Europe’s Left After Brexit
In just eleven months, the Greek “Oxi” and Brexit shook up both the European Union and Europe’s left.
Exasperated by the EU’s mixture of authoritarianism and economic failure, a segment of Europe’s left is now calling for a “break with the EU,” which would mobilize left-wing support for exit referenda across the continent. Their analysis has come to be known simply as “Lexit.”
DiEM25, the transnational Democracy in Europe Movement, rejects the Lexit logic in favor of an alternative agenda for Europe’s progressives. Undoubtedly, the Left must confront — with all its energy and imagination — the European Union’s practice of depoliticizing decision-making. In fact, this task also falls on other European democrats, Greens, and liberals. These formations may not consider themselves Left, but share our duty to resist Brussels’s authoritarian incompetence.
The question is not whether progressive forces must clash with the EU establishment and current practices. The question is in what context, and within what overarching political narrative, this confrontation should take place. Three options present themselves.
Option 1: More Europe
Standard variety euro-reformism — practiced typically by social democrats — calls for “more democracy,” “more Europe,” and “reformed institutions.” But this option is founded on a fallacy: the European Union has never suffered from a democratic deficit that could be rebalanced with more democracy and a few reforms.
As I argue, the EU was intentionally constructed as a democracy-free zone that would keep the people out of decision-making and defer to a cartel of big business and international finance. Saying that the European Union suffers from a democratic deficit is like saying an astronaut on the moon suffers from an oxygen deficit.
The standard process of inter-governmental deliberations and gradual treaty changes cannot hope to reform the European Union’s institutions. For this reason, calls for “more Europe” are misguided: under the present regime and with the existing institutions, this can only result in a European Austerity Union.
This reformist position would likely formalize and legalize the Schäuble Plan and grant the European Union the power to veto national budgets, massively curtailing democracy across the federation. In turn, the crisis afflicting Europe’s weakest citizens will deepen, the xenophobic right will gain strength, and the EU’s disintegration will speed up.
With this in mind, pro-democracy progressives have no alternative besides spearheading a head-on clash with the European Union establishment. This brings us to the second and the third options.
Option 2: Lexit
Tariq Ali, among others, has eloquently made the case for left-directed exit referenda. Stathis Kouvelakis, post-Brexit, summed up the position: “we have to play the referendum game, while blocking the forces of the xenophobic and nationalist right from winning hegemony and diverting the popular revolt.”
In short, to beat right-wing misanthropy, we have to support their referenda that will remove our states from the EU.
But Lexit is neither realistic nor consistent with the Left’s fundamental principles. Most immediately, it is unlikely that exit referenda — movements that have been devised and led primarily by the Right — will help the Left block their opponents’ political ascendancy. But further, to do so would be to contradict some of the Left’s longest held convictions about social transformation.
The Left used to be good at separating static from dynamic analyses. Since Marx, drawing on Hegel, prioritized process over outcomes, we took into account the direction of change, not just the state of the world. This distinction is crucial for our analysis of the European Union.
For example, the position we should have taken before the creation of the common market and the eurozone cannot be the same after these institutions were established. It was, therefore, perfectly consistent to oppose Greece’s entry into the common market and into the eurozone and, later, to oppose Grexit.
Even more significantly, our strategy depends greatly on whether we start with a borderless Europe in which workers exercise free movement or with the Europe of the early 1950s where nation-states controlled borders and used them to create a new category of proletarian called gastarbeiters. This last point highlights Lexit’s danger. Given that the European Union has established free movement, Lexit involves acquiescence to — if not actual support for — the reestablishment of national border controls, complete with barbed wire and armed guards.
History should guide us. The Left should have demanded common minimum wages in exchange for its support for the single market. Instead, it hoped to enact them after its establishment, a goal that has been frustrated time and again. With that in mind, do Lexit supporters truly believe that the Left can surpass the xenophobic right by endorsing the latter’s call for building new fences?
Further, Lexit would have ripple effects. For example, do the plan’s proponents believe that the Left will win discursive and policy wars against the fossil fuel industry after supporting the re-nationalization of environmental policy? If the European Union disintegrated under these conditions, the Left would face monumental defeats on both fronts.
Option 3: Disobedience Within the EU
The third option, proposed by DiEM25, rejects both the euro-reformist’s call for “more Europe” and Lexit’s support for abolishing the EU-level altogether. Instead, we suggest a pan-European movement of civil and governmental disobedience that will produce a surge of democratic opposition to how European Union elites do business at the local, national, and international levels.
At DiEM25, we do not believe that the EU can be reformed through the usual policy-making channels, and certainly not by bending the existing rules on budget deficits by .5 or 1 percent of national income — as France’s, Italy’s, Spain’s and Portugal’s governments are doing.
Vicenç Navarro recently wrote “parliaments still have power, including the power to question austerity policies.” This is technically correct, as the Syriza government’s first five months in powerdemonstrated. But Navarro is, regretfully, wrong when he uses the new Portuguese government as an example.
He claims that the Socialist-led coalition “stopped the application of the austerity policies imposed by the European Commission.” I wish it were true. But before getting the mandate to form a government from troika-friendly, right-wing president Aníbal Cavaco Silva, the parties of the Portuguese left had to agree to the previous governments’ “commitments to the Eurogroup” — that is, they ceded to the troika’s existing program before their government even formed, confining themselves to only delaying the introduction of fresh austerity measures.
So, yes, national parliaments and governments do still have power — the power to do what our Syriza government did during the Athens Spring, before capitulating on the night of the referendum.
With the European Central Bank ready to start a bank run — or even close down a country’s banking system — a progressive national government can only use its power if it is prepared for a rupture with the troika. This is where DiEM25 agrees with the Lexit camp: a clash with the European Union establishment cannot be avoided. Where we diverge, however, is in their assumption that this can take the form of a campaign to leave the EU.
We reject this wholeheartedly and suggest instead a campaign of willful disobedience, targeting the European Union’s unenforceable rules at the municipal, regional, and national levels while making no move whatsoever to leave. Undoubtedly, the institutions will threaten the rebel governments and finance ministers who adopt DiEM25’s agenda with expulsion, with panics, with “bank holidays” — just as they threatened the Greek government, and me personally, in 2015.
When they do, it is crucial not to succumb to the fear of exit but to look them in the eye and say:
Bring it on! The only thing we fear is your sole offering: the perpetuation of the debt-deflationary spiral that drives masses of Europeans into hopelessness and places them under the spell of bigotry.
If we do not blink, then either they will blink — in which case the European Union will be transformed — or the EU will be torn asunder by its own establishment. If the Commission, the European Central Bank, Berlin, and Paris dismember the European Union to punish progressive governments that refuse to abide by their policies, it will galvanize progressive politics across Europe in a manner that Lexit could never do.
Consider the profound difference between the following two situations. First, the European Union establishment threatens progressive, democratically elected governments with expulsion when they refuse to obey its authoritarian incompetence. Second, progressive national parties campaign alongside the xenophobic right for exit.
This is the difference between clashing with the EU establishment in a manner that preserves the spirit of internationalism, demands pan-European action, and differentiates us fully from the xenophobic right, and walking hand-in-hand with nationalisms — and, inescapably, reinforcing their hegemony — while allowing the European Union to portray the Left as indistinguishable from the likes of Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen.
Naturally, the DiEM25 agenda must develop strategies that will allow our cities, regions, and nations to rebel against the European Union’s threats. It must also include plans to deal with the EU’s collapse if its establishment is foolish enough to make good on its threats against disobedient national governments. But these strategies and plans are profoundly different from initiating the European Union’s disintegration as the Left’s own objective.
In short, DiEM25 refuses to endorse exit as an end-in-itself or even to deploy it as a threat. But we shall not be deterred from governmental disobedience when faced with the threat of forced exit.
A New International
The Left’s traditional internationalism founds DiEM25: our position on the European Union reflects precisely this.
I hope my comrades will permit me to remind them that when Marx and Engels adopted “workers of the world, unite” as their slogan they did not reject the importance of national culture or of the nation-state. Rather, they rejected the idea of a national interest and the view that struggles must prioritize the nation-state level.
DiEM25’s proposed rebellion would deliver authentic democracy to local governments, national governments, and the European Union. We do not prioritize the EU over the national level — as the reformists do — nor do we prioritize the national over the regional or the municipal level.
Alas, several European leftists insist on the reverse: prioritizing the national over the international. Stefano Fassina, for example, takes DiEM25 to task by arguing — via Ralf Dahrendorf — that democracy at the EU level “is not possible… because a ‘European people,’ a European demos for a European democracy, doesn’t exist.” He goes on:
among the idealists and the euro-fanatics, some still think that the European Union can transform itself into a kind of nation-state, only bigger: the United States of Europe.
This left-wing objection to a pan-European movement defies understanding. In effect, it argues that supranational democracy cannot exist because a demos must be characterized by national and cultural homogeneity. I can just imagine Marx’s rage at hearing this! Just as I can imagine how puzzled it would leave the left-wing internationalists who dreamed of — and struggled for — a transnational republic.
The Left, lest we forget, has traditionally opposed the bourgeois belief in a one-to-one relationship between a nation and a sovereign parliament. The Left countered that identity is created through political struggle, whether it be class struggle, postcolonial struggle, the struggle against patriarchy, the struggle to smash gender and sexual stereotypes, and so on.
DiEM25, therefore, by calling for a pan-European campaign of disobedience against transnational elites — in order to create the European demos that will ensure democracy — aligns with the Left’s traditional approach. Fassina and others now attack this approach, arguing for a return to a one-nation-one-parliament-one-sovereignty politics, in which internationalism is reduced to cooperation between nation-states.
Fassina evokes Antonio Gramsci to support his prioritization of the national level. He writes that Gramsci advocated for the
category of “national-popular” to give popular roots and hegemonic capacity to that Italian Communist Party, which in its symbol had the red flag with a hammer and sickle resting on the flag of Italy.
To be sure, Gramsci argued that, to achieve international progress, the Left had to create local and national progressive movements. But he did not prioritize the national over the transnational level nor argue that transnational democratic institutions are either infeasible or undesirable.
In true Gramscian spirit, DiEM25 insists that our European rebellion should happen everywhere — in towns, in regions, in nation-state capitals, and in Brussels — without prioritizing one level over any other. Only through this pan-European network of rebel cities, prefectures, and national governments can a progressive movement become hegemonic in Italy, in Greece, in England — indeed anywhere.
Someone may cheekily ask: “Why stop at the EU level? As internationalists, why don’t you campaign for worldwide democracy?” Our answer is that we do campaign for global democracy from an internationalist perspective. DiEM25 is building strong links with Bernie Sanders’s movement in the United States and is signing up members in Latin America, Australia, and Asia.
But — for better or for worse — history has delivered a borderless EU, with some programs worth preserving. The Left must defend this absence of borders, these climate change policies, even the Erasmus program, which gives young Europeans the opportunity to mingle in a borderless educational system.
Turning against these splendid artifacts of an otherwise regressive European Union would contradict the Left’s core principles.
DiEM25’s Progressive Agenda for Europe
Progressives must fight to re-politicize and re-democratize decision-making. Donald Trump in the United States, right-wing Brexiters in Britain, and Le Pen in France all rose up in the wake of an economic crisis caused by a twin crisis: the disaster of financialization and the failure of liberal democracy.
The question for Europe’s Left, as well as for progressive liberals, Greens, feminists, and so on, is whether this struggle can be won through reform, exit, or, as DiEM25 suggests, a campaign of disobedience within but also against the European Union. DiEM25 was formed to build a genuine alternative: a borderless surge of unifying politics across Europe — EU and non-EU countries alike — based on an alliance of democrats across various political traditions at all levels of political engagement (towns, cities, regions, and states).
To those who dismiss DiEM25’s call for a pan-European democratic movement as utopian, our answer is that transnational democracy remains a legitimate, realistic long-term goal, one that resonates with the Left’s time honored internationalism. But it must be accompanied by a precise plan for immediate action.
First, oppose any talk of more Europe now, when reform would, under the present circumstances, translate into the iron cage of institutionalized austerity. Second, present Europeans with a blueprint to redeploy existing institutions in order to stem the economic crisis, reverse inequality, and reinvigorate hope. Third, ensure that this blueprint considers how to maintain internationalism in the event that the European Union establishment’s incompetent authoritarianism causes the its disintegration.
“The EU will be democratized. Or it will disintegrate!” This remains DiEM25’s guiding pronouncement. We cannot predict which will occur, so we struggle for the former while preparing for the latter. And we do this by working towards a progressive agenda that engages the grassroots level and progressive experts.
Its purpose? To defeat the worst enemy of European democracy: euro-TINA, the reactionary dogma that there is no alternative to current policies besides the European Union’s dismantlement.
DiEM25’s antidote is, indeed, this progressive agenda, which we will be rolling out in consultation with local, regional, and national actors over the next eighteen months. Putting this together will demonstrate to defeated, disheartened, and disillusioned Europeans that, astonishingly, there is an alternative.
The agenda will be pragmatic, radical, and comprehensive, comprising policies that can be implemented immediately to stabilize Europe’s social economy, while granting more sovereignty to city councils, prefectures, and national parliaments; proposing institutional interventions that will reduce the human cost if the euro collapses and the European Union fragments; and devising a process that enables Europeans to generate a shared identity with which to bolster their reinvigorated national cultures, parliaments, and local authorities.
DiEM25’s Progressive Agenda for Europe will unify a progressive international to counter the nationalist international that is gaining strength all over the world.
The Way Forward
The European Union has now reached an advanced stage of disintegration. There are two possibilities for its future: either it has not passed the point of no return and can still be democratized, stabilized, rationalized, and humanized. Or disintegration is certain.
DiEM25 believes that dropping a democratization campaign would be a major error in either case. If is still possible to fashion a democratic European Union — a prospect that seems less and less likely every minute — it would be a pity not to try. But even if we believe that the existing EU is beyond democratization, to abandon the struggle and turn exit into an end-in-itself will play into the hands of the only political force capable of benefiting from such an agenda: the intransigent, xenophobic right.
So, what should progressives do? DiEM25’s answer is:
- Campaign vigorously along internationalist lines for a democratic European Union — even if we do not believe that the EU can, or ought to, survive in its current form;
- Expose the European Union’s authoritarian incompetence;
- Coordinate civil, civic, and governmental disobedience across Europe;
- Illustrate through DiEM25’s own transnational structure how a pan-European democracy can work at all levels and in all jurisdictions;
- Propose a comprehensive Progressive Agenda for Europe that will include sensible, modest, and convincing suggestions for fixing the European Union and for progressively managing the EU’s and the euro’s disintegration if and when the establishment brings it on.
This article originally appeared in Jacobin Magazine.
Yanis Varoufakis does a Twitter Q+A with @BerlinPolicy
Here’s a short Twitter Q+A that took place yesterday between Yanis and the Berlin Policy Journal. They covered topics like debt slavery, EU democracy, Thatcher and motorbikes.
BPJ: Thanks for joining us Mr Varoufakis
YV: Thank you for the invitation.
You left office about a year ago – any regrets? #i140c #eurocrisis
None whatsoever. Once it was no longer possible to do good for Greece as minister, there was no reason to stay in office.
Your proudest moment as #Greece’s Minister of Finance?
When a poorly dressed boy pointed me out to another boy & said: “This is the guy that gave our mum a card to buy groceries!”
Since you left, #Greek #euro crisis no longer dominating Europe’s headlines – #coincidence?
My departure ended a rebellion against debt bondage/slavery. Slavery, does not create headlines. A slaves’ revolt does.
Describe your relationship with Wolfgang #Schäuble
An interesting relationship between fin ministers of a strong & a weak country who were equally powerless to do what was right.
Any takeaway from the #finger #boehmermann affair? #Varoufake
That satire is despised by despots and only appreciated deeply by humanists (even if it comes at a political cost to them).
You recently came out as an admirer of Margaret #Thatcher – care to elaborate? #oppositesattract
I admired something prescient once said by a political opponent. If we cannot do this, politics is inhuman.
You were once dubbed “Most interesting man in the world” by .@businessinsider – are you? #nofalsemodesty
If this is true, the world has become very boring.
You are critical of the #EU but pro-#European – how does that work?
In the same way that to be a good patriot you must often be scorchingly critical of your government.
Do you think there would have been a #Brexit if there had been no #austerity?
No.
In 2015 you started democracy movement .@DiEM_25 in #Berlin. Do its aims fit into the current framework of the #EU?
DiEM25 believes that the EU is disintegrating. We must stabilize Europe’s economy first, before radically democratising the EU.
Any realistic hope to fulfill .@DiEM_25‘s demands?
Did the initiators of the anti-slavery movement think their demand was utopian? You bet they did! So what? They succeeded!
Describe a day in the life of #Varoufakis.
Writing, reading, debating and, at some point late in the day, chatting, watching, and listening with my partner-in-everything.
You’re a fan of #motorcycles. Favorite model and/or place to ride?
Yamaha XJR1300, coastal roads in northern and southern Attica, the Peloponnese plus wonderful B roads on Scotland’s West Coast.
Last question: What cause are you most passionate about today? #i140c
Democratising Europe (against the troika’s will) in order to prevent a return of the 1930s in some vicious post-modern form.
Thanks again for your time today!
You are welcome.
Mecklenburg: for whom the bell tolls
By Lorenzo Marsili
The far-right party Alternative für Deutschland yesterday mobilised 21% of the vote in the regional elections in Mecklenburg, surpassing Angela Merkel’s own party. Europe’s core is proving to be vulnerable to the xenophobic and nationalist symptoms that are on the rise across the continent.
Mainstream commentators say we shouldn’t worry, as the mainstream parties CDU and SPD will manage to keep control of the regional government by joining in a coalition.
But this is precisely the problem.
The grand-coalition has become the symbol of failed Europe. Traditional centre-left and centre-right parties, which until recently represented the vast majority of the electorate, are today obliged to join forces to keep insurgents at bay and ensure governability – barely and with increasing difficulty.
Sadly, a retreat to the fortress of the status quo will not save Europe from a postmodern re-enactment of the 1930s. Distrust towards the political establishment and towards democratic institutions is just a reaction to the spectacle of mainstream politics barricading itself to defend a political and economic system that no longer works for a majority: a broken economy in a broken democracy.
The economic and refugee crises are two key failures of our broken system. What solutions are on offer? A bribe to the authoritarian Erdogan regime to try and keep refugees out of the EU. Austerity – and at best a few decimal points of budget “flexibility” – to address an economic disaster that has now lasted for nearly ten years with no signs of improvement.
Germany is at the core of both failures. On the economic front, it is the country of “No” (No to Eurobonds, No to common investment plans, and so on.) and the main culprit, in the ideological blindness of its government, for the perseverance of an EU policy mix that most world economists publicly judge to be a failure. And a failure for Germany too: the country may be Europe’s powerhouse, but it is also the country with the highest percentage of working poor, many of whom live in places like Mecklenburg, a region with a GDP per capita closer to Greece’s than to the German average.
But on immigration, yesterday it was Germany’s turn to suffer the effects of the politics of “No”. And especially the No uttered by a large number of member states to the idea of a common European plan for the redistribution and management of refugee arrivals. A plan that would have reduced the anxieties of the German electorate and helped correct a phenomenon that would be totally manageable for a Union of 500 million people.
Instead, our continent is blocked by mutual vetoes while our governments choose to navel-gaze in the hope that problems will sort themselves out.
They won’t. We are facing the storm in paper boats piloted by drunk captains. The timidity of the establishment is a recipe for disaster. The increasing feeling of political and economic exclusion of many is real – and is here to stay. It represents a generalised system failure to which no convincing response is being formulated by mainstream parties.
Let’s be honest with ourselves: the centre cannot, must not, and will not hold. But to avoid ceding the resulting void to the racists and reactionaries we need to open a space for a third alternative – simultaneously against the policies of the establishment thus far and against resurgent nationalism and xenophobia.
Will we manage to set sail before hitting the rocks? As every day goes by, it becomes clearer than ever that only a pan-European mutiny will set the course straight.
Why I joined DiEM25 (Judith Meyer)
Translation of a speech by DiEM25 member Judith Meyer at a DiEM25 meeting in Aegina, Greece, in August 2016.
Good evening!
My name is Judith Meyer. I am German, I don’t have Greek origins, so my Greek is horrible, but I’ll try to speak to you in Greek.
Why am I here with DiEM25? The story begins in January or maybe February 2015.
The Greek negotiations entered public consciousness. Until then, the average German wasn’t talking much about Greece, about the Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) and so on. There was a general sense that the South doesn’t understand economics and regularly needs German money, but people in Germany couldn’t have told you how many MoUs had been signed or what their terms were. Yanis Varoufakis changed that.
He did not just represent the Greek people strongly in the negotiations, but also showed other Europeans what was happening. What was happening at the Eurogroup, what was happening with Greece, what are the other European governments doing, who, behind closed doors, often exceed their popular mandate.
Of course German newspapers didn’t write this. At that time, some of us woke up because there was no longer diversity in German newspapers on this topic, ALL were writing that Greeks are lazy, that the new Greek government was ignorant and dangerous, that Finance Minister Varoufakis was the worst, the enemy of German taxpayers. When all newspapers write the same, that’s a warning signal: it’s crucial to find other opinions too.
When you look for the truth on that time period, it’s easy to find.
- Greeks aren’t lazy – on average they work 700 hours more than Germans every year.
- The new Greek government wasn’t ignorant or dangerous – its proposals had the support of well-known economists.
- Varoufakis wasn’t the enemy of German taxpayers – he wanted us not to pay billions of Euros if there is no chance of economic recovery in Greece, and the following year we’d have to pay even more.
Unfortunately the majority of my compatriots did not look for this information and only listened to the media who spoke of BATTLE between you and us. That was the means that the German media used so that there would be no solidarity between the poor people in Germany and Greece. Our media spoke of germanophobia in Greece, they showed photographs of Greek demonstrations where people had Merkel with Nazi emblems… that hurts, but… if the peoples of Europe don’t work together, only bankers will win.
To be honest, even we who did not support the German government didn’t know how harsh our politicians could be to Greece. In May, June, I was writing articles to explain the Greek positions to my compatriots and to English speakers, but I still didn’t believe my Greek friends who were afraid of becoming a debt colony. I didn’t believe them. I apologised to them on the 13th of July.
I think that outside of Greece, not many expected it, because we’re Europeanists. We didn’t want to believe it. It was a terrible wake-up call for those who saw it (which wasn’t all in Germany, because many German media reported about the 12th of July as about just any other night of negotiations, they didn’t speak of victory or the like).
For me, my European dream had been demolished. In my depression, I wrote an email to Mr Varoufakis on July 14, in order to thank him for having shown us the true face of the European Union.
He didn’t know me, so I didn’t expect a reply, but it came: “Thanks Judith. We need to remain pro-European and criticise actively those who have usurped Europe.”
Thus we started to exchange emails. In November he wrote to me about DiEM25, the manifesto and so on.
As a European movement, DiEM needed a multilingual web presence, and since I speak 13 languages, the first task I undertook was the organisation of multilingual Twitter accounts and the translation of the website by volunteers.
Nowadays I organise everything to do with DiEM25 volunteers. We have so many! More than 20,000 Europeans want to do volunteer work for DiEM25.
The Athens Spring and the 12th of July were a necessary shock. Now my generation, the Erasmus generation and the generation of open borders, has woken up. We won’t allow the leaders of the European Union to destroy our European dreams.
We demand a democratic Europe with transparency, shared prosperity and a sense of ethics. Europe will either be democratised or it will disintegrate!
Yanis Varoufakis' speech at the DiEM25 members meeting in Aegina (August 2016)
Good evening,
The reason we are here is simple:
Greece is suffocating in a Europe that is disintegrating.
And Greece will continue to suffocate as long as Europe is disintegrating.
And Europe will continue to disintegrate as long as countries like Greece are being suffocated.
Behind this spiral of Suffocation and Disintegration there lies a stupendous consensus between disparate political forces: Dr Schäuble, Chancellor Merkel, President Hollande, but also the latest incarnation of the Greek government, comrades from Popular Unity (like its leader Panayiotis Lafazanis and my good colleague Costas Lapavitsas), Jean Luc Melenchon (the French Left’s presidential candidate in 2012), Oskar Lafontaine (the admirable former German finance minister who left his party to co-found Die Linke) – they are all aligned with a consensus reflecting Euro-TINA; the dogma that, within the Eurozone and the EU, there can be no alternative to the policies that suffocate Greece and disintegrate Europe.
In January 2015, the Greek people gave us a mandate to demand such an alternative. To demonstrate that Greece can overturn the policies of Suffocation and Disintegration within the euro and the EU as long as we were determined to say NO till the end to the EU’s established policies – as long as we did not allow ourselves to be terrorised by the threat of eviction from the euro.
The Troika (including their local stooges), using its standard method of fiscal waterboarding (augmented by an enhanced threat of imposed Grexit), divided us and, thus, defeated the Athens Spring. The result? Greece’s suffocation and Europe’s disintegration intensified. (Brexit and Greece’s deepened recession were mere symptoms…)
However, the spirit of that Spring survived. From Athens it spread like a bushfire to Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, Dublin, Helsinki, London, Lisbon – to every corner of Europe. It took the form of the Democracy in Europe Movement – of DiEM25.
They tell us that, if Europeans dare ever again to question the Euro-TINA dogma, which underpins the Suffocation- Disintegration spiral, they will asphyxiate their representatives again exactly like they asphyxiated the Greek government in 2015 – in Madrid, in Rome, wherever their dogma is questioned. Our answer to them: Bring it on! Nothing scares us more than the Suffocation- Disintegration spiral, their sole offering.
Thank you for being here tonight. It is as if, together, we confirm that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
Eurosceptics got globalization wrong: Only a democratic EU can boost national sovereignty
Article by Tomas Vanheste
Correspondent Europa between power and imagination
Translated from the original Dutch by D Verstraeten DiEM25 Belgium
Photo (c) by Étienne b. photography
They’re guys, but friendly guys. In the legendary café A La Mort Subite, where many a revolutionary and artists conspired together, I encounter four followers of DiEM25.
Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek minister of Finance, launched this movement with a manifesto which explains its fundamental principles. Its motto: “The EU will either be democratised or disintegrate!”
‘The manifesto is an invitation’, says the Portuguese Guilherme Serodio, who came to Brussels in order to work in a think tank in the field of food safety, and has now co-founded a start-up for market transparency. ‘People can build their own groups, nobody organises it from the top down. DiEM25 grows organically, we connect and exchange. We use the collective intelligence generated in the network.’
‘We don’t have a formal structure or organisation’, adds Belgian IT-entrepreneur Joren De Wachter . ‘You do not need to become a member, the only thing we ask people who participate in the meetings is to support the manifesto. It is a real grass-roots movement. I have never been a member of a political party. Change does not come from the old guard – they are responsible for the present policy of austerity that has created so much destruction.
‘Being half Greek, half Swede raised in Greece, I’m of course very concerned by what happens there’, says Erik Edman. ‘I was in Greece during the summers of unrest, at occupy the squares. I was also very much involved with everything Yanis Varoufakis did. The manifesto is for a large part based on the experiences which Yanis had with the EU. There is a lack of democracy at the heart of European decision making’. Erik came to Brussels with the intention of reforming the European institutions and works in an organisation that promotes Corporate Social Responsibility.
‘DiEM25 shows that it is possible to unite people from different political traditions and classes’ (quote)
‘I’m from Portugal’, says Davide Castro, a colleague of Erik. ‘My family moved to England when I was twelve, because of the enormous crisis at the time, caused by the impact of the euro on the Portuguese economy and by allowing China into the World Trade Organisation. Industries collapsed, factories closed. After my graduation, I moved to Brussels to join those who also believe in the existence of alternatives to the present framework of the EU. (He founded ‘The Critique’). It doesn’t stop there. DiEM25 demonstrates that it is possible to unite people with different traditions and political backgrounds.
Davide is the contact person for DiEM25 Belgium. When I approached him with the question if he could tell me more about the ideas and the plans of the movement, he suggested that we meet with a small group. And here we are, in ‘A La Mort Subite’, all guys. Nice, socially motivated, white, highly educated guys. ‘We want to be diverse’, they tell me. ‘And DiEM25 is really more mixed than this small group, certainly both sexes and all ages are present. We will also go into local communities and pubs to involve people of all backgrounds in our quest for a better Europe.’
With these four I talk about what democratisation entails – according to DiEM25 – and what their plans are to bring about this change.
More transparency in Brussels
‘The goal is a democratic Europe’, says Erik. ‘If we compared what we want with the present situation, we would become very depressed. That’s why we have planned several intermediate steps. Core issues that are presently very problematic in the way that Europe is being run. Step one is transparency. In order to have a healthy, functioning democracy, we need to know by whom, where and why decisions are made. Presently, government leaders and ministers disappear for hours behind closed doors and afterwards explain each in their own and different way what’s been decided. There’s no coherent story, there are no minutes of the meetings. In order to know if our representatives really represent us, we must know the facts. It is a very moderate demand really: we want to know what our representatives say in our name.’
DiEM25 issued a transparency petition – click here for the petition which has already been signed by 76000+ people – with demands like a public register of all meetings between lobbyists and employees of the European Commission and live streaming of all meetings of the European Council, the Eurogroup and the ministers of Finance.
‘In a democracy you need to be able to critically follow decision making’, explains Joren.
If it isn’t so, then it is not legitimate. If a law is adopted in the national parliament, each step of the decision-making is public’.
But, playing devil’s advocate, I ask: ‘Does the Dutch government not meet every Friday behind closed doors? Shouldn’t members of an administration be able to meet confidentially and freely to exchange ideas?’
‘True, but we want to hear the meetings of the Councils of Ministers in the EU when they vote on legislation’, counters Joren. ‘We don’t know what they say or how they vote. I am a lawyer. A decision, reached in secrecy, has no legitimacy. Montesquieu would abhor this way of decision-making.’
More democracy
The final goal is a democratic Europe. Is it therefore necessary to deconstruct the EU and to build something different, or “simply” reform it.
‘We don’t want to take down the EU, not yet’, answers Erik. ‘We believe in the European project. But we think that the EU alone doesn’t represent the European project. It doesn’t fulfil its potential. It is disintegrating. Brexit is the first symptom of a deeper disease. People do not feel that they have a connection with the EU. You cannot feel connected with a trading block’. He spits out this word. ‘The EU will have to democratise and bond with people or it will disintegrate.’
‘One of the key points is that in the present structure, debate and choice are forbidden’ (Quote)
Please explain in detail what you mean by democratisation?
Guilherme: ‘If you build something to allow people to participate more, you have to involve them from the start. It’s not that we say: this is democracy and this is the way to achieve it. No, let’s all come together, think about what democracy is and build it.’
Joren: ‘One of the core issues is that, in the present structure, debate and choice are forbidden. Economic policy is constitutionalised. This is crazy. Economic policy is the essence of democratic choice. The EU was top-down up to now: They say “We are the governments, the enlightened people and we’re going to tell you what to do”. Whereas what we advocate is a twenty-first century bottom-up system.’
Davide: ‘In 2018, we want to have a constitutional assembly, where a lot of people from all over Europe meet with experts, generating and harnessing a lot of collective intelligence and get them to think on how to get out of this situation.’
‘Europeanising’ the biggest issues
The manifesto states that DiEM25 wants to Europeanise policy in five essential areas: State debt, banks, insufficient investments, migration and increasing poverty. At the same time it states that the national right to self-determination should be respected. Is that not contradictory?
Davide: ‘Critics will say that European countries are too diverse to be unified, but the lack of democracy and transparency is an issue that can unify a lot of people in the Netherlands, Portugal, Greece and England. We really should recognise the real fears and concerns that exist all over Europe and deal with it in a manner which surmounts borders. DiEM25 is unique because that’s exactly what it does. It is a European movement which tries to bring change all over the continent.’
Joren: ‘There’s no contradiction between sovereignty at national level and a European identity and citizenship that allows you to act also at that level. People who point to an opposition between those two are still thinking along twentieth century lines. It is perfectly possible for those two to co-exist and supplement each other. A more democratic European level increases sovereignty at each level.’
You can easily say that there’s no contradiction. But in these Eurosceptic times, people experience it differently. Opinion polls show that most citizens want that power to flow back from the EU to member states.
Davide: ‘We’re talking about issues like the lack of investment, the banking crisis and migration. These cannot be solved at the level of the nation state. Critics may say that it is utopian to have a pan-European movement that will address these problems, but it is rather utopian to say that they will disappear by letting things remain as they are…we need to think about alternatives.’
Erik: ‘We aren’t Eurosceptics like Farage, but rather EU-sceptics. Skeptome means that you think it out. We consider the EU as this wonderful idea, designed in response to very ugly times, but realised in the wrong way.’
‘The question is: what kind of Europe do you want? One where roaming is free or one where you have to wait two hours in a queue at the borders?’ (Quote)
Guilherme: ‘I also don’t think that there are many countries where people would vote for leaving the EU, certainly not after the Brexit referendum. I think there are many people who say: I feel European, but I’m not represented by this EU. And there’s a whole generation of Erasmus students emerging.’
Joren: ‘Only journalists ask this question. By framing the debate in this manner, you are part of the problem. It is an unfair question. It sets the nation state against Europe. They are both part of the same process. If you say that people should choose, you confound the debate and you are not intellectually honest. The question is not whether you want more or less Europe, but what kind of Europe you want. A Europe where there’s free roaming, or one where you have to queue two hours at the border? A Europe where children can study in another country or one where you have to pay duties on imports from Italy?’
Erik: ‘Our point is that, if people see what Europe can be (that’s what creating awareness is about), they would agree. Europe and the nation states are now presented as communicating vessels. If one does more, that means that the other does less. That’s totally wrong, because the sovereignty of the nation state stopped existing a long time ago in this globalised world. As a Greek, I can tell you: the state lost its sovereignty a long time ago.’
Make noise
Beautiful, such agreement on Europe, but how is DiEM25 going to act concretely to change Europe, I wonder.
‘We man the barricades’, jokes Erik.
‘We are a political movement’, says Joren. ‘We will organise debates, let people express themselves in publications and petitions. We are going to make noise in the public arena, put forward ideas, and influence the terms that the debate will be held under.’
‘Do not accuse us too fast of holding philosophical debates without having practical solutions’, says Guilherme. ‘That was precisely what happened to Yanis Varoufakis during the months of the Greek tragedy. He wanted to hold a discussion on the system, but he was told: you are too philosophical, we have to be practical. During our events, we brainstorm and build together. It’s all about togetherness.’
‘We connect networks,’ says Davide. ‘Last Sunday, we came together for the fourth time in a General Assembly. You co-operate better if you get to know each other better. It is essential to create a friendly atmosphere.’
I will follow them, these friends.
This article originated on the ad-free journalism platform The Correspondent, your antidote to the daily news grind. Like this piece? Sign up to receive a story a week from The Correspondent at corr.es/newsletter. Like Tomas Vanheste on Facebook or follow him on Twitter @tvanheste.
Reclaiming Europe from the powers that be – Barbara Spinelli in conversation with Lorenzo Marsili
Barbara Spinelli is an author, journalist and MEP for the GUE/NGL group in the European Parliament, as well as a member of DiEM25. Lorenzo Marsili is one of the initiators of DIEM25 and the cofounder of European Alternatives.
Lorenzo Marsili: In your response to Verhofstadt, you have argued that before considering any constitutional change of the European institutions we need to invest in policies capable of restoring citizens’ trust towards the European project. Failing that, any project of Treaty reform will likely be hindered by the profound mistrust towards the EU. This two-steps approach is also at the core of the manifesto of DIEM25 – stabilisation of the Eurozone first, and then constitutional reform. Can you tell us what kind of reforms you think are necessary to recover trust towards the European project?
Barbara Spinelli: If we really care to defend the European project, it is completely unreasonable to start institutional revisions before having radically changed the policies that brought us to this multi-faced crisis, so similar to the one of the Thirties, in the first place. And the root-cause is not only in the EU’s economic-financial make-up but also in its democratic failure, the disintegration of societies, and a loss of orientation and hope experienced collectively by European citizens. The mainstream version of institutional federalism is substantially dead but still clings to the belief that modifying the balance of power between the different bodies of the Union will be enough to solve all problems. But this revolution has already taken place, and it is still underway, and we know that it has produced what Jürgen Habermas calls “post democratic executive federalism”. The debacle and decomposition of the Union are so vast that the order of priorities must change: Politics is not losing importance, but policy is the priority today. European politics will hopefully be of a federal nature, but such goal must be the consequence and the formalisation of a fundamental reconsideration of the policies adopted since today: in the economic and financial field, in the management of the too scarce own resources of the Union, in the effective, and not only claimed, democratisation and transparency of all common institutions.
This is precisely what is being refused by the powers that be in the Union,, and such refusal clearly appears in the two resolutions on which the European Parliament is working: both on the Verhofstadt report on the transformation of the Treaties and the Bresso-Brok report analysing what can be done without Treaty changes. The basic idea of both reports is evident: the various economic agreements stipulated since the beginning of the great crisis of 2007-2008 must be incorporated in the Treaties. The aim is apparently democratic: as inter-governmental agreements, the European Parliament has no co-decision power over them and is hence marginalised. The tendency of the Member States is to increase the weight and the number of such agreements: it is a privileged path for governments that are less and less keen on bearing the supervision of the national and European Parliaments. We have tested this approach with the Fiscal compact and also with the recent EU-Turkey agreement, renamed “statement” in order to avoid being subject, like any international treaty, to the vote of the Parliaments – both European and national ones.
We have arrived at a tipping point in the EU where the obsessive insistence on the institutional method – be it intergovernmental or Community-based – is not only insufficient. It is a technical masking of a political substance that does not change, of a European project that does not want to become neither political nor democratic, but deliberately tends to be a programme of oligarchic domination. To take an example, the Fiscal Compact does not improve or become socially just, if we simply incorporate it in the Treaties and consider it as part of the Community method instead of an intergovernmental or international agreement. We will still be left with nothing but failing austerity policies.
In other words, we are facing a clear strategy: the aim is not advancing towards a normal democratic government, but towards a so-called administrative “governance” that serves to protect the interests of small power cliques and privileged groups, insulating them certainly not from the markets, but from the uncertainties of universal suffrage and of constitutional democracy.
Lorenzo: Why should we trust a shift of gear to be any more likely today than over eight years of avoidable crises? We still have to hear convincing arguments as to how any ambitious and disruptive proposal can survive the haggling between 27 members states, all of which have national vetoes, several of which are ruled by openly nationalist and xenophobic governments, and some of which have deeply ingrained economic obsessions. We have seen it all before: ambitious proposals for investment reduced to the risible Juncker plan; a migration agreement reduced to a few hundred relocations from Greece and a bribe to Turkey’s Erdogan. And then again an ineffective Youth Guarantee and a dysfunctional Banking Union. Why should it be different this time?
Clearly the current Treaties are not enough. And definitely we need an authentic Constitution: not signed but the governments of the Member States but starting, as the American one, with the words: “We, the people…” . However, policies must change beforehand. How can this be done with the current institutions? I am convinced that a democratisation of their mechanisms and their decision-making could be a first step, albeit certainly not the only one. If the heads of government, the ministers, the commissioners, the members of the Parliament felt themselves under permanent scrutiny from well informed citizens (and hence “enlightened”, according to Kant: treated as adults), they would have quite some difficulties behaving as an oligarchy. It would not be possible for the Eurogroup to take a decision against the opinion of a Member State, as happened in the meeting of 27 June 2015 when the former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis demanded for the Greek objections to be formalised , and the legal services of the Union replied that it would not have been possible, in light of the fact that the “Eurogroup is not mentioned in the EU Treaties and operates as an informal grouping. As such, it is not subject to any written rule”.
Concrete transformation plans could come from the citizens and not only from the European Parliament. Transparency is important but is not everything, the citizens ask for more. They demand first and foremost a true European New Deal, which would create jobs and fight against poverty and growing inequality. The proposals are many: from those illustrated by Yanis Varoufakis, to those which came out from the Citizens Initiative “New Deal 4 Europe” (tax on financial transactions and carbon tax for investments in ecologically sustainable growth). Only by starting a New Deal we will be able to face the refugee crisis, building an economy based on solidarity, and avoiding falling into xenophobia, racism, and widespread violence.
Lorenzo: Agreed. But what are the subjects capable of filling the gap? We hear over and over a string of empty exhortations to build “another Europe”, but few believe in this rhetoric any longer. National parties don’t seem interested or able to see beyond the failed euro-reformist rhetoric (Francois Hollande was the first to promise a transformation of austerity policies – we are now left with the Loi Travail and the State of Emergency). Transnational parties – a series of acronyms without a true strategy or common campaign – have proven to be unfit to lead a democratic revolution. Is it perhaps time to imagine a true European party? Or maybe, even in light of the next European elections, to imagine a “democratic front” to bring different political and social forces together with a simple but firm reform programme of the Union? Could this include disobeying EU rules? Or how can we overcome empty rhetoric and put up a strategy of rupture with a status quo that you rightly define, with the words of Habermas, “post democratic executive federalism”?
Barbara: In reality, the subjects are there, we just need a better eyesight, and the language, the curiosity and the capacity to listen and be able tell them, like the old prophets did: Here we are. Not only to represent you, but also to understand and spread what you think, what you fear, what you demand or what has deceived you. Class war has not ended, even if the social question naturally presents itself under new clothes today. Not only the representation of these subjects is missing, not only do we have to face a vast attack against all intermediary bodies of society (beginning from the trade unions), but there is something more: the division today is not between who is “up” and who is “down” , but between who is “in” and who is “out”. The best definition that translates this being “out” is the one used by Saskia Sassen: it’s no longer a question of marginalisation or exploitation only, but of brutal and active expulsion. We are faced with old impoverished classes, with a new downgraded middle class full of fears, and with new classes that are even deprived of a name. And all of them tell us, as the Commendatore in Don Giovanni: “Ah tempo più non v’è” – “Your time is up”. We have to speak with these groups, so as not to fall ourselves into the denial of reality we are stigmatising.
Let’s not hide to ourselves that Syriza’s failure has inflicted powerful and far-reaching wounds, to the point that millions of citizens do not believe in possible alternatives anymore, and not only in Greece. They rightly think that the universal suffrage has been disrespected. We have to admit that democracy as a whole is left with broken bones. I am convinced of the influence of the Greek events over Brexit, a vote that has been claimed by a large number of people who said to themselves, often without considering the effective powers of Great Britain: what Athens has not been able to reach (the restoration of popular sovereignty), we, as a stronger and older State, have the power and strategic weight to achieve it. The capitulation of the Syriza government after the referendum of the 5th of July 2015 has to be recognised and represented as something similar to the primal scene which unsettles the child who was used to imagine his parents as gender-neutral, as “innocents”. Once the primal scene has been recognised, you can decide not to consider it, or pretend not having seen what you have seen, but the effect remains and it will be devastating if you don’t get out of it with some precautions and a new knowledge.
Such denial of reality is also one of our ruinous deficiencies. The Greek traumatic breaking point is still being hidden, or worst, is totally repressed or embellished even by great part of the radical left demanding “another Europe”. What we must restore is the relationship with reality and the truths that it tells us: the reality of an humiliation which Syriza doesn’t recognise, the reality of Trump’s success, the reality of Brexit, the reality of a Polish society that has had enough with the pseudo liberal lies of the post-communist élite and has given the majority to Jaroslav Kaczynski and to the PiS. The reality doesn’t disappear just because we call it “populist”. We have to start again from here, from this irruption of the reality principle, if we want to avoid the remake of the 1930s.
You ask me what can be concretely done in order to build a European transnational party, a sort of “popular front” that could stand in the next European elections with a programme of rupture with the powers that be of the Union. First of all we have to clarify a few concepts by asking ourselves some fundamental questions: what does it exactly mean to take back our sovereignty; how to save the distinction between popular sovereignty and national sovereignty; what is the cost of non-Europe; what are the demands of the impoverished and expelled classes; which is the meaning of the rupture strategy you are mentioning, and are there actually States and local administrations capable of disobeying the absurd ruled imposed by European and national executives who pretend to lead us.
Then we have to respond to the fears of the people – voluntarily provoked by the hegemonic powers, but fears nevertheless. Let’s take the migration and refugee question as an example: we have to condemn the indecency of walls and collective expulsions predisposed by the Member States with the complicity of the European Commission, and denounce their will to inflate the extreme right with the purpose of using it as a scarecrow. But at the same time we must remove the sentiment of fear in our fellow citizens because this sentiment too is a “reality”. It is of utmost importance to launch a widespread campaign against those fears, understanding their mechanism, helping to overcome them with rational arguments and proposals, and explaining that the “monster” in front of us is not the refugee question but the question of a Europe that no longer works. No government, no European institution, no mainstream newspaper has had until now the courage to remind the citizens that the refugees and migrants arrived in the Union’s countries this year represent only 0.2 percent of the EU’s population.
We have to break with the rules that ruin the Union, but we must also reassure the citizens: it’s a matter of urgency. It is useless to say that we will “mobilise the masses” against racisms and neofascisms, because the masses we are talking about don’t exist anymore, and a large part of them has anyway ceased to vote.
Lorenzo: This much we have learnt over the last years: it is EU decision-making itself that is broken and unable to result in coherent and ambitious policies. The timidity and corruption of our establishment, coupled with the disastrous inefficiency of our institutional structures, make for a toxic combination. We must, at some point, talk about reforming the European institutional structure. But this is a tortuous path. The so called “ Schäuble plan”, namely the integration of the Eurozone through the appointment of a European finance minister essentially tasked with enforcing the austerity rule-book, seems a step in the wrong direction. But also a traditional European Convention – a grim show of bureaucrats and national diplomacies – risks resulting in a hole in the water. Many speak about the need for a constituent Assembly directly elected by European citizens. Others, such as Piketty, advocate the idea of a Parliament of the Eurozone. What is the most promising path to trigger a reform of the government of the European Union?
I agree with the idea of a Constituent Assembly, but without leaving the project in the hands of an intergovernmental process. It already happened once, in 1984, when a constitutional project put forward by the European Parliament has been devitalised and deformed in this way.
The Schäuble plan you are talking about goes in a completely different direction. It does not even limit itself to proclaiming a European finance minister. Since Great Britain voted for Brexit, Schäuble is recommending the simple return to an intergovernmental Europe, to the old “balance of power” which caused two world wars in the previous century. He takes distance from any federal vision in order to save and protect the austerity policies imposed during these years. The very word “vision” is abhorred. The key expression today, according to Habermas, is the following: “No more vision, everything by now is just a question of “Lösungskompetenz”, of solution skills” . The German establishment’s and Schäuble’s goal is to consolidate the definitive victory of ordoliberalism.
According to the ordoliberal doctrine, born in between the two wars in the School of Freiburg, “keeping the national house in order” is the necessary and sufficient condition for the achievement of an international order. Every State must first reorder its accounts, and only then common economic resources, cooperation and New Deals may come. In the international headquarters nothing must be decided in common; at most, it is a place of information where the strongest impose adjustments on the weakest. Ultimately, the essence of this doctrine is simply and purely the return to nationalism. A nationalism that today also risks contaminating the minds of left-wing anti-austerity forces. To them, I would feel like telling: be careful, in the battles for an “exit” from the euro, or the Union, you risk finding at your side not those who want to shield Europe from the global markets, but the barely masked nationalism of Wolfgang Schäuble.
The IMF confesses it immolated Greece on behalf of the Eurogroup
This week began with a debate in Greek Parliament called by the Official Opposition (the troika’s main, but not only, domestic cheerleaders) for the purposes of, eventually, indicting me for daring to counter the troika while minister of finance in the first six months of 2015. The troika who had staged a bank run before I moved into the ministry, who had threatened me with bank closures three days after I assumed the ministry, and who proceeded to close down our banks, now moved to charge me with… bank closures and capital controls. Like a common bully, the troika proved immensely keen to blame its victims, and to violate and vilify anyone who dares resist its thuggery.
My reaction to the troika’s charges, and threat of being pulled up in front of a judicial inquiry , was simple: “Bring it on!” “I shall face you”, I challenged them “in any forum you want: in an amphitheatre, a TV station, even a court room!” In the end, they chickened out and the parliamentary motion was defeated as some of them (a small party usually fully in troika’s clasps) strategically voted against.
And then, to complete this week’s drubbing of the troika, the report by the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) saw the light of day. It is a brutal assessment, leaving no room for doubt about the vulgar economics and the gunboat diplomacy employed by the troika. It puts the IMF, the ECB and the Commission in a tight spot: Either restore a modicum of legitimacy by owning up and firing the officials most responsible or do nothing, thus turbocharging the discontent that European citizens feel toward the EU, accelerating the EU’s deconstruction.
While I was in the ministry, negotiating with such folks, the troika-friendly (or should I say troika-dependent) press was arguing that I am not fit to conduct these negotiations because I had dared insinuate that, from 2010 to 2014, the IMF, the ECB and the Commission had been fiscally waterboarding Greece, causing an unnecessary Great Depression as a result of their thuggish imposition of macroeconomically incompetent policies. The establishment press were claiming that a finance minister of a small, bankrupt nation which is being waterboarded by the high and mighty troika functionaries cannot afford to say, in public or in private, that his small, bankrupt nation was being waterboarded.
My response was that we had tried silence and obedience from 2010 to 2014. The result? A loss of 28% of national income and grapes of wrath that were “…filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage”. Thus, it was time to put to the troika moderate, rational counter-proposals while refusing to continue to acquiesce to their pretend-and-extend tactics. It was a stance that I was never forgiven for.
A year after the troika succeeded in having me ejected from Greece’s government, by prevailing upon Alexis Tsipras to capitulate to them against the wishes of 62% of Greece’s voters, the IMF’s ‘internal affairs’ is now confirming that my stance was utterly justified, rather than mistaken or undiplomatic. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in his 29th July Telegraph article, had this to say about the IMF’s IEO report:
A sub-report on the Greek saga said the country was forced to go through a staggering squeeze, equal to 11pc of GDP over the first three years. This set off a self-feeding downward spiral. The worse it became, the more Greece was forced cut – what ex-finance minister Yanis Varoufakis called “fiscal water-boarding”. (See below for more pertinent quotations from Evans-Pritchard)
The question now is: What next?
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What good is it to receive a mea culpa if the policies imposed on the Greek government are the same ones that the mea culpa was issued for?
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What good is it to have a mea culpa if those officials who imposed such disastrous, inhuman policies remain on board and are, in fact, promoted for their gross incompetence?
In sum, an urgent apology is due to the Greek people, not just by the IMF but also by the ECB and the Commission whose officials were egging the IMF on with the fiscal waterboarding of Greece. But an apology and a collective mea culpa from the troika is woefully inadequate. It needs to be followed up by the immediate dismissal of at least three functionaries.
First on the list is Mr Poul Thomsen – the original IMF Greek Mission Chief whose great failure (according to the IMF’s own reports never before had a mission chief presided over a greater macroeconomic disaster) led to his promotion to the IMF’s European Chief status. A close second spot in this list is Mr Thomas Wieser, the chair of the EuroWorkingGroup who has been part of every policy and every coup that resulted in Greece’s immolation and Europe’s ignominy, hopefully to be joined into retirement by Mr Declan Costello, whose fingerprints are all over the instruments of fiscal waterboarding. And, lastly, a gentleman that my Irish friends know only too well, Mr Klaus Masuch of the ECB.
Finally, and most importantly, the apology and the dismissals will count for nothing if they are not followed by a complete U-turn over macroeconomic, fiscal and reform policies for Greece and beyond.
Is any of this going to happen? Or will the IMF’s IEO report light up the sky fleetingly, to be forgotten soon? The omens are pointing to the latter. In which case, the EU’s chances of regaining the confidence of its citizens, chances that are already too slim, will run through our leaders’ fingers like thin, white sand.
FURTHER QUOTES FROM EVANS-PRITCHARD
“The report by the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) goes above the head of the managing director, Christine Lagarde. It answers solely to the board of executive directors, and those from Asia and Latin America are clearly incensed at the way EU insiders used the Fund to rescue their own rich currency union and banking system.”
“While the Fund’s actions were understandable in the white heat of the crisis, the harsh truth is that the bail-out sacrificed Greece in a “holding action” to save the euro and north European banks. Greece endured the traditional IMF shock of austerity, without the offsetting IMF cure of debt relief and devaluation to restore viability.”
“The International Monetary Fund’s top staff misled their own board, made a series of calamitous misjudgments in Greece, became euphoric cheerleaders for the euro project, ignored warning signs of impending crisis, and collectively failed to grasp an elemental concept of currency theory.”
“Many documents were prepared outside the regular established channels; written documentation on some sensitive matters could not be locatedIEO report
It describes a “culture of complacency”, prone to “superficial and mechanistic” analysis, and traces a shocking break-down in the governance of the IMF, leaving it unclear who is ultimately in charge of this extremely powerful organisation.”
Naples Mayor Joins DiEM25
>> Italy’s third-largest municipality becomes the newest “rebel city” to embrace the transnational movement’s agenda to democratise the EU
NAPLES, ITALY, August 3, 2016.– DiEM25 is delighted to welcome Naples’ Mayor Luigi de Magistris to its ranks.
A courageous former prosecutor known for being a sworn enemy of the Mafia, De Magistris was recently re-elected as the City of Naples’ mayor with a crushing majority of more than 66%.
Over the past five years, Naples – Italy’s third-largest municipality – has emerged as one of Europe’s most innovative “rebel cities” in the fight for a truly democratic EU, promoting the direct engagement of its citizens and social movements in the political decision-making process.
Naples’ effective promotion and protection of common goods and social spaces, its open-door policy toward migrants and refugees, as well as its achievement of becoming the only major European city to switch its water services back to public ownership, show that bottom-up change is both possible and necessary. As a DiEM25 partner, the Italian municipality joins the movement’s transnational grassroots effort to bring about real, lasting change at European level.