The Extreme Centre by Tariq Ali

Author:Tariq Ali
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Which Europe could they be looking at? This is a view from inside the bubble. Even in Germany, the strongest of the EU states, there is growing unease with the role the nation is being forced to play and a number of anti-EU parties have emerged. Most of these parties are misguided, but the reason they have arisen is the pervasive loss of trust in the elites who control party politics and represent the symbiosis between big banks, big corporations and politics, all umbilically linked. Hostility to the EU is not confined to the far right. It is the failure of both the extreme centre and many on the left to sharply criticize the EU that has made the right such a pole of attraction.

Far from being the case that criticizing a hallowed EU will encourage reaction and national chauvinism, it is the lack of a serious critique that is exacerbating the process. Habermas is, of course, a philosopher of the extreme centre. Negri should know better. The gulf between Europe’s rulers and the ruled has rarely been starker. Politically, the absence of any democratic accountability in the structures of the EU combines badly with the economics of debt-logged stagnation. On the military front, membership of NATO is virtually compulsory for new members, slotting them in to a broader imperial strategy. German unification, celebrated all over the EU, has led to the country becoming the key state in determining social and economic priorities.

Member-state equality became a joke after the expansion. Even when in two founding states, France and Holland, majorities voted against the EU constitution in 2005 mainly because it enshrined neoliberalism, popular opinion as expressed in those referenda was effectively ignored. Currently the Berlin–Washington Axis overrides the archaic and authoritarian structures of the European Union in the eventuality of major policy disagreements. The Franco-German equilibrium has become meaningless and redundant. Once German decisions get the green light from Washington, they are imposed on the other member states.

Most of Europe’s admired philosophers cannot interpret this world, let alone change it. Economists and sociologists, however, are discussing a number of possible alternatives. In ‘EuroMemorandum 2014’, a group of radical European economists have mapped an alternative course of action.2 Their criticisms focus on the failed economic policies, pointing out that youth unemployment in 2013, while relatively low in Germany (7.8 per cent) and Austria (9.1 per cent) was 23.7 per cent in Belgium, 25.8 per cent in France and Ireland, 57.3 per cent in Greece and 55.9 per cent in Spain. In the sphere of finance, the economists note that the situation is ‘extremely fragile’ and that in Italy and Spain, the new ‘government bond issues have been taken up almost entirely by nationally-based banks’. On banking reform they insist that the ‘weight of finance in the economy’ must be reduced and speculation made illegal in the banking system.

Most of their arguments, especially those sharply critical of the authoritarian imposition of ‘structural reforms’ under threat of sanctions, are cogent and rational. They call for an end to sado-monetarism.

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