
Union, at least as it stands now and with the policies and the
arrogance it is producing, is simply unacceptable not just by
British, but by a clear majority of all European citizens. The
Maastricht system, institutional incarnation of neoliberalism (and
atlanticism), imposed in Western Europe in the wake, and under the
enormous impact of the collapse of “Soviet socialism”, and also
of the Mitterrand (and the British Left) defeat and capitulation and
of the German reunification, as it was executed, proved to be a
socially regressive, economically inefficient, politically
oligarchic, antidemocratic structure.
It is
collapsing in front of our eyes, as the result of the first wave
(2008) of the financial crisis and the way European leaders reacted
to it. Its destruction could catalyze a second wave of
financial-economic crisis.
The final
political blow to the legitimacy of the European Union was inflicted
last year, when all the world saw the way Berlin and Brussels crashed
Greece, a member of the European Union.
Even if they
did not say anything at the time, everybody drew the conclusions
about the nature and the character of this Union and of German policy
in Europe. It was only a question of time before the political
fall-out of this “victory” turns back, hitting those who
masterminded it. This is what is happening now.
Greeks were
too weak to succeed in their rebellion. British were too strong to
accept such a Union. It was History, not the Left or the Right, which
put European revolt on the order of the day. European Left proved in
2015 too hesitating, too weak, too unwilling to become the leader of
the Revolt till the end. A part of the European Right was there to
fill the vacuum, at least at that stage. And it did it.
By voting to
leave the European Union, British citizens confirmed, as
contradictory as it may seem, that they are deeply Europeans, in
their own way of course and following the particular path history and
the international position of their country has determined.
By voting
the way they voted, British did the same that did, before them, the
citizens of Cyprus, of France, of Netherlands, of Ireland, of Greece,
every time they had the opportunity. They rejected massively the
policies produced and imposed by the elites, both national and
European ones (the two more and more indistinguishable), in spite of
the enormous terror and propaganda campaigns to do the opposite.
European
elites answered to this repeated cry of peoples by saying to them
that they don’t understand what they are voting for, by ignoring
the direct expression of the popular will and by doing the exact
opposite of the policy they were mandated by their electorate to
apply, in complete disrespect of the most elementary democratic
principles.
The Marie
Antoinette syndrome
Maybe
European elites thought that, if there is divorce between people and
its rulers, they should change people, as once Berdold Brecht put it
to the adress of the rather deaf East German rulers of his time.
By doing it
time and again, they simply laid the ground for a strong European
nation to go one step further than previous revolts, voting clearly
for a divorce with Brussels. Though some forces in the British Left
have supported this, so it would be inexact to attribute everything
to the Right (the opposite happened in Greece where a part of the
Right supported the revolt), it did that under the initiative and the
domination of Rightist forces, because they were the only available
to play this role. This may have and it will have of course a huge
impact on the follow-up, but is not changing the fundamentals roots
and the character of the revolt. It makes more, not less necessary
for the European Left to review and change in a radical way its
policy towards both the national and the European questions. If it
will not do it, it will simply disappear just as the regime is
disappearing.
In Britain,
but also everywhere in the continent, the European Union is more and
more understood by a majority of the citizens as a system not
defending people from, but organizing social regression. (Some of its
leaders even say it openly, probably unaware of the political
consequences. Barroso for intance said some years ago that everybody
knows that future generations will live in worse conditions than in
the past! Some advisors of Sarkozy have stated openly their goal to
overrun completely the social project incarnated in the historic
compromise French communist resistance passed with De Gaulle, in
exchange for resigning from the goal of a revolution in France, but
also because De Gaulle supported in fact a “social-democratic”
and national project for his country).
In the
western and in the southern parts of Europe “European integration”
as it is realized, it is also more and more understood as a mechanism
to take back from people the political freedoms and rights they used
to enjoy after the victory over Nazism and Fascism, in 1945 and, as
far as it concerns Portugal, Spain and Greece, after the collapse of
the dictatorships in 1974. It is not a coincidence the fact that JP
Morgan for instance, published, some years ago, a report stating that
the huge obstacle to reform which needs to be overcome are the
“antifascist constitutions” South European nations acquired after
1974!
It is
important to remark at this point that there is from time to time a
lot of talk of “federation” in Europe, but no real project of
federation. By “federation” they mean, in really Orwellian terms,
not any federation of European nations and states. They mean their
subordination to the power of the High International Finance (and the
US as far as it concerns geopolitical questions). There is no more
telling symbol of this subordination, and of the enormous lie hidden
behind all federation talk, than the appointment of a Goldman Sachs
banker, Mr. Mario Dragui, in the position of the President of the
(independent, but only from people and nations) European Central
Bank, in fact to the position of an unelected European super Prime
Minister.
The revolt
of Europeans is developing along national lines for a number of
reasons. Most people, especially the most threatened, and in
particular the more traditional working class, feel the need, by
instinct, before they hear anybody telling them, of state and of
nation to protect them. Some people in the Left believe this is
reactionary, but they have to explain why is progressive the
replacement of national states from the international rule of big
Banks (many of them and the most important, they are not even
European!)
It is not a
coincidence, that those revolts are happening mainly in nations which
have, more or less, a strong national tradition. Cypriots have done
one of the first anti-colonial revolutions after the 2nd World War,
in spite of being a handful of people opposing an Empire. In the
administration councils of French multinationals they speak now
English, still France remains the country of the Marseillaise and it
has a tendency to remember it, every time it feels the need. By the
way, the first communist revolution in modern European history, the
Paris commune, begun because French bourgeoisie wanted to handle the
capital to the Germans. Netherlands is one of the birthplaces of
European freedom, the country of Spinoza. Ireland as a country has
been defined by the revolt against foreign rule. Greeks have mounted
a ferocious resistance against Hitler, when most European nations had
compromised with him. They inflicted in 1940-41 the first military
defeat in Europe to the Axis and their subsequent resistance has
provided to the Soviets and the “General Winter” precious time,
while it disturbed seriously Rommel’ s logistics in Africa. (By the
way they paid a very heavy price, as they were betrayed or crashed by
their Allies after the War. They risk now to suffer the same fate,
paying a terrible price for both their revolt and for the
unpreparedness and betrayal of their leaders).
Neoliberals
have been able to control nearly all the media and political
landscape, intellectuals and the public opinion. They were even
capable of erasing mush of History from the program of western
universities. You can be a graduated economist nowadays, but ignore
completely Keynes or Galbraith, a political scientist, without having
read one page of Plato or Aristotle, a psychologist ignoring the work
of Freud. Even most physicists do not know how Kopernic or Galileo
were thinking.
By
controlling everything, they fell victim of their success, believing
finally blindly their own propaganda. By saying so much time and on
so many occasions that “There is no Alternative”, they became
finally completely incapable of politically supporting and struggling
for their own alternative. Not to speak about understanding what is
going on and how people are thinking.
In the
environment of prosperity of the ’90s, all that seemed extremely
strong and successful. But as both the middle classes and more
oppressed social strata felt the pressure of the economic crisis and
then of the financial crisis of 2008, the material conditions for
neoliberal hegemony begun to collapse and with them the political and
ideological foundations of the European Union. Unsatisfied by the
pro-globalisation turn of many leftist politicians and parties, the
traditional working class has in some cases deserted them moving to
the far right, the other anti-establishment pole. The identities
neoliberalism tried to suppress for ever, did not disappear, they
went “underground”, remaining deeply inside the collective (and
nationally organized) subconscious, ready to be waken up when people
feel the need to legalize their resistance to a threatening new
order.
Political
corectness finished by blinding its architects and rehabilitating
many of the very same ideas it was persecuting!
Right and
Left, destroying and building
European
Right seems more fit to the role of finishing the collapsing European
Union and destroying the existing European order.
But the real
question is not this any more. The real question is what will replace
the existing European order and how to avoid the rather unavoidable,
in the middle term, collapse of the existing European order will not
lead also to the collapse of Europe.
For various
reasons, the simple return of Europe to its nation-states, cannot be
the solution. And even if British, French and Germans can as a
minimum think and try it, nobody else can seriously believe to such a
perspective. This is why, the defense of the nation-states and of
what remains of democracy in their context is absolutely necessary,
but in the same time is impossible without the emergence of a new
project, socio-economic and international, able to replace the
collapsing neoliberal Order.
If Europeans
needed finally the Right to destroy, they will probably need some
sort of Left to build. But this should be a much more radical, much
more serious, much more dedicated Left, deprived of its illusions
about the EU and globalization and its opportunism.
The result
of the British referendum illustrates well the hard choices Sanders
and Corbyn will be pushed to make, between the radicalism which
propelled them to their positions and the conservatism of their
parties. To succeed they should find a way to unite the dissent, the
reformism of those who still have much to lose and those who have
nothing to lose. The conclusions the Podemos leadership in Spain and
the leaders of the French and the German Left will draw from the
British case may be be also of crucial importance not only for the
immediate future of the continent, but for its History.
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