The
EU no longer serves the people – democracy demands a new beginning
Yanis Varoufakis
Friday 5 February
2016 07.00 GMT
We
don’t have to choose between surrendering to or leaving Europe –
let’s relaunch it with the citizens in control
The aversion that
many in Britain now feel towards the EU springs from the right
instinct but leads to the wrong answer. Undoubtedly, Brussels
disdains democracy and luxuriates in unaccountability. David
Cameron’s hollow compromise will do precisely nothing to address
this. Yet at the same time, a vote for “Brexit” in the
forthcoming referendum is not the answer either.
The European
Community was, in its early incarnation, a magnificent undertaking.
Its construction allowed for the revitalisation of national cultures
in the spirit of European cosmopolitanism, disappearing borders,
common institutions and shared prosperity. Despite different
languages and diverse cultures, Europe began to pull together, in
peace and ostensible harmony. Alas, the serpent’s egg was hatching
inside the foundations of the emergent union.
Normal states, such
as Britain, evolved through the centuries as political mechanisms to
contain social and economic conflicts between antagonistic groups and
classes (eg the monarchy, the barons, later the merchants, the trades
unions, etc). This is not at all how the EU, and its Brussels
bureaucracy, developed.
It began life as a
cartel of heavy industry (coal and steel, then car manufacturers,
later co-opting farmers, hi-tech industries and others). Like all
cartels, the idea was to manipulate prices and to redistribute the
resulting profits through a purpose-built, Brussels-based
bureaucracy.
This European cartel
and the bureaucrats who administered it feared the demos and despised
the idea of government by the people, just like the administrators of
oil producers Opec, or indeed any corporation, does. Patiently and
methodically, a process of depoliticising decision-making was put in
place, the result a relentless drive towards taking the “demos”
out of “democracy”, at least as far as the EU was concerned, and
cloaking all policy-making in a pervasive pseudo-technocratic
fatalism. National politicians were rewarded handsomely for their
acquiescence to turning the commission, the Council, Ecofin (EU
finance ministers), the Eurogroup (eurozone finance ministers) and
the European Central Bank into politics-free, democracy-free, zones.
Anyone opposing the process was labelled “un-European” and
treated as a jarring dissonance.
This is, in an
important respect, the deeper cause of the aversion that many in
Britain instinctively harbour for the EU. And they are right: the
price of de-politicising political decisions has been not merely the
defeat of democracy at EU level but also poor economic policies
throughout Europe.
In the eurozone, to
maintain their unenforceable fiscal rules, the Brussels and
Frankfurt-based “technocracies” ensured that economies sharing
the euro were being sequentially marched off the cliff of competitive
austerity, resulting in permanent recession in the weaker countries
and low investment in the core countries. The more their policies
failed, the more authoritarian they became and the more irrational
the policies they imposed.
Meanwhile EU member
states such as Britain that had had the good sense to stay outside
the eurozone were also affected by Europe’s overall slide into
deflation and are now alienated, seeking inspiration and partners
across the Atlantic, or in China, where only disappointment and great
losses of sovereignty await (as any reading of the TTIP and TISA
trade deal documents confirm).
Today Europeans
everywhere, from Helsinki to Lisbon, from Dublin to Crete, from
Leipzig to Aberdeen, are feeling let down by EU institutions. Many
are attracted to the idea of tearing up the EU, except that they
remain wedded to the single market. Brexit campaigners are promising
voters that they can have their sovereignty and access to Europe’s
single market. But this is a false promise.
A truly single
market, a genuinely level playing field, requires a single legal
framework, identical industry, labour and environmental protection
standards, and courts that will enforce them with the same
determination throughout the single jurisdiction. But this then also
requires a common parliament that writes the laws to be implemented
across the single market as well as an executive that enforces the
courts’ decisions.
A people such as the
British, where all sides of politics cherish the idea of a sovereign
national parliament, cannot envisage such an institution coming into
being. They are right to be prepared to sacrifice, for a loftier
cause, the ease of buying second homes in Normandy or settling on a
Greek island.
But what is the
alternative? If neither the retreat into the cocoon of the nation
state nor surrender to the disintegrating democracy-free zone known
as the EU are good options, is there a third way?
Yes, there is. It is
the one that official “Europe”, and some local elites, resist
with every sinew of their authoritarian mindset: a surge of
democracy, orchestrated by Europeans seeking to regain control over
their lives from unaccountable technocrats, complicit politicians and
opaque institutions.
On 9 February some
of us, convinced of the above, are gathering in Berlin to found a new
movement – DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025). We come from
every part of the continent, including Britain, and are united by
different cultures, languages, accents, political party affiliations,
ideologies, skin colours, gender identities, faiths and conceptions
of the good society.
One simple, radical
idea is our motivating force: to democratise the EU in the knowledge
that it will otherwise disintegrate at a terrible cost to all. Our
immediate priority is full transparency in decision-making
(live-streaming of European councils, Ecofin and Eurogroup meetings;
full disclosure of trade negotiations; ECB minutes, etc) and the
urgent redeployment of existing EU institutions in the pursuit of
policies that genuinely address the crises of debt, banking,
inadequate investment, rising poverty and migration.
Our medium-term goal
is to convene a constitutional assembly where Europeans will
deliberate on how to bring forward, by 2025, a fully fledged European
democracy, featuring a sovereign parliament that respects national
self-determination and shares power with national parliaments,
regional assemblies and municipal councils.
Is this utopian? Of
course it is. But no more so than the notion that the current EU can
survive its anti-democratic hubris, and the gross incompetence
fuelled by its unaccountability. Or the idea that democracy can be
revived in the bosom of a nation-state asphyxiating within
transnational “single” markets and opaque free trade agreements.
Yes, our movement
seems utopian even to us. However, the only alternative is the
terrible dystopia unfolding before our eyes as the EU disintegrates;
David Cameron celebrates the potential exclusion of some eastern
Europeans from social security benefits; ambition is renationalised;
xenophobia surges; and newer and taller fences are built begetting
insecurity in the name of … security.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário