What about the (South) Eastern Question…?
Diem25, though a very young social movement, is still very weakly represented in south-eastern Europe: that’s a fact. Of course if one likes to complicate things, it might be challenging to define at first what exactly “South-Eastern Europe” is and what holds it together. Should we call it “the Balkans”? Well let’s not linger too long over terminologies and turn to what was once bluntly called “European Turkey” as depicted in masterly fashion in this 1908 edition of Le Petit Journal.
Before diving into Balkan issues and their current state of affairs, it is worth quoting Maria Todorova, quoting in turn from “Imagining the Balkans“, by the Afro-American sociologist and civil-rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, as he pondered the florid “semi-colonial” status of the region:
The issue of the Balkans’ semicolonial, quasi-colonial, but clearly not purely colonial status deserves closer attention. Admittedly, the categories of colonialism and dominance or subordination can be treated essentially as synonyms. For W. E. B. Du Bois, the legalistic distinction between colonized and subordinate was ephemeral: “[I]n addition to the some seven hundred and fifty million of disfranchised colonial peoples there are more than half-billion persons in nations and groups who are quasi-colonials and in no sense from free and independent states.” The designation “free states” was a fiction that disguised a reality of oppression and manipulation: “In the Balkans are 60,000,000 persons in the ‘free states’ of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece. They form in the mass an ignorant, poor, and sick people, over whom already Europe is planning ‘spheres of influence’.
That should explain to us to some extent why in states like Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria (“happily” members of the European Union), or Albania, all of them representing the utmost embodiment of European internal colonization and effective deployment of neo-liberal policies, progressive social movements like Diem25, fiercely fighting exactly against these afore-mentioned scourges, are scarcely represented.
The one exception to this list, evidently not in the sense that it could withdraw itself from the austerity measures “recommended” to its government by the EU establishment, but to the extent that there Diem25 could find fertile soil, is Serbia. Serbian Diemers were crushed so to speak between many different ideological tectonic plates. One of them was the “leftist epiphany” existing in their country which means that some disillusioned intellectuals have started looking at left-winged ideas in a more affirmative way. There are many reasons why public opinion was reluctant to embrace this “political left”. Just to refer to some of them: it is worth mentioning that Milosevic’s clique, made up of all sorts of business tycoons, and responsible for Serbia’s economic plight during and after the Milosevic era, was always associated with the “progressive parties”. Parties including the Labour Party, Association of Free Syndicates of Serbia, Social-democratic Union and even the Democratic Party, member of the “Pink” International, were active (especially the Democratic Party) in turning Serbia into a heaven for a few rich people and a hell for the many who were poor. Furthermore, the workers’ syndicates, inherited from the Yugoslavian era, were used indiscriminately to silence the working class. Trade union struggle was damped down in the 1990s and showed weak signs of life until 2009. Why? Because the world economic crisis, known in Serbia as SEKA (Svetska Ekonomska Kriza) had also reached these shores, so to speak.
So, what happened was a hard and sobering blow for the working class: workers started to form their own unions and, with considerable difficulty, strove to defend their independence from the state authorities. All this, combined with the non-EU status of Serbia, left progressive and social activists in a sort of desperate plight. They became small, disunited and in serious internal dispute over one basic question: Who would be the leader of the Left? Of course, they massively omitted one major challenge. Even if, by some stroke of luck, they had become a political force in our country, who would come to their aid? The only force that can give them the support they need is the pan-European movement of leftists and progressives in general (not to be mistaken with today’s Serbian “progressive” regime) and the only such movement is DiEM25.
In Hungary there is not much of a ‘Left’ – the idea has been largely discredited by 45 years of Soviet socialism. It has been noted that there is a political difference to be found in a country that had Soviet troops (such as Hungary) compared to those that did not (such as Yugoslavia) – this is an important observation.
The effect of this in Hungary is that the opposition to the present right-wing government comes only from neo-liberal liberals and also from the anti-neo-liberal fascist right – few in Hungary would call themselves ‘democratic left’ today (how that would be defined from a DiEM25 perspective, anyway?). A new democratic ‘Left’ has never emerged in Hungary after the changes of the late 80s/early 90s.
We do not have answers for how to ‘fix’ this reputation or attitude other than to say it needs to be acknowledged by leftwing activists in western Europe as a fundamental feature of ‘eastern’ European politics. Ignoring this or understanding it by invoking some kind of misplaced ‘Soviet nostalgia’, or glossing over it completely, does nothing to help.
Before examining our four case studies, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia, let’ s quickly recall the past two decades in those countries. One fundamental issue dissociates Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, on one hand side and Yugoslavia, later Serbia, on the other: the former three countries “won” the Second World War thanks to the Soviet Union, whereas last one did so thanks alone to their own partisans. This was a crucial factor in the political divisions that until today, have kept these countries apart. Mainly in Romania and Bulgaria the external diplomatic mission, regardless of political direction, whether rightist or leftist, was always committed to subordinating its local and national interest by seeking out “strategic” international partnerships with the world’s great powers, whether this was the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, or NATO. Serbia, by winning the war on its own and by deploying its own “third way” communism, was armed with the self-confidence and pride, which would later decay soon enough into nationalism and internal struggle.
The 1990’s
Let’s start this short historical memento with the 90s. Whereas in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, those times were naively perceived as “times of hope and liberty”, in Serbia, at the time part of Yugoslavia, things escalated very tragically. In brief, there was the initial crisis, which gave way to nationalism, then war, accounting for 100, 000 victims and millions of refugees. Meanwhile, Bulgaria and Romania were exonerated from this flagellum, mainly due to their ethnic “purity”, given that their few minority populations were not scattered all across the whole country and instead “confined” to a few regions, Hungarians in Romania, in Eastern Transylvania and Turks in Bulgaria, and in the Rhodope Mountains.
It is worth remembering in this context the bitter historical irony that during the NATO bombings in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (consisting of Serbia and Montenegro), as an aftermath of the “Yugoslavian wars”, they basically bought their NATO and then subsequently EU, entry tickets, by opening their air space to NATO airplanes. This was a modern version of Metternich’s “Divide et Impera”, working to perfection. Among others common ties between Romania and Bulgaria one can should also mention the demographic, but also psychological, ubiquity of the communist-inherited secret police. Those were the ones orchestrating the “coups d’états” in the early 90s, and after the fall of Iron Curtain, they were the cowboys of the new capitalism, eastern-style.
It is worth having a look at the numbness of mainstream civil society in those countries, in comparison to “western” social unrest. Whereas “in the West” G20 summits (think only of what happened a few months ago, in Hamburg), American military invasions, mostly in Iraq, or in Afghanistan or trans-Atlantic commercial deals like TTIP and CETA, have ignited huge protests among civil society while south-eastern Europe has remained seemingly inured. However “corruption”, obviously local corruption, has been the hot potato in that part of the world. In all these afore-mentioned countries the locally corrupt oligarchy has prompted “the demos” to take to the streets. This says a lot about the social chasm there. It is also highly interesting how corruption has become a key topic on their political agenda and not a few times has served to fuel the careers of populists – but this could be the subject of another paper, if not an entire book.
The explanation for DiEM25 being unfortunately unable till now to find fertile soil in this part of Europe, can also be found in the different mainstream civil society perceptions of some key aspects of its progressive agenda. Let’s examine three of these aspects:
Democracy
Probably it is worth ab initio quoting Oscar Wilde‘s bitter joke about democracy: “it is impractical and it goes against human nature, this is why it is worth carrying out“. One can hardly find another place in Europe where collective thought is committed to the first part of this sentence. Mainstream civil society is simply lethargic vis-à-vis grass roots democracy, or “democracy from below”, one of the main endeavors of DiEM25. A feeble and sometimes too centralized administration has turned people away from democracy, who were already convinced that their voices don’t count. An interesting phenomenon to note is that the massive brain-drain of Balkan “elites” has given birth to a new type of social mutant and also social-class: the “corporate proletariat”. The newly established white collar social tier has developed its own sense and ideas about democracy, and advocates shifting power from the former rusty “socio-communist” oligarchy to a new “liberal technocracy”.
Yanis Varoufakis says that a fundamental flaw of the EU is that it started out not as an institution based on democracy and human rights, but as an economic cartel of the Benelux countries. Well, on this side of EU Europe a fundamental flaw of the EU is that countries were brought into it in a rushed manner without our newly democratised cultures (‘the demos’) fully grasping the meaning of joining.
Also, in Hungary for example, the threshold for voter participation in the referendum was lowered from 50% to 25% for the purpose of pushing Hungary into the EU. This is not an argument for being against the EU, but it is important to know that normal democratic means were not deployed from the beginning. Therefore, sadly, it can be accurately said that Hungary did not join the EU in a normal democratic way. The implications of this are still felt today with the present government’s right wing populist attacks on the EU as ‘anti-democratic’ while inciting the population to hate the bogeyman called ‘Brussels’.
Social welfare (New Deal)
If in France changes to the legislation, some years ago, that slightly increased the pension age were sufficient to ignite the streets, almost culminating in civil war, in Romania and Bulgaria EU political dictates consisting in severe social and public expenditure cuts, in 2008-2010, were met with an astonishing passivity by “civil society”, civil anomie and the very same thing happened in Serbia. The accepted economic mantra for the last two decades has been to sell off human and natural resources at practically no cost whatsoever to the “free market”. The price paid for their economic “uncompetitiveness” has been a huge demographic decline and the loss of every surviving hope in the ability of state institutions to balance brutal social inequalities, guarantee social justice or encourage participative democracy.
Migration
There are bitter jokes in Romanian and Bulgarian to the effect that there are more Bulgarian and Romanian doctors in France than in their countries of origin. Sadly this is true. As borders opened and the labor market started to liberalize, all hopes and prospects started to look towards the west. One problem was that they did not look at all between themselves, Bulgarians to Romanians, Romanians to Serbians …
Two aspects are important to underline here, apart from the fact that south-eastern Europe was for decades, and still is, that inexhaustible source of both cheap labor as well as highly skilled workers, necessary to build the “digital economy” of the future.
One point is that by demographically growing to such an immense extent (there are hundreds of thousands of migrants from each of the three countries, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, in almost all big western European countries), their diasporas have developed their own cultural consciousness. On one hand, they still live to a great extent in a cultural ghetto, not being and also not wishing to be assimilated and on the other, they have transformed themselves into a new caste of lecturers or supervisors in their adopted countries, having now “learned better how things should be done.”
A second aspect concerns the reluctance, if not hatred sometimes shown towards recent refugees fleeing from conflict in the Middle East. Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria were far more moderate in their resistance than the Visegrad countries, mainly out of their obedience and submission to the EU establishment, their political class unwilling to upset “the big daddies” at Brussels while also concerned not to lose too much social capital at home. This is working Serbia, not yet an EU member, but humbly negotiating its entry ticket. The latter two countries are meanwhile securing their membership by almost going down on their knees to beg.
Conclusion:
So, to conclude, let us hope that this text isn’t just that – “mrtvo slovo na papiru” as they say in Serbia or “dead letter on the paper” aka something that has no value. This text is a call to our fellow Diemers from all over eastern Europe, from Tallinn to Tirana and from Ljubljana to Kiev, to join us in creating this platform that will bring us closer together, not only through our shared experiences, but also bring us closer to other Europeans with different histories in the west, south and north.
Carpe diem!
DiEM25 members from Bucharest, Sofia, Budapest and Belgrade.
Romania’s dangerous slide into illiberalism
The map above depicts countries where gay marriage is recognized (dark blue), where it is confined to a civil union (light blue), where it is not recognised (red) and where the issue is, well, a grey area. Let me to point your attention to the only EU “grey spot”, namely Romania.
To quote from Romanian Constitution, article 48: “marriage is grounded in the free consent between spouses”. Whether “spouses” could be of the same sex, is left open. This was the backdoor through which the current establishment party, PSD (Social Democratic Party) were able to clamp down on sexual-minority rights in Romania and endorse, along with the Romanian Orthodox Church, a campaign against gay marriage.
In this spirit, a gathering of more than 40 groups, many of them religious or describing themselves as “pro-life”, started in 2015 the so-called “Coalition for the family”. The alliance’s goal is to amend the Constitution to explicitly specify that marriage is the union between a man and a woman (like the other red countries in the map above).
And they’ve been pretty successful so far – in just a few months they were able to gather over 3 million signatures to take the initiative to parliament. Moreover it is likely they will make big gains in November, when a national referendum could be called to change the constitution. In this respect, Romania is following its regional neighbours, Croatia, Poland and Hungary.
But there is more than that at stake. This sad story is after all about Romania’s conservative establishment, political as well as social, and the perverse way in which it is exploiting the deeply rooted rural mentality of large parts of its population.
It is about the battle for progressive ideas, like those of DiEM25’s Progressive Agenda. Grassroots democracy lives and flourishes where minorities are not subdued by authoritarianism. We should all be aware of this, and push hard against it.
Bogdan is a member of DSC Bucharest, but also a humble engineer living in Munich. His main points of interest are socio-political issues of South-East Europe, as well as promoting DiEM25 there.
Exposed: The role of Big Finance in ECB decisions
A new report by the European Corporate Observatory shows how international financial corporations hold 98% of the seats in the expert groups that advise the European Central Bank (ECB).
In other words: a ton of lobbyists for Big Finance are perilously close to the centre of decision making at a key EU institution, while civil society organisations and academics are nowhere to be seen.
The ECB is responsible for administering the Eurozone’s monetary policy, and is one of the three entities that makes up the ‘Troika’, responsible for imposing harsh austerity on countries like Greece and Ireland. Its mission, it explains, is “to serve the people of Europe”. If you think that the corporations officially advising the ECB, like BNP Paribas and Société Générale, have the people’s interests at heart… well, think again!
The murky world of ECB decision making is nothing new to DiEM25. Since our inception, we’ve called for full transparency in decision making at the ECB and other EU institutions. More recently, we started a campaign to demand that the ECB publish vital files relating to its treatment of Greece in 2015. Nearly 30,000 people have signed the petition so far.
Want to be part of the solution? Get involved or, if you have alternative proposals, mail us!
Jane is a member of our London DSC and blogs at www.ambitiousmamas.co.uk on feminism, politics and race. You can also follow her on Twitter.
Greece and reforms: more déja-vu
Greece is entering the third review of the current “bailout” program. Although this is expected to last until the end of the year, we have begun to see Greece on the news again, with voices urging the Government to complete the process on time. These voices have been heard before.
This review includes reforms in a number of sectors, from energy to the labor market and social benefits. Let’s be clear: “reform” is a synonym of “destabilization” and “austerity.” And “review” is a synonym for forcing the Greek Government to take all the consequential necessary actions. All these take place while the Greek economy is shrinking and is bound to extremely high primary surpluses and billions of debt to be repaid in the next years and decades.
Even if Greece finds its way out of the current program in summer 2018, it will still remain under very strict troika supervision until it repays 75% of its debt. During these years, austerity, widespread and on-the-cheap privatizations and exacerbated inequalities will continue to flourish. The non-upper classes will have to keep finding the money to pay very high taxes to support the economy. Any news of growth and recovery is and will continue to be just ‘fake news’.
For these reasons, we reject the strategy of behaving like an exemplary prisoner (Greece’s approach since the beginning of the crisis, except the first half of 2015) and call for disobedience, constructive disobedience, with the immediate implementation of our proposals for Greece as part of our European New Deal.
Catch Yanis' Facebook Live tonight!
Tonight, at 5pm CEST (4pm London, 6pm Athens), Yanis is hosting his second Facebook Live chat. In it, he will answer DiEM25 members’ questions. The main topic for discussion this time will be our movement’s “electoral wing” proposal that so many are talking about now.
Please post your questions as a comment here or on the forum. The video chat will appear here.
Hope you can join us!
DiEM25 rocks Italy on tour
Last week, DiEM25’s Yanis Varoufakis and Lorenzo Marsili toured Italy, meeting activists, movements, municipal coalitions and political figures across the Eurozone’s third largest economy to put forward our proposals for tackling Europe’s common problems, and to introduce our ongoing debate on DiEM25’s role in the 2019 European elections.
Over five days our team visited six cities, speaking at seven events to over 5,000 people. We were humbled by the extraordinary turnout and the widespread interest in our ideas and proposals!
Here’s what happened:
The first stop was Milan on September 27 at the Fondazione Feltrinelli. Titled “There is (no) alternative?: Progressive proposals for Europe”, the event was sold out to the point where the organisers had to set up a second room for it!
Speakers included Milan’s former mayor Giuliano Pisapia and Tonia Mastrobuoni, Berlin correspondent from the paper La Repubblica. The main topic: the need for a large transnational party in Europe, gathering all progressive movements to offer a real alternative to the Establishment and nationalist parties.
Video diary #1 from @yanisvaroufakis+@l_marsili, now touring Italy to take DiEM25’s proposals across the country: https://t.co/iJuZDHPSFO pic.twitter.com/yGoJPleIcO
— DiEM25 (@DiEM_25) September 28, 2017
Next up, Yanis and Lorenzo visited Turin, at the ‘Festival Proxima del 99%’. Over 600 people attended to hear Yanis and Lorenzo, alongside speakers like Italian trade union leader Maurizio Landini and Nicola Fratoianni, discuss what’s going wrong with left wing politics in Italy, the sinking numbers in electoral turnout and political participation, and how today’s national-level problems can only be resolved if we take into account the transnational dimension.
The Festival Internazionale at Ferrara provided the venue for the next tour stop. Speaking to a packed theatre of over 1,000 (mostly young) people – many of whom had been queuing around the block (pictured) – Yanis and Lorenzo outlined the core problems of the EU/Eurozone, and the Establishment’s fake narrative of a ‘North/South divide’ which treats these regions as different worlds with different issues. They also took questions from the audience.
Next came the “Movements and Cities of Europe”, an open assembly in Bologna with the municipal movement Coalizione Civica. Yanis’ speech, calling for a ‘political awakening’, closed the event, and it was very well received by the 500-strong audience.
The fifth stop was Naples, where our team joined the first national assembly of DiEM25 in Italy to solidify the activist base there. The event was organised by DiEM25’s local group in the city, DSC Naples 1.
Our team then made a second stop in Naples to speak alongside its mayor, Luigi de Magistris, about the DiEM25’s concept of “rebel cities” – a network of progressive municipalities like Barcelona, Zagreb, Warsaw and Naples itself. Together with Luigi de Magistris and several movements from the city, Yanis and Lorenzo debated how an innovative transnational campaign for the 2019 European elections could look.
Video diary #2 from @yanisvaroufakis, @l_marsili+friends on their DiEM25 tour of Italy! This time from Naples. pic.twitter.com/X22dnNY2RA
— DiEM25 (@DiEM_25) October 1, 2017
The final stop was Palermo on October 1, at an event organised by DiEM25’s local group DSC Palermo2. Titled “Palermo Europe: the future goes from the Mediterranean”, Yanis, Lorenzo and a host of other speakers including Palermo’s mayor discussed how Palermo and the region represented a new model for the welcoming and integration of migrants and refugees, a foundational claim for DiEM25.
The tour also marked the launch of a new initiative “Radio DiEM25 Italia”, with ongoing live videos from our members, DSCs, partners and movements across the country. (Check it out at on the page of DiEM25 Italia.)
The tour might have ended, but the journey has just begun. Stay tuned for future tours and help us spread the word: The time to build a new Europe is now!
Catalonia: democracy and secession
For DiEM25 as a pan-European and transnational movement, the emancipatory critique of all nationalisms is a given. It is simply a matter of principle, and therefore beyond discussion.
But that does not mean that we belong to the broad chorus of those who ascribe “mistakes” to all parties in the dramatic crisis of the Spanish state. The central government in Madrid, because it “overreacts”, its armed forces because they act “disproportionately”, and the Catalan government, because it is/was “nationalist” and therefore the main actor responsible for this crisis.
Things are not that simple.
At the heart of the matter, first of all, it is important to note once again the complete and, in this case, infamous failure of the European Commission and the governments of the EU member states. The rejection of the Catalan Government’s request that they play a mediatory role in their conflict with the Spanish State and its police force is only the final confirmation of this failure and infamy. In fact, the Europeanization of the Catalan question could have been the beginning of a progressive response.
The Commission, however, declares the conflict to be an “internal affair” of Spain and thus definitively takes sides with the regime in Madrid. It thus reaffirms the commitment of the governments of the EU member states, which had previously already supported the Spanish State.
The attitude of the Commission and its governments follows the calculation that politics must be reduced to the unconditional securing of one’s own power. Madrid, Brussels, Paris and Berlin also agree among themselves that they will base this calculation primarily on the use of a paramilitarily reinforced police force. With the violent attack on the mass protests against the Hamburg G20 summit, Berlin has once again set the line of march, a violence seconded by Paris when it made the French state of emergency permanent.
From the perspective of over 900 people who have been brutally injured by Rajoys’ uniformed squad groups, the only legitimate judgement on the Spanish situation is summed up in the sentence “Spain is dead“, deployed by the author Albert Sanchéz Piñol in his commentary on these events.
In view of this complicity of the EU and its governments with the police riots and the millionfold robbery of the right to the freedom of political choice and the right to free political expression, we add: “This EU is dead.”
The violence of majoritarian servitude
It is not only the Spanish State, which once again has impressively confirmed its Francoist origins, that calls for our condemnation. And not only the complicity of the EU and its governments to the post-Francoist regime. What also deserves our condemnation in no small part is the subjective loyalty of the Spanish majority to its regime. In this lies the essentially political problem of this crisis, as well as many another crisis, which therefore are the most difficult to solve: the problem of the voluntary servitude of the majority, and the problem of the violence used by these servants against those who no longer want to be servants.
This includes those parts of the Spanish (and not only the Spanish) left, who wanted to criticize the regime in Madrid only to the point where they requested the movement for a referendum to recognize the unity of the Spanish state, and thus to subjugate itself to it. The hypocritical arguments of these left must also be taken to task: the references to the “petty bourgeois” foundation of the movement, the alleged “concealment” of the allegedly only relevant “social question” and, last but not least, their reduction of the Catalan movement to a nationalist movement.
All these arguments are only repeating with regard to the Catalan question, what the Spanish left has already said to the Basque question. They are repeating what the Turkish left said to the Kurdish question, what the French left said to the Corsican question, what the British left said to the Irish and Scottish question, what the Israeli said to the Palestinian question, what the Sinhala left said to the Tamil question. They repeat what the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi as a defender of the unity of the state of Myanmar said to the slaughter of the Rohingya minority.
In their criticisms of “nationalism”, or, more precisely, of “separatism” and “secessionism” – they all suddenly become advocates for the party of their respective majority society, and thus the party of their state. They become a party par excellence of the state, the party of the unity of the state to be secured at (almost) any price, and consequently a party to the violence used by the state. It doesn’t matter at all if this criticism is based not in national, but in social categories: in both cases, majoritarian decisions are taken. This is what we fundamentally oppose.
For the same reason, the Catalan question for us is not a national question, nor a question of a nation state, but a question of democracy. It poses itself not only in every actually existing, but also in every possible democracy. It is the inevitable self-questioning of every democracy. It stands as long as democracy is constituted by the state, and it is set up as long as democracy is in a majority ratio. It articulates the right of the self-defence of minorities, and it defines this right as a right to separation and secession.
The last step is essential, because the right to self-defence of the minority becomes practical only as a right to separation or secession. The right to separation or secession therefore becomes the essential right also of the minorities in a Catalan, Kurdish, Corsican, Irish, Scottish, Palestinian, Tamil, or Rohingya state, and thus the ultimate proof of democracy.
However, the right to self-defence of the minorities proves itself not only as the right to separation and secession from the majority, nation and state, but also as a right to the transgression of nation and state in favour of a global, practically-speaking a continental, for us a European perspective.
The overcoming of the unity of majority, nation and state, always invariably and without exception, has to be tackled at the same time both in the great and in the small: going the widest distance and to the proximate nearness at one and the same time. This is the cause of the city as cosmopolis, and it is the cause of a federation of cities as a cosmopolitan federation: a federation of individuals. The good part of this is that in the cosmopolitan trajectory path and goal always coincide. Spain is dead, this EU is dead.
DiEM25’s electoral wing is a historic moment
How DiEM25 could become ‘a hotbed of grassroots democracy capable of supranational solutions’, according to our Coordinating Collective member, Rosemary Bechler.
>> A movement-party (a hybrid, that is neither an issues-based movement nor a power-seeking bureaucratic party)
DiEM25’s “Not Just Another Political Party” proposal outlines a ‘dual approach’ – a movement-party (a hybrid that is neither an issues-based movement nor a power-seeking bureaucratic party) which can perform both functions. We have seen some exciting organisational experiments broadly attempting to reconcile the horizontal and the vertical in European progressive politics over the recent period. The most successful are those that don’t back off from the transformative energies of people self-organising, for the sake of some filter or gatekeeping function often prematurely designed to capture power.
Our introduction to Not Just Another Political Party poses a crucial question: how can we be involved in elections, national or pan-European, without losing our ‘movement character’ and our capacity to converse with and influence existing parties through dialogue and collaboration?
With this proposal we have turned that make-or-break question into a realistic prospect, an ongoing democratic process at the heart of the DiEM25 movement. Faced with any given electoral opportunity, the movement as a whole, in its pan-European form, in national debates and as individual members of that movement will decide together which strategic approach is best. On 1st November we decide whether we should seek to register an electoral wing in as many countries as possible. But the decision of whether that electoral wing runs in any future election will, again, be taken by DiEM25 in its all member vote manner. Pan-European votes will decide each electoral strategy as well, but only after we have learned much about the democratic depth of our movement, the impact of different cultures, all inspired by a common European vision.
What criteria will members use? I hope the one mentioned in the quote from the Manifesto. Members will be trying to decide which form of political intervention will best connect ‘our common agenda… with local communities and at the regional and national level.’
Coming from a UK plunged into the Brexit debate for the foreseeable future, I warmly welcome a chance to access an in-depth pan-European discussion and analysis about our common future. But I cannot imagine DiEM25 ‘going electoral’ soon in a general election in the UK. In terms of the connection we seek, I can’t at present imagine a better opportunity than the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, where middle class people who care about others can connect with working class people in a way that our media, beginning with the Reithian BBC, has tried its best to render impossible for so many years. In national elections, I do have an interest in the potential for seeking consensus in progressive alliances against a Ukipised Conservative party, as long as they are bottom up alliances, and I do believe that DiEM25UK could make itself useful as an arena for those sorts of conversation.
But if DiEM25 in its collective wisdom decided to ‘go electoral’ in the UK, as an individual member of DiEM25 the movement, but not as a registered party member, I would still be able to choose to argue for and indeed pursue my goals as sketched above.
>> A transnational movement-party, with a common programme across all European states
Before ever getting to this stage, we would have taken the time for the relevant National Committee (NC) to empower its members to assess their capacity and the optimum impact out of a wide range of options, from the ones DIEM25 has already trialled – asking candidates to sign a charter committing them to DiEM25 policies; endorsing candidates, parties or coalitions; working for a progressive alliance; otherwise raising the profile of our European New Deal proposals in the election debate, or some option we haven’t yet imagined – through to forging a more permanent partnership with a local party that would act as its ‘electoral wing’ in that state – (a movement that is setting out to attract parties, rather than the other way around, has a truly innovative twist to it, doesn’t it?) – or launching a new party that has a fully-fledged DiEM25 political programme. They would make a recommendation, or put a set of options, to DiEM25 as a whole to decide. In the unlikely event of a rift between the NC and the rest of DiEM25, some agreed process would have to resolve the conflict. Crucially, in all cases everyone would learn.
What is liberating about the hybrid opportunity we are proposing is that this is truly bottom-up decision-making of an ambitious kind. Each member has to decide both collectively what the best scenario is for DiEM25, and individually where they in all conscience can best allot their own time and effort. I care about this rich process of decision-making, not only because of the way I may be disposed to vote. To quote a colleague, “we want to present people with a vision for Europe and themselves that’s truly radical” [my italics]. This to my mind precisely requires DiEM25 to become a prefigurative movement, a longterm investment in a democratic and democratising process, which will be informed and enabled by the pan-European experience of DiEM25 as a whole.
This is essential not only for fully liberating the transformative energies of the members, but also for keeping properly open, open at every pore, the relationship between the political organism and its outside world – the place it wishes to move into and to transform, on the scale and with the speed that we need this to be done.
Not being sucked into the disciplinarian straits of internal democracy, but using its smart processes as an opportunity to gestate the debates and the very diverse relationships that we need to cultivate in our wider societies… enables each one of us to turn outwards to where the real challenge lies. In between elections, we need not be afraid of conflicting priorities. In fact if we have enough members, I hope our movement will test out rival approaches to see which works better to build DiEM25, rather than waste too much time in deliberation.
At the same time, self-organising is hard and can be demoralising work, if there is no clear sign of focused impact and progress. The aim to bring our European New Deal policy framework to a ‘ballot box near you’ in the 2019 European elections, provides a marvellous focal point for sharing ideas, best practice, contrasting evidence, our hopes and fears, while testing our capacities for galvanising our efforts together – in short for transnational decision-making.
>> A hotbed of grassroots democracy – more so than the elitist/bureaucratic national parties of the left
To again quote a colleague, our pan-European movement “has the opportunity to solidify around a set of radical values, transcending traditional classification, which encourages people with different political backgrounds either to join or join forces with us.” But, he asks, “how does one influence policy without participating in the system?”
The tension here is between a pluralist seed-bed of ideas and commitments and a streamlined machine for external political intervention. The only answer is to place both functions where they are best served, while ensuring that the other function is least jeopardised in the process. We already have a policy-formation process that has allowed us to intervene in a timely and constructive way in a wide range of European developments, large and small. At present, it could benefit hugely from the imminent formation of thematic ‘DiEM25 spontaneous collectives’ (DSCs), but only if it is allowed to pick and choose what it finds useful for our particular school of diplomacy. Otherwise the entire movement will spend its time amending policy, rather than transforming the conditions of business-as-usual that surround us, first and foremost by building our own DiEMer ranks.
This is why I believe that it is crucial that we define our operating principles clearly when it comes to the primary tasks of National Committees and DSCs. The national bodies must be coordinating collectives with the widest and deepest brief for growing our movement and helping to deliver (or not) its electoral strategy. They should spend their time facilitating communication in all directions, internal and external, not turn into executive decision-makers and gatekeepers of a narrowing kind. And in my view too, thematic DSCs should have as their primary function not the formation of policy, but the creation of compelling and productive open debates that draw thinking people into our movement. Which is why the pluralist nature of our movement, uniting people from different parties and movements within one country let alone across the nations of Europe, gives our transnational hybrid formation such a crucial head start over more unreconstructed top-down organisations.
In our proposal, we have differentiated ourselves markedly from what we have referred to as the ‘democratic centralist’ tendencies of conventional political parties. We may need to be forgiven for deploying historic hyperbole here. ‘Democratic centralism’ was the concept invented by Lenin to describe something rather more authoritarian than simply ‘the idea that members must become subordinate to the party and the majority’. Lenin used it to assert that members should be subordinate to the ‘leadership’ (the executive committee) – a little like Tony Blair, only without the excuse that in the throes of revolution internal party democracy is a time-consuming luxury.
Of course Lenin argued that after the revolution is over, democratic centralism should be abandoned. But this did not happen during his lifetime. As a result, the concept has become a term of abuse with sarcastic connotations, implying that a party is completely dominated by the leadership, while pretending to be democratic.
Nevertheless, the idea is in the same family – and what we now propose indicates both how far and how little politics has moved on. The important distinction for our purposes is the contrast between an elitist, top-down and heavily stage-managed exercise and DiEM25’s commitment to a grassroots, participatory or bottom-up democracy. Some may fear they are trapped in another drama of the former kind. This is not surprising, since in the recent period, too many of us have been damaged by well-meaning experiments that have nevertheless plummeted down this disrespectful path. But I hope that most of us are more optimistically ready and willing to do what it takes to be the demos that Europe needs.
I can also say that my experience of Coordinating Collective discussions over the last six months is that despite and because of the considerable talent that we have there, we know that it is essential that we succeed in designing together precisely this process of mutual empowerment. We need to strike the internal bargains that liberate if we wish to have any advantage over our powerful competitors, given the distributed networking world in which we live.
Steven Weber articulated the point well in The Success of Open Source (Harvard UP, 2004), comparing open source to modern religious communities. He said: “It is the leaders who are dependent on the followers more than the other way around… the primary route to failure for them is to be unresponsive to their followers.” This is so important because of the central importance for our times of the self-organising conversation which produces civility and vision out of our many discreet conditions, in particular across traditional barriers whether of identity, language or culture: “Here we find people trying to understand one another, to develop constructive debate, to take into consideration the full scope of modern politics.”
It is this conversation above all, this ‘rich dissensus’, that is DiEM25’s ultimate resource for the European transformation we all seek.
>> A national platform that seeks ‘European solutions to national problems’
This is surely where decisiveness and vision come together. And here we find that far from being idealistic, this is simply what the “full scope of modern politics” demands – that as a movement we help Europe find ways to tackle the toxicity of the Nationalist International and its neoliberal accomplices, further up river towards its authoritarian source, so that we can defend all the gains we have made in all these places, large and small, where we proliferate and conduct our liberation struggle.
Carpe DiEM!
Why Europe needs a new democratic left
Arguably the most dramatic economic shift of our time was the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal revolution of the 1980s, that put an end to the largest period of continuous economic growth in history after World War II. In its aftermath, inequality rose to levels not seen since the 1920s, economic growth became anaemic, and industrial production moved elsewhere.
But the most destructive element of that cultural and economic revolution was the retreat of left-wing parties, that ended up compromising with neoliberalism for the sake of their immediate survival, rather than defending the traditional values of the left (a strong social contract, public infrastructure, strong labour and consumer protections, and reigning in corporate power).
Politicians like Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder and Bill Clinton put forward political reforms that would have been deemed too radical in the 1940s up to the 1970s, even on the right. Their nominally-left parties deregulated the financial system, slashed public investment, eliminated taxes on the rich and privatised whole chunks of the state while overturning labour, consumer, and environmental regulations. In the end, there was little difference between traditional left-wing and right-wing parties, except for a few social and lifestyle issues.
The effects of this lack of political diversity on the economy are plain to see. The world fell into its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, banks failed spectacularly and had to be bailed out by taxpayers, inequality went through the roof, public services degraded, and labour relations became precarious. Even the subsequent economic recovery was based on low wages for labour and huge profits for a handful of global companies.
The electorate reacted very rationally to this lack of alternative proposals from the left. If left-wing parties were adopting right-wing policies, the thinking went, they might as well go for the ‘genuine article’. And so the European People’s Party became the dominant force in Europe, as did the Republican party in the US. Meanwhile, some voters began to seek alternatives elsewhere, like on the extreme right with parties like France’s National Front, Germany’s AfD, the UK’s UKIP, and the Alt-Right and Tea Party movements in the US, to name but a few.
As the nefarious effects of neoliberalism became clear, and as right-wing populism started to show its true colours and inner contradictions, a political opening appeared for real left-wing parties that want a return to more egalitarian economic policies, a financial system kept in check, a greater share of the wealth given to labour, and true democratic transnational institutions to regulate international trade and economic activity. While the ‘false left’ keeps racking up one defeat after the next – in Germany, Spain, Greece, the US, and the Netherlands – and with many traditional socialist and labour parties on the verge of extinction, the back-to-basics left keeps beating expectations. Politicians like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Bernie Sanders in the US and Antonio Costa in Portugal have defied the common wisdom that only the centre can have electoral success (a center that has dramatically shifted right over the last 40 years).
At European level, a new political entity has been stirring up a serious debate on the future of Europe and the economy. DiEM25 has been sowing the seeds for a rebirth of the same European ideals that proved so successful in the past. Rather than fighting neoliberalism with nationalism and isolationism, we propose a reconstruction of Europe’s synergies and solidarity around strong democratic institutions that can’t be easily co-opted by the same corporate lobbies that have defaced Europe, and which resulted in Jose Manuel Barroso jumping from the head of the European Commission to the head of Goldman Sachs.
If European voters are not given true alternatives in the democratic system, they will seek them elsewhere. DiEM25 seeks to prove that true democratic control of European policies, that bypasses non-democratic institutions like the Eurogroup, the European Commission or the European Council, is the only hope for Europe, if it wants to preserve its prosperity, stability, and freedom.
José Luis Malaquias is a DiEM25 member and a Physics engineer based in Portugal.