A Vision for Europe 2020 E-Book

• Herausgeber: ERIS
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 649

Beschreibung

An international all-star cast of thinkers, artists, and policy makers joins forces for a transparent, united, democratic Europe. The 2020 Edition features contributions by Kate Aronoff, Bill McKibben, Evgeny Morozov, Jerome Roos, and more. The European Union was an exceptional achievement. It brought together and in peace peoples speaking different languages and submersed in different cultures, proving that it was possible to create a shared framework of human rights across a continent that was not long ago tormented by murderous chauvinism, racism, and barbarity. It could have been the proverbial Beacon on the Hill, showing the world how peace and solidarity may be snatched from the jaws of age-old conflict and bigotry. But things turned out differently. Today, a common bureaucracy and a common currency divide Europeans who were beginning to unite despite their different languages and cultures. A confederacy of myopic politicians, economically naïve officials, and financially incompetent 'experts' submit slavishly to the edicts of financial and industrial conglomerates, alienating people and stirring up a dangerous anti-European backlash. Proud peoples are being turned against each other. Nationalism, extremism and racism are being re-awakened. With contributions from some of the world's foremost thinkers, artists and politicians covering the full spectrum of concerns for the future of the Union, this volume presents realistic and viable alternatives to the mainstream barrage of dreadful prospects—a true vision for Europe. "A book that gives hope and provides solutions to break the doom loop. A must-read for all citizens who do not want to abandon Europe to the neoliberals and the nationalists." —Thomas Picketty "Now more than ever, it is tempting to believe that there is no alternative to financialised capitalism. This collection of rigorous policy proposals, lucid analysis, and courageous creative thinking breaks free of this doctrine to chart a course toward a democratic, liberated, social Europe." —Paul Mason "This volume questions the notion of the EU being a private members club and offers, instead, a vision: one that supersedes the utopia-turned-realism that has been zombied into a set of nationalistic and intellectually limited concerns and turns it into a collaborative space and culture of commons." —Markus Miessen "An incredibly timely book and a very much needed initiative. The progressives all around the world need to talk, join forces, network, exchange ideas and create a community of knowledge that will enable us, the people, to create a better and fairer future for all." —Frank Barat "What sort of Europe do we want? That of the failed neoliberal centre in service to corporate power? That of the creeping fascists peddling nationalism and racism? Or the Europe of working people fighting for equality, democracy, peace, and sustainability? This superb collection of short essays offers a compelling vision of that progressive alternative." —Neil Faulkner

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First published in paperback by Eris 2019

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Contents

Foreword

PART ONE - Manifesto

Which Idea of Europe Is Worth Saving?

A Manifesto for Democratising Europe

A Liberated Europe by Raoul Martinez

A Peaceful Europe by Eyal Weizman

A Realistic Europe by Katrín Jakobsdóttir

PART TWO - Democracy

Liberal or 'Illiberal Democracy'? No, Thanks!

Europe: For a Transnational Democracy

Municipalism: Experiments in Autogestion

Don’t Let Belgrade D(r)own

Democracy Has Many Enemies

A Decentralised Europe by Gerardo Pisarello

PART THREE - Transparency

The Greek Files Campaign

DiEM25 Policy Paper on Transparency

The View from Brussels

Triple Threat to Transparency: a Brexit Story

A Productive Europe by James K. Galbraith

PART FOUR - Economy

Why We Need a European New Deal

Elements of a European New Deal

Taking Back Capital Control

Tax Wars or Tax Cooperation? Europe’s Fate Hangs

It’s Time for Europe to Tackle the Finance Curse

The Far Right’s Gold Fetish

Greek Tragedy in Times of Austerity

Shaking off the Burden

An Egalitarian Europe by Alice-Mary Higgins

A Social Europe by Caroline Lucas

PART FIVE - Work

Let There Be Light

DiEM25 Policy Paper on Work

Building Shared Prosperity in the Twenty-first

Digital Socialism

The Yellow Vest Revolt

A United Europe by Lorenzo Marsili

PART SIX - Environment

The Game-changing Promise of a Green New Deal

The Scale of the Problem Itself

The Ten Pillars of the Green New Deal for Europe

Decarbonisation without Democracy

Different Voices: Building the Environmental

A Lesson from Denmark: How on Earth Do We Save

A Sustainable Europe by Jeffrey D. Sachs

The European Far Right's Environmental Turn

An Ecological Europe by Tim Jackson

PART SEVEN - Refugees and Migration

Beyond the Familiar: A Third Emergent Migrant

DiEM25 Policy Paper on Refugees and Migration

Hope Is Out There: Let Them In

Global Compact: Europe’s Migration Tourniquet

We, Refugees

The Temptation of Left Nationalism

Great Migration and the Future of Europe

A Pluralist Europe by Elif Shafak

PART EIGHT - Technology

Democratising Technology and Innovation

DiEM25 Policy Paper on Technological Sovereignty

For a Political Praxis of Algorithmic Sovereignty

The Right to the (Digital) City

A Technological Europe by Shoshana Zuboff

An Open Europe by Daniel Erlacher

PART NINE - Arts and Culture

The Politics of Creativity

The Politics of Culture

The DiEM Voice Project: Making Noise, Generating

Creativity Must Operate Across Borders

A Creative Europe by Jonas Staal

A Cultured Europe by Pamela Anderson

A Historically-minded Europe

PART TEN - The Future

Challenges Ahead

Conclusion

Appendix

Authors’ Biographies

Foreword

Yanis Varoufakis

A year is a long time in politics but would, ordinarily, be too short a time to make a difference to our vision for the future. Alas, last year was no ordinary year. By ensuring that the future no longer is what it used to be, the last twelve months made necessary a revised Vision for Europe. You are now, dear reader, holding the result.

In the May 2019 European Parliament elections, our Green New Deal for Europe, the Manifesto based on our Vision for Europe, was comprehensively trounced. Even though DiEM25 and our European Spring allies managed to gather one and a half million votes, we failed to elect a single MEP. Judging by that sorry result, some might plausibly say that our Vision for Europe sank like a lead balloon, at least electorally.

One explanation for our electoral failure is, indeed, this: our analysis and policies were poor or at odds with Europe’s electorates. However, there is a second explanation. Even though many Europeans are ready to adopt DiEM25’s analysis and to support our policy agenda, Europe’s politics reproduce the dominance of unpopular institutions and the power of their functionaries. Judging by the evolution of conventional wisdom, especially among younger Europeans, this second explanation seems quite plausible. Indeed, since our electoral defeat in Germany, France etc., both the analysis in the first Vision for Europe and the policies in DiEM25’s Green New Deal for Europe have gained incredible traction.

This paradox lies at the heart of Europe’s disintegration—a process that began in 2010 with the euro crisis, accelerated in 2015 with the crushing of the Greek Spring, gathered pace with Brexit’s triumphs in 2016 and 2019, and was turbocharged in 2020 by Covid-19 and the European Union’s pathetic response to the pandemic. The structure of the paradox is easy to dissect.

On the one hand, there is the widespread consensus that the European Union’s monetary and economic union is not merely flawed but the source of unnecessary recessions, environmental degradation, and avoidable pain for a majority of Europeans. On the other hand, Europe’s politics guarantee that this consensus is paid lip service by the dominant political forces while being kept brutally and ruthlessly away from Europe’s decision-making centres.

DiEM25’s Manifesto, our Green New Deal for Europe and, yes, the first edition of A Vision for Europe acknowledged this paradox, as well as its capacity to undermine the European Union and progressive, radical Europeanism more broadly. However, I believe now that our language, our texts and the way we phrased our campaign speeches were far too timid. It was simply not enough to say “Europe will either be democratised or it will disintegrate”. Although correct as a prediction, our political campaign needed something more powerful than a prediction: it needed a more radical statement of what was happening and what we should be about.

What we are really up against

Re-reading A Vision for Europe, I realised that it was missing something crucial: a class analysis of the true reasons why Europe’s establishment is turning down sensible, moderate policies and institutional changes that would be mutually advantageous across Europe.

If I am right that DiEM25’s Green New Deal for Europe, including its smart public debt and investment-financing technical proposals, would lift all boats at once (German and Italian, Dutch and Greek), why were the German and Dutch governments so hostile to the idea?

A Vision for Europe did not answer the question, leaving it to the reader mistakenly to think that either we are wrong or that the political agents of the northern establishment are inane. Neither is true. Our analysis is correct and the northern establishment is pursuing its self-interest smartly. Can it be so? How?

The events of 2020 settled this question. It is clear now that even the most hard-nosed fiscal conservative living in Northern Europe can see that, in the face of a gigantic recession caused by the pandemic, leaving each member state to fend for itself will lead, sooner or later, to the euro’s disintegration. They are certainly smart enough to recognise that, given Italy’s state of affairs, forcing Rome to borrow billions at a time of collapsing national incomes will lead to default and exit from the eurozone with a very high probability. Or, that it will, alternatively, cause such a depression that a neofascist government will rise up to do what the recession failed to: bring on a fatal clash between Rome and Brussels.

But, if I am right, why has the EU establishment killed off the only alternative to crippling increases in national debt, i.e. Eurobonds? Why has it ignored DiEM25’s technically astute proposal for a European Central Bank bond issue, an ECB-bond, of thirty-years maturity by which to raise €1 trillion in order to absorb the catastrophic rise in national debt that will, inevitably, cause Italy’s default, then Spain’s, eventually France’s, etc.?

Given that the establishment running the EU knows full well that Italy and the rest of Europe’s South are great contributors to the surpluses of the North (by keeping down their exchange rate and the interest rates of their Treasuries below zero), why are they taking great risks with the euro’s disintegration? Why are they not using the pandemic as an opportunity to solidify the North’s advantages from Europe’s monetary union by embracing DiEM25’s proposals both for an ECB-bond and a large pan-European investment drive financed by an alliance of the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the ECB? Who would benefit more from such an investment program than, say, Siemens and Volkswagen?

The answer that the first edition of A Vision for Europe lacked begins with a realisation. Yes, the politicians representing the oligarchy-without-frontiers recognise all of the above as well as you and I, dear reader. But they also see something that most progressives don’t: that the architecture of the eurozone is unique in the history of capitalism in the way it has empowered the oligarchy that those politicians represent.

Having created a gargantuan central bank without a state to control or to support it, nineteen states (those using the euro) have been left without a central bank to support them directly. Once bereft of the power to control money and interest rates, soon these states hit the limits of their spending. Once on the fiscal ropes, no government, regardless of its political and ideological colours, can do much in the sphere of income and wealth redistribution.

Having removed control of money and interest rates from the states, the designers of the eurozone did something that had never been accomplished before: they robbed every democratically elected Prime Minister or President of the instruments with which to transfer significant amounts of wealth from the rich to the poor who constitute the majority—or, in Aristotle’s definition, the demos. In short, they surreptitiously took the demos out of European Democracy. Whether they did this intentionally or not is irrelevant.

The fact that matters is that, with the creation of the euro, democratically elected governments could no longer shift large quantities of value from the oligarchy to the majority. Future economic historians will surely mark this as a momentous development.

Compare and contrast the German Chancellor with the Prime Minister of the UK. Even though Germany is far richer, its trade surplus is enormous, and the country is better run than the UK, the German Chancellor, even if she wanted to, could not shift large amounts of income and wealth from rich to poor Germans. Why? Because she is constrained not to run large deficits and has no control of the central bank. In contrast, the UK’s Prime Minister, backed by the Bank of England, can run large deficits in pursuit of public investment or even simply transfer large amounts of wealth to poorer residents, e.g. in Northern England.

We are now ready to see what we are up against. Yes, the EU oligarchy can see that the implementation of our Green New Deal for Europe would do wonders to end the euro crisis that began in 2009 and which turned ballistic, courtesy of Covid-19, in 2020. It can see as well as you and I that its profits would rise, not fall, as a result. However, it also realises that DiEM25’s policy proposals usher in new instruments, like ECB-bonds and a Green Investment Fund empowered by an EIB-ECB alliance.

These new instruments will, surreptitiously, re-enable elected politicians in Germany, in France, in Italy, etc. to re-distribute large chunks of income and wealth from the European oligarchy to poorer people living both in Europe’s North and South. Is it not understandable that this is not something the oligarchy will consent to lightly?

In summary, A Vision for Europe erred in not explaining to the reader two key points: First, that our proposed policies for transforming Europe are policies that even the oligarchs see as mutually beneficial for Europeans in Central, Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe. Secondly, they don’t care. Understandably!

Indeed, the oligarchy-without-borders fears European disintegration far less than it fears the instruments of public finance that we propose because of their potential to redistribute some of its ill-gotten wealth. It is thus prepared to push Europe to the brink rather than allow these instruments to be forged.

Why not just accept that this EU must end?

We are faced by an EU oligarchy willing and able to push the EU to the brink rather than acquiesce to financial instruments that democratically elected governments can use against it and in the interests of a majority of Europeans in every EU member state. A Vision for Europe failed sufficiently to stress this reality, letting readers surrender to the mistaken belief that our task was one of persuasion. How can you persuade all-powerful people already convinced by, but wholly uninterested in, your argument?

No, our task was never to persuade the powers-that-be. It was to confront them. Our task was never to reform the EU by winning arguments in the Eurogroup or the European Council. It was to transform the EU through fierce confrontation taking the form of, what at DiEM25 we refer to as, Constructive Disobedience: constructive proposals like our Green New Deal for Europe coupled with a readiness to say NO, to disobey until the cows come home.

Lexiteer friends, leftists who have given up on the EU long ago and campaigned in favour of exiting the EU, have been admonishing us for the ‘constructive’ part of our Constructive Disobedience and our refusal to campaign for exiting. “Why make pie-in-the-sky proposals that the EU establishment will never consider?”, they ask us. “Why maintain the false hope that this EU can be transformed?”, they continue. “Why not do the honest thing and campaign to bring our countries out of this toxic EU?”, they conclude. Our answers were, and remain, solid for at least three reasons:

1. Any campaign to exit the EU, even if it is meant for good progressive reasons, will alienate middle-of-the-road, relatively apolitical, Europeans that progressives must attract. They will ask: “Won’t the dissolution of the EU, however terrible the EU might be, come at a huge cost for common people?” “Won’t the end of the EU boost nationalism, thus jeopardising peaceful coexistence on our Continent?” The only honest answers to both questions are affirmative.

2. Any campaign to exit the EU will devastate activists in Germany and other surplus countries where the conservative establishment is unassailable. I recall happily the excited faces of audiences of young activists in Hanover or Hamburg every time I recite DiEM25’s call to unity across the continent, not as Germans or as Greeks, but as progressive Europeans forming a transnational movement aiming at a transnational European demos that will eventually construct a genuine European democracy. Do you know, dear reader, what these same young Germans would feel if the message was “To hell with the EU, let’s all go back to our nation-states and collaborate via our governments”? They would feel devastated! They would immediately think to themselves: “We are alone. Us and the ironclad German oligarchy!” No, this is not something I would ever do. The call for a transnational movement to build a transnational European Democracy was right and, given the existence of this EU, uniquely consistent with progressive politics.

3. Any campaign to exit the EU, even if motivated by a left-wing agenda, will only be appended by the Nationalist International which will lose no time weaponising the tumult caused by the EU’s rupture to build tall walls, to demonise foreigners, to turn European peoples and communities against one another, and to reinforce the alliance between an increasingly authoritarian state and an unfettered oligarchic corporate cartel.

DiEM25 was, for the three reasons above, right to reject the Lexiteers’ strategy of calling for a campaign to disintegrate the EU via Brexit, Grexit, Italexit, Fraxit, etc.

Moreover, DiEM25 was not at all naïve to put forward a Vision for Europe that begins with specific policy recommendations for the short and medium term—our Green New Deal for Europe which provides a sensible, moderate blueprint that could, tomorrow morning, and under the current EU rules, cure all sorts of ills: the public and private debt crisis, how to fund the Green Transition, a jobs guarantee scheme to end precarity, a Universal Basic Dividend to deal with inequality and automation, etc.

No, DiEM25 did not naïvely think that the EU establishment would be so impressed by our Green New Deal for Europe that they would begin to implement it under the pressure of its logic. We knew full well that they would rather blow up the continent than allow its implementation. So why promote it as an EU-healer when we knew that those in control of the EU would prefer the EU’s disintegration to our policies’ implementation? The answer is simple: because it is the only way to win the hearts and minds of a majority of Europeans.

Let’s be clear on this: there are two types of Europeans. A large minority ready to be convinced that this EU must end, people we are bound to lose to the Matteo Salvinis and Boris Johnsons of Europe. And a majority comprised of people who know that there is something rotten in the EU but who, also, roll their eyes when hearing progressives repeat empty slogans such as “Another Europe is Possible”, especially when we tell them that this ‘other Europe’ will come only if we end the existing EU. If we tell them “this EU must end” all we achieve is to make them feel oddly sympathetic to the EU functionaries. To abandon their apathy and to withdraw their tacit consent to the EU establishment’s ways, they need first to experience rational rage against the EU establishment.

How do we instil rational rage in the majority’s souls and minds against the EU establishment? First, we need to answer their legitimate question: “Precisely how could things be done differently within the existing institutional framework?” If we do not provide them with a definitive, convincing answer, we shall lose them either to the racist Nationalist International or to the illiberal establishment. In particular, telling them that nothing good can happen within this EU is the death knell of every progressive political force. Euro-TINA (the doctrine that There Is No Alternative within this EU) is a right-wing, reactionary mantra that DiEM25 sensibly rejected from day one—that is, on the 9th of February 2016 when we founded in Berlin the first ever transnational movement.

DiEM25’s analysis was right. The only way to generate rational rage amongst Europeans is to demonstrate to them how easy it is to end every single crisis destroying the life prospects of most Europeans. To show them how much good could be done to so many, even within the awful rules and treaties of the EU. Once they see that, they will automatically ask the pertinent question: “If all that good could be done today, why are those in power not doing it?” Since the only answer is that the authorities are in the pockets of an oligarchy ready and willing to destroy not only their lives, but the EU as well, helping them ask this question is the first step to making possible generalised civil disobedience to the EU’s rulers. That’s the essence of DiEM25’s Constructive Disobedience: demonstrate what could be done and let even the politically apathetic feel rational rage that it is not being done.

In conclusion, DiEM25 rejected, and continues to reject, Lexit because there is no point in campaigning for the end of the EU. Progressives, we believe, must take a page out of the EU oligarchy’s manual. Look at the oligarchy’s political agents. They wrap themselves up in the EU flag pretending to be Europeanists so as to exploit the gut feeling of most Europeans that the EU’s disintegration will cost common folk dearly and, also, help hatch the serpent’s egg in every country. But, at the same time, they are ready and willing to destroy the EU to serve their interests. We should do something very similar on behalf of the suffering many.

What should we do? Like the oligarchy, we must remain tuned to the prescient intuition of most Europeans that ending the EU will inflict most costs upon the weakest while, at the same time, strengthening only the neofascists. This rules out a Lexit campaign. However, like the oligarchy, we must be prepared to take the EU to the brink, in pursuit of the minimum policies that are necessary to serve the interests of the many against those of the oligarchy. To put it bluntly, just like the Dutch and German finance ministers, we must be prepared to blow up the EU in order to protect the interests of our people; i.e. the vast majority of Europeans.

Re-reading A Vision for Europe, my self-criticism is that we put too much emphasis on the ‘constructive’ part of Constructive Disobedience and not enough on the ‘disobedience’ part, and the necessity of contemplating, and even planning for, the EU’s ending.

The obvious case-study: Brexit

Covid-19 hit hardest people living in countries, like Italy and Spain, with the least capacity to spend the monies necessary to save lives and jobs. Faced with the EU’s determination to insist on lending the victims money—with interest—instead of accepting the logic of fiscal union as a prerequisite for a stable and civilised monetary union, I wrote in The Guardian the following:

The message today to Italians, Spaniards and Greeks is: your government can borrow large amounts from Europe’s bailout fund. No conditions. You will also receive help to pay for unemployment benefits from countries where employment holds up better. But, within a year or two, as your economies are recovering, huge new austerity measures will be demanded to bring your government’s finances back into line, including the repayment of the monies spent on your unemployment benefits. This is equivalent to helping the fallen get up but striking them over the head as they begin to rise.

On 25th March 2020, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported in The Telegraph on a conversation we had:

The Greek socialist said he had always tried to keep the European faith—even in his worst clashes with Brussels—but has finally given up. “I don’t think the EU is capable of doing anything to us other than harm. I opposed Brexit but I have now reached the conclusion that the British did the right thing, even if they did it for the wrong reason,” he said.

Those were, I can confirm, my words. Interestingly, they impressed immensely many Brexiteers who welcomed my ‘conversion’. Some Lexiteers went further by mixing approval of my ‘new’ stance with scorn that it took me too long, that when I was finance minister I had not enacted Grexit, that DiEM25 had wasted energy by sticking to a Remain-and-Reform agenda.

Did I have a road-to-Damascus moment after the EU’s Covid-19 moment? No, I did not. For decades I have admonished the EU with strong arguments exposing its vicious misanthropy. Since the euro crisis began, I have spoken of its ‘fiscal waterboarding’ practices (which were recently referred to as ‘torture devices’ even by Heiko Maas, the current German foreign minister). I even referred to Brussels as a democracy-free zone. So, telling Evans-Pritchard that the EU is only capable of dishing out pain to our people was nothing new.

What was new was my assessment that, in the end, by opting for Brexit, Britons made the right choice for the wrong reasons. This is a statement that requires some unpacking if only because it has an important bearing on—at least my—vision for Europe.

First, let me explain why I said that Britons were, in the end, right to get out of the EU. The eurozone is often described as a union within a union, or a club within a club. While this description is formally correct, it fails to capture the centrifugal forces that the euro’s creation unleashed. Once the single currency was created, in the designed absence of common debt instruments and a common banking system, the EU train was put on a track leading inexorably to a junction. There, it could turn sharply toward unification or continue on the same route until, running out of track, it disintegrated. That junction was reached with the euro crisis but the EU establishment, for reasons explained earlier, is resisting unification—thus forcing the EU off its rails. Under these circumstances, it is not wrong for the people of Britain to bail out of this slow-motion train wreck.

Secondly, why did I say, seemingly condescendingly, that the British got out for the wrong reasons? This should be obvious to progressives. The lies about the billions of pounds that would be saved and rechannelled to the National Health Service; the demonisation of EU migrants as having been the cause of stressed social services (when it was all down to Tory austerity); the jingoistic projections of a liberated free-market Britain sailing the oceans of enterprise and reconstituting its Empire; the role of dark networks of disinformation targeting those vulnerable to hate speech.

Thirdly, and most importantly, have I regretted that DiEM25, and I personally, campaigned against Brexit? No, I have not. Anyone who witnessed our 2016 campaign will realise that it was two-pronged: Against Brexiteers who were blowing, willingly or unwillingly, fresh wind into the sails of nationalism. And, with equal ferocity, against Remainers who were portraying the EU as the best thing since sliced bread.

As for the charge of my British Lexiteer friends that, when I was Greece’s finance minister, I was not prepared to pull the trigger and exit the eurozone, this is simply a lie. I was prepared and I would have done it, if my own government had not buckled. Indeed, the reason I was so hated by the EU establishment was that I was not a Lexiteer but this would not have (and the troika knew this well) stopped me from pulling the trigger and issuing a new drachma. Had I been a Lexiteer, they would have not minded me, since the majority of Greeks would not have followed me. What made 2015 a moment when the EU establishment feared for its dominance, even only for a few short months, was that they were facing a Europeanist foe ready and willing to do as they did: to take matters to the brink by being ready even to blow up the euro, the EU itself, rather than betray the interests of his people (i.e. the majority of Europeans, not just of Greeks).

Our Vision for Europe demands new radicalism, new alliances, new ruptures

Our constantly evolving Green New Deal for Europe is crucial. But it is not enough. Covid-19 has created new facts on the ground. The sums our Green New Deal proposed for funding the Green Transition (€500 billion annually) were ridiculed in 2019 but, today, appear utterly understated.

Capitalism has been, temporarily, suspended. Our Vision for Europe can no longer rely only on the constructive proposals that are the ‘constructive’ part of our Constructive Disobedience strategy. This is the time to envision a post-capitalist Europe. In this context, the Green New Deal must be recognised as the first stepping stone to a vastly different future. We must now inspire people with a vision of what follows both capitalism and our Green New Deal. What should that vision be? Here are some ideas: an economic democracy where companies are run on a one-person-one-non-tradeable-share-one-vote principle; where there are no private banks but, instead, the central bank provides free digital accounts to every citizen; a society that grants a trust fund to every baby born.

Turning to alliances, the original Vision for Europe got it right when warning xenophobes and crypto-fascists that we shall fight them everywhere. But it was remiss when it failed to warn the remnants of what was once social democracy that we shall treat them too as toxic agents of a recalcitrant establishment. Let’s be clear on this: the social democratic establishment forces have done the most damage to the progressive cause in Europe.

Who gave the EU’s oligarchy the greatest effective support and legitimacy over the past decade? No, it was not the conservative parties. It was the German and Austrian SPDs, the Socialists in France, the Democratic Party in Italy, Greece’s PASOK and Syriza parties that signed up to every piece of troika nastiness, the new socialist Eurogroup President from Portugal, etc. While many progressive people are still entangled in the poisonous web of those parties, and need to be rescued, our vision for Europe will only stand a chance if DiEM25 has nothing to do with their leadership.

In contrast, the rift between us, DiEM25, and Lexiteers must now end. We must agree to disagree on whether the right tactic is to demand an exit from the EU or, as DiEM25 believes, to continue to envision a democratic union. But we must move beyond this disagreement and plan ahead for an internationalist, post-capitalist Europe. DiEM25 is about bringing European progressives together independently of the EU. Europe, we must scream from the rooftops, is not the EU. As bankers and fascists unite across EU and non-EU borders, so should we.

Finally, to make our vision for Europe consistent with our internationalism, we need to embed it within the vision for the world—exactly as DiEM25 is currently struggling to do by building the Progressive International together with wonderful progressives from all over the planet.

There is no doubt that to make any of this remotely feasible there is a lot of work to be done. Work that is physically exhausting, mentally gruelling, emotionally destructive. But work that, nevertheless, we can’t even imagine giving up on. The best way to carry on is to take breaks during which to develop further our Vision for Europe, our Vision for the World.

PART ONE

Manifesto

Which Idea of Europe Is Worth Saving?

Slavoj Žižek

In January 2019, a group of thirty writers, historians, and Nobel laureates (Bernard-Henri Lévy, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Mario Vargas Llosa, Adam Michnik, and others) published a manifesto in newspapers across Europe, including the Guardian in the UK.1 They claimed that Europe as an idea is coming apart before our eyes: “We must now fight for the idea of Europe or see it perish beneath the waves of populism”, they wrote. “We must rediscover the spirit of activism or accept that resentment and hatred and their cortege of sad passions will surround and submerge us.”

This manifesto is deeply flawed and shows why populists are thriving: its signatories—the cream of European liberal intelligence—ignore the unpleasant fact that the populists also present themselves as the saviours of Europe.

In an interview just after attending a stormy meeting with leaders of the European Union, Donald Trump called the EU the first in the line of ‘foes’ of the US, ahead of both Russia and China. Instead of condemning this claim outright, we should ask some simple questions. What bothers him so much about the EU? Which Europe is he talking about? When asked by journalists about immigrants flowing into Europe, he answered like the anti-immigrant populist he is, saying immigrants are tearing apart the fabric of European culture and endangering its spiritual identity. In short, he answered as if Orbán or Salvini were talking through him. One should never forget that they also want to defend Europe—but which Europe is it that bothers them?

It is the Europe of transnational unity; the Europe aware that, to cope with the challenges of our time we must move beyond the constraints of nation states; the Europe which desperately strives to stay faithful to the old Enlightenment motto of solidarity with victims; the Europe conscious that humanity is One, that we are all in the same boat, and that the misery of others is our problem to solve.

Peter Sloterdijk notes that the primary struggle today is securing the survival of Europe’s greatest economico-political achievement: the social-democratic welfare state. According to him, our current reality is ‘objective social democracy’, as opposed to ‘subjective social democracy’. One should distinguish between social democracy as the panoply of political parties, and social democracy as the “formula of a system” which “precisely describes the political-economic order of things, which is defined by the modern state as the state of taxes, as infrastructure-state, as the state of the rule of law and, not last, as the social state and the therapy state.”

We encounter everywhere a phenomenal and a structural Social Democracy, a manifest and a latent one, one which appears as a party and another one which is more or less irreversibly built into the very definitions, functions, and procedures of modern statehood as such.2

This idea that underlies united Europe has been neglected, corrupted, and it is only in a time of crisis that we are compelled to return to this essential dimension of Europe and its hidden potential.

Europe lies vulnerable in the great pincers of America on one side and Russia on the other, both desperate to dismember it. Trump and Putin support Brexit and Eurosceptics in every corner. But what is it that bothers them about Europe, when the EU fails at every test, from its inability to enact consistent immigration policies to its miserable reaction to Trump’s tariff war? It is obviously not this present Europe, then, but the idea of Europe, an idea that becomes palpable in moments of danger. The problem Europe faces now is how to remain faithful to its emancipatory legacy when threatened by this conservative-populist onslaught.

In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, the great conservative T. S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse: this is what must be done. The only way to defeat populism and redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy, is to perform a sectarian split from liberal democracy’s main corpse. Sometimes, the only way to resolve a conflict is not to search for a compromise, but to radicalise one’s position.

Ernesto Laclau insisted that the need to construct an enemy image immanent to populism was not a weakness, but its strength. Left populism, of course, should construct a different enemy image: not the threatening racial Other (immigrant, Jew, Muslim) but the financial elites, the fundamentalists, and other ‘usual suspects’ of the progressives. This urge to construct the enemy, however, is a fatal limitation of populism, because today the ultimate enemy is not a concrete social agent but the system itself, a certain functioning. Alain Badiou wrote that one doesn’t fight capitalism but its concrete agents, and therein resides the problem, since the true target is capitalism itself.

Because of their focus on concrete enemies, left populists privilege national sovereignty as a defence against global capital. Aufstehen in Germany essentially follows this same path. In this way, most of them not only endorse populism but nationalism, presenting their struggle as a defence against international financial capital. Some leftist populists in the US have already deployed the term ‘national socialism’.3 While it would be stupid and unfair to claim that they are closet Nazis, one should nonetheless insist that internationalism is key to any project of radical emancipation. 

DiEM25 sees that resistance against global capital has to be global itself, to become a new form of universalism. There definitely are enemies, and the topic of conspiracies is not one to dismiss. Years ago, Fred Jameson perspicuously noted that in today’s global capitalism things happen which cannot be explained by blaming some anonymous ‘logic of capital’. For example, now we know that the financial meltdown of 2008 was the result of a well-planned conspiracy by certain financial circles.

The true task of social analysis remains to explain how contemporary capitalism opened up the space for such ‘conspiratorial’ interventions. This is also why references to ‘greed’ and appeals for capitalists to show social solidarity and responsibility are misplaced: ‘greed’ (understood as the pursuit of profit) is what motivates capitalist expansion; the wager of capitalism is that the acting out of individual greed will contribute to the common good. So, again, the task is to change the system so it will no longer permit, let alone solicit, this ‘greedy’ behaviour.

Nowadays, it seems easy to agree that the enemy is neo-fascist, anti-immigrant nationalism, or Trump in the US. But the fact remains that the rise of Trump is the result of a failed liberal-democratic consensus, not its cause. So, although one should not exclude from the repertoire new forms of ‘anti-fascist’ alliance with the latter, it is this very consensus that needs to change.

Back to the letter of the thirty liberal luminaries. What they refuse to admit is that the Europe whose disappearance they lament is already irretrievably lost. The threat does not come from populism. Populism is merely a reaction to the failure of the European liberal establishment to remain faithful to the continent’s emancipatory potentials, offering a false way out of ordinary people’s troubles. The only way to really defeat populism is to submit the liberal establishment itself, its actual politics, to a ruthless critique.

Which political orientation promises to do this today in Europe? Which orientation enables us to break the vicious cycle of liberal establishment and the rise of populism? What remains of the radical left strangely reproduces the opposition between populism and liberalism: it is caught in the tension between left populism which openly flirts with nationalism, seeking the solution in a strong nation state, and abstract liberal tolerance which plays on Europe’s guilt and preaches opening up to others (refugees, immigrants) without addressing the roots of the problem.

Only DiEM25 does what needs to be done. In its opposition to global capitalism, it remains staunchly internationalist. Its programme is devoid of moralistic dreams: it offers precise economic and political measures. Instead of opposing our reality on behalf of abstract dreams, it locates in this very reality the potential of a just future. DiEM25 is the voice of reason in our political landscape—not a cynical, opportunist reason, but a reason which addresses the irrationality of our predicament. If we ignore DiEM25’s call, we are foresaking our future.

Notes

1Bernard-Henri Lévy et al, “Fight for Europe—or the Wreckers Will Destroy It,” The Guardian, 25 January 2019, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/25/fight-europe-wreckers-patriots-nationalist.

2Peter Sloterdijk, “Aufbruch der Leistungstraeger” Cicero, November 2009.

3This happened at the conference of the Union for Radical Economics at Amherst, Massachusetts, in September 2018.

A Manifesto for Democratising Europe

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 deny, exorcise, and suppress it in practice. They co-opt, evade, corrupt, mystify, usurp, and manipulate democracy to break its energy and arrest its possibilities. A Europe ruled by Europe’s people, government by the demos, is the shared nightmare of:

•The Brussels bureaucracy (and its more than 10,000 lobbyists)

•Its hit-squad inspectorates and the troika they formed with unelected ‘technocrats’

•The powerful Eurogroup that has no standing in law or treaty

•Bailed-out bankers, fund managers, and resurgent oligarchies contemptuous of the multitudes and their organised expression

•Political parties appealing to liberalism, democracy, freedom, and solidarity only to betray their principles in government

•Governments that fuel cruel inequality by implementing self-defeating austerity

•Media moguls who have turned fear-mongering into an art, for power and profit

•Corporations in cahoots with secretive public agencies, investing in that fear to promote secrecy and a culture of surveillance that bends public opinion to their will.

The European Union was an exceptional achievement, bringing together in peace European peoples speaking different languages, submersed in different cultures, proving that it was possible to create a shared framework of human rights across a continent that was, not long ago, home to murderous chauvinism, racism, and barbarity. The European Union could have been the proverbial Beacon on the Hill, showing the world how peace and solidarity may be snatched from the jaws of centuries-long conflict and bigotry.

Alas, today, a common bureaucracy and a common currency divide European peoples that were beginning to unite despite our different languages and cultures. A confederacy of myopic politicians, economically naïve officials, and financially incompetent ‘experts’ submit slavishly to the edicts of financial and industrial conglomerates, alienating Europeans and stirring up a dangerous anti-European backlash. Proud peoples are being turned against each other. Nationalism, extremism, and racism are being reawakened.

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, finance, working conditions, and environment. The price of this deceit is not merely the end of democracy but also poor economic policies:

•The Eurozone economies are being marched off the cliff of competitive austerity, resulting in permanent recession in the weaker countries and low investment in the core countries

•EU member states outside the Eurozone are alienated, seeking inspiration and partners in suspect quarters where they are most likely to be greeted with opaque, coercive free trade deals that undermine their sovereignty

•Unprecedented inequality, declining hope, and misanthropy flourish throughout Europe

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 course that ‘official Europe’ resists with every sinew of its authoritarian mindset: a surge of democracy! Our movement, DiEM25, seeks to call forth just such a surge. One simple, radical idea is the motivating force behind DiEM25: Democratise Europe! For the EU will either be democratised or it will disintegrate!

Our goal to democratise Europe is realistic. It is no more utopian than the initial construction of the European Union. Indeed, it is less utopian than the attempt to keep alive the current, anti-democratic, fragmenting European Union. Our goal to democratise Europe is also terribly urgent, for without a swift start it may be impossible to chisel away at the institutionalised resistance in good time, before Europe goes past the point of no return. Our goal is 2025.

If we fail to democratise Europe within a decade, if Europe’s autocratic powers succeed in stifling democratisation, the EU will crumble under its hubris. It will splinter, and its fall will cause untold hardship across Europe and beyond.

Why is Europe losing its integrity and its soul?

In the postwar decades during which the EU was initially constructed, national cultures were revitalised in a spirit of internationalism, disappearing borders, shared prosperity and raised standards that brought Europeans together. However, a serpent’s egg lay at the heart of the integration process.

From an economic viewpoint, the EU began life as a cartel of heavy industry (later co-opting farm owners) determined to fix prices and to redistribute oligopoly profits through its Brussels bureaucracy. The emergent cartel, and its Brussels-based administrators, feared the demos and despised the idea of government-by-the-people.

Patiently and methodically, they put in place a process of depoliticising decision-making, a process to relentlessly take the demos out of democracy and cloak all policymaking in pseudo-technocratic fatalism. National politicians were rewarded handsomely for their acquiescence to turning the Commission, the Council, the Ecofin, the Eurogroup, and the European Central Bank into politics-free zones. Anyone opposing this process was labelled ‘un-European’ and treated as a jarring dissonance.

Thus the deceit at the EU’s heart was born, yielding an institutional commitment to policies that generate depressing economic data and avoidable hardship. Meanwhile, simple principles that a more confident Europe once understood have now been abandoned:

•Rules should serve Europeans, not the other way around

•Currency should be utilised, not hoarded

•A single market is consistent with democracy only if it features common defences of the weaker Europeans, and of the environment, that are democratically chosen and built

•Democracy cannot be a luxury of creditors, refused to debtors

•Democracy is essential for limiting capitalism’s worst, self-destructive drives and opening a window onto new vistas of social harmony and sustainable development

In response to the inevitable failure of Europe’s cartelised social economy to rebound from the post-2008 Great Recession, the EU’s institutions that caused this failure resorted to escalating authoritarianism. The more they asphyxiate democracy, the less legitimate their political authority, the stronger the forces of economic recession, and the greater their need for authoritarianism. The enemies of democracy gather renewed power while losing legitimacy and confining hope and prosperity to the very few.

This is the unseen process by which Europe’s crisis is turning our peoples inwards, against each other, amplifying pre-existing jingoism and xenophobia. The privatisation of anxiety, the fear of the ‘other’, the nationalisation of ambition, and the renationalisation of policy threaten a toxic disintegration of common interests from which Europe can only suffer. Europe’s pitiful reaction to its banking and debt crises, to the refugee crisis, to the need for a coherent foreign, migration, and anti-terrorism policy, are all examples of what happens when solidarity loses its meaning:

•The injury to Europe’s integrity caused by the crushing of the Athens Spring, and by the subsequent imposition of an economic ‘reform’ programme designed to fail

•The customary assumption that, whenever a state budget must be bolstered or a bank bailed out, society’s weakest must pay for the sins of the wealthiest rentiers

•The constant drive to commodify labour and drive democracy out of the workplace

•The scandalous ‘not in our backyard’ attitude of most EU member states to the refugees landing on Europe’s shores, illustrating how a broken European governance model yields ethical decline and political paralysis, as well as evidence that xenophobia towards non-Europeans follows the demise of intra-European solidarity

•The comical phrase we end up with when we put together the three words ‘European’, ‘foreign’, and ‘policy’

•The ease with which European governments decided after the awful Paris attacks that the solution lies in re-erecting borders, when most of the attackers were EU citizens—yet another sign of the moral panic engulfing a European Union unable to unite Europeans to forge common responses to common problems

Our horizon

Realism demands that we work toward reaching milestones within a realistic timeframe. This is why DiEM25 will aim for four breakthroughs at regular intervals in order to bring about a fully democratic, functional Europe by 2025.

Now, today, Europeans are feeling let down by EU institutions everywhere. From Helsinki to Lisbon, from Dublin to Crete, from Leipzig to Aberdeen, Europeans sense that a stark choice is approaching fast. The choice between authentic democracy and insidious disintegration. We must resolve to unite to ensure that Europe makes the obvious choice: authentic democracy.

When asked what we want, and when we want it, we respond:

•Immediately: full transparency in decision-making.

EU Council, Ecofin, FTT, and Eurogroup Meetings to be live-streamed

Minutes of European Central Bank governing council meetings to be published within weeks

All documents pertinent to crucial negotiations (e.g. trade-TTIP, ‘bailout’ loans, Britain’s status) affecting every facet of European citizens’ future to be uploaded on the web

A compulsory register for lobbyists that includes their clients’ names, their remuneration, and a record of meetings with officials (both elected and unelected)

•First twelve months: address the ongoing economic crisis utilising existing institutions and within existing EU Treaties.

Europe’s immediate crisis is unfolding simultaneously in five realms: public debt, banking, inadequate investment, migration, and rising poverty.

All five realms are currently left in the hands of national governments powerless to act upon them. DiEM25 will present detailed policy proposals to Europeanise all five, while limiting Brussels’ discretionary powers and returning power to national Parliaments, to regional councils, to city halls, and to communities. The proposed policies will be aimed at redeploying existing institutions (through a creative reinterpretation of existing treaties and charters) in order to stabilise the crises of public debt, banking, inadequate investment, and rising poverty.

•First two years: Constitutional Assembly.

The people of Europe have a right to consider the Union’s future and a duty to transform Europe by 2025 into a full-fledged democracy with a sovereign parliament respecting national self-determination and sharing power with national parliaments, regional assemblies, and municipal councils.

To do this, an Assembly of their representatives must be convened. DiEM25 will promote a Constitutional Assembly consisting of representatives elected on transnational tickets. Today, when universities apply to Brussels for research funding, they must form alliances across nations. Similarly, election to the Constitutional Assembly should require tickets featuring candidates from a majority of European countries. The resulting Constitutional Assembly will be empowered to decide on a future democratic constitution that will replace all existing European Treaties within a decade.

•By 2025: enactment of the decisions of the Constitutional Assembly.

Who will bring change? We, the people of Europe, have a duty to regain control over our Europe from unaccountable ‘technocrats’, complicit politicians, and shadowy institutions. We come from every part of the continent and are united by different cultures, languages, accents, political party affiliations, ideologies, skin colours, gender identities, faiths, and conceptions of the good society. We are forming DiEM25 to move from a Europe of ‘We the Governments’, and ‘We the Technocrats’, to a Europe of ‘We the people of Europe’.

Our four principles

1. No European people can be free as long as another’s democracy is violated

2. No European people can live in dignity as long as another is denied it

3. No European people can hope for prosperity if another is pushed into permanent insolvency and depression

4. No European people can grow without basic goods for its weakest citizens, human development, ecological balance, and a determination to become fossil-fuel free in a world that changes its ways—not the planet’s climate

We join in a magnificent tradition of Europeans who have struggled for centuries against the ‘wisdom’ that democracy is a luxury and that the weak suffer what they must. With our hearts, minds, and wills dedicated to these commitments, and determined to make a difference, we declare that.

Our pledge

We call on our fellow Europeans to join us to create the European movement which we call DiEM25.

To fight together, against a European establishment deeply contemptuous of democracy, to democratise the European Union

To end the reduction of all political relations into relations of power masquerading as merely technical decisions

To subject the EU’s bureaucracy to the will of sovereign European peoples

To dismantle the habitual domination of corporate power over the will of citizens

To repoliticise the rules that govern our single market and common currency

We consider the model of national parties which form flimsy alliances at the level of the European Parliament to be obsolete. While the fight for democracy from below (at the local, regional or national levels) is necessary, it is nevertheless insufficient if it is conducted without an internationalist strategy toward a pan-European coalition for democratising Europe. European democrats must come together first, forge a common agenda, and then find ways of connecting it with local communities at the regional and national level.

Our overarching aim to democratise the European Union is intertwined with an ambition to promote self-government (economic, political, and social) at the local, municipal, regional, and national levels, to throw open the corridors of power to the public, to embrace social and civic movements, and to emancipate all levels of government from bureaucratic and corporate power.

We are inspired by a Europe of reason, liberty, tolerance, and imagination made possible by comprehensive transparency, real solidarity, and authentic democracy.

We aspire to:

A Democratic Europe, in which all political authority stems from Europe’s sovereign peoples.

A Transparent Europe, where all decision-making takes place under the citizens’ scrutiny.

A United Europe, whose citizens have as much in common across nations as within them.

A Realistic Europe, that sets itself the task of radical, yet achievable, democratic reforms.

A Decentralised Europe, that uses central power to maximise democracy in workplaces, towns, cities, regions, and states.

A Pluralist Europe of regions, ethnicities, faiths, nations, languages, and cultures.

An Egalitarian Europe, that celebrates difference and ends discrimination based on gender, skin colour, social class, or sexual orientation.

A Cultured Europe, that harnesses its people’s cultural diversity and promotes not only its invaluable heritage but also the work of Europe’s dissident artists, musicians, writers, and poets.

A Social Europe, that recognises that liberty necessitates not only freedom from interference but also the basic goods that render one free from need and exploitation.

A Productive Europe, that directs investment into a shared, green prosperity.

A Sustainable Europe, that lives within the planet’s means, minimising its environmental impact, and leaving fossil fuel in the earth.

An Ecological Europe, engaged in genuine worldwide green transition.

A Creative Europe, that releases the innovative powers of its citizens’ imagination.

A Technological Europe, pushing new technologies in the service of solidarity.

A Historically-minded Europe, that seeks a bright future without hiding from its past.

An Internationalist Europe, that treats non-Europeans equally.

A Peaceful Europe, de-escalating tensions in its East and in the Mediterranean, acting as a bulwark against the sirens of militarism and expansionism.

An Open Europe, that is alive to ideas, people and inspiration from all over the world, recognising fences and borders as signs of weakness spreading insecurity in the name of security.

A Liberated Europe, where privilege, prejudice, deprivation, and the threat of violence wither, allowing Europeans to be born into fewer stereotypical roles, to enjoy equal chances to develop their potential, and to be free to choose more of their partners in life, work, and society.

A Liberated Europe by Raoul Martinez

“We dream of a liberated Europe free from fear and prejudice, where all people enjoy the conditions necessary to live dignified, fulfilled lives; a Europe free from the myths that distort its past, justify its present, or endanger its future; a liberating Europe that works to atone for centuries of colonialism, slavery, and theft by opening its borders and sharing its wealth.

The path from our reality to this dream is obstructed by established systems and influential myths. It is obstructed by capitalism, and its two destructive tendencies: to concentrate wealth and to expand in scale. The first destroys democracy; the second, our natural world. If capitalism overwhelms democracy, that liberated Europe will remain a dream. In its place there will be a Europe of confinement, of fences, borders, and walls that keep at bay those devastated by economic and ecological violence.

Under capitalism, the principle of one-dollar-one-vote determines the future. Those with the greatest wealth have the incentive and means to subvert democracy. Through party funding, lobbying, think tanks, media ownership, and the revolving door that links big business to government, the rich corrupt our electoral systems. Ending their dominion requires a revolution. Where there is no democracy, we must introduce it. Where there is some democracy, we must deepen it. Where the resources and institutions central to modern society have been bought and privatised, we must take them back.

No society will survive if its collective actions are devoid of rationality. A minimum threshold must be met: namely, avoiding conscious self-destruction through ruinous war and environmental degradation. Capitalist civilisation has proved incapable of meeting this basic requirement. Annihilation is highly profitable. Given the depth of the ecological crisis, the challenge for a genuinely democratic Europe is to nurture a culture that can meet this life-sustaining threshold.

A liberated Europe would not only reject capitalism but dispense with the myths that glorify its elites and whitewash its past. Myths of superiority and beneficence conceal the violence that has enabled this continent to seize a disproportionate share of the world’s resources and generate a disproportionate share of its waste. Myths of merit and individualism legitimise inequalities, obscuring the simple fact that the lottery of birth determines who we are, who we hope to be, and the available resources—both material and psychological—that allow us to transition from one to the other.

Generation after generation, we have all been led down well-trodden paths to a familiar destination: a society in which inequalities of power and wealth are reproduced and extended. If the aim of society is to unlock the potential within each of us, we must create new paths to a new world where the resources and rights necessary for individual fulfilment are equitably shared. We must expose the lie that equality of opportunity is compatible with high levels of inequality.

And finally, the myth of separation. Throughout our lives, we all adopt cultural stances that connect us to some but divide us from many. Yet with different influences, any of us could have embraced a group, cause, or belief different from the one we did. Paradoxically, humanity’s diversity is a testament to a deeper commonality: we are all products of forces beyond our control, with the potential to be other than who we are. We must remember that our common humanity goes deeper than the identities we inherit—and on that foundation build a stronger continent together. Before we are British, French, German, or Greek, let us be European.

A truly liberated Europe is one in which we unshackle our allegiances from national flags and cultural fictions, and give them instead to universal principles, the natural world, and a shared identity.”

A Peaceful Europeby Eyal Weizman

“Europe is best seen from its margins. From Roman times until today, whether in the Mediterranean, the eastern Balkans, or Ukraine, the state of the European project is still decided there, for the nature of Europe consists of pacifying its centre and exporting violence to the frontiers.

I offer this observation from a personal perspective, because Israel is one of these eastern frontiers. Though not an official member, it sees itself as part of that culture whose self-imagined function is holding back the orient—maintaining a front beyond which lurks all kinds of danger.

Colonial regimes have always been laboratories in which new technologies of control are conceived and tested for the world—whether to divide and fortify, or to eavesdrop and control. Israel/Palestine is a laboratory of this kind. Not only has Israeli industry generated a huge export market for their spy software and security systems, they have also exported a certain political sensibility from the margin to the centre: an ‘everywhere war’ against refugees and migrants. When Donald Trump calls for a fortified border with Mexico, he relies on the success of the Israeli border—a ‘success’ that remains unproven and at enormous cost to Palestinian lives and livelihoods. Hungary and Poland have a close ideological, technological, and economic relationship with Israel. Serbia did the historical job of Europe in Srebrenica. The two states should have been immediately admitted as honorary members.