The celebrations in Rome were marked by the publication of a white paper in which European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker established various possible scenarios for the EU’s future — keep the current rhythm, step on the accelerator, apply the brakes, or go into reverse. Not a word was offered on the substance, the policies, that would define these routes. Nothing on youth unemployment, the migration crisis, cuts, violence against women, or climate change. In an umpteenth display of ignorance, Europe’s elite closed their eyes to the crises affecting the continent and the concerns of those experiencing them. [...]
With its aggressive foreign policy, the European Union has intensified conflicts around the world and contributed to fresh waves of forced migration. With its police management of its borders, it has turned the Mediterranean into an enormous mass grave, asylum into an exception and immigration into a danger for whoever is fleeing from bombs and misery. With its institutional xenophobia, the EU has normalized the discourse and proposals of the new radical right formations and the xenophobic populism that are today spreading across Europe, a specter of the past now Le Pen-izing minds across the continent. [...]
Sixty years ago, what is today the European Union was born as a project to create a single market, a customs union, and greater coordination between states in coal mining and steel production. Extractivism, free competition, and commodity circulation are the germ of the European project. Let’s not trick ourselves by presenting the policies of the last decade as somehow exceptional. Market logic and monetary and budget questions have always been the priority. [...]
We could say that today Europe is in dispute. They want to trap us in a false dichotomy where we have to choose between a neoliberal EU or a xenophobic retreat into the nation. This choice is not only a trick, it is a mutually reinforcing one.
We need a Plan B for Europe — and its problem is not its speed, but its direction. Let’s start to give form to a European project that recovers the roots of democracy in partisan antifascism, solidarity, peace, and social justice. A European project that neither excludes nor expels anyone, for it is a project no one would want to walk away from. That task has today become as urgent as it is indispensable.
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