No more culture war: debating political power and the EU

What follows below is an unpublished article written by Alex Hochuli & George Hoare, synthesising the proceeds of our first live event, held in London in March 2019, in advance of what was meant to be the UK's withdrawal from the EU on 29 March. 

We decided to publish it now, in the wake of Labour's devastating defeat in the 12 December general election, as that vote confirmed our worst fears about most of the left's strategy with regard to Brexit.

The debate about democracy, the working class and the EU - that we we argued, below, was essential to have out - did not materialise. Or to the extent that it did, questions of principle were marginalised in favour of tactical considerations, ones now proven to have been misguided. 

Brexit has become a culture war, rather than a political struggle: Leave and Remain as identities ranged against each other, while the central question of democracy and sovereignty gets occluded. So how to reinvigorate a debate about internationalism and provide much needed political clarity? 

Democracy in Europe imposes itself as the crucial question on the continent today. Whether you prefer to call the EU neoliberal, managerial, technocratic or anti-popular, the reality stares us in the face: the EU as currently constituted is largely inimical to popular interests. This is recognised as much by remain-and-reform advocates like Yanis Varoufakis’ Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM) as by unreconstructed Communist parties in the European periphery (say, Greece’s KKE or Portugal’s PCP). 

And yet, Brexit was a historical accident, an irruption that emerged through the particular circumstances of internal Tory Party battles. And yet here it is, this is our Rhodes; so, jump. But Brexit is a difficult beast. Emerging as it does at the end of the end of history - in fact, for a British context, the vote to leave the EU is the constitutive event that puts an end to posthistoire - people were unprepared. Unaccustomed to debating politics, to the notion of rupture, to dealing with the fallouts from genuine political change there has been more evasion than confrontation. It puts paid to neoliberal politicians’ promises of “adapting to change”. Instead, they retreat. Witness Theresa May’s own version of extend-and-pretend (a term originally coined for the Troika’s inane treatment of the Greek crisis); or the way identitarian struggles between cosmopolitan/elitist Remainers and democratic/racist Leavers (delete as appropriate) have filled the void where a debate over the shape of post-Brexit Britain should be.

It has also, notably, been remarkably parochial, as if the question of the EU was only of import to the British; as if ‘British national interest’ were the point around which debate should pivot.  Remainers have been as guilty as Leavers here, despite their professions of anti-nationalism. In the meantime, Europe is in tumult. Polls in Italy now show only a minority would want to remain in the EU (but, contradictorily, a majority favour the euro); Greece’s historic OXI has been forgotten; a section of the most important social movement in Europe, the Gilets Jaunes, favour ‘Frexit’; and doomly prognoses for the European Parliament election this May make centrist opinion tremble. 

So not only is Brexit not going away, neither is the European question - for all European peoples. The task is to bring it to popular consciousness. Bluntly: what is an internationalist position today? At the risk of being too literal, is it inter-national, or is it transnational? Do the existing post-national institutions of the EU point the progressive way forward, or are they unreformably undemocratic?

Conscious that these questions are too infrequently posed, the global politics podcast ‘at the end of the end of history’, Aufhebunga Bunga held an event in London (better quality, audio only link here) that brought together activists and commentators from a range of European nations and political positions. Crucially, these are individuals with real stakes in the struggle for another Europe. There are many lessons the European Left can take from the Brexit process, but that self-consciousness is difficult to obtain when the Leave vs Remain culture war gets repeated ad infinitum. Instead, we must ask what the response of the British ruling class has been to the political challenge posed by the referendum result; examine the strengths and weaknesses of the British state and the tactics and behaviour of the EU. The task in such a debate, then, is to outline the position the Left should take not only in response to Brexit, but also to the profound crisis in the EU.

David Adler, Athens-based policy coordinator for DiEM 25, presented the case for one of the most popular Europe-wide Left approaches to Europe and the EU - namely that reform of the EU, while not easy, is possible with the right sort of transnational mobilisation. Catarina Príncipe, activist, member of Bloco de Esquerda and contributing editor at Jacobin, highlighted how Portugal has been treated as the ‘good example’ of EU-enforced austerity against Greece’s ‘bad behaviour’. Lee Jones, Reader in International Politics at Queen Mary and co-founder of The Full Brexit, supplied the analysis from the British perspective, highlighted how Brexit has come to stand in for arguments about democracy and sovereignty in Britain and beyond.

Good faith debates about concrete questions of strategy within the Left have been rare since 2016’s referendum result. Undoubtedly this is in part because the EU has become a totem for large parts of the British Left. We have seen a “sacralisation” of the EU; as it has become a sacred object, debates have overwhelmingly been conducted in a moral register. 

A colder, more analytical debate from positions all identified with “the Left” revealed three main lines of tension and weaknesses within the European Left over Brexit. First, there is a live question over priorities - mainly, whether Brexit is more or less important than the Corbyn project. While there may be no contradiction, in the sense that socialism is simply an extension of popular sovereignty, arguments are often couched in terms of whether the strategy of the Labour Party correctly is to stay as removed as possible from concrete Brexit positions, in order to build electoral support for a Corbyn government. Second, it is clear that the Left has not fully grasped Brexit as a European event. Brexit cannot be understood as a phenomenon limited to British politics - it has already had, and will continue to have, profound effects on the national democratic politics of other member-states. At present, we have an unsystematic view of how Brexit is understood differently in different national contexts. This partly reflects the overwhelming pro-EU orientation of the British Left, which has often portrayed Brexit as a consequence of internal Tory politicking or the unfortunate but unavoidable racism of the British working class. 

Third, there is still a regrettably low level of understanding of what the EU actually is, which also suggests an urgent need for popularisation of various aspects of Marxist state theory. Let us be realists about historical processes. The Right’s analysis of the EU as a force that bestrides Europe and has somehow stolen power away from national governments is rightly seen as incorrect - the bureaucracy at the centre of this superstate, the European Commission, is barely larger than the BBC. Basically, the EU does not suck power from nations. Instead, the EU functions as a mechanism for national governments to insulate themselves from democratic accountability. Driven by the continued reorientation of national elites away from national democratic accountability to less accountable EU structures, the EU limits sovereignty through a set of processes by which elites across Europe limit their own scope for action. In this sense, our national governments’ hands are indeed tied; although they - like Ulysses - asked for these bindings. Given these deep changes in elite orientation and capacities for state action that EU membership did not effectuate but reinforces, it therefore makes sense for us to see EU integration as, critically, a process of state transformation. “Capital needs the state!” as Príncipe rightly exclaimed in the debate. Specifically, we could say that, in Europe, what capital needs is the transnational state, the neoliberal container that is the EU. 

So, as Europeans and democrats - and realists - , where do we go from here? And on what concrete questions do these differing strategies pivot?

In the left debate between reform and leave - or “voice versus exit”, to use A.O. Hirschman’s classic trichotomy (the third option, “loyalty”, cannot be taken seriously as a radical position in this context) - both sides end up accusing the other of impracticality or utopianism. For Leave proponents, reforming the EU is so much pie in the sky. For those seeking to “transform the EU”, as Adler chooses to put it, a Lexit is much more unlikely to succeed, for it will breed competing nationalisms. Transforming EU institutions without the threat of national exits, though, suggests a European demos would collectively rise up. 

So here we encounter a second conflict: is there a European demos? Some European fellow-feeling exists: according to the 2018 Eurobarometer roughly two in three citizens feel attached to “Europe” and more than half say they feel attached to the EU. But this latter figure lags far behind scores for local and national levels of politics. In this sense, politics remains contained in the national cages in which it was created. 

Consequently, we face a coordination problem. If retreat to the scale of the nation-state is dismissed out of hand, then how do we get Left parties into government at the same time in sufficient number of countries to force reform upon the EU? Or, in a more insurrectionist mode, how does a Europe-wide social movement emerge to threaten Euro elites? And if it does, how can it be European in its scope, rather than having its national bourgeoisies in its sights? Finally, without the threat of exit, attempts at reform may be too easily dismissed. Adler, conscious of this, pronounced himself in favour of both: exit where you can, remain and reform elsewhere. So in Britain, there is an express majority for exit, whereas, in Portugal or Spain two-thirds currently favour continuing membership (though it’s only half for Spanish leftists). 

The question, however, recurs: at what scale democracy? Where does politics happen? Is there a historical tendency towards the expansion of the boundaries of political community, with the EU in the vanguard? Is it, in Perry Anderson’s words, “the last great world-historical achievement of the bourgeoisie”? Perhaps. But might not the path to internationalism remain via the nation-state? It is, after all, the only capitalist structure which has yet permitted working-class inscription into decision-making at any level. 

Socialism and socialist strategy are, as always, a question of priorities. The European Left is weak and disorganised, with the British Left as particularly demoralised after the historic defeats of organised labour by Thatcherism and its further beating at the hands of New Labour. Given that energy, resources, and morale are in short supply, where should the Left direct its energies? This is perhaps one of the constitutive weaknesses of any transnational approach - it is not possible to act on all fronts at once, and a basic political realism requires us to prioritise our energies and intellectual focus. Indeed, given how much of a challenge the democratic takeover of the nation-state will be for the reemergent Left, a transnational mobilisation is a demand of epic proportions to make on the currently disaggregated national Lefts of Europe.

The European Left today faces a serious question not about its commitment to internationalism but its understanding of it. Thin cosmopolitanism is not enough. Taking questions of power and possibility seriously – and moving beyond the sacralisation of the EU and associated culture war that elides Europe and the European Union - is the essential first step.