This is just a little out of date, but still interesting.
http://socialistviewpoint.org/julaug_16/julaug_16_15.html
Once More on the European Union
By Tony McKenna
The European Union (EU) debate is perhaps one of the more difficult to
make sense of. For you are bombarded with a vast number of articles from
every color on the political spectrum. How does one go about making an
informed decision? It’s said you can tell a lot about a person by who
their friends are. When translated into political thought the axiom has
a simplistic but not un-useful purpose: take the time to look at the
groups and social forces which are gathering around a particular
position. These might give you some hint as to which political interests
the position truly serves and hint at its real essence. However, in the
case of the EU referendum—the vote, which is to be held later this year
in the UK on whether we should remain or leave the European Union—there
is a remarkably odd admixture of people who have aligned themselves with
both sides. So, for instance, the grinning, demagogic crackpot Nigel
Farage has shared a platform with the left-wing firebrand George
Galloway, both advocating a British withdrawal from the EU. At the same
time David Cameron and his excellent anti-austerity nemesis, the leader
of the Labor Party Jeremy Corbyn—find themselves in the unusual position
of seeing eye-to-eye on the issue and campaigning to keep Britain in.
David Cameron’s political position is comprehensible. Along with the
main state institutions, a majority of the larger capitalist
corporations and their think tanks who are also lobbying to remain
affiliated, Cameron understands that the European Union has,
historically, been an effective means by which capital reproduction has
been managed on a European-wide scale. Emerging out of the Steel and
Coal Community (1952) by way of the Treaty of Rome (1957), the EEU
(Eurasian Economic Union, as it was then) was a project which hoped to
create a more federal Europe, specifically by fusing the economic
interests of Germany and France, and thus offsetting a tendency toward
the type of rival bloc building and geopolitical antagonisms which had
led to the Second World War. Indeed one of the arguments which those who
are pro the EU, and for Britain’s continued membership in it often
employ, is that the EU has secured a level of European harmony and
integration during the post war period relative to what had come before.
The assessment seems plausible, though it must be read in the context of
the fact that the processes of empire building in the latter part of the
twentieth century had largely shifted terrains; the bi-polar tensions
which defined that epoch were shifted from the European plain to the
transatlantic build-up of arms which categorized the cold war between
the USSR and the U.S.
Subordination to U.S. power
Indeed, the impetus behind the Treaty of Rome was very much America
driven, sponsored by American imperialism in order to create the kind of
unified market which, on the basis of an American federal style model,
would provide a stable economic region for an influx of American goods
and exports. The notion that, as some leftists would have it, the
European Union can provide a powerful bulwark to American power seems to
be chimerical—not only because the U.S. was so heavily involved in its
construction, but also because the Union itself is a somewhat toothless
entity, lacking a standing army or any real military fortification by
which its policies can be enforced; choosing rather to rely on the most
powerful of its client states—and also, notably, the United States itself.
Rather than act as a counterweight to American power, the EU seems to
have instead complimented it, and this was most clearly evinced in the
fracas which ensued in Ukraine recently, when Brussels helped pressure
president Victor Yanukovych into ratifying a rather one-sided agreement
with the EU relating to its Eastern Partnership policy, and Putin’s
Russia reacted with anger, making violent incursions into the territory,
occupying Crimea. In the event, the president was forced to reverse his
decision. At the same time, the fault lines of public opinion in Ukraine
itself, torn between East and West, increasingly fissured and fractured,
setting the basis for civil turmoil. In the light of this type of
incident, the EU seems to be acting according to a clearly imperial
remit, favoring Western European and U.S. hegemony over and against the
power to the East, a distant echo of the cold war itself—with Putin
himself reacting in kind albeit at the head of a much weaker Russian power.
One of the strongest points, from a left perspective, against the EU
stems from its subordination to the United States and its perceived
eagerness to sign up to the labyrinthine clauses of the Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership, an agreement which is being conducted
very much under the public radar and promises to create a single market
uniting U.S. and the EU on the basis of the power of large capital; one
where corporations would be given the right to sue individual
governments for state policies which work against their profit margins.
Given the secretive, almost Byzantine like complexity of the decision
making process at the heart of the EU bureaucracy, the image of a group
of unelected plutocrats who are operating very much in the interests of
international finance, is one which is hard to repeal—especially given
the experience of Greece in 2015, when the democratic mandate a
government was handed by its population was overturned in favor of the
prerogatives of various EU bodies.
Neoliberalism
In actual fact however, the EU’s commitment to neoliberalism is
significantly more seasoned. In the early 80s the French government,
under Mitterrand, had endeavored to enact a Keynesian policy, which was
quite at odds with the rapacious, free marketeering, which categorized
the economic mood of the epoch more broadly. Mitterrand introduced
increased nationalization and the devaluation of the franc as a means to
boost exports and reduce state debts. However the Union’s monetary
wing—the European Monetary System (EMS)—was practicing a far more
stringent policy in terms of international currency, allowing the rates
between members to fluctuate only within narrow and controlled limits.
The policy of the EMS became the lever by which France was compelled to
reverse devaluation, and therefore squander the impetus behind the
export boom, which was to provide a palliative to the stagnation of real
wages in the domestic economy. In such a context, Mitterrand was forced
to perform a U-turn, which saw him gravitate toward the neoliberal
solution, perhaps the only option left within the remit of parliamentary
politics. Mitterrand’s capitulation to free market economics was part
and parcel of a broader retreat, of course; one which saw the miners and
the unions crushed in Britain at around the same period, but also the
decimation of industry on a European-wide scale—a decimation which saw
government subsidies slashed and the devolution of economic policy onto
local and often private interests—alongside the almost unfettered growth
of the financial sector and speculative endeavors. The EMS, then, and
the Union more broadly, provided an effective organizational force,
which contributed to the recalibration of Western European capitalism in
accordance with a more neoliberal paradigm.
Greece
But without a doubt, the Union’s most notorious act in its position in
the vanguard of European neoliberalism was its noxious role in the Greek
debacle of 2015. The Syriza government of Greece had swept to power on
an anti-austerity agenda, promising to repeal the bulk of the
international debt. The combined pressure of the European Central Bank,
the IMF and the European Commission—the threat of economic sanctions
they brought to bear—was such that the “radical” left government soon
felt compelled to change its position, signing up to an agreement in
which it promised to “refrain from any rollback of measures and
unilateral changes to the policies and structural reforms” the
“troika”—the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Commission (EC),
and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—had floated. This, despite the
fact that the vast majority of the Greek people had voted by way of a
single issue referendum to reject the “bailout,” despite the fact that
Syriza’s mandate only existed on the back of a radical mass movement
which was fervently anti-austerity. This was a desperate blow to the
prospects of a cohesive, anti-capitalist, anti-austerity wave of
resistance on a European wide level. Why had Greece been allowed to
achieve such an economic flashpoint in the first place? The common
explanation, generated by many of the organs and think tanks favorable
to the EU and sympathetic to the impositions it sought to impose on
Greece usually ran along the lines that Greek workers were less
productive—or to parse the same point in more explicit moral terms—were
lazier—than their Germanic counterparts, for instance. The Greek
worker’s right to retire at 63—as it stood then—was seen to be a
corollary of the fact that the German worker had to slog on until 67.
The attempt to show that Greek workers are less productive than German
workers, or any other group for that matter, has been refuted—in terms
of hours worked—by OCED (Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development) statistics which showed how in 2008, for example, the Greek
workforce notched up an extra 48 percent of working hours than that of
the Germans.1 In actual fact, the descent of the Greek economy into the
most desperate economic crisis, and the ability of the central,
longstanding and major EU powers to better weather the storm—was about
the fact that many of the newer and peripheral countries in the EU
entered the Eurozone and were at once burdened with high exchange rates.
In combination with this, the squeeze on workers’ wages in Germany, a
slashing of unemployment benefits, and the increased relocation of
German industrial capital to Eastern Europe all set the basis for the
advantage of German exporters. In the same vein, argues the economist
Michael Pettis, the severity of the crisis in the peripheral countries
has been exacerbated in particular by German and French finance capital,
which “were offering nearly unlimited amounts of extremely cheap credit
to all takers in Spain.”
Left justification for Brexit
It seems in light of the examples of Spain and Greece, and indeed the
periphery countries more broadly, that the left demand for a Brexit is
well justified. But what perhaps this type of demand overlooks is the
specifics of the UK’s particular relationship to the EU. The UK is not a
periphery country in the way in which Greece is. In my view it made
perfect and complete sense for Greece to exit the EU in 2015, once the
creditors refused to take part in anything resembling compromise—even if
the Greek economy had to revert to the drachma, and all the economic
privations, which would have entailed as a consequence. But Britain is
not in this kind of relationship to the EU. Austerity is being forced
upon us by a pro-austerity government—not, as in the Greek case, an
anti-austerity government compelled to change course as a result of EU
pressure. Britain has a significantly more powerful and resilient
economy, and it is difficult to see it being subsumed under the type of
exploitation which has undergirded the Greek case—i.e., the mode by
which the periphery is exploited by the center. If Britain is withdrawn
from the EU, the very power which is carrying through austerity—i.e.,
the British Tory government—will be strengthened rather than weakened in
such a scenario. So that, in my view, is the first chink, in the left
case for the Brexit, and it is not insignificant.
The second, and far weightier, is the question of immigration. According
to the Research Agency Ipsos MORI, in a study enacted in 2013,
immigration is unpopular with approximately two thirds of the UK
population, with over 50 percent of those polled favoring the option of
reducing it “a lot.” These concerns, relates the same institution, have
become particularly prominent in the period following 2000. Indeed one
might speculate that the post-September 11th climate—with its heightened
sense of Islamophobia and the fear and angst which surrounds certain
cultural emblems like the Burka and certain cultural practices like the
consumption of Halal food—is very much linked to the increased fears
surrounding immigration. The burka is particularly instructive with
regard to this, because it succeeds in covering the face, and this very
easily dovetails with the inherently racist sensibility that there is a
mysterious swarm of people who can all be subsumed under the single
appellation of “Muslim” and who are embroiled in a set of cultural
practices and values which is both uniform and opaque. The “Muslims,”
therefore, are articulated as a culturally distinct group which is
visibly separate from a “British” core—but at the same time, they seek
to live among “us,” so they shield some of their more unsavory practices
from the limelight in much the same way the veil obscures the emotions
of the face. Over time, they smuggle into the host culture a set of
alien practices which eventually come to undermine it—and that is why we
get the constant drivel about cities like Birmingham becoming “Muslim
only zones,” little bastions of fanaticism which have managed to worm
their way under the skin and surface of the indigenous and healthier
(and superior) culture.
Imperial stratagems
The Ipsos MORI polls suggest a strong link between anxieties, which
surround “race relations” and anxieties, which surround “immigration”
and “immigrants”—and this supports the way in which fear about the
“other” is articulated in a period which has seen the rise of a vast
displacement of refugees especially from countries with large Muslim
populations. But more profoundly, the link between “race” and
“immigration” is in large part a by-product of the way in which the
stratagems of Western imperial power have been reconfigured in the
twenty-first century—specifically the series of invasions and incursions
which have been manifested in the Middle East. One of the most potent
ideological cloaks for the naked pursuit of economic and territorial
interests has been the notion of “western values” in opposition to the
primitive religious barbarisms of the near East; the means by which
conquest and slaughter are justified on the basis of a secular
liberalism and the so called expansion of “democracy.” These are, to be
sure, updated, recycled versions of Kipling’s old school white man’s
burden line—no longer is the suppression of the natives to be guaranteed
by the crude pseudo-science of race craft; instead the emphasis on an
ideology of superior “race” is shifted to that of a superior culture.
These kinds of themes tend to resonate in the UK because of its specific
historical trajectory. When Kipling wrote his famous poem it was
ostensibly addressed to American imperialism, but it was very much a
product of British imperial aspirations and the philosophy of empire
especially as espoused in India. With the end of empire, the sense of
dislocation and disorientation which comes from living through a period
of inexorable historical decline in some ways helped strengthen imperial
identity rather than weaken it; many people clung more desperately and
more trenchantly to the belief that Britain has some special historical
role even as its actual influence in world affairs was increasingly
marginalized. This couldn’t very well translate into a sense of military
or economic superiority because in these fields Britain had been long
since eclipsed but it did work its way into a belief in the possession
of a unique, separate, timeless and almost hermetically sealed
culture—usually a “Christian” one whatever that is taken to imply—one
which was now under threat from the driving, penetrating influx of
foreigners who do not adhere to “our” values.
The people who espouse these types of xenophobic views, generally
speaking, are not to be placated through reasonable and rational
arguments. It is of little use, most of the time, to point out that
“British” culture has been fertilized with ongoing and profound waves of
immigration from the Beaker people in the late third millennium BC who
brought with them bronze age technology, to the Germanic tribes who
arrived in the aftermath of the Roman collapse and who added and
enriched the linguistic fabric of the epoch so that it could eventually
be woven into old English. Neither is it of any great consequence to
them when you point out the studies that show (like this one in the
Financial Times) how immigrants to Britain—from those countries like
Poland, Hungary and Lithuania which joined the EU in 2004—actually paid
out “64 percent more in taxes to the UK than they received in benefits”
in the subsequent period leading up to 2011.2 And there is relatively
little gain in saying that the toxic, atavistic fears which surround
immigration are nothing new but were exhibited in much the same form
after the Second World War and the migrations of Black populations which
were so necessary to reinvigorate British industry, or the mass
migrations of Asians particularly in the 1970s which have provided such
incentive to trade and tailoring, commerce and cuisine. There is little
point in raising these facts precisely because you are responding to the
type of fears and unconscious anxieties which have a cultural resonance
which harkens back to the loss of empire and the decline of an epoch,
and are therefore precisely calibrated responses—a culturally orientated
amour-propre which is designed to relieve worry in times of great flux
and economic hardship, and to provide a fantasized bedrock, an eternal
and unchanging edifice, which must be clung to at all costs, much in the
way a small child clings to their special blanket.
In reality there has only ever been one profound and long lasting cure
for racism and xenophobia on a broader scale. And that is heightened
immigration. When one is working with people from other countries, when
one’s children goes to school with children of many different ethnic
identities, then the ossified forms of racial and xenophobic ideology
are shattered in practice for they cannot sustain in face of the living
realities, of seeing those children play together, or having a laugh
with a mate at work who also happens to be from Africa. As Bobby Duffy,
the director for Public Affairs of the polling agency Ipsos MORI, points
out—it has “long been recognized in studies of attitudes to immigration
that the areas with the lowest immigrant numbers are often those that
express the greatest concern about immigration.”3 Or to say the same
thing, it is those who in actual fact have very little contact with
immigrants and very little experience of the effects of immigration who
are able to so effectively conjure up the fantastical deprivations,
which have been visited on their lives by the specter of the foreign
infiltrator. That this rather sinister archetype is the product of
fevered, overworked minds is apparent from the level of vulgar
contradiction, which it manifests. In Britain, it is the United Kingdom
Independence Party or UKIP who have most relentlessly purveyed this kind
of ideological product, but when you stop to consider what is actually
being sold here, you are immediately confronted by the fact that you are
being offered a dud. On the one hand, UKIP tells us, these immigrant
workers are prepared to undercut British workers by stealing their jobs
at little pay, but at the same time we are assured that the same element
is feckless and lazy, and quite prepared to retreat into a life of
parasitism courtesy of the British state. As one commentator so acutely
phrased it, UKIP’s fantasy immigrant is none other than “Schrodinger’s
immigrant”—i.e., a person who is at the same time absolutely hard
working and absolutely lazy.
I have already hoped to illustrate that there is a strong and cogent
left position for exiting the EU. However, the UKIP constituent and
their social basis in some sections of large capital—but more
importantly small business owners, fringe section of the working
classes, those precarious elements who flit between a series of
temporary jobs on zero-hours contracts, and are without the means to
become unionized—these elements in particular find the UKIP narrative
persuading, especially in periods of economic downturn or decline. In
such a context, their deprivations no longer appear to them as
individual miseries but instead achieve a more universal tenor; their
own misfortune is part and parcel of a broader and more tragic
trajectory—the decline and demise of a whole epoch. An empire where once
the center held, an empire in which hardworking, industrious white
Christian culture formed the core—more and more subject to the processes
of entropy and decay until what is left at the center is little more
than a rump, a lingering silent minority, strangers in their own
heartlands; a precious, perishing culture evaporated before the
indifference of metropolitan elites and the never-ending influx of
foreign elements they facilitate. Holding to such a view offers both
comfort and catharsis—it allows the deprivations and desperation of the
individual economic existence set adrift in modernity, atomized—to be
reformulated in the context of a world historic fantasy by which an
imaginary past, usually constructed along the lines of some supposed
pure, unchanging category (“white” “Christian” “culture”)—is then seen
to be mortally threatened by the postulation of some equally imaginary
future and the shadow of the swarthy, faceless immigrant which steps out
from it.
It was never immigration which created loss of jobs and reduced pay,
though. It was an economic crisis which saw the largest sum of money in
history transferred from the poorest to the wealthy in terms of a series
of international bailouts which were designed to bolster the vulture
companies and institutions of international finance. It was the policies
of hack and slash which governments across the world applied to social
services and labor rights in its aftermath. Immigrants might be willing
to work for less, but the real issue here is about the lack of a decent
minimum wage, a wage which parties like UKIP are adamantly against—while
at the same time the same party advocates for forced unpaid work for
housing and council tax benefit claimants, and the slashing of
incapacity benefits. UKIP are compelled to raise a fantasized, gushingly
sentimental, inevitably patronizing vision of a “white working class” in
the very moments when they are actively engaged in savaging the real
thing—of whatever complexion—in reality. And so immigration becomes more
than a merely logistical question, which can be answered by recourse to
the actual facts, the empirical data which measures the real term
economic effects of immigration and show it to be, by far and away,
beneficial overall. Instead the immigration issue becomes a means—not
only by which those elements, especially in the lower middle classes—are
able to weave the pressures of economic disintegration into some kind of
spiteful morality-fable in which petty rancor is furnished by a sheen of
historic tragedy—but it also becomes the practical mechanism by which
the economic crisis and its causes in the activities of the ruling
classes and the unfettered expansion of finance capital—is displaced
onto the victims of those processes, the workers across the board, and
those displaced and economically vulnerable peoples who seek their
salvation in other places.
The referendum
This then returns us to the question of the British referendum. If a
“Brexit” is achieved the UKIP element at home will be immeasurably
strengthened, and the sense of xenophobia, of national chauvinism will
become all the more claustrophobic. More importantly, however, the
solidarity among oppressed groups in their struggle to challenge the
existing order and the austerity politique it promotes—such a struggle
will be inevitably weakened at the points of contact between all the
various social elements which are immiserated by the thrust of
neoliberalism, and which have the potential to grow into a powerful and
cohesive movement against it. For the reactionary elements in those
groups will be bolstered in the claim that it is the poor outsider,
rather than the rich banker, who is truly responsible for economic
deprivation Most importantly of all, the streams of immigration which
find their way into the UK; which provide the means by which the specter
of the sinister outsider is exercised at the level of practical
existence by the real awareness that the lives of the people who arrive
in this country to live and work hold a parity with our own; such an
inflow will be massively curtailed, and the free movement of labor which
helps forge working class solidarity on an international basis will be
inevitably restricted. What will pertain in the aftermath will be the
so-called democratically elected government of the Conservative Party, a
government which crawled to power on an exhausted and apathetic mandate
(around 24 percent of the vote) with a newly rejuvenated and increased
set of powers.
More specifically, it will be the extreme right, rabidly anti-immigrant
wing of the party which will be galvanized and very much come to the
fore—if not by making a bid for direct leadership. The pro-austerity and
anti-union policies of the party in its current form will be married
with the isolationist, little Englander, vituperative politics of a
rabid fringe which is already seething with hatred, and which, in quite
lunatic fashion, sees itself as the means of national salvation in and
through the return to an addled, senile vision of some imaginary past of
shires and crumpets and cricket games unmarred by foreign faces. These
groups are with us all the time, of course, and they are rightly subject
to satire and lampoon, but they are more than just figures of farce.
Talking to people on working or student visas who live and work in this
country, one is struck by the tone of trepidation which has crept into
their voices, the foreboding which surrounds their own circumstances and
the way the people around them see them, and the simple fear which comes
from not knowing whether you are to be suddenly uprooted in the imminent
future. These are the people who are attuned to the cultural mood
precisely because they are newly arrived outsiders and can see events
from the outside as they develop; such people provide us with a useful
social barometer, which picks up on the changes in the air, and even
though it is clear that the EU is an organization which channels and
structures neoliberal policies—the removal of Britain from it, at this
point, will indicate a shift in the political climate which is ominous
indeed.
1 Tony Mckenna, “The Greek Paradox,” The Huffington Post, February 16,
20120:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/tony-mckenna/the-greek-paradox_b_1276360.html
2 Helen Warrell, “EU migrants pay £20bn more in taxes than they
receive,” The Financial Times, November 5, 2014:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c49043a8-6447-11e4-b219-00144feabdc0.html#axzz4A8Yxgaix
3 Mehdi Hassan, “Five questions for anyone who says ‘it’s not racist to
talk about immigration,’” November 13, 2014:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/11/five-questions-anyone-who-says-its-not-racist-talk-about-immigration
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