Citizens of Nowhere

How Europe Can Be Saved from Itself

Lorenzo Marsili, Niccolò Milanese

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786993724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Europe might appear like a continent pulling itself apart. Ten years of economic and political crises have pitted North versus South, East versus West, citizens versus institutions. And yet, these years have also shown a hidden vitality of Europeans acting across borders, with civil society and social movements showing that alternatives to the status quo already exist. This book is at once a narrative of the experience of activism and a manifesto for change. Through analysing the ways in which neoliberalism, nationalism and borders intertwine, Marsili and Milanese – co-founders of European Alternatives – argue that we are in the middle of a great global transformation, by which we have all become citizens of nowhere. Ultimately, they argue that only by organising in a new transnational political party will the citizens of nowhere be able to struggle effectively for the utopian agency to transform the world.

Chapter 1

Broken Clocks

If humanity is to have a recognisable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.

Eric Hobsbawm, 1994

The Greek spring

In 2015, a small country in the south-east of Europe tried to appeal to the common interest of Europeans crushed by years of dysfunctional and unjust politics. The country was on its knees, social anger at its limits. The middle class were impoverished, the poor had been made poorer, while the mafia and kleptocrats were protected by the helping hand of a captured political class. A proud people were blamed for the dishonesty of their leaders. With half of the population not able to find a job, Greeks were derided as lazy and work-shy.

A small marginal party, with a name as evocative as it is improbable, Syriza – the coalition of the radical left – became the electoral champion of one of the largest popular movements in the recent history of the country. In January 2015, Syriza dramatically swept to power, capturing the front pages of newspapers worldwide, and causing more than one European chancellor to break out in a cold sweat.

The Greek government sought to make one thing as clear as possible: the Greek request was not for contributions to public spending for a bankrupt country. Rather, and more radically, it was for a different solution to economic stagnation, unemployment and the burden of debt for all Europeans. The government requested common solutions to growing public debt, lack of investment in a stagnant economy, zombie banks, and unemployment rates in the double digits. These, it argued, were problems that concerned all of the Union.

Aware of its small size and weakness, the government appealed for support from citizens, parties and movements throughout Europe. The huge civilisational symbolism of Greece was invested in this struggle. The negotiations between the new Greek government and the Eurogroup – the EU’s informal but powerful gathering of national finance ministers – dominated the media with an obsessive intensity, as if the future of Europe, and perhaps even the credibility of democracy itself, depended on the fate of Greece.1 It was not for the first time in European or world history.

In the spring of 2015, Athens became the capital of living European democracy, garnering a world audience. After Tahrir, Puerta del Sol, Zuccotti Park, St Paul’s, Gezi Park and Kiev Maidan, massive attention focused on Syntagma Square. European social movements met in Athens, insurgent parties such as Podemos in Spain offered their support, and many young people moved to Greece temporarily to offer material help and engage in a renewed struggle for democracy. We remember well the spiral of meetings, emails, conference calls and international gatherings that went into organising people to support a common demand for change. These acts of solidarity were not just about Greece but harboured the idea that another Europe is possible, and that what happens in Europe has consequences across the planet. The Athens spring focused the energies, hopes and fears of Europeans, whether they were in favour of the Syriza government and its plans or not. And as always at such symbolically charged moments, what happens next – the way things are dealt with by politicians, the media and those in positions of power – is hugely important.

In this case, what happened next was a catastrophe for politics in Europe. It was decided by Europe’s elites that the belief in political alternatives was a systemic risk too contagious to be tolerated. It was therefore necessary to impose a harsh lesson on the rebellious and ungrateful Greeks, one that would serve as an example to the ordinary citizens of Europe: the Spanish to begin with, the Italians, the French, and any others who might call into question the economic policies of the Union. Any success for Syriza risked uniting Europeans and destroying the dominant strategy of divide and rule. ‘Keep the people docile, make some small technical fixes, and kick the can down the road …’ was the ruling mantra of the elites.

No progressive government in Europe lifted a finger to turn the plight of Syriza into a real contestation over the economic policy of the Union. Tsipras was left isolated at the European Council, forced into a humiliating climbdown after having won a referendum in his country in favour of refusing the deal proposed by the Troika (i.e. the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB), jointly responsible for lending ‘bailout’ money to Greece). European elites used to complain that no one was interested in the European Union, that people were ignorant of European policies, and that they did not get enough space in the newspapers. Now the eyes of the world were on the national leaders, the representatives of the Commission and the ECB, who found nothing better to do than rigidly refuse all questioning of a status quo that was manifestly failing. Given the opportunity to propose a different course for Europe – one of reconciliation, of humanism and decency, and of empowered citizens – the other countries of Europe, the Commission, the ECB and the IMF preferred to dogmatically insist that no negotiation was possible, no better future was available, that everything should simply carry on regardless of the consequences. If a country doesn’t like it, there is only one option offered: leave! Thus the Greeks were invited to leave the currency union of the continent they gave the name to if they continued to refuse to submit unquestioningly to its policies.

Several days after that dark night for Europe, Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, made a series of revealing confessions to the Financial Times. Firstly, that negotiations should be blind to all political passions, and purely technocratic: ‘negotiations should be about numbers, laws, procedures. The discussion about dignity, humiliation and trust, this is not a negotiation. It is an introduction to fight, always in our history.’ Secondly, that in the end he was not concerned so much about the economics, but by the politics and the glimpse of a possible alternative:

I am really afraid of this ideological or political contagion, not financial contagion, of this Greek crisis … We have something like a new, huge public debate in Europe … It is something like an economic and ideological illusion, that we have the chance to build some alternative to this traditional European economic system. It is not only a Greek phenomenon.2

A Chinese encounter

Beijing, late summer 2015. A few weeks have passed since the defeat of Syriza, with Greece forced to sign a new memorandum with its creditors and hold new elections. But despite a crisis that has wiped out 30 per cent of the economy, left over half of the country’s youth unemployed, and rendered all of the political parties illegitimate, the Greek parliamentary system remains intact. Widespread protest is followed by an orderly vote at the polls and growing apathy and abstention in the streets.

‘All of this would have been unthinkable in China,’ says Zhang Ying, a prominent spokesperson of the Chinese Communist Party. ‘There is one thing we envy greatly about your democratic system: its resilience. In our country, an economic crisis of such a magnitude and social conflicts of such a scale would have brought about a collapse of the system. And instead you wait for the next elections.’3

The long years of European crisis have not passed unobserved. While they have confirmed all the prejudices held by the Chinese elite about the inefficiency and short-termism of democracy, they have also demonstrated its capacity to survive prolonged periods of economic collapse and social discontent.

China’s history is indeed based around cyclical changes in ruling dynasties through violent upheavals. But, more generally, the resilience of democratic systems is mostly absent in authoritarian or party-state regimes. These are ‘rigid’ systems, often incapable of adapting themselves to new circumstances and heavily dependent on ‘performance legitimacy’ – that is, they are accepted for as long as they deliver. This makes them prone to rupture in cases of systemic crisis, mismanagement of the state, or widespread social and economic malaise. In the Middle East, for instance, the 2011 Arab Spring transformed rapidly into a revolutionary wave precisely due to the incapacity of the political system to direct the demands for change coming from the squares into a framework of non-violent transformation. There is acute awareness of this fact: in calculating the potential costs of a war with Japan over the disputed Pacific islands, the Chinese leadership reasoned that a loss for Japan would have caused a collapse in government, whereas a loss for China would have triggered regime change.4

When things turn sour, authoritarian or rigid regimes enter a zone of profound existential risk. The likely reaction is ‘stiffening up’, pretending that nothing is going on, using coercion and authority to avoid a long overdue change. This can certainly prolong the life of a discredited and unpopular regime, and, in some exceptional cases, provide the starting point for its relaunch,5 but when change finally arrives – as it no doubt will – it will be disruptive and destructive.

By contrast, the democratic system appears highly ‘elastic’, able to regulate conflict and give expression to demands for change before they reach breaking point. In a democracy you can replace the party without replacing the state; and replacing the party should serve to change the way in which the state is run. This is the radicality of democracy: everything is always in flux and contestable. You can declare a revolution through the ballot box. At least in theory.

In the heyday of liberalism many were afraid of democracy precisely for this reason. There is a great body of work describing the profound anxieties of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century elite that the expansion of suffrage might allow the proletarian masses to take power and overturn the system. It is no coincidence that the story of the extension of the franchise is a long and often violent one, from the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 in the UK to the expansion of universal suffrage only in the first half of the twentieth century across Europe. This was an argument that also resonated, inversely, among the first Marxists, who imagined that a politically emancipated working class could potentially seize power through democratic means and thereby overturn capitalism.

In reality, the opposite happened. Liberal capitalism used the enfranchisement of workers and t...