The Disease behind the Dis-ease
A Response Expanding on the Points Made by Professor Schmale
by John Saudino
12 January 2020
A State of Doubt, Hesitation and Weakness, if not Crisis
Professor Wolfgang Schmale’s article “Europe 2019-A Review of the Situation” makes many vital points. It is an excellent diagnosis of a kind of general malaise that is painfully apparent in European society and in its leading institutions. Professor Schmale points out the political instability as evinced by the failure of so many governments to form workable coalitions and the increased activity of the far right. There is institutional weakness on the EU level which leads to a great deficit in perceived and real legitimacy. There is great disappointment in national leaders like Emmanuel Macron who cannot seem to address the concerns of the environment and the economic hardship of the “gilets jaunes” at the same time and prefer touting slogans instead of real negotiation and discussion with other European leaders. There is no real success in crafting any coherent European foreign policy. Boris Johnson’s Brexit victory has created a point of contention for many years to come. There is a general lack of confidence and determination in all fields. There is no resolve whatsoever regarding any future integration of the Balkans and a lack of public discourse on the problems that matter most; first and foremost the pressing issues of economic and social life that affect people most.
All in all a very grim and accurate picture is presented. If these trends continue it is likely that this experiment in human peace, prosperity and freedom we know as the European Union will face further disintegration. It is possible that eventually this community with its unequaled level of liberty and quality of life that is home to the largest single economy in the world and represents the greatest hope, not only to its own inhabitants but to the world as a whole, may very well fail and end up being a mere utopian memory.
But why is this so? Why is a political order that has achieved so much in the way of freedom and prosperity in the wake of the totalitarian carnage of the 20th century now so threatened with collapse? What is the disease that is the root cause of all these symptoms that Professor Schmale has described so well?
One of the reasons for the general level of cluelessness on the institutional level is the great sea change in the traditional party landscape; certain political alignments, in particular party affiliations based on the class allegiances of an industrial society, those key to the Social Democrats for example, simply cannot continue to exist in the same form in a postindustrial society. This is only a partial answer, however. The radical shift to the far right and the resulting paralysis on the institutional level have another cause that needs to be focused on more clearly.
I would argue that the symptoms are not caused merely by the failings of individual politicians, by shifts in the economy or by the institutional weaknesses of the Brussels system, though these are certainly important factors, but rather that there is something afoot that is decidedly more deliberate and decidedly more sinister.
What is plaguing Europe like the pathogen of an infectious disease is something of a genuine movement or ideology, one that goes under the general mass-market brand name of “Anti-Globalism”.
Populism from Above
Anti-Globalism is not particularly new; there were various versions of it in the early twentieth century. It is a form of nationalism that envisions distant corrupt “elites” that lurk behind any and all trends that perturb or pain those who see themselves as the downtrodden. Paradoxically enough its leaders and ideologues are often elites themselves, people like former Goldman Sachs manager Steve Bannon, who styles himself a defender of “the common man”, while he pushes through an abomination like the “Citizens United” Supreme Court case of 2010 in which he was the plaintiff. This decision overturned a half century of election finance reform and essentially allows billionaires to buy elections. In England it was the far right Tory Brexiteers like millionaire Rees-Moog and bank loving Boris Johnson who sold the common man the means to his own demise. The anti-Globalist with the greatest media presence is of course the 21st century proponent of the old fascist “America First” slogan of the 1920s, Donald Trump, who is himself, at least as far as the public perception is concerned, a successful billionaire.
However without a doubt the greatest of all anti-Globalists is another oligarch, a man who some have argued is in fact the richest man in the world, so rich and powerful that he has been able to install the President of the United States to do his bidding; I mean of course Vladimir Putin. This last remark is not just some flippant bit of Trump bashing; Yale historian Timothy Snyder has done an extensive investigation of Putin’s roll in Europe’s problems and in Trump’s rise to power. Russia’s roll is not at all restricted to merely assisting Trump with a cyber war on the US election of 2016, which is well documented in the Muller Report, but in rescuing him from certain financial ruin in an apparent effort to groom him for his present role over the course of several years which took the form of loans, direct payments and property purchases.[1] Either through his indebtedness to Putin or his own conviction Trump has been all too willing to back Putin’s agenda on many fronts, including Trump’s open hostility to the European Union and his active support for its disintegration, unprecedented for an American president.
The Russian roll in the Brexit referendum was also a matter of investigation by MI6 in a report that Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused to release before the latest election. Russia’s close coordination and financial backing of the European far right has been going on for years; its support of and networking with the AfD, the FPÖ and of the Front National in particular have been very significant. Activists from these and other European far right parties were given “press passes” so they could travel to Ukraine in 2014 to legitimize Russia’s annexations of Ukrainian territory.
“Oligarchs of the World Unite!”
The ruse of anti-Globalism is the same as that of fascism in the 20th century. Like this earlier form of anti-Globalism, the new one sells disgruntled classes of people the fantasy that they can somehow turn back time and annul the negative effects that technological advance has had on their economic standing. Back then it was the rise of industrialism that was ruining the lives of small business owners and helping the fascists to turn this class against the workers. Today it is the native working classes that are feeling the pinch and resenting the “elites” as well as the foreign underclass in their midst. But the fact of the matter is that just like then, the globalism of today is made inevitable by the advance of technology; it cannot be undone. Corporations are going to outsource jobs and cooperate to their own benefit and our detriment regardless of what any Brexiteer or anti-EU party does. The fracturing of Europe into small units will only make each unit more easily digestible for multinationals.
The response to inevitable globalization must not be to destroy technological advance and erect the borders for the sake of preserving a long gone state of affairs but reacting to the objective realities collectively and transnationally to create arrangements for dealing with the changes that benefit everyone. This seems very utopian today, but it is only the cynic emboldened by his ignorance and his totally arbitrary assumptions about “human nature” that will deem such action impossible.
There was indeed a sense of solidarity afoot about 100 years ago. As the internationalism of the working class movement embodied in Marx’s famous phrase started to gain strength towards the 1890s, the “specter haunting Europe” was an international one. The class conscious “workers of the world” that were to “unite” and had nothing to lose “but their chains” were in the course of their repeated general strikes that stopped economic activity and cut off vital supplies of coal indeed gaining significant power. They had gained power enough to force the hand of the state.[2]
It was clear that as long as workers were divided into different countries with radically different degrees of workers’ protection and wage levels, the ruling classes would be able to play the workers of one country off against those of another and keep the working class at bay. This would no longer work if they managed to unite internationally. Hence, it was indispensable that the working classes of Europe have their class consciousness poisoned by nationalism. The inculcation of all classes with militant German nationalism, for example, was state policy in Germany and was ubiquitous at all levels of education.[3] This indoctrination finally paid off for the German and Austrian ruling classes when in 1914 they won the backing of the establishment Social Democrats for a war that turned out to be nothing more than an act of orchestrated mass suicide for Europe’s workers.
The situation is no different in the case of today’s anti-Globalists. Their goal is to use nationalism to halt international cooperation and break up Europe into smaller entities so that each can be forced into increasingly disadvantageous trade relations with regard to international corporations. The demands for “competitive” wages, “deregulation” and greater “flexibility of the labor market” will end in a never ending race to the bottom with regard to worker’s rights, social insurance and wages. While the middle class suffers increasing setbacks and is locked into its own narrow universe in a mythical “nation-state”, in an ideological concoction of fascist design, the oligarchs will be free to roam freely over the entire globe, hiding their money in offshore accounts, buying elections and driving the level of social and environmental standards in these competing entities into the ground.
Hence the battle cry of the anti-Globalists has nothing to do with their so-called “sovereignty” because the only sovereignty gained by actions like Brexit is the sovereignty of right-wing oligarchs and media moguls over the English people, in the same way that the Russian kleptocracy rules over the Russian people. The real battle cry of the anti-Globalists once they have been properly exposed for what they actually are is “oligarchs of the world unite!”
Neoliberalism and “The Politics of Inevitablility” vs “The Politics of Eternity”
This is not to say that Russia is to blame for all that is evil in the world; forty years of neoliberal market fundamentalism emanating from the USA and England ever since the Reagan/Thatcher “revolution” has played a key role in preparing the ground for the oligarchical takeover of Western society that we are now witnessing. In Snyder’s analysis the cause is the historicist progressive “End of History” kind of neoliberal determinism that he calls “the politics of inevitability”. It is this promise of progress that eventually “breaks” at the point where the working/middle class is impoverished and disillusioned in the face of the bonanza of the 1%. It was the financial crisis of 2008 that put the nail in the coffin of the “American Dream” of inevitable upward mobility. Wealth inequality is at its highest levels in the United States since the 1920s; the situation is similar in the UK.[4] It is in these two homelands of Anglo-Saxon liberalism themselves that Russia’s efforts at establishing anti-Globalism have been most successful, in the countries where social advancement has been most curtailed and there is tremendous wealth inequality in which oligarchs can buy the political system. According to Snyder it is at the point where the politics of inevitability breaks that the “politics of eternity” raises its ugly head. Eternity here refers the stopping of all political change; the public is made to accept the lack of social mobility, the power of a permanent oligarchy, and an increasingly authoritarian state.
The corruption and authoritarianism of the Russian kleptocracy that quickly stole the wealth of the Russian people in the 1990s and has been a bulwark of Putin’s authoritarianism ever since, was unfortunately only the first of such “eternity” regimes. We see the same kind of crony capitalist autocracy in Viktor Orban’s Hungary and clero-fascist tendencies in Kaczynski’s Poland. These two EU member states present constant problems as they slowly erode the rule of law in their own countries, constantly undermine European institutions and immunize each other from all consequences by means of reciprocal promises to veto any sanctions against the other.
Since the early 2000s Recep Tayyip Erdogan has presented Europe with another kind of authoritarian Trojan Horse. This highly populated nation that at one time embodied the hope of expanding democracy and secularism eastward into the Muslim world has, under Erdogan’s brand of Islamic clero-fascism, turned out to be a double edged sword in the other direction. Its status as the second most powerful member of NATO after the United States combined with its geostrategic location on the Dardanelles make its loss to Islamist anti-Globalism a strategic catastrophe. These combined factors of an anti-European Turkey, an authoritarian Hungary, the Russian occupation of Ukraine and its control of Syria, taken together turn the entire strategic military balance of power around the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean against Europe. As if that were not enough there is the constant psycho-terror Erdogan carries out in the form of his claim of transnational citizenship for European Turks who he instigates into anti-European agitation during every Turkish election, while he simultaneously uses the blackmail of triggering another migrant crisis to devastate the European body politic once again. Given this precarious geostrategic and political situation with regimes governed by the politics of eternity either at or within its borders, and with the open hostility of even the United States, it is no wonder that European institutions at the highest levels are experiencing a profound crisis of confidence.
Staring Down the Monster with Conscious Defiance
I have peppered this piece with several references to the “F-word”, fascism. This is no doubt one of the most misused and abused terms of political discourse and has in some people’s diction degraded into nothing more than a vague catchall term for anything the speaker does not like. This, I assure you, is not at all the case here. When I refer to Russia as having an official ideology of clero-fascism, I mean it literally. The genuinely fascist nature of Russian official ideology is another particularly interesting revelation of Snyder’s book.
When Putin stretched the Russian constitution and manipulated the election of 2012 so he could seek yet another term as president, it became clear that there was a lack of a succession principle. There was not, nor would there ever be, any truly meaningful election and Putin would remain President for life. In this situation it became necessary to establish an alternative model that had already been germinating in the Russian Republic of a post democratic regime with a strong reliance on the Orthodox Church, increasing authoritarianism and stage-managed pseudo-elections. In order to prepare the way for such a transition the media had been unified into one state controlled system that largely ignores domestic affairs and treats Russians to a fabricated set of mantras about their eternal innocence against the eternal evil of the outside world, particularly that of the decadent immoral West, that always victimizes them.[5]
All of these elements of Russian clero-fascism were explicitly laid out by a 20th century Russian fascist philosopher named Ivan Ilyn (1883-1954) whose mortal remains were exhumed in 2005 from his gravesite in Switzerland to be ceremoniously reburied in Russia. Since then his works have been republished in Russia where they are required reading for Kremlin staff and provide points of explicit citation in Putin’s speeches. To promote his ideas and others there are several prominent fascist intellectuals of the Isborsk Club like Alexander Plechanov, Genadi Zyuganov, and Alexander Dugin who advise public officials including Putin and are often guest commentators on Russian state television. In addition to being a key member of Putin’s ruling United Russia party Dugin is the head of the Eurasia Party and leader of a movement and ideology called Eurasianism that envisions a unified Russian led superstate stretching from Kamchatka to Portugal. Russian far right groups like the Night Wolves (a fascist motorcycle gang), along with the aforementioned players, all played a key role in Russian’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2014.[6]
The explicitly declared enemy of all these fascist thinkers has been the European Union and the United States which, at least until Trump, has been defending it. It is not anything that Europe has done but what Europe is that upsets the Russian leadership. What it represents is a successful model of progressive liberal democracy that acts as a foil to the oligarchical authoritarianism they have established. Until and unless they manage to break it up into individual “nation-states”, as they have been actively trying to do, it will stand in the way of their Eurasian fantasies of domination. It is in this context that the Ukraine crisis must be understood.
Yes, Russia is indeed an existential threat to Europe and to liberal democracy worldwide, but this does not mean there should be any essential enmity toward the Russian people. Perhaps one day in a post Putin Russia they will finally overcome their 200 year old identity crisis and realize, in spite of all the utter insanity of these state sanctioned fascist Eurasianists, that they are, in the final analysis, a European nation. That however will not even become a theoretical possibility until Putin is gone.
Chto Delat’? What is to be done?
With all these forces waged against it, what is the EU to do?
First off the EU leadership needs to fully comprehend what they are up against. The enemy is not something new and inscrutable; it is fascism, something old, quite familiar and universally despised by all intelligent and reasonable people. What Europe needs is the kind of unity, cooperation and clarity of mind that people of different backgrounds and ethnicities can only achieve when they are facing down a common existential threat. If you have been paying attention while reading this article, you will have realized that is exactly what Europe is facing, the existential threat of fascist anti-Globalism. Europe must experience a rebirth as a result of the process of once again facing down and defeating this monster.
Both domestically and internationally this enemy needs to be ruthlessly called out for what it is. The answer is not caution and hesitation but bold action. We need more Europe not less. Most of all we need actual leadership. It is high time to start instituting a European presidency, a real presidency that is popularly elected and has earned a legitimate mandate from all Europeans. An administration like this that maintains a clear sense of presence and accountability will go a long way in creating the kind of unity and strength needed to face this crisis. Those who shutter at the notion of a “United States of Europe” need to have their fears allayed and the necessity of unity explained to them. We need a real political unity with a powerful military and a coherent foreign policy. We need to be able to secure our external borders, if need be by military means, in a way that does not make us dependent on international events like the war in the Middle East and the ravings of Erdogan.
Those within the European union who erode the rule of law need to be brought back into line by any means necessary, be it diplomatic engagement, or economic sanctions. Most of all we need leadership, the quantum leap in the level of transparency and accountability that only a popular executive branch election can bring. It could, of course, also be a parliamentary style election but with a clear European wide leading candidate for each party that personifies this future order, communicates the principles and measures promised, strengthens the rule of law and takes personal responsibility for his or her actions. And we need a complete end to corporate lobbying and corruption.
The Balkans need to be integrated before Russia undermines their budding institutions. They need to be integrated with or without their problems by a European leadership that will solve problems and not run away from them. Also a settlement of the Ukraine crisis needs to be reached that allows the people of Ukraine to join the EU and NATO if they so choose.
If Putin’s orange haired monkey loses the White House in 2020, it will make things a lot easier, but we must not wait for that or make our actions dependent on it. It is time for Europe to come of age and consciously embrace the unifying enlightenment principles that we all share—to escape from its “self-imposed tutelage” as Kant said. Embracing principles means being willing and able to defend them, both against external and internal enemies, be they fascist groups like neo-Nazis or jihadists, or foreign states like Russia, Turkey, or the United States.
Only through a renewed sense of pride, unity and purpose will Europe be able to survive the current onslaught. It is a time for bold and profound reform in the direction of a European superstate with a truly legitimate, transparent and competent centralized government.
If we fail in this endeavor, our grandchildren will have to satisfy
themselves with vague legends of the freedom and prosperity and overall human
flourishing that once was, legends about the Europe that they can only
fantasize about from the dungeon that their lives will have become.
[1] The Road to Unfreedom, by Timothy Snyder, 2018, ch. 6
[2] Carbon Democracy, Timothy Mitchell, 2011, pp. 25-27
[3] The Outline of History Vol 2, H.G. Wells, 1920, pp. 876-877
[4] Snyder, ch. 1
[5] Snyder, Ch. 2-5
[6] Ibid, Ch 7
