Demo against labour law in Paris, April 9, 2016. Wikicommons/Jules78120. Some rights reserved.Dear Yanis,
We decided to write you this letter after following closely the
launch of DiEM 25 in Rome on 23 March. The missive aims to discuss a series of
issues regarding your initiative that we found unconvincing by offering a
well-intentioned criticism of it.
We clarify at this point that our aim is neither to dismiss a
priori the project
nor to appear like smarty pants that know better than anyone else how things
should be done, something not totally foreign within the universe of 'the Left'.
Rather, with this letter we wish to raise some questions publicly that we
suspect many may have already thought about and discussed informally and that
could be used as sparks for improving the initiative.
Let
us start with the identity of DiEM 25. During your presentations, you have
often repeated that DiEM 25 is a ‘movement’ fighting for the democratization of
Europe by attempting to change the content of the already existing structures
of the European Union. However, what escapes us is who DiEM 25 exactly is and
who its ‘enemy’ is meant to be. More precisely, who are you fighting against?
Is the enemy the structures of the European Union? Or possibly the economic
elites? Or just the Brussels’ bureaucrats? And who is DiEM? Is it something
that is constituted by individuals, pre-constituted groups, or is it just a narrative
related by Yanis Varoufakis?
It
may well be too early to find a definitive answer to this issue – after all
certain things become clear only as they are developed, but the type of social
movement that you are trying so keenly to build seems to carry a certain
statutory uncertainty inscribed in its very foundation. Every social movement
of the last decade or so has had a specific definition to the question of
‘who?’ – both in terms of who ‘we’ are and who ‘they’ are – even in cases when
the movement emerged as an outcome of very complex and contradictory processes.
For example, the anti-globalization movement focused its criticisms and
activism against the multinational corporations that were responsible for stripping
political power from states through trade agreements and deregulated financial
markets. The question of identity is really a crucial one not just for abstract
or psychoanalytic reasons but from a strategic perspective. Do you think that people with such diverse conceptions of democracy
can agree on common agendas? We are very doubtful of this.
The
strategic dimension takes on even more significance when considering another
feature of your initiative. The ambiguous physiognomy of DiEM 25 is further
reinforced by rendering the political affiliation of the people who will join
your initiative irrelevant as a criterion for their involvement. You insist
that: “We are not a coalition of political parties. The idea is that anyone can
join independently of political party affiliation or ideology because democracy
can be a unifying theme”.
We
appreciate that DiEM intends to reach out beyond the restricted circles of the
‘converted’, but it should be noted that it would make little sense to belong
to a conservative party (or even a social-democratic one for that matter) while
also adhering to DiEM. In this regard,
the nature of DiEM 25 runs the risk of depoliticising its members, as it
totally neglects the fact that the differences between the various political
traditions are not limited to an abstract and harmless plane of ideas, but
extend to the meanings and understandings of the democratic process as such.
Let us not forget, for example, that the liberal and the aristocratic views of
liberal-democracy at the beginning of the twentieth century in many European
countries did not include the participation of subaltern classes: their
political involvement was won only through strenuous processes of struggle. In
other words, the content of democracy was not something given but an issue of
struggle and definition.
We
consider that what is happening nowadays is in many respects similar: the
destabilization of the representative institutions that the economic and
political crisis has brought about puts the very meaning of democracy under
contestation. While the political establishment considers the state of
exception that has been imposed on a number of countries a democratic one, the
new protest movements that emerged in 2011 (Indignados in Spain, Aganaktismeni
in Greece, Occupy Wall Street in the US ) also claimed back for themselves
the concept of democracy. Do they amount to the same thing? Do they serve
similar interests? Are these two types of interpretations of democracy not
contradictory?
We
do not dispute that we need to disengage people from their previous political
identifications and that this requires openness towards those coming from
different political paths. What should be avoided, however, is a frontist
strategy in disguise that fails to highlight that the democratic deficit is the
fruit of the irresponsibility of those political traditions that are now so
uncritically called upon. Moving to the European level and considering that the
aims of DiEM 25 are limited to the democratic reestablishment of the structures
of the EU, do you think that people with such diverse conceptions of democracy
can agree on common agendas? We are very doubtful of this.
This
leads us to a further strategic issue: what exactly is to be done? It seems
that DiEM has put all its bets on the European dimension, entirely bypassing
the national one. How cogent is this move and how effective is it likely to be?
Is it really necessary to delete the state from the map as a locus of
progressive democratic reforms and to consider it as an outdated and
old-fashioned obsession? We do not think so! We consider the radical
reestablishment of democracy within the various nation-states as equally
important to action at a European level. Holding both the nation-state and
Europe as political horizons does not amount to entrenching oneself behind a
form of backward nationalism, as many DiEM followers have suggested.
In
this sense, it is particularly striking that in the argumentation you developed
in Rome there prevails an utmost disregard for other experiences of resistance
towards austerity measures. In fact, if there has been any advance made towards
the undoing of neoliberalism in recent times, that has only happened in Latin
America. We are aware that Latin America offers models that are now running
into crisis and which have often been treated with deep suspicion by many
sectors of the European left. But maybe we should not throw the baby out with
the bath water. Blinding ourselves to the many achievements of Latin Americans
in the last decade or so would amount to crass Euro-centrism.
Many
lessons can in fact be learnt, as Podemos, for example, has done. One of these
is the recognition that the nation-state is certainly in difficulty, but its
death certificate has not yet been issued. The neutralisation of the Washington
Consensus and its stabilization packages has been achieved through a reactivation
of the nation-state in two different ways. It seems
that DiEM has put all its bets on the European dimension, entirely bypassing
the national one.
Firstly,
as a locus of identification. Despite all its regional internationalism, the
Latin American pink tide was first and foremost a collection of national
phenomena. Chávez’s Venezuela served as a powerful source of inspiration, but
each experience manifested its own distinct particularities which resulted in a
case-by-case seizure of power, only to be followed by some inter-state
convergence at a later stage (ALBA, UNASUR, CELAC). In other words, recent Latin
American progressive projects have demonstrated the importance of speaking the
language of the nation and its people, a language of course expunged of any
type of chauvinist or racist connotation. Even though the Bolivarian spirit
pervaded to different degrees all these processes, it was the reference to the
concrete material problems and issues pertaining to each country that made
Chávez, Morales, Correa and the Kirchners popular and thus electorally
hegemonic.
DiEM,
on the contrary, seems to place too much faith on a European cosmopolitan
spirit in a continent where cultural and linguistic differences are a hundred
times more pronounced than in Latin America. It is a language which runs the
risk of remaining unheard precisely by the people who are suffering the
democratic deficit the most and to whom the initiative should be able to speak.
Secondly,
the state has been turned towards the achievement of democratic goals. This was
not an easy task in a context where many of the administrative functions of the
state had been dismantled in the name of market equilibrium, and where its
bureaucracy was so imbued with a neoliberal ethos. Nevertheless, and despite
lying at the periphery of the world, the ‘re-oriented’ state has often been
able to mount challenges to global capital that were deemed inconceivable and
unrealistic by the neoliberal mantra.
This does not amount
to a denial of the fact that globalised financial capital exerts pressures that
are difficult to cope with at a national level and that many of the dilemmas
that Europe is facing require large-scale efforts, as in the case of the
refugees crisis. It just means that ruling out entirely the possibility for
states to act upon the situation is an oversimplification, especially if Greece
is taken as the sole example (other countries, Spain in primis, would have a very different bargaining power
vis-à-vis the creditors). It means moreover that it is only by directing our
efforts where there are realistic chances of some tangible result that any step
towards the democratisation of Europe can be made.
Raising
awareness at a continental level is crucial. But if left to itself, it leads
sooner or later to its exhaustion. If not accompanied by the attempt to
transform the institutions, the mere demand for their democratization is
unlikely to produce any real change. And their transformation can only go
through the nation-state, as a fully fledged European politics, capable of
interpellating all citizens, does not yet exist, and given the demographic and power
asymmetries, one wonders whether it is desirable that the European Union existed in the first place.
Last
but not least, Yanis! The issue of democracy within DiEM 25.
We
were negatively impressed by the fact that nobody apart from you spoke on
behalf of the project and that the issue of representative structures within
DiEM 25 was quite ill-defined. Is it possible, Yanis, to try to democratize
something as big as the EU without previously having created solid democratic
structures within your project? Is it not a bit at odds with your own aims? We
think that at this point you totally neglect the very recent experience of
Syriza.
In
our understanding, Syriza’s attempt failed terribly not only because the
leadership of the party chose the wrong strategy in its negotiations with the
institutions, but also because it abolished even the most elementary forms of
democratic functioning within the party before and during the period of the
negotiations. The party structures were incapacitated and a tiny minority – Tsipras’
group – dominated over the decision-making process. This bureaucratization of
the party promoted a very distorted version of how politics should be conducted
by considering that people and social movements should not have any say, as
running the party is a job of the party elite. The outcome of this process is
the one that we all know. We are really afraid that DiEM25 may go along the
same route if it continues to be a one-man show.
We
consider the formation of truly democratic structures within the initiative as
a vital necessity that will prevent a similar evolution to the one that
happened within Syriza. Needless to say, this process should also have a gender
balance and people should be coming from different social and cultural
backgrounds. The experience and know-how of the various social movements should
be a crucial component in making DiEM a more solid and democratic structure. This
is the only way through which DIEM can be grounded socially and cease being an
elitist leader-centered top-down forum.
Such
a process will be able to guarantee the democratic accountability of DiEM as
well as the marginalization of the opportunists that will attempt to use it as
a vehicle of their own interests. Summing up, we believe that DiEM 25 faces the
same choice as the EU: democratization or barbarism!
Sincerely,
George
Souvlis & Samuele Mazzolini
This letter was first published on Left East
