From the EU to Latin America: left populism and regional integration

Must regional integration be based on neoliberal competition?

The EU’s inability to deal with the challenges of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the refugee crisis of 2015-6, together with the (not unrelated) emergence of divisive right-wing nationalisms across the Union, has called into question the very possibility of a transnational European identity, or of a common economic and political strategy that is capable of responding to the democratic mandate of the peoples of Europe. The aim of this article is to explore ways of rebuilding a popular left politics that is capable of operating at the European level and restoring faith in the potential of a European project for social justice and equality.

These crises and the failure to tackle them made visible two major problems: the unequal position of national economies within the EU (and even more so within the Eurozone), and the lack of political will for tackling issues at the European level.

The absence of a common fiscal policy transformed the Eurozone into a mechanism that reinforced pre-existing uneven development. This meant massive gains for Germany, but increased the divisions between North and South. The latter, differentiated from the rest and derogatorily renamed ‘PIIGS’ (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain), became defined as the weakest links, and were characterised by a combination of factors including higher budget deficits, trade imbalances and high interest rates for borrowing. This was the logical result of thirty years of neoliberal dominance both at national parliaments and within the EU institutions, during which time social-democratic parties and governments as well as the right had internalised its discourses, and its failures had gone unrecognised. The negotiations in 2015 between the left government of Syriza-ANEL in Greece and the Troika (ECB, EC and IMF) was the first time this consensus was brought into serious question at the pan-European level. The resistance of the Greek government and people thus opened up the possibilities for looking for a different paradigm. As we know, however, in the end, austerity, privatisations, free reign for the banking sector and protection for the financial sector - and all things celebrating the legacy of Margaret Thatcher - were all forced on Greece. But these events brought to the fore serious questions about the commitment of EU institutions to democracy, and highlighted the North South divide.

It was the refugee crisis that most exposed the weak political will amongst EU institutions for finding collective solutions to difficult problems, particularly, in this case, in a manner that respected international law or exhibited any strategic awareness. A questionable and shaky deal between the EU and Turkey that tried to block the entry into Europe of hundreds of thousands of refugees was reinforced by fence-building by states nostalgic for the long gone and in most cases imaginary days of territorial cohesion. The absence of a convincing European response was then exacerbated by a proactive and divisive intervention from the Visegrad group of countries (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary). And in February 2016, a meeting initiated by Austria and including the Balkan countries tried to stop the refugee flows passing through the Balkan route, introducing border controls and closing down crossing points, effectively nullifying a passport-free Schengen zone.

At this dismal conjuncture the European project seemed pretty much at a standstill. Very few people still remember that, way back in the mid-1980s, there were once two competing paths at the heart of the European project, one neoliberal and one social. Jacques Delors, advocate of the latter, in his first speech as President of the Commission in 1985, reminded the European Parliament that a social Europe should strive for ‘a balance between justice and efficiency’. Part of his vision was the protection of workers’ rights (currently under attack): ‘When will we see the first European collective bargaining agreement? … It would provide a dynamic framework, one that respected different views - a spur to initiative, not a source of paralysing uniformity’.¹ The shift away from this vision started after the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which represented a major...