Jacobin, Topic: The Brexit Debacle

Link: The Brexit Debacle

You can't understand the chaos of Brexit without understanding the fundamentals of the European Union.

Excerpt:

"There’s more discussion now about the possibility of a second referendum. You’ve written that while you’re sympathetic to the people in the People’s Vote campaign, in your view, the European Union is not, cannot be, will never be, what its left-of-center partisans want it to be. Why do you reject the possibility that the European Union could be reformed in a progressive direction?

RS [ Richard Seymour]

The obvious question I would like to put to left Remainers is, what of the treaties of the European Union do you agree with? The answer would not be very extensive. Someone might say, “Well, the Schengen zone I agree with,” but even there you have to qualify it by saying, “But it’s a pity that it’s tied to Fortress Europe.” Someone might say they’re in favor of the social chapter, but they would also have to say that it’s a pity that the social chapter comes with neoliberal competition state aid law. And so on.

If you look at the treaties they’re overwhelmingly restrictive in terms of what national governments can do with their budgets, with their industrial strategy. They’re not really able to have an industrial strategy. They’re required to maintain balanced budgets. That’s austerity budgets for most of Europe.

As for reforming the European Union in a progressive direction, have a look at what happened to Syriza. There was a political party that was elected precisely to try this strategy of pursuing a humanitarian agenda. Essentially, it was a humanitarian bailout: “We’re going to stop people from killing themselves and dying of starvation and suffering needlessly without medicine. We’re going to have a bailout for our people rather than the bankers.”

They used debt as an instrument with which to pummel Greece, to force Greece into privatizing most of its existing public sector industries, selling them off at fire sale prices, cutting pensions. This is the standard EU agenda.

Now, can the European Union be reformed in a progressive direction? I don’t foreclose the possibility that some serious mass political struggle could result in a reformed European Union. I don’t think it would become a progressive institution, but it could become less worse than it is. But we have to think seriously about the scale of disruption and rupture that would be required to make it happen..."