European Union

By Ter García and Pablo Elorduy / Translated by Esther Ortiz Vázquez, Susana Macías Pascua & Rob Dyas

Democracy, debt and human rights were the central themes of the Agora 99 meeting in Madrid, which was conceived to unify answers and demands against the shock policy being imposed by the EU. Despite the very ambitious goals, it was understood from the beginning that none of the European movements problems would be solved overnight. “Come down to earth and don’t tense up”, suggested one of the moderators. Calmly but with an intense schedule, due to the urgent situation of the European citizenship, for four days Madrid became the meeting point of more than two hundred activists from different Greek, Slovenian, German, French, British and Italian social movements which came to take part in Agora99.

The meeting took place in May during Frankfurt’s Blockupy workshop. Under the aim of coordinating a common European strategy for demonstrations around debt, social rights and democracy, the work meetings took place at Madrid´s Patio Maravillas (occupied social centre) thanks to technology such as Munble and other electronic chat tools. This threefold approach permeated the twenty meetings, tackling issues ranging from education, housing and health to joint water management, communication, and participative democracy.

“You are not a loan”

What kind of tools do we have to fight the debt model? The central one remains that of default. “This can be either managed from the top, by the debt owners, or from the bottom, democratically”, stated Isidro López, member of the Observatorio Metropolitano during the round table workshops.

Yorgos Mitralias, who forms part of the Greek Citizen Committee against Debt (CADTM), participated in the debt panels where the austerity measures imposed by the Troika on the peripheral Euro countries were analyzed in depth. In this workshop, tax resistance to the debt payment was suggested as a concrete response that might be given by the European citizenship. Moreover, the debt team highlighted the need of being pedagogic, coordinating and unifying the message at an international level so as to confront the blind alley that management of the debt as a shock tool inevitably leads to.

The work carried out by the different debt audit networks, especially in Greece, contrasted with the heterogeneous variety coming from the rights area. Here several movements spent hours sharing both experiences and information, with civil disobedience being the common denominator.

Occupy to stop repossessions

“There is a strong presence in the neighbourhoods in Spain. In Milan the movement is growing quietly, but it is taking shape and, in the last evictions we’ve had, the presence in the neighbourhood was also strong.” says Gonzalo Mosquiera of the Cantiere Social Centre, having just watched a video of a stoppage of a repossession in Madrid. Taking the lead from one of the tools that another housing group tried to put in place, Mosquiera’s collective have created a mobile app that allows users to view a map of notifications of evictions that might be taking place in Milan. He is quick to point out that there the campaign named Occupy Sfitto (Occupy the Empty) is more concentrated on preventing evictions of squats and the opening up of new squats for those without a home in a city that, he points out, has more that 80,000 empty dwellings owned privately and a further 4,500 empty public buildings. They have already forced the council to create a body that assesses each case individually.

“The situation in Germany is very different because we don’t have the same problems with mortgages”, confirms Hanno, a German activist, who also states however that the prevailing environment of fear is exploited by the landlords to increase rents, most notably in Hamburg. “In Berlin a short time ago locals managed for the first time to prevent a family being evicted, following the example of the Stop Desahucios (Stop Evictions) campaign in Spain and next week there is a protest being held for the right to a home”, explains Hanno.

A little later in the recently opened La Morada social centre, one of the Greek activists of Agora99 is speaking in a workshop about self-management and civil disobedience. He describes how, in Athens, the workers of a clinic occupied it in order to maintain the right to healthcare despite the proposed cuts.

Nearly 30 people attended the debate workshop to define and design a list of basic common rights. “In Paris we are working on the minimum wage. I think we need to fight for this on a European level and get it included on a list of European rights”, says Sophie Banasiak of Real Democracy Now Paris and other workers collectives. Sophie announced that on the 1st December there are protests organised based around these social rights and invited the other groups that were present to participate in order to make a Europe-wide mobilisation.

The removal process, that is the demand that the dominating powers resign, began more than a year and a half ago and will continue to be a key part of the European agenda. The commencement of a constituent process was one of the things that most inspired the participants. Roughly one hundred people worked throughout the Saturday afternoon to formalise the proposal, unifying the demands for direct, participative democracy through texts and communal events. Raúl Sánchez, one of the energizers of the axis of democracy, admitted during the morning session that the constituent debate does not have the same intensity in all the PIIGS countries (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) in spite of the fact that the “commission dictatorship” of the Troika has attempted to block democracy from Lisbon to Athens.

Saturday evening proposals

During Saturday evening, sheltered from the rain, the three central themes of debt, democracy and rights were being settled so that the proposals could be transferred to the meeting the following Sunday. It wasn’t easy: exhaustion, the difficulty of dealing with some concepts at the same time in Italian, Spanish and English, and the specific urgent matters from each country, weighed down the progress of the three meetings. However, there were several proposals before the proceedings were brought to a close, both regarding agreement on future dates and common approaches that bring forward a new agenda of actions, mainly as regards to communications, which started last 14N.

The meeting on Sunday, which initially was to take place in Puerta del Sol, was in the end held in the EKO community centre. For more than six hours, participants of each working party presented their conclusions and proposals and, although the meeting did not finally produce any definitive decision, several actions have been brought to the table. “Why are dates so important?” wondered Aitor from Barcelona, “we are supposed to establish a horizon to know what we want and how we want it done”. His intervention questioned the emphasis in establishing an overly prescriptive agenda for the movement, which, nevertheless, has declared a few dates, some of them in connection with the pace of the different nodes, and others purely reactive, like the call to “hack” the forthcoming meeting of the Council of Europe in Brussels next March 2013.

“The meeting of the European movements in Madrid has been a qualitative leap”, states Dario Lovaglio from Universidad Nómada (“Small open political laboratory and in process that enables the collective production of new theoretical paradigms”- taken from its web site). “On the one hand, for being an ambitious project: a step forward to reinvent European democracy; on the other, for its inclusive and plural capacity”. To Lovaglio, Agora99 is the first step towards the construction of another European political framework, which feeds on the actual experiences of the participant movements that cope with the crisis. “It is there, where the crisis is lived out everyday, that new ways can be thought up of democratically re-appropriating common property and social, collectively produced wealth, both material and immaterial”, concludes Lovaglio. Working to revert the general state of shock and convene another meeting in the near future is the next step for Agora99, a public and open round table for the 99%.

A device within the network for the spread of information

The urgent need to configure a communications tool to coordinate and communicate to the different European movements (and many others) was suggested during the weekend in Agora99. “It is very complicated to build such a tool, there must be a group of hackers -people who work in participatory processes - who think of how to generate it also through other developed experiences like the ones in Brazil or Bolivia, explained Guillermo from Patio Maravillas (an occupied social centre in Madrid). At present what exists is an email list and a willingness to facilitate a fundamental tool that will help put to work the plans of the meeting towards a new network, which should be set in the coming months.

[This article was originally published in Spanish on November 9th 2012]

By Isidro López (Madrilonia) / Translated by Sarah Pilar Iacobucci and Juan Martín Rodríguez

The announcement from Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank (ECB), about the plans for huge purchases of Spanish (and Italian) bonds has resulted in a rapid fall in the average interest rate that the Spanish Treasury must pay to finance itself. Pending confirmation of the details, the Spanish risk premium declined substantially to just under 400 points. The measure will not however be ‘free of charge’ for Spain.

Contrary to the information being published in the Anglo-Saxon and German media, the reduction of public expenditure has been a key policy in Spain since May of 2010, when the spread between the 10-year Spanish bond and the 10-year German bond exceeded 100 points. On August 3rd of 2012, the Spanish premier Mariano Rajoy confirmed an economic adjustment program of approximately 102 billion euros from 2012 to 2014 based on expenditure cuts and revenue increases. The cuts in the Healthcare and Education sectors, which depend on the regional budgets rather than the central government, are highly controversial given the dramatic consequences of the absence of certain hospital services and the dismissal of schoolteachers.

Meanwhile, the threat of a second bailout remains though the first bailout fund has not been completely paid out. Rajoy said he will decide whether to seek help or not only after the regional election in the Basque Country and Galicia, scheduled for October 21st. The contentious debates he wishes to postpone relate to the potential cuts to pensions and unemployment benefits. After massive protests led by public workers in July, the peoples’ reaction will be tested again on the labour unions’ demonstration on September 15th and the planned mass protest at the Congress of Deputies on September 25th.

The ECB is the key institution in the neoliberalisation project within the European Union (EU). It is worth remembering that this process has always been based around the creation of a transnational authority (the so-called troika: European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) which has imposed a series of economic conditions without any opportunity for democratic debate. Obviously, the social conflict resulting from these tough measures and their democratic illegitimacy takes place in the local arena of every EU nation-state, decreasing the support of the national governments in many cases (Papandreou, Zapatero, Berlusconi, Sarkozy, etc.) but never challenging the economic commands imposed by the troika, with its slogan “there is no alternative”. This dynamic is in fact the result of a fierce political battle that occurred in the early 80’s: the views of the British Thatcherite neoliberal and German ordoliberal alliance were imposed at the very inception of the federalist concept led by Jacques Delors, who was in favour of deepening the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and corporatist values that shaped the EEC until the 80’s.

The ECB represents the culmination of this process, which itself has developed almost entirely within the construct of the European Monetary System, the euro. The ECB, designed according to the tight monetary dogmas of Milton Friedman’s school of economics, has a mandate for price stability (inflation control) and an emphasis on independence and insulation from political interference, the latter being a euphemism for the European electorate. In other words, it is the perfect institution to manage the European economy since it avoids democratic interference. The main objective before the creation of the ECB was to avoid it becoming a lender of last resort; an authority, linked to the financial crisis, responsible for providing large sums of fresh-printed money to stabilize the falling prices of financial assets.

On the other hand, according to the post-Keynesian economist Hyman Mynsk the central bank has to act as a lender of last resort in order to prevent economic depressions. This view is therefore contradicted by the neoliberal dogma of market self-regulation. In addition, the central bank, ruling as a lender of last resort and consequently absorbing the debt of the financial players by money printing, should be backed by a state (or a productive social entity with a clearly-defined political status) that answers for the debt issued. Specifically, this last point is exactly what Germany is determined to avoid in the construction of the euro-area, which the ECB is reorganizing in the absence of a formally constituted power. The wealthy and not-so-wealthy country members are being shuffled through the back door, leaving the implicit guarantee of intervention in the hands of the German government. The Maastricht treaty and the Euro Stability Plan are the consequences of this approach which, despite being managed by Germany, France and England, has also integrated most of the elites in the continent into a single political project.

However, reality is very stubborn opponent and it seems that after all, old Hyman Mynsky was right. The ECB has acted as a lender of last resort almost exclusively since the beginning of the crisis, though always remarking its temporary nature rather than accepting this status definitely. Specifically, it started purchasing national debt in secondary markets from 2010 until the beginning of 2012. This program, relatively effective in stabilizing the risk premium, might even be successful in keeping the national debt interest rates at the level desired by the ECB, in other words, the rates the people of the EU need. In fact, the dramatic increase of the national-debt interest during the last months coincides with a suspension of debt purchases by the ECB. This being a disciplinary measure to push both Spain and Italy to accept the political requirements of the bailout, which will be arranged over the coming years.

Germany, maintaining its position, is reluctant to accept this policy in order to reinforce its political position. If Germany guarantees the neutralization of the debt by money-printing, the market pressure will cease in Spain, Italy and other targeted countries. Therefore, the political requirements, the privatizations and the budget cuts demanded from the “neutral” European elite would not be necessary. This would be the failure of the neoliberal flagship, which is the creation of the transnational European domain where “economic necessity” rules. The not-so-wealthy member states accept these mandates and contain the resulting social conflicts within their own borders. Besides being the government that supports the neoliberal system in Europe, Germany maintains many economic advantages. For example, it finances itself at a much lower cost than other countries targeted by financial agents, and subsequently avoids the political cost of a social crisis. This is the situation before the renewal of debt purchases by the ECB.

The question then is: what does this have to do with us? The conclusion is that the ECB is the seed of a future European state. This is of course not to say that a European state is a certainty but simply that the ECB is a money issuing entity that, in terms of classical political economy, is the representation of the European productive forces articulated through a social and territorial division of labour that transcends the national borders of every member state. The financial players and their political allies see it as a threat not only for the current model of obtaining profits from the national debt interest but also for the neoliberal regime itself.

Today’s nations, and also the would-be state of the ECB, are just the result of class struggle - those who do not like this term may say social conflicts. If the European leaders (representing the national elites) are risking starting a process that could threaten, or at least call into question, the almost absolute power they have over their territory and population, they do so because they know that social conflict may increase substantially in the near future. The consequences of this increasing struggle, whether the non-payment of debt or a popular open challenge to the political class, might jeopardise their power more profoundly. Thus, the elites’ “desperate” strategy is to sacrifice parts of their constitutional principles at the European level in order to avoid unpredictable effects at the national level. They expect that these measures will remain in the technical sphere, expecting the people not to understand their political significance for a while.

With regards to the financial powers, they try to keep them satisfied by emphasising the provisional nature of the measures and their subordination to the opening up of profitable national assets (privatizations and austerity cuts). At the same time, they raise the spectre of a potential national default when necessary. Naturally, our responsibility is to extend the conflict, pushing to refuse the debt and call into question the political representation. These should be our goals until the ’making-the-best-of-a-bad-job’ EU guarantees the democratic rights that would force Europe to assume its redistributive responsibilities.

[This article was originally published in Spanish on September 7th, 2012]