How to save Europe
It is necessary to articulate a confederal Europe capable of overcoming the technocratic, militaristic, post-national and Atlanticist design of the European Union
English translation of an appeal by some leading intellectuals on the Spanish left — Héctor Illueca, Augusto Zamora, Antonio Fernández and Manolo Monereo — originally published in Publico. They advance the idea of a confederation of nation-states to replace the current European Union, break with Washington and Atlanticism, and re-establish friendly relations with Russia. While I have a few minor quibbles with their proposal — notably the point that such an initiative should still involve supranational rather than merely international institutions, which is a significant distinction — I broadly share the thrust of their argument.
What seemed unthinkable just a few years ago is now a tangible reality: Europe has entered a new phase of rearmament. In budgetary terms, the leap is colossal and unprecedented since the Second World War. The EU’s plans foresee a mobilisation of up to €800 billion in the short and medium term […].
The EU’s decision to launch a rearmament plan of this magnitude marks a turning point in the continent’s economic and political configuration. In fact, unlike other emergency initiatives such as the Next Generation EU fund, which established exceptional mechanisms for debt mutualisation, rearmament will be financed mainly through the issuance of sovereign debt by each member state. This will have profound implications for inequality, fiscal discipline and the political hierarchy within the European space. This choice is by no means neutral: by opting for a decentralised financing system, the EU enshrines an asymmetric architecture that reproduces and deepens existing inequalities within it, evoking the barbaric years of the financial crisis, when public debt became a mechanism to discipline peripheral countries and force them to implement harsh social cuts. Instead of correcting the errors of the past, European rearmament reproduces them in a new politico-military context.
The peoples of Southern Europe know well what this means: rearmament could reactivate the model tested during the eurozone sovereign debt crisis. Countries like Spain, Italy and Greece, with structurally high debt levels, will face serious difficulties in financing their war effort, and it is likely that this indebtedness will take place under increasingly burdensome conditions, limiting their fiscal room for manoeuvre and conditioning their budgetary decisions, reproducing a political hierarchy imposed by the markets. This means that the more solvent states will be able to develop their defence capabilities without too many problems; conversely, peripheral states will only be able to meet their military spending commitments if they accept cuts in other key sectors, such as healthcare, education or pensions. The result will be a highly hierarchical war economy, in which borrowing capacity determines each state’s relative position in the actual distribution of European power: those who can finance rearmament lead; those who cannot, simply obey.
As conceived, European rearmament subverts public priorities and buries the postwar tradition of social constitutionalism, consolidating a new historic bloc around war-capital interests. The state’s margin of manoeuvre vis-à-vis the various social classes will become increasingly narrow and subject to geostrategic imperatives established by bodies completely alien to the popular will. In this context, a growing separation will be observed between the legal country — the formal institutions — and the real country — the dispossessed majorities — thus eroding the already damaged legitimacy of the current order. A new consciousness will emerge from the ocean of lies that fuels war propaganda. It is still diffuse, fragmented, even contradictory. But it exists and is fed by fatigue, deteriorating living conditions and a memory that still preserves the echoes of past resistances. This consciousness will not immediately express itself in organised forms or in old languages. It will be a slow, irregular and troubled process. But it will open a crack, and through that crack, history may slip in.
Every crisis contains within it the possibility of a new beginning. The fracture of the material constitution can open a long-term political cycle oriented toward the democratic redefinition of power. Beneath the surface, like an old mole digging tirelessly, a critical consciousness is emerging that could guide a constituent process based on popular sovereignty, the defence of peace and social justice. In our view, this commitment does not require a break with Europe as a political and historical space, but quite the opposite: the reconstruction of Europe on new foundations.
It is necessary to articulate a confederal Europe capable of overcoming the technocratic and post-national design of the current EU. A Europe that begins by recognising the nation-state as an indispensable space for democracy and integrates it into a framework of supranational cooperation based on mutual respect and the existence of common institutions. This is not about returning to the old exclusionary nationalisms, but rather starting from the premise that there can be no democracy without a demos, and that only within the framework of an organised political community, endowed with the capacity for deliberation, decision-making and self-government, can the general will be expressed.
A confederal Europe requires rethinking the continent as a pluralistic and solidaristic community, built from the bottom up, in which peace, international law and equality among member states are guiding principles. This is not a matter of theoretical musings or abstract formulations. If Europe aspires to have its own voice in the international arena and to cease being an appendage of Washington, there are at least three critical points that must be considered to chart an alternative path: first, to expand the political space of states so they can manage their national economies according to their specific interests; second, to propose a treaty of friendship and cooperation with Russia that expresses a desire for mutual understanding and strategic collaboration, abandoning the logic of confrontation; and third, to commit to active integration into a more balanced multipolar world open to a plurality of political, economic, and cultural models. Ultimately, Europe must choose whether it wants to remain a subordinate actor, unconditionally aligned with US interests, or whether it is willing to participate in the construction of a new and more balanced world in which people have a voice, a role and recognition.
Europe must take a stand, break with its subordination to Atlanticism and emerge as an active part of a world in transition that no longer revolves around Washington — much less around Brussels. We must recover, if possible, the spirit of Bandung, the 1955 conference that brought together the newly independent Afro-Asian countries to proclaim the right of peoples to determine their own destiny in an international framework based on sovereignty, peace and cooperation among equals. That historic meeting marked the emergence of a collective subject on the world stage — the announcement of a bottom-up geopolitics that claimed the dignity of peoples liberated from colonialism.
More than half a century later, Europe has the historical responsibility to embrace that legacy and define its place in the world. Returning to Bandung means building a different relationship with the Global South; recognising as interlocutors the peoples — from Latin America to Africa to Asia — who are demanding a new international order based on equality, sustainability and social justice. In short, it means actively participating in the transformation of the world — the great task of our time.
Returning to Bandung is not a sign of nostalgia for the past, but a commitment to the future.
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)
Why confederal? The EU is at its core an intergovernmental organization. Unless we get rid of the EU Commission, the EU Parliament and the EUCJ, nothing will ever change. We don't need a supranational bureaucracy, a fake parliament and a kagaroo court to run a customs union and common policies...
https://www.eclaireur.eu/p/the-eu-aims-for-a-significant-push
What the peripheral nations of Europe should do is withdraw from NATO. NATO serves absolutely no useful purpose 35 years after the end of the so-called Cold War (so called, because it was known by this name only in the "West", not in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries).