What I see happening is more and more rhetoric and less and less real action. For good or bad, my sense is that the institutions of the EU will survive, argues Immanuel Wallerstein. |
Middle East Online |
One of the many
games pundits and politicians are playing these days is to spell out why
and how the European Union (EU) is going to collapse, is already
collapsing. Anyone who follows the news worldwide knows all the standard
explanations: Grexit and Brexit will only lead to other exits; nobody
wants more migrants (refugees) in their country; Germany has too much
power, or not enough; ultra-rightwing forces/parties are rising almost
everywhere; the Schengen Agreement providing visa-less movement is being
suspended in most countries that had adopted it; unemployment is
unstoppably growing.
There is an underlying theme in
this litany of pessimism (or is it optimism?). Europeans — both the
sophisticated and the "ignorant" — have become impervious to rational
arguments. They are almost all acting irrationally, responding to their
emotions and not to reflective analyses. But is this so, Charlie Brown?
It makes for a good comic strip, but does that mean the EU will actually
cease to exist?
I am not here giving my views about
whether the EU is good or bad, should or should not be supported or
undermined. Rather, I wish to analyze what I think will actually happen.
Will the institutions that now make up the European Union continue to
exist ten or twenty years from now? I suspect they will. To see why I
think so, let us review together what may make Europeans — both the
sophisticated and the "ignorant" — hesitate about taking the fatal step
of dismantling what they have been working so hard to create for the
last seventy years or so. There are some reasons that one might call
economic, others that are geopolitical, and finally still others that
might be called cultural.
Let us begin with the
economy. The situation in terms of current income, both for the states
and for most individuals, is bad everywhere in the EU. The question is
whether dismantling Europe would be likely to improve it, or in fact
make it worse.
One subject of constant debate is the
Eurozone — will it survive? Take for example what happened in Greece in
the two 2015 elections there. Alexei Tsipras, the leader of the
now-governing party Syriza, was elected in the first election on an
anti-austerity platform. He then, in negotiating with the EU for a
further loan, retreated on just about everything he had promised the
Greek voters. He agreed to measures demanded by the EU that severely
hurt the real income of the majority of the population. For this, he was
denounced for betraying his promises by left forces within Syriza who
withdrew from the party and established their own list. Yet in the next
election called very swiftly by Tsipras, he received the mandate again.
The Greek voters chose him rather than the left forces within Syriza.
It
seems clear, at least to me, that the Greek voters paid no attention to
the left denunciations because above all they did not want to leave the
Eurozone. Tsipras had made maintaining the euro a priority and the left
forces sought instead to resume an autonomous currency. Apparently, the
Greek voters believed that the very real negatives of being in the
Eurozone were, in their view, less than the probable greater negatives
of recreating the drachma.
The situation is roughly the
same concerning the so-called safety net features that European
governments had installed, such as pensions and unemployment benefits.
Virtually all the countries in the EU have been cutting the safety net
back for lack of funds. These cuts have been resisted, sometimes
successfully, by left or left-of-center parties. But is there any reason
to suppose that, were the European Union to disappear tomorrow, these
governments would have more funds to distribute? The left parties often
say so, condemning what they see as the neoliberal pressures of the EU
bureaucracy in Brussels. But look around the world. Can you point to
governments not under the purview of Brussels that have been able to
increase welfare-state expenditures?
If there is no
real advantage in terms of real income levels in dismantling the EU, are
there other reasons to do it? The EU has played an important
geopolitical role since its inception, and has been growing steadily in
membership. The United States has been publicly supporting the rise and
expansion of the EU but actually trying to undermine it. The United
States has seen the EU as a major geopolitical danger. It is obvious to
most observers that the EU's geopolitical strength is the result of
numbers. A dismantlement would end this strength and reduce the separate
European states to no practical importance geopolitically.
In
the end, most European leaders and movements understand this. However
much some of them rail against the EU as a structure, are they ready in
fact to yield the advantages that a large singular entity gives them?
Rightwing groups, especially in eastern Europe, see the EU as one
pressure on the United States to offer them military protection against a
putatively aggressive Russia. Leftwing groups in other countries, such
as France, use the strength of the EU to contain what they think are
putatively aggressive actions by the United States. What would either of
these groups gain by the dismantlement of the EU?
Finally,
there are the so-called cultural links between the United States and
Europe. They are publicly proclaimed and more quietly disdained as a
remnant of U.S. hegemonic dominance in the first twenty-five years after
1945. Once again there are varying motivations. The left parties and
movements want to use their unified structure as a mode of regaining the
cultural autonomy (even superiority) they felt they had before 1945.
The rightwing forces want to use their strength to insist upon their
cultural autonomy on so-called human rights questions. Once again, in
union there is strength.
What I see happening is more
and more rhetoric and less and less real action. For good or bad, my
sense is that the institutions of the EU will survive. This does not
mean they won't change. There is, and will continue to be, a real
political struggle within the EU about the kind of collective
institution it ought to be. This intra-European political struggle is
one part of a worldwide struggle about the kind of world we wish to
build as an outcome to the structural crisis of the modern world-system.
Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).
Copyright ©2016 Immanuel Wallerstein - distributed by Agence Global
|
blog archive
Thursday 17 March 2016
Collapse of the European Union? A Skeptical View
التسميات:
Middle-East-Online
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment