openDemocracy: Over the worst in Europe: the 2010s have not ended like the 1930s

There are only two known ways to bring together diverse countries into one political unit. One is from above – empire-building. The other is from below, via the mechanisms of democracy, leading to the birth of entities such as the USA. The European Union tried to find a third way, avoiding both empire and democracy: achieving union by technocratic imperative.

With the demos thus effectively shut out and with no Emperor to exercise oversight, the experts took it upon themselves to move political integration along, bereft of effective control and accountability. With the marketplace seen as the default mode of all human activity, it was decided to start political integration with the introduction of a single currency, the euro. The rest, it was assumed, would follow in due course, given that people are only interested in market outcomes, rather than in participating in the politics of “Brussels”. [...]

We know now something that was not generally known (but should have been) even ten years ago: when governments place the common good in the care of “independent agencies”, thus divorcing decision-making from democratic oversight, the common good gets hijacked by special interests. In the end, in spite of being shut out from the decision-making, it is the demos who pay the price. This is what happened to the demos of Europe in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and the sovereign debt crisis of the early 2010s. In both crises, the culprits bought themselves yachts; the ordinary people got saddled with record public debt.[4] [...]

Identity politics does away with this kind of individual, closing human beings into cages of group “identities”. The French thinker Raphael Glucksman has rather cleverly translated such identities as “groups of origin”: “communautes d’origine, de foi, de couleur, de peau”.[9] You cannot escape from the tribe you were born into; and everything you think, say or do is an expression of that tribe’s identity. If you try, as an autonomous individual, to escape from the tribe, by for example making the necessary efforts and sacrifices to get a good education, then you are not congratulated for achievement; you are denounced for having acquired a privilege.[10]

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