At dinner with my
Galician friends last Friday night, the main topic of conversation
was how their families had suffered a loss of income from Cuba when
Castro seized power in 1959. And this led on to how money coming from
South America – particularly Argentina – had sustained families
here in Galicia during Spain's “years of hunger” brought about by
Franco's insane pre-60s economic policies. Anyway, there's now a
chance that Spaniards will get compensation for Cuban property
confiscations. See here on this.
I imagine that bank
charging practices differ in every country. They certainly do
between the UK and Spain. Last week I sent some cash from my bank in
Britain to my new one here. The former charged me a small sum for
sending (i. e. losing) the cash but the latter charged me ten
times more for receiving it. Not a good start. Needless to
say, I won't be earning any interest on the money for as long as my bank – like the rest of them – short changes its customers as
part of its recovery from ludicrous investments of 2007 and before. No
wonder they're not terribly popular. Keep the lawyers; hang all the
bankers, say I.
There were 2 new Spanish words for me last week . . . . la yenca and el rocanrol. The former is - inter alia - a dance of a gentler age. And the latter is - look at it again - rock and roll. I fear the yenka fell under this heading in 60s Spain.
Talking of languages . . .
I neglected to add yesterday that reader María had kindly confirmed that, in Gallego/Galician, "Happy New Year" is not Feliz Ano Novo - 'Happy New Bum' - but, rather, Google's first attempt - Feliz Aninovo. Though reader Paideleo has submitted what seems to be another variant - Feiz Ano.
I haven't mentioned
Russian propaganda activity for a while. So, here's something
I read a a few months ago. It's hard not to be worried by it. Horrified, even.
In contrast, today's cartoon:-
Finally . . . . This is an article from Prospect magazine. It purports to explain what's happening in European politics but, if you still can't understand how intelligent, liberal, non-racist Brits could favour a Brexit, you might find it especially useful. Essentially, when forced to choose between liberalism and democracy, they went with the latter. Even if it damages their financial interests, as in my case. Compared with dying for democracy, it ain't much:-
Europe in revolt
Across a continent,
there is a void between governments and their citizens. Ignoring this
vacuum leaves it free for the chauvinists to exploit by Chris Bickerton
From the timeless cafés
of Vienna, or from the trendy bars of Berlin and Amsterdam, it is
easy to dismiss Brexit as a curiously British affair. Did Winston
Churchill not describe Europe as “where the weather comes from”?
Have Brits not always thought of themselves as an “island nation,”
close but quite different from the rest of Europe?
The United Kingdom’s
role in the European Union has added to this impression. British
governments have made much of their opposition to closer integration
in areas such as defence or on issues that threaten the financial
supremacy of the City of London. The perception of the UK as an
awkward European partner has been so strong that some Europeans
welcomed Brexit. Without those truculent Brits, they argued, the
European project can finally take off and embrace its federalist
destiny.
However tempting this
sort of thinking may be for the EU’s supporters, it is a fatal
misunderstanding of the meaning of Brexit. Far from being an isolated
event, Brexit is a symptom of a much deeper and more extensive crisis
of politics. This crisis is not only playing itself out in the UK and
in the United States under President-Elect Donald Trump. Across
Europe, mainstream politicians struggle to command the trust and
faith of voters. Traditional parties are dismissed as belonging to a
corrupt and self-serving political elite. In Germany, the “word of
the year” in 2010 was wütburger, meaning “angry citizen.”
In Spain, protest movements have been organised under the name of los
indignados, “the outraged ones.” In France, a pamphlet written by
a nonagenarian war hero entitled “Indignez-Vous” (“Time for
Outrage!”) became a global hit, selling over four million copies.
Far from being a
short-lived response to the hardships of the European financial
crisis, this sentiment has hardened. Some malcontents, such as those
who are sitting in the Italian parliament as representatives of the
Five Star Movement, are taking up the challenge of politics
themselves. Others are turning to radical parties on the right and
left, from Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany to Syriza in
Greece and Podemos in Spain. The Chinese call this, with a good
measure of schadenfreude, “the great revolt.”
This revolt differs
from bourgeois and workers’ revolutions of the past. The emotions
of anger and frustration prevail over those of hope. No rising force
within society claims the mantle of the “universal class.”
According to the late Irish political scientist, Peter Mair,
politicians in Europe have over the last few decades retreated into
the state. Citizens, for their part, have disappeared into the
private sphere. What used to be a relationship of representation
between governments and citizens has been transformed into a
relationship of antagonism and deep distrust. As a result,
21st-century politics in Europe is all about trying to bridge what
Mair called “the void”: an absence of any meaningful and
legitimate political relationship between politicians and voters.
The EU is not the cause
of this void, as is clear from looking across the Atlantic and seeing
how the same phenomenon is dramatically reshaping US politics.
However, in Europe, the EU appears to many citizens as the primary
mechanism used by national governments to avoid tackling this
political crisis. Politicians insulate themselves from public
disaffection by making policies at the European level. They rely on
the complexity of the EU’s institutions and on the technocratic
language used by its officials to depoliticise even the most
controversial of issues. Successful for many years, this strategy
adopted by Europe’s elites has now begun to unravel. We see this
most obviously in the UK but, not far beneath the surface, it is
happening across the continent.
This breakdown in
relations between national political classes and the mass of citizens
is engulfing the project of “ever-closer union.” This is not
simply a story of rising Euroscepticism, which itself is nothing very
new. What is different is the combination of a targeted dislike of
the EU with a much broader antipathy towards politics and elected
politicians.
The UK is merely a
powerful example of a wider trend. Euroscepticism in the UK was for
many years associated with the yellow socks and pin-striped suits of
Bill Cash, the Conservative MP for Stone, who became known as one of
the leading critics of the Maastricht Treaty. In 1997, the
billionaire James Goldsmith tried unsuccessfully to transform his
Referendum Party into a national electoral force. He ran candidates
in almost every parliamentary seat but won only 2.6 per cent of the
vote. Ukip made the anti-EU cause its own but floundered for many
years on the margins of British politics. There are simply not many
votes in running exclusively as an anti-EU party.
Ukip’s breakthrough
came when it started to mobilise a wider and growing scorn for the
political establishment. The scandal over parliamentary expenses in
2009 led to a dramatic boost in its fortunes. Capitalising on the
silence of mainstream parties on immigration, Ukip began to draw in
traditional Labour voters. Transforming its anti-EU message into a
much broader anti-establishment weltanschauung, Ukip took up the
language of sovereignty and democracy in the name of all those
ignored by the “Westminster elite.”
Citizens across the
rest of the EU will recognise Ukip’s transformation and the success
of its political strategy. In the Netherlands, the arrival of the
flamboyant Pim Fortuyn in the early 2000s was a political earthquake.
His attack on politically correct and out-of-touch elites struck a
chord: many Dutch voters no longer knew who represented them or what
it meant to be Dutch in an era of globalisation and European
integration. Fortuyn was shot by an animal rights activist in the
Dutch commuter town of Hilversum, days before his party won the
second largest share of the vote in the 2002 general election.
Fortuyn’s role in
Dutch politics was short-lived, but his successor, Geert Wilders, is
here to stay. Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV), founded in 2006,
has forced concerns about immigration, Islam and the EU on to the
political agenda. Dutch liberals have tried to silence him through
electoral pacts and through the courts. This has only helped Wilders,
giving credibility to his claim that traditional political elites are
excluding him and his party from power. Elections in the Netherlands
are scheduled for 2017 and there is every chance that the PVV will
pick up enough seats to demand a central place in the governing
coalition.
In France and Italy, a
similar story is playing itself out. The Front National is a
formidable political machine, perhaps the most organised and coherent
of France’s political parties. In 2002, when the party’s founder,
Jean-Marie Le Pen, found himself in the second round of the
presidential election, the sense of shock was palpable. Journalists,
who had rarely ventured beyond the boulevards of Paris, jumped on
trains to the provinces in search of these mysterious Front National
voters. It is quite different today. Of the dozens of figures who
have declared their intention to run in the French presidential
election next year, Marine Le Pen is one of the most likely
contenders to reach the second round. The real question is whether
François Fillon, the centre-right former prime minister and the most
likely person to run against her, can keep her out of the Elysée
Palace. The language of the Front National has become the language of
French political debate, and a run-off between Fillon and Le Pen
rather accurately captures the state of French politics today.
In Italy, marginal
parties have become key actors in the country’s political drama.
The main opposition is the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the Northern
League, both of whom were leading architects behind the victory of
the “No” campaign in Italy’s referendum on constitutional
reform held on 4th December. The M5S, founded by the Italian comedian
Beppe Grillo, is viscerally hostile to the Italian political
establishment. He believes that ordinary citizens are far better
qualified to run the country than professional politicians. His most
quoted phrase is “vaffanculo,” which means “fuck off” and
which he directs with gusto at the country’s political class. The
M5S’s early electoral successes were at the local and regional
level but in elections in February 2013 the movement gained the
largest number of parliamentary seats of a single party.
The M5S today runs some
of the country’s biggest cities, from Rome to Turin, and polls
suggest it may win more seats than the governing Democratic Party in
the next general election. The Northern League has traditionally been
a separatist movement, campaigning for the independence of the rich
Northern regions. In recent years, it has become a regular feature on
the national political stage. Opinion polls suggest it may even get
more votes than the main centre-right party, Forza Italia, in a
future national election. Its leader, Matteo Salvini, has become a
national political figure and is spearheading opposition to Italy’s
membership of the single currency.
In Europe’s bastion
of political stability, Germany, changes are also afoot. The
dominance of the traditional parties—the Christian Democrats, the
Socialists and the Liberals—has given way to a much messier
political map where even “grand coalitions” represent fewer and
fewer voters. Much of the anger in the country is being channelled to
its margins, to Die Linke on the left and to the AfD on the right. A
prominent challenger to Angela Merkel from within her party, the
outspoken gay politician Jens Spahn, recalls the figure of Pim
Fortuyn. Spahn has made his homosexuality the basis for an attack on
what he sees as the intolerance of Muslim immigrants, much as Fortuyn
did a decade and a half ago.
Even in those instances
where the “great revolt” seems to have been temporarily halted,
such as in Austria, the details betray a more complex reality. In the
re-run of the country’s presidential elections on the same day as
the referendum in Italy, the far-right candidate Norbert Hofer was
defeated by Alexander Van der Bellen, a retired economics professor
who ran as an independent candidate but was backed by the Austrian
Green Party. Van der Bellen’s success was fêted by liberals as a
victory of the establishment against its critics.
The reality is rather
different. Austria’s presidency has, since 1945, been filled by a
member of either of the Social Democrat party or the People’s Party
in a remarkable division of political labour. These two parties have
dominated Austrian politics for generations. The real significance of
the run-off between Hofer and Van der Bellen is that the candidates
from both of these main parties were defeated. The monopoly over
power traditionally held by the centre-left and centre-right has come
to an end, a sign that anti-establishment feelings are as powerful in
Austria as elsewhere.
Europe’s “great
revolt” augurs badly for the future of the EU. The Brexit vote did
have some very British roots. With its open and flexible labour
market, where growth has come from expanding the labour force rather
than through increases in productivity, the British experience of
free movement within the single market has been a source of division
and tension. However, only the most naive Europhile can assert with
confidence that “it could never happen here.”
In the Netherlands, it
was the determination of some Dutch citizens that forced the
government to hold a referendum in April 2016 on the EU’s
association agreement with Ukraine. The government lost the
referendum and those involved in organising the “No” campaign
spoke openly about it being a “warm-up” event for a referendum on
the country’s EU membership. Under Dutch law, referendums with
constitutional implications can only be organised if a two-thirds
majority is secured in parliament. The far-right leader, Wilders,
tried to pass such a motion this year but failed. Next spring, when
the composition of the parliament could be quite different, he may
try again.
In France, Le Pen has
made no efforts to hide her negative views of the EU. She has been a
vocal proponent of “Frexit”—a French exit from the EU—and has
committed the Front National to organising a referendum on France’s
EU membership. The Italian opposition is scathing about the euro and
has promised a referendum on eurozone membership. The M5S has been
vague about its position in such a vote but Grillo has for years
demanded a return of “monetary sovereignty” for Italy.
Leaving
the euro would be far harder to engineer and to manage than the UK’s
exit from the bloc. There is no legal basis for it (unlike Article 50
for Brexit) and were any eurozone member state even to think
seriously of returning to a national currency, all those with euros
in that country would take them abroad. This would mean a bank run,
and a crisis for the currency far more serious than that which Greece
presented in the summer of 2015. Brexit is nothing compared to this
messy unravelling which is why the eurozone is likely to limp on for
some time.
The “great revolt”
is already transforming the EU from within. In a referendum on 2nd
October, Hungarians were asked to vote on the EU’s refugee quotas.
A vast majority of those who participated rejected the EU’s policy,
but the turnout was extremely low—so low in fact that the result
was not binding on the government. This reminds us of another
important characteristic of “the void”: the withdrawal of
citizens into their private spheres, resulting in apathy and
disengagement. Nevertheless, the rising popularity of national
referendums is injecting politics into the EU’s institutional
structures, which for so long have thrived on the opposite logic of
depoliticisation. The apathy that we see in Hungary may mean the EU
is off the hook for a while, but it would be wrong to confuse such
acquiescence with actual support for the project of “ever closer
union.”
Beneath the
mainstreaming of Euroscepticism and its challenge to the EU lies a
deeper transformation in the very structure of political competition
in Europe. The 20th century was characterised by the victory of party
democracy as the dominant model of politics: parties, often with
sizeable memberships, would compete for votes on the basis of very
different programmes. Politics was a clash of ideas and political
traditions: social democrats, Christian democrats and communists
would argue with each other about their visions for the future. Other
actors, such as the church, trade unions, business associations, were
part of the debate. Individuals mattered but ideas mattered more.
Today, people have
become sceptical not only of the ability of politicians to represent
them but of the very idea that there is some kind of public interest
out there. In response, politics has become dominated by individuals
who claim to be authentic and genuine. Nigel Farage’s popularity
was built on his image as an ordinary bloke. Jeremy Corbyn’s toxic
relationship with the rest of the Parliamentary Labour Party is taken
by his supporters as proof of his authenticity and evidence that he
has not been captured by the so-called Westminster bubble.
Both sides in the UK’s
EU referendum campaign sought to exploit this dominance of
personalities over issues. Remainers presented staying in the EU as
the only socially respectable position. As one poster put it: “If
people like Rupert Murdoch, Nigel Farage, George Galloway, Nick
Griffin and Marine Le Pen want Britain to leave the EU, where does
that put you?” In the final days of the campaign, celebrities took
over altogether. We saw this with the infamous boat-off on the River
Thames, where Farage’s Brexit flotilla was ambushed by a boat
commandeered by the ageing Irish rock star, Bob Geldof. In an image
that sums up this form of unmediated and personalised politics,
Geldof, flanked by a group of like-minded friends, swore and stuck
his two fingers up at the Ukip MEP.
The same tension
between issues and personalities is being played out across Europe.
In Spain, the emergence of the new party on the left, Podemos, has
been subsumed under the personality of its leader, Pablo Iglesias. A
familiar presence on television, Iglesias is a media celebrity. Aware
that voters knew him but not the party, Podemos put a picture of
Iglesias on the ballot paper in the European elections of 2014. In
the party’s most recent manifesto, Iglesias was photographed
watering the plants on his balcony, the manifesto itself modelled as
a stylish Ikea catalogue.
In Italy, Matteo Renzi
rose to the top by attacking his own centre-left party for its
out-dated attachment to left-wing ideas. Targeting the sclerotic
political and administrative establishment, Renzi always saw himself
as a figure of unceasing energy. He based his own political identity
around the idea of change which is why he associated himself so
closely with the constitutional reforms that were rejected by almost
60 per cent of Italian voters.
Italy used to be
described as a partitocrazia, rule by the political parties.
Today, as a legacy first of Silvio Berlusconi and now of Renzi,
parties have become vehicles for individual ambitions. This is
another reason why Renzi tied himself up with the referendum. The
details of the reform were themselves complex and it was not obvious
that they would lead to the streamlined decision-making in the way
Renzi had promised. However, since he had made so much of his
super-human talent for getting things done, the reform became a
symbol of his personal ability to deliver on his promises. Renzi
announced his resignation following his defeat in the referendum and
it is now up to the President of the Republic, the softly-spoken
Sicilian judge Sergio Mattarella, to decide on how the next
government should be formed. Waiting in the wings are the country’s
unconventional opposition forces, emboldened by their victory.
The rise of unmediated
politics challenges the EU at a number of different levels. There was
a time when European citizens tended to trust EU institutions more
than their own national governments. Distrust now extends itself to
the whole edifice of European government and politics, and especially
the EU-wide dimension whose claim to represent the European interest
is greeted with scepticism and derision.
Political life has
become quite unpredictable. People’s loyalty to a party or to a set
of ideas cannot be assumed. This is as true for those at the top of
society as for those at the bottom. In the UK’s Brexit vote, there
was little by way of solidarity among the country’s ruling class.
One establishment figure told me that he was considering voting
Brexit in the hope of making London property affordable for his
children. Given the EU’s reliance on the authority of its member
state governments, this unravelling of traditional social and
political alliances at the domestic level have left the EU paralysed,
unable to move forwards or backwards. This broader crisis of politics
connects Brexit to the rest of Europe; it is the iceberg, of which
Brexit is simply the visible tip.
But if the EU is not
the direct cause of the “great revolt,” where has it come from?
Part of the answer lies in the way global economic integration has
reshaped European societies, unevenly distributing gains and losses.
Economists regularly tell us that globalisation has transformed the
way income and wealth is distributed across society. A growing
Chinese middle class and an explosion in incomes of the top 1 per
cent in the rich countries has been accompanied by a squeeze in
income for Europe’s working and middle classes.
Class resentment is,
however, very far from being the whole story. Many leading pro-Brexit
campaigners came from the same privileged background as the former
British Prime Minister David Cameron. In France, one of the figures
spearheading anti-establishment sentiment is Emmanuel Macron. Former
finance minister and once a banker for Rothschild & Co, Macron
has founded En Marche, a new movement that is trying to push aside
mainstream parties in the name of a new citizen-led politics. Some of
the leading voices in this revolt are found in parts of Europe that
have done relatively well in economic terms, such as Poland. What we
are witnessing is not just a conventional revolt of the poor against
their rich masters.
At issue are long-term
transformations in the structure of our societies. The decline in
membership and participation of the very institutions that forge our
sense of collective self—what sociologists call our social
capital—is common across all European societies. The social
structure itself is marked by the growing atomisation of labour
markets: agency working and zero-hour contracts generate little by
way of a sense of community. Under these conditions, most
organisations are seen as being in it for themselves, defending their
own selfish interests. But why are these deeper trends making their
entrance on to Europe’s political stage today?
The answer lies in the
uncoupling of liberalism from democracy. We have taken the convenient
umbrella term, “liberal democracy,” for granted but liberalism
and democracy are not identical. It is the consequences of confusing
one with the other that are transforming political life in Europe and
beyond.
Liberalism as a
doctrine is focused on controlling the state and government. The
rights of individual citizens are paramount, to be defended via
independent institutions such as the courts. Often, liberalism is
invoked as an antidote to the dangers of majoritarianism. Liberals
argue that majorities do not always make good decisions and a society
needs to protect itself from the “tyranny of the majority.”
The political order
established in the wake of the demise of traditional social democracy
in Western Europe was clearly a liberal one. Grandiose projects of
social transformation, that took society as a whole as their starting
point, were given up in favour of a defence of individual rights. In
the course of the 1960s and 1970s, the new left in Western Europe
embraced this turn to rights and celebrated diversity with the
feminist slogan, “the personal is the political.”
With this ideological
shift, we have seen growing support for institutions designed to
protect individual rights against decisions by political majorities.
The power of parliaments was eroded by the creation of new regulatory
bodies, from fiscal councils to empowered constitutional courts.
Before the 1990s, the vast majority of central banks were controlled
by governments and interest rate decisions were at the core of
macro-economic policy-making. Given the significant winners and
losers they create, it was considered quite inappropriate that such
decisions should be handed over to unelected technocrats.
Over the last 20 years,
macro-economic policymaking has been thought of in terms of rules
that bind the hands of profligate governments. Central bank
independence became a global norm and was made a requirement for
membership of the European single currency. This post-political
settlement placed economic issues beyond the reach of politics. In
Europe, the EU’s treaties have long functioned as a de facto
economic constitution, policing the boundary between what is (and is
not) acceptable economic behaviour. However reasonable these
boundaries may appear, their connection to the will of national
majorities is weak. They also have distributive consequences which
have reshaped the social structure of our societies.
This victory for
political liberalism in Western Europe was mirrored years later in
the east. The conditions for joining the EU were exactly those of the
construction of a liberal polity, with specific provisions made for
minority rights and other constitutional guarantees of individual
liberty. In principle, the political systems put in place were based
on majority rule but over time domestic populations in Eastern Europe
chafed against a sense of being able to change the governments but
not the policies. This sentiment did not disappear after membership
of the EU in 2004, it only increased. The version of the “great
revolt” under way in Eastern Europe is not particularly aimed at EU
membership as such. The target is the edifice of liberal politics
built after 1989.
The Brexit vote brought
out starkly this conflict between liberalism and democracy, ignored
for so long by those who took liberal democracy for granted. Many
Remainers voted in favour of EU membership precisely because they see
the EU as the best way of locking-in policies which they liked.
Anyone arguing for Brexit from the left was accused of risking the
dismantling of workers’ rights by the current and future Tory
governments. Few Remainers believed in the left’s ability to use
the rules of majority government to secure its own programme.
It is not only in the
UK that the language of democracy and popular sovereignty has been
abandoned by the left, in favour of locking in individual rights
through constitutional rules. In France, popular sovereignty is the
ideological terrain of Le Pen, in Poland it belongs to the shadowy
Jarosław Kaczy´nski and in Hungary Viktor Orbán. Back in the 1980s
and early 1990s, Europe’s social democratic left made a Faustian
pact with the EU, trading majority rule for the hope of a politically
unassailable “social Europe.” Today, the much-heralded “social
Europe” is more distant than ever before. The EU has become a
symbol of the victory of constitutional rules against the wishes of
democratic majorities.
In spite of this,
Europe’s left is not going back on its Faustian pact. In Spain, the
new left-wing party, Podemos, has developed an anti-austerity agenda
that has surprisingly little to say about the EU. Where the left has
moved, it has copied rather than challenged the language of the
radical right. In Germany, Social Democrats have seized on discontent
with Merkel’s liberal refugee policy to make their own case for
restrictions on immigration. Criticisms of the eurozone’s
one-size-fits-all policies have come from left-leaning German
intellectuals but politically these ideas have only been taken up by
the AfD. Syriza’s failed attempt in 2015 to rewrite the terms of
its own bail-out deal with European creditors, through a high-stakes
plebiscitary game, has strengthened the view that there is no future
for the left outside of the embrace of the EU and its single market.
What makes it most
difficult for the left to return to majoritarian politics is its own
uncertainty about what it would like to propose to voters. Parties
such as the Front National have some idea of how they would like to
tackle problems of globalisation, inequality and the movement of
people. There is no such clarity on the left. One reason for this is
the distance that separates mainstream social democratic parties from
their traditional working-class electorate.
In the UK, the gap is
glaring but it is also evident in France, Spain and in Italy.
Centre-left parties have become urban, middle-class parties. When
they formulate policies, they think of working-class voters as a
rabble: frustrated, prejudiced, racist and impervious to the facts.
For this reason, the easiest route is to emulate the political right
in arguing, for instance, for tighter rules on immigration. Figures
such as Corbyn, who buck the trend, are dismissed as unelectable
madmen.
But there is another
reason why the European left is struggling so hard to come up with
ideas and policies that can provide answers to the challenges
European societies face today. Ideas do not come into the world fully
formed, from the heads of national civil servants, from technocrats
employed by international institutions or from ivory tower academics.
Programmes for government are products of society and of political
conflict. By positioning itself as unequivocally in support of
supranational policymaking at the European level, the left has
isolated itself from the very process that generates the kinds of
ideas and policies it so desperately needs: that of representative
democratic politics at the national level.
To furnish itself with
a programme, the European left must reclaim the language of democracy
and popular sovereignty from the likes of Le Pen and Wilders. This
will go some way to bridging the void between governments and
citizens and make it possible for politics to become, once again, a
source of ideas about what sort of common life we would like to lead.
But doing this will come at a cost for the left: a complete
reassessment of its embrace of “ever closer union.”
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