267 Plea for a different EU

I felt that in this blog I could not ignore Brexit. So here is an intermezzo on it.

Where does Brexit come from, and the more widespread resentment against the EU? What lesson is there to be learned? Where should the EU now go?

The EU has concentrated on the enlargement of the market. It was caught in a neo-liberal ideology of enhancing markets. There are good economic arguments for free trade, but politically it has had adverse effects that now appear to be draconic.

Next to economic advantages, the shift of production to low-wage countries leads to more transport of products over larger distances. That is bad for the environment but does not appear as a cost to firms and hence does not play a role in their calculations.

What is worse, in globalisation corporations can exert pressure on countries, under the threat of shifting production elsewhere, to offer or permit advantages, in pressures on wages, labour conditions, more flexible and insecure work, tax evasion, tolerance of pollution, lower cost of energy, deceit, monopolies (e.g. in pharmaceuticals), fiddling regulations (e.g. in emission control), and other misconduct.

The market has always been seen as a source of freedom and resilience against totalitarian regimes. Now the operation of markets is experienced as a totalitarianism of markets that swamp and cover everything. It is in reaction to that, I propose, that we now see a surge of resentment and rebellion of the lower educated that have been left behind in rising inequality of income, wealth and employment, both on the political left (Bernie Sanders, Corbyn) and the political right (Trump, LePen in France, Wilders in the Netherlands, …). And, I think, in present tenacious strikes in Belgium and France. And in Brexit and in a drive to other exits that may now be expected.

The main point now is that in this dissatisfaction and insecurity, sentiments of fear of foreigners and nationalism are mobilised, and form a dark cloud of political menace. Purely economic arguments have become suspect, a ploy of the elite that benefits from economic injustice.

To avoid political disaster, politics must harness itself to limit abuse of power in globalisation by corporations.

That can only be achieved in international cooperation, as in the EU. Withdrawal within national borders will not achieve it. Perhaps joint mobilisation can offer some counter to the blaze of anti-EU sentiments, in the present, spreading revolt, where one sees the EU as a motor of globalisation, with surrender to its adverse effects, instead of curtailing them. Here lies an opportunity for rehabilitation. More a EU for the people, and less only for the market.   

At several places in this blog, I discussed the notion of ‘system tragedy’ where people are locked in to a system with perverse effects, even against their will. The EU must gather the strength to reform the system entangled in the present configuration of capitalism. If it does not, revolutionary movements will break it up.