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Backwards Compatible
Kudos to the Guardian for giving a column to a voice rarely heard in the British EU debate: The fanatically anti-liberal scribblings of Serge Halimi, who believes that the problem with the EU constitution was that it was too liberal.
Such views are rarely heard outside the adolescent fever hut of French far-left politics. The constitution debate brought them into the French mainstream (Halimi writes for French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, also known as Le Monde Diplodocus thanks to the relevance of its opinions).
Halimi reckons that rather being a progressive force, economic liberalism is a "Great Leap Backwards" - he wrote a book explaining how this is so. Nice title: One can imagine what he believes a "Great Leap Forward" would be. As you can imagine, he must rarely find himself on the winning side in an argument, so it is kind of the Guardian to indulge him following the extreme left's brush with respectability after Sunday's poll.
Back on Planet Earth, Anatole Kaletsky unpicks the reality behind the EU's defeat.
He has little time for far-left fantasists:
"Across Europe, even in such traditionally free-trading countries as the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, there are widespread fears about global competition and immigration, their impact on national cultures, as well as on wages, pensions and jobs. It is tempting for Europhiles to conclude that votes against the constitution do not really represent antipathy to European integration, but rather to global integration on terms dictated by Anglo-Saxon economic liberalism and the interests of the US.
"On this view, which in France has now permeated from the unreconstructed Left to much of the political and media establishment, the constitution should have offered more protection from foreign trade, financial competition, immigration and American culture. The voters would then have welcomed it with open arms.
"The obvious problem with this argument is that the French Left’s dream of a protectionist, anti-American Europe has never been feasible because it would be unacceptable to Britain, the Netherlands, Scandinavia or even Germany — not to mention the new members in the east, who rightly see the US as their ultimate military protector against Russia. An anti-American Europe would require nothing less than the dissolution of today’s continent-wide EU and its reconstitution as a tiny club of geopolitically like-minded nations, which might, in the end, be reduced to France, Belgium and Luxembourg."
Europe's "dirty little secret," Kaletsky writes, is that the possibility of the EU acting as a barrier against globalisation was always a pipedream:
"Europe is more dependent on foreign trade, investment and capital flows than America. Europe’s businesses and banks are more vulnerable than America’s to currency movements and global capital flows. There is no alternative to the capitalist system of economic management which could secure the survival of Europe’s labour-intensive industries against Chinese competition or make its state pensions, welfare benefits and short working hours affordable in an era when pensioner numbers are soaring, while working populations are in decline."
Though the opening of markets within Europe has helped to create prosperity, every other project, most notably the single currency, has failed to deliver results. Stagnation and unemployment are now the most prominent features of the Eurozone.
Kaletsky was writing before the news broke that Germany's finance minister had attended a meeting where the collapse of the Euro single currency had been discussed. Stern magazine claims that the government is planning to blame the currency for the nation's lack of growth and high unemployment. A recent poll indicated that 56 percent of Germans would like their old currency back.
Of course, the German government has distanced itself from the reports, but Kaletsky's realism, coupled with Halimi's nostalgia for totalitarianism and Germany's demands to take charge of its future once more suggest some of the challenges facing anyone who still dreams of forcing unity upon Europe.
