an article<\/a> by Joseph Richardson that covers much of the important ground for leftwingers.<\/p>\nHe reminds us that the neoliberal imperatives of the EU were starkly on display recently in the crushing of Greece, despite its people’s efforts to resist self-immolation through the imposition of hyper-austerity policies. As western economies continue to suffer in the self-destructive pursuit of endless and impossible growth, the EU’s role as a heavy \u2013 bullying, intimidating and roughing up member states and their publics \u2013 will become ever more evident as weaker members struggle to keep up their payments to a gangster elite.<\/p>\n
The neoliberalism enforced by the EU is not some unfortunate experiment we can reform, or even\u00a0reverse, at some distant point in the future. It is hurling us towards a climate\u00a0precipice\u00a0that will soon make human life impossible on the planet.<\/p>\n
Richardson also rebuts claims that the EU has been the post-war bulwark against militarism and regional conflict. As he points out, peace in Europe is the legacy of its leading nations’ declining global clout\u00a0in the post-war period, the rapid transfer of power to the US, and Washington’s\u00a0need for a quiet market in Europe for its goods.<\/p>\n
The cost, on the other hand, has been decades of a dangerous arms race and nuclear stand-off, first with the Soviet Union and now with Russia, in which the EU has been deeply implicated \u2013 through its subservient position inside a US-dominated Nato.<\/p>\n
Europe has also continued, as a US client super-state, to actively participate in resource-grabs in developing nations like Libya and Iraq. Quite contrary to the myth of a peaceful Europe, huge sums are invested by\u00a0member states in the arms trade at home and in fuelling and sustaining conflicts in other regions, such as in Syria.<\/p>\n
An\u00a0immigration\u00a0debate\u00a0ought to\u00a0be at the\u00a0centre of\u00a0campaigning\u00a0about the EU, just not in the way it is being presented\u00a0in this campaign. The migrants trying to pour into Europe\u00a0are refugees from\u00a0EU and US\u00a0policies – a global economic policy that is making poorer parts of\u00a0the planet increasingly uninhabitable, and a foreign policy that stokes ethnic and sectarian divisions and provides the arms\u00a0needed to ensure\u00a0yet more bloodshed.<\/p>\n
Without the EU, the imperial role of the US would be far more obvious. The EU\u2019s entirely undeserved nice-guy image, despite\u00a0its mostly lock-step alliance with Washington on international affairs, shields the US from proper scrutiny.<\/p>\n
At home, the fundamental question facing anyone who considers him or herself of the left is the same it was when a similar referendum was conducted in 1975, as Richardson explains:<\/p>\n
“Unlike the MPs campaigning for remain today, politicians like [Tony] Benn understood that the lack of democracy at the heart of the EU was not an oversight on the part of its founders, but an essential component of a project which sought to supplant national governments with a supranational authority divorced from the concerns of ordinary people. So long as power was vested in national assemblies, these institutions, however imperfect, were at least answerable to their voters, but once power over economic policy was ceded to bureaucrats then the business elites which effectively governed Europe were easily able to overcome popular resistance to their policies by dispensing with the need for elections.”<\/p>\n
In short, the EU cannot be reformed by Britain staying in because the union\u2019s very structures are designed to accrete power for the few without accountability to the many.<\/p>\n
The EU is one of the key trans-national institutions, along with others like the IMF and World Bank, whose role is to claw back on behalf of the US the social democratic gains made by many European publics after the Second World War. After all, were\u00a0leftwing politics to be\u00a0seen as\u00a0a viable or even preferable alternative to US neoliberalism, then European national publics might demand the right to take back governance of their countries \u2013 and Washington\u2019s global dominance would be at an end.<\/p>\n
Even though I believe we are too far down this path for a leave vote to actually result in the chosen outcome, it does not mean an exit vote is pointless. Testing structures designed to negate expressions of popular will \u2013 like trying to bend the bars of the prison cell you find yourself in \u2013 has an educational role. We cannot fight for our freedoms until we start to understand how truly unfree we have become.<\/p>\n
UPDATE:<\/h3>\n
There is a criticism\u00a0of\u00a0this article on social media I find deeply troubling – and an indication that people aren’t really thinking about\u00a0the key issue.<\/p>\n
It\u00a0is this: that by making the case I have here, I am giving succour to the far-right. It is\u00a0vital, these people say, to remain in the EU to prevent the rise of the fascists.<\/p>\n
Let’s set aside the anti-democratic assumption behind\u00a0this criticism: that I should keep quiet and not make arguments that might\u00a0inflame the “masses” into taking decisions that will be harmful to them.<\/p>\n
The question being avoided is this: why are far-right movements becoming so prominent\u00a0in Europe? The (justified) sense among European publics that\u00a0politicians, both local and EU ones, are no longer accountable\u00a0to them is fuelling frustration and anger. People are unhappy\u00a0at being ruled by unelected elites and being economically pillaged by faceless\u00a0corporations. This has led to a new radicalism in politics, on both the left and the right. It is a battle where everything is still to play for.<\/p>\n
However, history suggests that politicians of the far-right excel in exploiting emotions of popular anger and resentment for their own ends.<\/p>\n
The EU is not about to become a bastion of working class rights. It is going to continue imposing a global neoliberal order that victimises\u00a0the working class and increasingly the\u00a0middle class too.<\/p>\n
Staying in the EU is going to increase the frustrations of the 99 per cent, and make them even more open to\u00a0the scapegoating strategies employed by\u00a0the far-right. Leaving the EU may or may not make\u00a0the far-right stronger, depending on how well the left responds to the challenge (the signs so far are not good).\u00a0But what should not be doubted is that staying\u00a0in will only accelerate the\u00a0rise of the fascists.<\/p>\n
UPDATE 2:<\/h3>\n
Another strange\u00a0criticism\u00a0being levelled at me\u00a0is that Britain is\u00a0far from democratic itself and it would be better to invest our energies in reforming the EU.<\/p>\n
I couldn’t agree more than the UK has a very large democratic deficit – not least an unrepresentative electoral system whose inertia will\u00a0make radical change extremely difficult.<\/p>\n
But that should supply\u00a0an even stronger argument to leave the EU. It\u00a0provides\u00a0an additional layer of undemocratic “representation”, distancing us even further from our local politicians, who themselves barely\u00a0represent us.<\/p>\n
Reforming the corrupt UK political system is going to be herculean task. Reforming the EU is going to be downright impossible if it has to be done\u00a0at arm’s length and collectively, through each EU state’s corrupt domestic political system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here is\u00a0a prediction about the outcome of today’s UK referendum on leaving the European Union. Even in the unlikely event that the remain camp loses, the UK will still not Brexit. Europe\u2019s neoliberal elite will not agree to release its grip on a major western nation. A solution will be found to keep the UK […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,57],"class_list":{"0":"post-2134","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-britain","8":"tag-europe"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}