(This is a piece of thinking out loud.) ***
Notes on the present conjuncture in Europe The recent speeches by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vicepresident J D Vance, along with a reported telephone conversation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and the opening of a formal diplomatic process in Saudi Arabia between the US and Russia, seem to signal a fundamental shift in the approach of the United States to the current geopolitical order.[1] These are my initial thoughts on what has happened, and what might happen next. I If we are to take Trump, Vance and Hegseth at face value, what they appear to have indicated is that the US administration is no longer prepared in its geopolitical actions to take what they see as the interests of European states into consideration, and they are no longer prepared (as they see it) to subsidise European "defence". If they are serious (and I think they are) then, in a nutshell, this means that the old European-Atlantic military alliance, structured through NATO, has collapsed. Whatever might happen in US politics in coming years, there seems no going back on this. This would represent a "Zeitenwende" of some significance. II Up to now the institutional European politics of the current epoch has been structured through three essential interlocking paradigms: a national parliamentary paradigm, expressed through national (and sub-national) parliamentary institutions (including political parties); a social-economic paradigm, expressed through pan-European institutions (principally those pertaining to the EU); and a global geo-military paradigm, expressed largely through the institutions of NATO. The shift in US governmental policy, if followed through, will compress this structuring, by pushing the different paradigms towards the space defined by the middle, European one. The immediate consequence of a possible collapse of the European-NATO structuring of European military policy will be a drive to construct a common European defence apparatus, independent of US political input, money and, eventually, technical know-how. (Merz is already openly pushing this.) This in turn will increase pressure towards pan-European fiscal and parliamentary integration: common European military institutions will be inconceivable without considerable movement towards fiscal unity (common taxation, and decision-making on spending) and this is in turn will ultimately require some kind of common institutional political regulation on a qualitatively deeper scale than what exists at present. These two processes will in turn tend to displace the European parliamentary sphere towards the pan-continental plane from the national one. (This will not be something that will happen overnight, and to an extent it is a process that is already underway, but current events will, if I am right, accelerate it considerably.) One important ideological justification for all this will in the immediate time period come from a focus on the perceived military threat of Russia vis-à-vis the eastern European sphere. Russia will be presetned as an existential threat to European security (and by extension European "values"), a circumstance which will require, in the absence of a contribution from the US, a common European defence policy and accompanying institutions. (It is not necessary for the there really to be a Russian threat for this to take place, just the perception and belief.) There is a logic here that, once unleashed, the mainstream of bourgeois political forces within European Union states, and also within states with an EU sphere of influence, will find very difficult to resist. [2] III All this, if pushed through, will have a dramatic impact on domestic politics within individual European countries. At the level of the bourgeois parties, the nature of Europhobic and Europhilic political stances will clearly take on different meanings if institutional politics takes on an increasingly pan-European, and ever more militaristic, character. Pro-European political outlooks have tended to be perceived as belonging to the more "liberal" end of the spectrum; anti-Europeanism more authoritarian. To the extent that Europeanism becomes subsumed within a new project of European militarism these associations will be challenged. [3] More "liberal" political stances, less inclined to increasing military spending, will under these circumstances tend to be pulled towards a more militaristic outlook. IV The far-right, currently on the rise across Europe, has innate anti-EU and pro-Russia instincts. We can expect it therefore to situate itself such as to exploit popular opposition to the inevitable rechannelling of public resources towards military ends, couching this opposition as a defence of the "nation" and national sovereignty against the construction of a European superstate. The orientation of the far right in this way would clearly repesent an especially dangerous -- proto-fascist -- aspect of future political realignments. V The rise of Islamophobia across Europe had already risen to dramatic levels in recent years, and the ongoing Zionist genocide in Gaza and its legitimisation by mainstream European political currents of all shades have given anti-Muslim racist hatred a further impetus. Although anti-immigrationism as a political stance has had a long pedigree across the European political spectrum, there has always been a hierarchy of more or less acceptable immigrant profiles within this -- sometimes specific to the counties concerned -- but in recent years it has increasingly been immigrants perceived as "Muslim" (often no more than a simple synonym for "brown" in popular imagination) who have now been seen as the most threatening everywhere. Islamophobia is on the verge of becoming as widespread and pernicious in the first half of this century in Europe as anti-Semitism was in the first half of the last one. The fear of (and hatred towards) the Islamic "invader" is grounded on a number of different premises, but they all share a common basis. "Muslims" are held to be responsible for a rise in crime and antisocial behaviour, for the deterioration of public services, for increasing unemployment and for lower wages. They are responsible for such things (it is said) not only because of their perceived sheer numbers (although the actual levels of the various categories of immigration appear to be consistently overestimated) but also for their imputed failure to "integrate". Muslims represent in this way in the racist imaginary both an economic and a "cultural" threat to the societies where they are to be found. An imagined Muslim "culture" is in this way perceived as damaging to the "traditional" way of life and values of the host European country in question. This last aspect is an especially pernicious element in present-day Islamophobia insofar as it seems to have infected large sections of what one might call "liberal" politics. Muslims are here seen intolerant, patriarchal, misogynistic, homophobic and instinctively paedophilic. Islamism is projected as a barbaric product of an absent Islamic Enlightenment, on the basis of which Muslims are depicted as both uncivilised and a threat to civilisation (this last finding its imagined embodiment in a European civil society). On this politico-cultural confection there is constructed a poplar Islamophobia able to encompass radical feminism on the one end of the spectrum and far-right bootboy thugs on the other. If this were not enough, Islam and "Islamism'' are then *racialised*: what makes Muslims a threat in this reimagining is now not their culture or religion per se but their "genetic" -- innate, inherent and immutable -- propensity to such a cultural and religious outlook. Muslims thus understood are not just "barbaric" but irredeemably so. Thus not only is the Muslim migrant themself untermenschenised, already long-established communities of black and brown-skinned people are similarly cast as "foreign", and uncivilised beyond redemption. This is the origin of the increasing and pernicious use of the term “ethnic” (meaning *white*) in racist discourse: now it is no longer enough to be *nationally* German (or French or English) to be "really" German (or French or English): one has to be *ethnically* German (or French or English) -- meaning white -- to be really German (or French or English). On such grounds of racial classification genocides are constructed. VI In the above ways, because both immigrants and non-"ethnic" populations can be perceived as "other", and consequently irredeemably uncivilised and uncivilisable, they can also be projected as innately non-European and anti-European. The way is therefore open to the imagining of the new monetarily, fiscally and militarily unified Europe as a white, Christian *fortress* Europe. VII Overarching these developments are two global political processes of transcendental significance. The first is the Zionist genocide (currently focused on the Palestinian population of the occupied Gaza Strip, but threatening to break out of these bounds at any moment). What stands out in this respect is not just the sheer scale of the horror being unleashed but the craven indifference shown towards it by mainstream political forces of the right and left. In good part, this latter aspect is due to the fact that the target of the genocide is a population of islamacised *untermenschen* in the sense depicted above, such that the Zionist project can present itself, and be defended as, a defence of (western, European, white) "civilisation". The second -- less immediate but not less important -- is the global struggle for hegemonic power within the international state system. The period of the two world wars of the first half of the twentieth century marked the end of a struggle for hegemonic power following the decline of British state dominance at the end of the nineteenth century and inaugurated an extended period of United States global hegemony. This post-WW2 global state structure began to break down at the end of the twentieth century, since when we have been in a situation marked by on the one hand the decline of the old hegemon (the US) and the rise of potential new ones (China, Europe). Historically, these periods of global state hegemonic instability have been resolved by protracted periods of global warfare, and it increasingly appears that this is the kind of period we are approaching now. If this conjecture is correct, then this is the real content of the political developments we are currently witnessing. What the current United States administration is doing appears to be a housekeeping operation: it clearly sees the long-term threat to its own position vis-à-vis global markets and resources as coming from China, and is streamlining and reordering its alliances and affairs accordingly. In short, it is preparing for World War Three. VIII To say that the European left stands disarmed in the face of all these developments would be something of an understatement. Across the spectrum of the political left in Europe we can identify the following currents (although, of course, overlaps exist). * Mainstream social democracy. Despite projections some years ago of a process of "Pasokification", the main European social democratic parties remain in existence as actual or potential instruments of government, although it is quite clear that none any longer represents any kind of oppositional, "socialist" project in any meaningful sense of the word. * Left social democracy. Emerging from mainstream social democracy (and in some cases from the mainstream Communist Parties), also pulling in new forces from outside the traditional social-democratic milieu, these are parties, coalitions or more informal groupings, of the like of Podemos, La France Insoumise, Bloco de Esquerda, Die Linke, Corbynism, Syriza, etc. Where such forces have had access to governmental power they have faced disaster (Podemos) or outright catastrophe (Syriza). There is no simple explanation for this, but it does appear to be the case that such currents do not seem to have developed an appreciation of what real oppositional governmental power means in a bourgeois society, and what a genuinely progressive government would need to do to survive an assault from the institutions of the order it opposes itself to.[4] * Post-stalinist campism. Certain political currents, either emerging from the Communist Parties, or influenced by them, maintain an outlook in which the world is divided up into an imperialist camp and an anti-imperialist one. The former is identified as the United States, and the latter by any existing state or regime whose geopolitical or domestic interests at any moment appear to conflict with those of the US (Iran, India, Assad, Maduro, Russia, China). This political outlook, through its Stalinist heritage, has a certain purchase within the left social democratic currents referenced above. * The leninist left. The bulk of these groups are of trotskyist origin, which ostensibly provides them with a direct link with the revolutionary heritage of 1917, but they are in the main deranged, tiny, cults whose only contribution to socialist theory is to give it a bad name. (Included within this category are groups like the British SWP and Lutte Ouvrière.) *Red-brown "diagonalists". Groups like the British Workers Party (Galloway) and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht combine ostensibly socialist economic politics, campist geopolitics and anti-immigrationism (as well as a certain input from alt-right conspiracyism, anti-vaxxism, etc.). Although such groups occupy the more exotic reaches of political discourse they are, like the far-right (with which they have a geat deal in common) also in a position to benefit from the chaos of political ideas the present conjuncture is throwing up (witness the recent performance of the BSW in Germany). IX We need a new left, and while this is not the place to present a screed of demands to include in a political platform, it does appear to me necessary, given the current configuration of forces and events, to emphasise that any progressive movement worth the name would include in its basis the following two positions. 1 Against militarism The existing European order has neither the right nor the capability to bring justice or end oppression through military means. In the case of Ukraine, the invasion of Russia, insofar as it represented a violation of Ukrainian political independence, i.e. its right to self-determination, was unjust. This remains the case independently of any judgement of the character or actions of the current Ukrainian state or government. Yet it was always the case (as the current situation now shows) that both European and US imperialism neither wanted nor were capable of delivering justice for Ukraine. While Ukraine has every right to confront militarily the invasion, and to demand whatever aid from outside that it wishes, it is incumbent on socialists in the imperialist countries to insist that their own governments abstain from any military intervention -- including the supply of weapons -- in any sphere. A peace that is bought with imperialist power will never anywhere turn out to be a just or lasting peace and it is the duty of socialists everywhere to disabuse the notion of the possibility of peace and justice emanating from the barrels of the imperialists' guns. Socialists must oppose NATO, and all its doings. They must also oppose the setting up any pan-European defence force. *Not a person, not a penny for the imperialist system. Not a person, not a penny for imperialist war.* 2 For the free movement of peoples The only beneficiary of control over immigration into Europe is European capital. It is not the immigrant who is responsible for the assault on ordinary people's living standards, it is the states that allocate resources who do this; it is not the immigrant who drives down workers' wages, it is the capitalist firms that pay them that do this. And while there is no economic argument in favour of controls on immigration, there is no "civilisational" one either. There are no races, only racism, and the continent that funded its own Enlightenment on the proceeds of the mass chattel enslavement of black bodies, who colonised the the known world in the name of progress, and who gave the world Mussolini, Franco, Hitler and the Holocaust, does not sit in a place from which it can lecture the rest of the world on "civilisation". The earth belongs to the whole of humanity, and no person either is or can be, for reason of birthright, illegal. *Open the borders: for equal rights everywhere, and for all.* *** Notes [1] Hegsworth was speaking at a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels on 12 February. His speech can be seen here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcxt2-JQMTE> (the speech begins at 39:45). Vance was speaking at the 61st Munich Security Conference two days later; his speech is here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCOsgfINdKg>. Trump’s reported conversation took place on 12 February, at some point in the day after Hegsworth’s speech. The Saudi Arabia meeting took place on 18 February. [2] The position of the UK is sui generis in this. At the time of writing, it seems as if the UK government is doing all that it can to placate the current US administration. [3] It is noteworthy that in the immediately recent past in the British parliament the loudest calls for an increase in the UK military budget had been coming from the obsessively Europhilic Liberal Democrats. [4] In this respect, it is an interesting exercise to speculate on what the fate of Corbynite Labour government in Britain would have been. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#35515): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/35515 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/111412499/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
