Blame the f***ing formatting problems on Blogger. The lack of proofreading is my fault.
US reactions to the EU referendum are more or less disappointing. You see middle-of-the-road and conservative pundits basically parroting British newspapers (because, as most Americans are incapable of reading any European newspapers, they have to rely on the viewpoint of one of the EU’s most europhobic countries…) and progressives chanting that the people’s revolution has come to fruition. A “great” article in the Nation by John Nichols proclaims that French voters ended corporate domination. Another “splendid” example was Diana Johnstone of Counterpunch which couldn’t have displayed a greater lack of understanding of French domestic politics (she thought Laurent Fabius, a horrendously unpopular politician both within and outside of his own party, would wrest the Socialist party away from François Hollande.)
Their enthusiasm could barely be contained that French voters said no to “globalization”.
My fellow US progressives, let me give you an analogy that maybe you’ll be able to understand. The allegedly progressive “no” movement (I’ll get back to that in a minute) is about as responsible as voting for Nader in 2004. Because, regardless of whether people like it or not, the EU has generally been a force for progressive ideas (especially from an American point of view). The Constitution, which wasn’t perfect, but which ensured strong protections to maintain a high standard of living and human rights, was the next logical step. So it took a free trade zone and ensured necessary social protections.
American progressives, I understand, are very leery when it comes to free trade. And clearly Nafta and the propsed Cafta are chief examples of where this has gone wrong because clearly maquiladoras only polluted Mexico and didn’t make anyone rich except for factory owners. On the other hand, we can point to the EU’s economic integration—which is far more comprehensive—and see the miracles it has done for once poor countries like Spain and Ireland. And then there’s the independent free-trade zone for South America, Mercosur, being proposed by center-left governments who want to help insulate themselves from American hegemony. A competitive market isn’t necessarily either anathema to social progress, either: Nordic countries are high-tax, welfare states with stringent environmental standards that are among the most business-friendly.
Basically, it depends on how we want to define progressive. Do we want to say that getting rid of a free-market economy is the definition of progress? How progressive was the command economy of the former communist block where people had to run all over town for toilet paper? Or do we want to define our form of progress as an economy that ensures a high standard of living, environmental protections, social coverage (health care, etc.), and all the other good stuff.
The Anglo-Saxon “progressive” does not automatically equal “extreme left.” I’m not advocating an irrational communist-phobia à la McCarthy, but on the other hand you can find plenty of people in Europe that Americans might qualify as progressives who recoil at the idea of communism. I consider myself a “progressive” in the American sense in that I believe that government has a role in regulating business, in promoting fairer taxes, providing public services, in ending discrimination, in promoting a better world. In France I’d be a Socialist party voter (that’s the “center left” not to be confused with the left-centerism of Tony Blair’s Labour party).
What I’m trying to explain here is that American progressives need to be a lot less quick to jump on European far-left bandwagons before they understand the terrain. While, yes, your chances of voting no were higher, the poorer you were, some American columnists wrote as if this were some victory in a class war (the little people rising up!). If you want to still subscribe to Marxist reductivism, well, just skip ahead a few paragraphs.
But the real reasons for so many people voting no were a general sense of economic insecurity and a total lack of understanding of European construction. I can’t blame voters for not having a clue about how Europe works because that’s what the political parties should have been doing for twenty years now. And I sympathize with people who have seen their buying power shrink and worry about a deterioration of their quality of life. Both the willingness to blame bad news on Brussels and the persistent 10 percent unemployment rate of the past twenty years are inexcusable failures of the political establishment—both right and left.
Unfortunately, the far left (including, sadly, the altermondialiste group Attac, which has been a force for good, but has now decided to get itself involved in divisive politics—apparently in an effort to enter the political realm itself) took advantage of this ignorance and told people they’d be able to save Europe if they voted no. In a cheap political move, they actually played on people’s ignorance by feeding them fear. People were convinced that if they voted yes, Europe would be taken over by the Thatcherites, that abortion would be illegal, that all of the public services would have to be privatized, that France would be able to renegotiate the treaty.
It’s actually the now dead treaty that would have saved us from that.
The columnists also, perhaps unwittingly, gave their okay to some of the most blatant xenophobia we’ve seen since… Jean-Marie Le Pen. From Portugal to Poland, everyone said workers were going to flood France and take away jobs from those who actually belong here. Aside from the fact France, has critical shortages of labor in nursing and in the hospitality sector (the fact that none of the ten percent of France’s unemployed are able to fill the gap shows a major problem with way this country retrains workers…), the European constitution expressly states that any worker in a job has to work for at least the minimum wage in their new country. Of course the media has found examples of foreign workers at lower wage standards than are illegal… working in the city hall of one mayor that was a “no” supporter. The mythical polish plumber has become the black welfare queen of 21st Century Europe : a scapegoat, an easily consumable icon of the “other” upon which we can all fix our fears and hate. For the extreme-left, a movement that says it wants to bring all peoples together, this is nothing short of shameful. This is the campaign US progressive writers are backing.
And then the ignorance of some writers has gone so far as to give a stamp of approval to the unconscionable. Diana Johnstone tells her readers that as for right-wing national sovereignty arguments, “there is nothing really so dreadful about that.” Except for the fact that national sovereignty arguments are perceived by most people (on the right and the left) as the slippery slope to the far right. National sovereignty is a code-word for nationalism. Like compassionate conservatism, there’s nothing wrong with it in principle, until you see what that actually means. Marine Le Pen, one of those not-so-dreadful sovereignty people couldn’t help but blather on about the “great French people” (which everyone understands to exclude racial minorities). Philippe de Villiers, another one of those not-so-dreadful sovereignty people, cited in his victory speech the writer Charles Maurras. If the name doesn’t ring a bell (it sends shivers up French backs), he was a fascist-sympathiser and Nazi collaborator. Even the extreme left no folks wouldn’t touch “national sovereignty” with a ten foot pole.
American progressives, so taken with France, took everything that the extreme left and Le Monde Diplomatique here said at face value, without bothering to notice that, for example, Italian communists were saying the exact opposite. I think there’s a value in far left figures like Arlette Laguiller and Le Monde Diplo, but I’m not a dogmatic follower of either.
The left in the US is horribly divided. But I think if it were able to think critically about its own values, and evaluate their own dogma in the big picture, we might not see the type of infighting that plagues progressive institutions like Pacifica radio.
In any case, we’ve now seen that the EU’s seams are all coming undone thanks to the French no. Take a look at the headlines from European papers for the past two days ranging from the end of the ratification process to the end of the Eurozone.
So now the poorer countries of Eastern Europe are joining with Britain to try to scrap plans to limit the work week to 48 hours (where people can opt out of the clause, but who really is in a position to freely “opt out” when their job is at stake. It’s also a plan that makes poor economic sense since the country with the longest average workday, England, is the least productive in Europe, and the country with the shortest, France, is the most productive. But I digress.). Now that France has lost its stature, it’s in for a tough battle. The far-left “nonistes” insisted the world would revolve around France. And, well, it doesn’t.
Now there’s no common vision, and everyone’s getting very antsy about whether or not the EU, with all of its flaws, is going to survive. The fact is European construction is a necessary step for a continent which, let’s not forget, just fifty years ago was the scene of Nazi death camps and lost generations. European integration is also the hope that even more recent tragedies like the Balkans don’t unfold again. France and Germany, which between 1870 and 1940 managed to get into three wars, now share things as mundane as television channels and as lofty as a common vision for Europe and the world.
And now the backbone of the French left, the Socialist party, is in another round of hand-wringing and backstabbing. There’s at least one thing the Democrats and the French socialists have in common. But the far-left is never going to get any power unless it’s in an alliance with the Socialists, who are now in disarray over the referendum. Hint: Presidential elections are in less than two years.
We’re just beginning to see the very un-progressive fallout of the vote less than a week ago.
