[Peace-discuss] The People vs. Europe

[Carl G. Estabrook]

The People vs. Europe
Dec 03, 2011
It looks as though the eurozone may be in a decisive meltdown, which  
is just fine in my book. The sooner we get back to francs, lire,  
punts, drachmas and the rest of the old sovereign currencies, the  
better.

It used to be as much a part of going to France to change money and be  
handed a bundle of notes featuring the devious Cardinal Richelieu as  
choking on Gauloise smoke. Instead, those francs are now replaced by  
the characterless but somehow always expensive euros.

The argument against the eurozone is that hard-faced Euro-bankers —  
their killer instincts honed at Goldman Sachs, Wall Street's School of  
the Americas — have the power to act as the bully-boys of  
international capital and impose austerity regimes from Dublin to  
Athens, scalping the poor to bail out the rich.

Now the end of the eurozone does not mean the end of the European  
Union. They're different. There are 17 nations in the former, 27 in  
the latter. Britain, for example, has never been in the eurozone,  
which is why the currency exchange in London will, in return for your  
worthless dollars, hand you bank notes with the Queen's portrait on  
them.

At the moment, the European Union has virtually no tax collecting  
powers. Its annual haul is about 1-percent of the EUs gross domestic  
product. By comparison, the U.S. government collects about 20 to 24- 
percent of GDP.

Throughout the entire Eurocrisis, there has been a basso profundo  
chorus from the Eurocrats that what's needed is a lot more  
centralizing. In the words of Wolfgang Munchau at the Financial Times  
on Nov. 28, the EU needs "a fiscal union": "This would involve a  
partial loss of national sovereignty, and the creation of a credible  
institutional framework to deal with fiscal policy, and hopefully  
wider economic policy issues as well."

I've read many editorial paragraphs with this same bullying timbre —  
that what the whole European enterprise needs is an impregnable  
fortress of Eurocrats dispatching its disciplinary legions — first  
technocrats and then, if necessary, NATOs shock troops to crush all  
resistance.

Two generations years ago, when Britain shook with acrid debates about  
the pros and cons of joining the EU, a big chunk of the left was in  
favor of joining. The notion basically was that in terms of potential  
for socialist advance, EU membership would at least offer a shot at  
liberating the sceptred isle from the suffocating, reactionary  
constrictions of post imperial infarction. Also, in play, Gaullism —  
meaning, in this case, defiance of the United States — was translated  
into a hope that the EU would be a left counterbalance to the American  
empire. Here we are 40 years on, with social democrats across Europe  
toiling even more diligently than their nominally more right-wing  
rivals to bail out the rich and grind down the poor at the behest of  
the bankers and panic-stricken bondholders.

Crisis is often invoked as the midwife of revolutionary change, and  
here are Greece, Italy, Spain and even France at various levels of  
crisis, with political orthodoxy and the normal order of things  
increasingly discredited.

Yet perhaps only in Greece and possibly Portugal — both with active  
Communist parties — is there any organizational vigor on the left. In  
some sense, one could see some emulation of the glorious path taken by  
Argentina in 2003 and 2004 with factory occupations and immense  
popular outrage, combined with decisive leadership by the late  
President Nestor Kirchner. The international debt collectors were  
successfully defied. Maybe in Italy there are some flickers of  
resistance, but France?

As Serge Halimi, the director of Le Monde diplomatique, put it  
recently, "There is no reason to believe that Francois Hollande in  
France, Sigmar Gabriel in Germany or Ed Miliband in the U.K. will  
succeed where Obama, Jos Luis Zapatero and Papandreou have failed....  
In the current political and social situation, a federal Europe would  
strengthen the already stifling neo-liberal mechanisms and reduce the  
sovereign power of the people by handing it over to shadowy  
technocratic bodies."

The EU "project," a very irritating word that should be tossed in the  
dumpster along with "iconic," "meme," "parse" and "narrative," is a  
potential outline of a totalitarian nightmare. Down with federalism!  
Remember Simone Weil's hatred of the Roman Empire and what it did to  
Europe's cultural richness and diversity: "If we consider the long  
centuries and the vast area of the Roman Empire and compare these  
centuries with the ones that preceded it and the ones that followed  
the barbarian invasions, we perceive to what extent the Mediterranean  
basin was reduced to spiritual sterility by the totalitarian State."  
As Weil's biographer, Simone Petrement, comments, "The Roman peace was  
soon the peace of the desert, a world from which had vanished,  
together with political liberty and diversity, the creative  
inspiration that produces great art, great literary works, science,  
and philosophy. Many centuries had to pass before the superior forms  
of human life were reborn."

But as Halimi concludes, "But when the people cease to believe in a  
political game in which the dice are loaded, when they see that  
governments are stripped of their sovereignty, when they demand that  
banks be brought into line, when they mobilize without knowing where  
their anger will lead, then the left is still very much alive."

"What did the Roman Empire ever do for us?" the left nationalist asks  
in Monty Python's imperishable "The Life of Brian." "Roads," the  
federalist begins tentatively. My native country of Ireland has been  
covered with vast roads, courtesy of the EU. We've got enough of them.  
Europe's got enough of them. Enough of the eurozone, enough of the  
"European project." Onward down the broad highway to a totalitarian  
EU? Europe is approaching the fateful crossroads.

--Alexander Cockburn

Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the  
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the book  
"Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils." <http://www.laconiadailysun.com/node/124527/18664 
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