European unity

 

People sometimes ask me about my views on Europe and the EU. I don’t have any specific expertise in this field, e.g. I understand nothing of the ongoing discussion of the “Eurobonds”. But I know something of international relations, and understand that we cannot seriously go back to the confinement to small states which Europe was conceived to liberate us from.  I will briefly state where I stand.

Flemings of my generations were Europe-minded as a matter of course, and I still feel that way. One reason is that we don’t have a nation-state to exchange for a European identity. “Belgian” is only a passport identity, there is no such thing as a Belgian nation. Therefore, in supporting European integration, we are not losing or even compromising a nation-state; we never had one. When I hear the Dutch philosopher Thierry Baudet argue for Dutch sovereignty and against the projected European identity, I hear someone speak from a confident sense of nationality, which I realize we have never had.

Another reason is that the European level counts internationally. For us, being from a small country, Europe is the only way to feel big. Maybe the French don’t need Europe to take themselves seriously, or at least they still have the historical memory of greatness, so they know what it feels to be something else than European. But for us, being European is the highest concrete political identity we aspire to.

In today’s and tomorrow’s world, size matters. One day we may have global unity, but during my lifetime, it will be alright if we can already manage continental unity. When we have to deal with giants like India or China, we do have to speak from a sufficiently large platform rather than from a small Dutch or Portuguese or Latvian position.

So much for my general sympathies: I am all for European unity. My study of India’s struggle for its own unity and integrity confirms the importance of a sense of unity over and above the sense of local specificity.

As for the euro currency: I am all for a common currency, which is very practical for borderers (and in Belgium, you’re always near a border) and travellers. Moreover, for Flemish autonomy, it takes away one of the worst hurdles: a Belgian currency would always be used as a blackmail instrument against the plan to break up Belgium. It is always said that the Belgian level will erode between the Flemish and European levels, but we see no such thing happening. In the case of the currency, however, it does. That is one reason to oppose these left- and right-wing radicals who oppose the common currency. However, a common currency requires a common economic policy. That is why I support further political and economic unity.

The problem is the EU’s reach and structure, not the abstract geographical entity Europe (of which democratic Switzerland and Iceland and prosperous Norway are parts, even though they reject EU membership). It is obvious that the EU badly needs to be democratized. The EU has just condemned the Swiss referendum resulting in a majority for limiting immigration, as well as the Crimean referendum yielding an immense majority for accession to Russia. It ignored and overruled the 2005 French and Dutch referendum results rejecting the proposed EU Constitution, which was reintroduced as the Lisbon Treaty. It made the Irish vote again until their referendum yielded the “right” majority, thus making a mockery of people’s sovereignty. As for representative democracy, the European Parliament is not really representative and does not have the power to bring down the effective EU government, called the European Commission.

So, the EU institutions have to be restructured to create a democratic and transparent power hierarchy, and provision must be made for a binding referendum at citizen’s initiative. Many competences in the cultural and social fields should be de-europeanized and given back to the member states, the European level should simply not deal with them.

On the other hand, the EU should speak with one voice on the world stage. Foreign policy and defence competences should be delegated by the states upwards to the European level. A European army should be created, not because we are eager to make war on anyone, but to give credibility to the EU’s diplomacy.

The present situation is neither here nor there. It is very confused and has its priorities backwards. We need to have less EU involvement with quota for butter or so, and more with the serious business of international relations. So, there is a lot of work to do in order to make Europe a fatherland we can love. But this is no reason to back off from the original plan to unite the European countries. I am not a Eurosceptic.

Since Europe is not a very deep concern, I will appeal to a very light kind of authority here.  As Toto Cotugno, the 1990 Eurosong winner from Italy, sang: “Insieme: unite, unite, Europe!”

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Thinking about democracy and populism

 

                On 4 October 2013, the Dutch & Flemish Day of Political Philosophy took place in Utrecht, in a hall of the Evangelical Church sometimes used by the university. Stefan Rummens (Catholic University of Leuven) and Willem Schinkel (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) were the main speakers.

Willem Schinkel spoke about Het crisisbeeld, “The image of crisis. Walter Benjamin and the interpretation of ‘crisis’ in modernity”. For Karl Marx, capitalism develops through crises. Friedrich Nietzsche posits a crisis of God and of man. It is said that modernity itself is a permanent crisis. One difference between then and now is that then, we had a crisis in decision-making, now one of indecision.

The main corpus of his treatment of Walter Benjamin, I am afraid I could not do justice to, and it is not really my field nor, I reckon, that of my readers. But what struck me, was Schinkel’s remark about the Occupy/Indignados movement: “What I have against Occupy is this idea of direct democracy, which is populist. The people is allowed to be there, but if they all participated in politics, it would be a chaos. Democracy is not about people’s participation in everything.”

One doesn’t have to be a deep thinker to utter this kind of opinion. Most politicians and chatterati hold it. What it says, is that (1) direct democracy is bad because (2) the common people are too incompetent in political work and too chaotic in their awareness of the goals of politics, and (3) too much popular sovereignty gets in the way of policy-making anyway. It is amazing that such an easy concept as direct democracy is so systematically misunderstood, unless we assume that a certain class of people has every interest in keeping it misunderstood.

The same position was taken by Stefan Rummens. He lambasted the idea of direct democracy, defined democracy as representative democracy, and said: “How are you going to generate systemic power through direct democracy.? How do you anchor power in the Occupy movement?” The neo-anarchist Occupy movement is hardly the best example of a movement for direct democracy, which has realizations to its credit since at least the 19^th century in its modern form, and since millennia in its primitive varieties. It says a lot about the state of our political “science” that a specialist has had to wait for the Occupy movement to prompt him to form an opinion of direct democracy.

Every single argument against direct democracy is a reapplied argument that has historically served against democracy itself. Thus, dictatorship or real monarchy is deemed efficient, while democracy counts as time-consuming and fragmenting your forces. A “republic” is a swearword for a pointlessly quarrelling assembly of divergent minds which only a strongman can pacify and render capable of action. Secondly, people are deemed incompetent while the political class in deemed competent, eventhough politicians know as little as anyone about consequential matters such as nuclear energy. Thirdly, the masses are deemed evil and only aware of their own immediate interests while the political class counts as public-spirited, serving only the general interest and thinking only of the long term. However, the astronomical state debt of Belgium is entirely the handiwork of the political class, with zero input of direct democracy. By contrast, Switzerland with its direct democracy has a better social security, a higher living standard, lower taxes and a tangibly lower rate of tax evasion, viz. because people tend to cheat less on taxes when thezy determine the use of their tax money. So, the facts refute the professor’s theory. (But as Hegel said to the man who pointed out the contrast between the master’s theory and the facts: “A pity for the facts.”)  The story that explains the California budget deficit by the referendum behaviour of its people, voting both for lower taxes and for higher government spending, is a perennial Loch Ness monster and simply untrue. People have their own family budgets to manage and therefore know well enough that the state’s budget is a fragile entity: handle with care!

Rummens’ actual topic was the current rise of “populism”, the pejorative name for democracy. Populist parties reduce complex issues to simple ones – again an argument that has always been used against democracy. Politicians equally reduce complex issues to a push of the “yes” or on the “no” button, often not even venting their heartfelt opinion (as commoners do in the secrecy of the voting-booth) but their party leadership’s commandments.

Rummens also observed that populist parties tend to attract the losers of the globalization process. Well, losers have political rights too, and they are entitled to desire a hearing from the political decision-makers (ideally the people itself). In the past, the socialist parties and the trade-unions took it upon themselves to defend the interests of those who stood to lose from what the upper class considered modernization; but now they have been co-opted by the System.

He also thought that their internal structure is not very democratic as they don’t want discussions to create the impression that the people is less homogeneous than the populists would like to believe. Maybe, but there is also the strategic situation: internal dictatorship is the usual political form in an army or a country at war, and many so-called populist parties find themselves besieged. To be sure, I don’t think a political party should have an undemocratic political structure, but we should keep things in perspective rather than impose stereotypes such the preferred “homogeneity” of the “people”. The Belgian Socialist and Christian-Democratic Parties also have a mock vote to “corroborate” the party president nominated by a small coterie at the top. Populist parties are not more undemocratic than most political parties as such.

The professor further asserted that populist parties need to single out (or create) an enemy. This is a conspiracy theory: first someone creates a populist party, then he sets out to find an enemy. In reality, the common people have been fretting over an existing problem, e.g. those created by their Muslim neighbours, and then found or join a populist party. The professor regularly lambasted the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), the largest Flemish political party. The financial transfers from Flanders to Wallonia have been going on as long as the state of Belgium has existed, since 1830. They are not a conjunctural phenomenon, explainable by Wallonia’s present-day economic slump, but a structural phenomenon valid even when Flanders was the poorer half. As soon as the transfers stop or are reversed, Belgium will be blown up. Now, the transfers and many other injustices have been with us for many years before a professor tabulated them exactly, and a few more before the N-VA made them into a political issue. It is objectively untrue that the party has “created” this problem, it was there first and then it found political expression – as is normal in a democracy.

Political “scientists” systematically overlook the contents of the populist parties’ programme. The transfer of sovereignty from the national parliaments to the European Union is one of the most pressing issues of the day. In the Netherlands, it is mainly the concern of the right-populist party PVV (Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders) and the left-populist Socialistische Partij (ex-Maoist). It was the only subject recently put to a referendum, and the result was telling: a large majority of the people voted against the project of EU constitution, while a majority of the members of parliament were all for it. This proves that the professional of “representative democracy” do not represent the people.  

                Rummens’ killer argument was this. The N-VA argues that Belgium consists of two separate democracies (they still use the conventional classification of Belgium’s parliamentary system as a”democracy”), two civil societies with their own public debates, their own cultural heroes, and indeed their own political parties. To repeat an example given by the pro-Flemish opinion-maker Peter De Roover: the philosopher Etienne Vermeersch is a world-famous authority in Flanders, a household address whenever a journalist wants an enlightening opinion on any issue under the sun – until you reach the linguistic frontier. Walloons don’t know him, and the Flemish don’t know Prof. Vermeersch’s Walloon counterparts. So, we have two separate societies, and they should be entitled to separate political institutions, normally taking the form of separate states. Fair enough, but now Prof. Rummens has discovered a contradiction is this self-evident observation. Europe, he says, consists of many democracies. We don’t watch Slovak television nor know the popular Spanish actors or Finnish singers, and we certainly don’t vote for Greek parties or Irish cabinet ministers, yet the N-VA, like most political parties, says it is all for European integration. Aha, gotcha!

                Note first of all that the professor has no problem with the separate Slovak or Finnish societies having a state of their own. So he does not logically object to the central N-VA demand: a separate Flemish state. Secondly, it is quite possible that the party has contradictory opinions about Belgium and the EU. Let’s assume this for now. But that does not make the N-VA’s position of Belgium any less correct or well-founded. If there is a contradiction, the party should rethink its position on the EU, not that on Belgium. The day when Europe will be properly debated (a situation postponed for many years by the EU’s overruling the negative referendum votes on its constitution project), perhaps the party position will be adjusted, but this makes no difference for its position on Belgium, which has been sufficiently debated by many quarters in our country.

                To sum up, our political philosophers do not think out of the box and are more than ever removed from the fine slogan “l’imagination au pouvoir!” (“imagination for president!”). They merely provide some nice sound-bites to the ruling class, justifying the present system’s status-quo.

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The Greek referendum

All Saints' Day 2011. After the EU leaders have cobbled together a financial arrangement intended to save the Greek exchequer and economy at huge expense to the North-European taxpayers as well as to the Greek workers and pensioners, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou now risks exploding the whole operation by calling a referendum. The Greek electorate, less than enthusiastic about the sternly conditional "aid package", may well abort it. Some first thoughts on the Greek referendum.




(1) The decision to decide by referendum is in itself excellent. The problem is that, like most referendums under parliamentary regimes and dictatorships, it is just a one-off referendum, not one embedded in a stable political culture based on regular lawmaking by referendum. True to type, it is called by the executive, not by the citizens themselves. This way, governments call referendums when they expect the popular preference to coincide with their own, all while avoiding or suppressing them in the opposite case. So, as an exercise in democracy, this promises to be a tainted referendum.

(2) Nevertheless, for most Eurocrats and their pall-bearers in the media, the Greek referendum is already far too democratic. Just last week, they already clamoured that Europe and her future were being "taken hostage" by the German Parliament when it insisted on exercising its constitutional right to decide on Chancellor Merkel's plan for saving Greece and the euro. In the Eurocratic view, echoing the rhetoric of all despots and anti-democratic ideologues throughout history, unelected Eurocratic committees should have their hands free to make the policy of their choosing,
unencumbered with democratic procedures. In fact, the expected conflict between the EU-charted course and the will of the people (not just the Greek people, for in this case, the Dutch or Finnish voters may well be on the same wavelength, viz. unenthusiastic) would have been avoided if earlier phases of the financial and economic policies affected had already been subjected to referendums. There was no need to fear a democratic vote on the Greek bail-out if a democratic mandate had earlier been secured for the steps that got us to this impasse, such as the introduction of the euro.

(3) In the expected and much-feared event of a "No" vote, the EU leaders have the option of taking the Greeks at their word and withdrawing the whole operation. That would mean: letting the Greek state go bankrupt. Considering contemporary citizens' dependence on the state, most observers will take that eventuality as too horrible to contemplate. But perhaps we just ought to take the wager. If Greek society collapses along with the state and cries for help, we can still send food aid, an ad hoc police force and all that. But possibly the Greek citizenry will prove more resourceful than to let it come to that point. Should be an interesting experiment.

(4) Since Eurocrats don't like experimentation, they can be counted on to unleash every trick in the book in order to prevent the Greeks from voting or, if that goes through somehow, from voting "wrongly". A multiple of the intimidation used on the Irish when they were forced to re-vote on the Lisbon Treaty (the renamed European Constitution draft) will now be rained down on the Greeks. To be sure, the Eurocrats may be right to this extent that in economic terms, their plan is perhaps a lesser evil compared with the prospect of Greek bankruptcy. But because present policies have never had a serious democratic basis, they will now resort to subverting or overruling democracy in order to force their solution on the people.

(5) Greece is now accused of being ungrateful. Of course, the EU powers-that-be are really trying to save the banks that have partly caused this mess and entangled themselves in it because the fall of those banks would in turn badly affect the whole other European economy; it is not like as if they are being altruistic towards Greece. Yet some tough questions do indeed deserve to be asked. Have any Greeks protested when their politicians were lying their way into the Eurozone by giving their EU partners false data about Greek state finance? Who among them has tried to stop their public spending from running wild? (Likewise, the Icelanders could be asked whether they reined in their banks when these were bringing in the money of duped investors who later demanded their money back from the Icelandic taxpayer.) Granted that the banks are selfish and irresponsible and thieves, and that it is an ugly sight to see taxpayers forced to bail them out, but the politicians and the common people also share in the responsibility.

(6) In an undemocratic system, such as the present parliamentary system with its delegation of powers to unelected levels of decision-making such as the EU, the temptation is very strong to contrast "the people", those innocent sheep, with "the politicians", that band of robbers. On many issues, the interests of the political class and of the citizenry diverge; but in the case of Greek financial irresponsibility, they may have converged. When it came to over-spending on social security and civil servants' wages, and to cheating the EU partners into facilitating this over-spending by allowing Greece prematurely into the Eurozone, the impression exists that Greek commoners and Greek politicians were on the same wavelength. Democratic-minded people should get out of this mindset of blaming a political class placed above them and washing their own hands off all responsibility.

(7) The great virtue of direct democracy is that decisions are made by those who bear the consequences of these decisions. Some commentators are sure to protest that the consequences of the Greek referendum will affect all Eurozone and even all EU citizens, most of whom are not entitled to cast a vote in Greece: "The Greeks are holding hundreds of millions of Europeans hostage!" They said the same thing about the Irish when they were delaying the Lisbon Treaty, when in fact the Eurocrats and these commentators did what they could to prevent all those other Europeans from voting, knowing fully well that the far more numerous German or British electorate would likewise vote it down if given a chance. As said here at the outset, the Greek referendum is tainted because it is held in the context of a non-referendum-based system. But if we ever want to make a start with European democracy, we should not postpone the opportunity and make the most of it. Even the certainty that the anti-democratic forces are going the use any problems accompanying the outcome as trump arguments to criminalize the very idea of popular sovereignty should not be accepted as an excuse. Let Greece be the trailblazer of direct democracy once more.

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