Bulwark on occupied terrain | Is the European Union any use to progressive politics?

The role of the European Union is controversial in the globalisation-critical movement. Some regard it as a possible engine of re-regulation and a counterweight to US politics. Others do not wish to place any hopes in the EU because of the existing neoliberalism of this institution. What does a closer look at specific fields of policy-making tell us?

Markus Wissen

Sections of the globalisation-critical movement see the EU as an important terrain for the regaining of the political ability to act. In December 2001 Attac Germany, for example, demanded in a press statement on the Brussels EU summit that the EU should become the ‘trailblazer in the re-regulation of the financial markets.’ The initiator of the French initiative raisons d'agir, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who died at the beginning of 2002, spoke out in favour of a European social state ‘in order to be able to put a stop to the raw and brutal power of narrow-minded economic interests’ (taz, 11.04.2001).
Bourdieu and Attac are of course both of the opinion that the EU in its present form is a trailblazer for neoliberalism rather than a bulwark against it. For example, Attac France's Manifest 2002 criticises the possibility ‘of “foisting” unpopular measures on citizens via the EU which governments at the national level would be able to impose only with the greatest difficulty.’ And in the final years of his political activity Bourdieu was untiring in his placing the blame for the intensification of social contradictions on the ‘Tietmeyer principle’ – the absolute priority of monetary stability over other economic objectives – which was europeanised by the creation of the European Central Bank.

Territorial hierarchy

That the EU is nevertheless presented time and again as a potential institutional terrain for anti-neoliberal politics is probably due to the non-contemporaneity of the economy, which is forming itself on a global scale, and state politics, which continues to be primarily organised on a national level. This non-contemporaneity is perceived as the central problem by many critics of globalisation. Its solution appears to lie in political-state forms of organisation at the supranational level. And –the argument goes – where would be a better place to start than at the European level, which already possesses a certain density of supranational institutions (such as the European Parliament) and of regulatory instruments (e.g. monetary policy)?
It is in fact a central question of power, who controls what at which spatial level and how the different spatial levels relate to one another. Marxist geographers in the UK and the US have been discussing this problem for some time by using the concept of scale. This describes, first, the spatial level at which societal and state actors are organised, at which conflicts are resolved and at which institutions are formed, i.e. the local, regional, national, supranational and global levels. Second, the concept describes the relationship of these levels to one another. The question here is, how do the processes and institutions at the different spatial levels intersect or overlap and to what extent do spatial hierarchies develop as a result.
The relationship (of power) among the different spatial levels is subject to a considerable dynamism in the epoch of globalisation: some state competences are moved from the national to the supranational or global level (up-scaling), while others are moved to the regional or local level (down-scaling). These shifts do not follow any functional necessities but are the subject of social struggles for power and control. European integration in the form of the EU offers plenty of illustrative material on this.
Thus the progress of integration since the middle of the 80s can be interpreted as an up-scaling of state competences driven by economic interests, which contributed to the shift in societal relationships of power in Europe in favour of big capital. A major player in this connection was and is the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) – a body in which the heads of leading European concerns have joined forces to organise the formation of opinion among Europe's economic elite and to put new issues on the political agenda. The initiative for the completion of the European Single Market, with which the march towards integration, after years of standing still, was put on a neoliberal path and gained speed again, came from the ERT at the beginning of the 80s.

The experiment of extensions to the East

The Single Market project promoted the concentration of capital in Europe and thus also the formation of European champions – European business mergers which were intended to strengthen the position of the European economy in the competition between the USA-Japan-Europe triad. At the same time the project created constraints at the European level, which increased the competitive pressure and thus also the pressure to adjust on national players and regulatory systems (such as social security systems or the regulation of labour markets). In this way it contributed to the breaking up of the nation-state, Fordist class compromises of the decades following the Second World War and to the disciplining of trade unions and social movements. Via the up-scaling of the economy and state politics the position of precisely those players in the national ‘arenas,’ who had at first put up resistance to the neoliberal restructuring, was weakened. A similar effect was obtained by the integration steps which followed the Single Market project, such as the Maastricht Treaty with its hard stability criteria and Economic and Monetary Union. The Single Market was thus also a model experiment for the worldwide liberalisation of trade.
The coming eastward enlargement of the EU could strengthen the disciplinary effect of the integration projects of the 80s and 90s even further. It is a highly asymmetric process, which has already in the run-up to enlargement led to severe social-spatial aberrations in the countries concerned. The step-by-step initiation of Eastern Europe into the EU has been characterised by ‘increasing income disparities, growing poverty and strong regional disequilibria’ (Dorothee Bohle). The candidate countries form a kind of experimental field: as a condition for EU membership they are obliged to carry out reforms such as the far-reaching privatisation of social security systems, which can then be re-imported into the old EU member states.

Progressive up-scaling

These disciplinary effects of state-economic up-scaling are supplemented by a series of flanking measures, which are ‘activating’ and thus secure acceptance. Among these are, for example, the qualification programmes and measures in favour of impoverished city areas co-financed by the European Social and Regional Funds. The symbolic dimension of European politics should also not be underestimated. The EU made an essential contribution, for example, to the establishment of concepts such as competitiveness, modernisation, flexibility and stability, which were a response to the crises and upheavals of the 90s. With publications such as the often quoted 1993 ‘White Book’ of the European Commission the EU helped to ‘normalise’ neoliberalism.
The up-scaling of state authority in the course of European integration is, however, not only the concern of capital interests. There are also examples of attempts to establish progressive regulations at the European level. These however were far less successful.
When the revision of the Maastricht Treaty was on the agenda of the Amsterdam EU summit in 1997, the Euromarch movement, which was formed by left-wing trade unionists and globalisation critics, advocated that EU policies should take greater consideration of social and employment policy issues. It demanded a European policy for full employment, the payment of a subsistence minimum and the inclusion of social components in the convergence criteria for Economic and Monetary Union. At the Amsterdam summit 50 000 people demonstrated for these aims.
The fact that a chapter on employment was in fact included in the Treaty of Union was certainly due to the insistence of the French government under its social-democratic Prime Minister Jospin. The French government was still influenced by the labour disputes of the winter of 1995-96. However, no obligations were imposed with regard to employment policy which would have irritated the neoliberal orientation of the integration process and put the national governments under pressure. Business interest groups opposed such obligations, as did the majority of the national governments. European employment policy thus also comes in a neoliberal guise: the promotion of competitiveness is considered the key to the creation of jobs.
The ambivalence of the progressive up-scaling can also be seen in reference to gender relations and equality policy. In the second half of the 1990s progress in this field had been made at the European level as a result of the struggles of the women's movement and of feminist lobby groups. While at the EU summit in Essen in 1994 women were still largely regarded as victims, who required special aids on the labour market, in November 1997 in Luxembourg the European summit committed itself to gender mainstreaming. According to this concept, the equality of men and women is to be supported by examining all employment policy measures at the planning stage for gender-specific effects. In a large number of EU member states this has increased the pressure to put the issue of gender equality on the national agenda. For Example the UK was forced, as a direct result of EU policy, ‘to accept higher standards for the low wage sector. The British low wage strategy towards the largely female part-time workers was thus undermined’ (Brigitte Young).
Nevertheless, the limits to gender mainstreaming by the EU are obvious: it is not at all directed towards both sexes. Rather, at its core ‘a female-specific project of consensus’ (Susanne Schunter-Kleemann). Issues such as the redistribution of wage labour and unpaid labour or the structures of power between the sexes are excluded. The EU is more concerned with ‘making equal treatment palatable to personnel managers and heads of government departments because of its advantages to them: advantages of cost, creativity, efficiency and marketing.’
Thus, on one hand, the up-scaling of state-political competences which was struggled for by the women's movement and feminist lobby groups had a similar effect to that of the politics of influential capital groups described above: where the latter contributed to the breaking up of the nation-state and Fordist class compromises, the former brought the movement into Fordist-patriarchal gender relations. The contemporaneity of the neoliberal and the anti-patriarchal offensives led on the other hand to a down-scaling of responsibilities to the private sphere and the individual. The result of EU equality policy was therefore a more efficient utilisation of ‘human capital’ rather than the permanent removal of gender hierarchies. Furthermore, as a result of the cutbacks in the social sphere which have been de facto necessitated by the Maastricht criteria, there has been a reprivatisation of the tasks concerned with reproduction: looking after children, for example, ‘again became an economic and social externality’ (Young). Equality between men and women as intended by the European policy of gender mainstreaming refers ‘to the abstract idea of an individualism which in the final analysis is free of reproductive activities’.

Exhausted capacities

The attempts to utilise the EU as a vehicle for progressive politics remain, where they do not fail completely, extremely ambivalent in their effects. This is the difference between them and the much more successful capital-oriented up-scaling. For the policy of the globalisation-critical movement towards the EU this leads to the following conclusions: the spatial organisation of politics and the economy – in the shape of the EU, for example – is not only the result of, but also the precondition for and medium of, societal conflicts. These do not take place, therefore, on a neutral institutional terrain, but on one where positions of power are already established and distributed. Whoever wishes to achieve emancipative goals has only two alternatives: either the goal has to be somehow capable of being linked to the ruling definitions of problems and strategies – or it has to question successfully these very strategies and with them the ruling spatial-institutional forms.
The effect of the first alternative is extremely problematic under the conditions of a neoliberal European Union. Even if the achieved up-scaling puts pressure in individual cases on backward regulations in some member states, it is often linked with a down-scaling in the form of the privatisation of responsibility. Social and gender-specific asymmetries are strengthened rather than reduced by this. This points to the great power of inertia of spatial-institutional constellations such as the EU, which time and again disappoint the all-too-great hopes placed in their capacity to change ifself.
The central challenge thus lies in the second alternative: it is a question of challenging the very existence of the neoliberal institutional terrains of the EU (and not only their 'false' politics. The decisive starting-point for this is to be found in our daily practice. This forms the sphere in which neoliberal rule will either be consolidated or undermined. The penetration of economics into more and more areas of life is a central part of European politics. Neoliberalism is intended to characterise patterns of work and consumption, personal relationships, perceptive and imaginative horizons. Its strength depends on the extent to which it succeeds in doing this. It develops cracks wherever people resist the neoliberal penetration of their daily lives. Precisely because neoliberal hegemony is essentially based on the penetration of economics into daily life, it is vulnerable at this level.
The changing of daily practice is not an alternative to the up-scaling of emancipative politics. However, it points the latter in the right direction. It is no longer a question of making the EU useful for anti-neoliberal politics via reforms. It is a question, rather, of creating forums, which lend the manifold local practices of resistance an international dimension and strengthen their resolve.

Markus Wissen works for the German Federal Coordination Internationalism (BUKO) programme ‘World Economy’ and is a social scientist at the University of Frankfurt am Main.

References:

Balanyá, Belén, Ann Doherty, Olivier Hoedeman, Adam Ma’anit and Erik Wesselius: Konzern Europa. Die unkontrollierte Macht der Unternehmen, Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2001
Bohle, Dorothee: ‘EU-Integration und Osterweiterung: die Konturen einer neuen europäischen Unordnung,’ in: Bieling, Hans-Jürgen/ Jochen Steinhilber (eds.): Die Konfiguration Europas. Dimensionen einer kritischen Integrationstheorie, Westfälisches Dampfboot, Münster 2000
Schunter-Kleemann, Susanne: Thesen für das Streitgespräch: Gender Mainstreaming – Abschaffung oder Aufwertung von Frauenpolitik, paper presented at the conference ‘Geschlechter-Aufgabe gender mainstreaming: Abschaffung, Umdeutung oder Aufwertung von Frauenpolitik’, Berlin 18/19 May 2001 (www.rosalux.de/Einzel/gendermain/kleemann.pdf)
Swyngedouw, Erik: ‘Neither Global nor Local. ‘Glocalization’ and the Politics of Scale,’ in: Kevin R. Cox (ed.): Spaces of Globalization. Reasserting the Power of the Local, The Guilford Press, London 1997
Young, Brigitte: ‘Geschlechterpolitik und disziplinierender Neoliberalismus in der Europäischen Union,’ in: Hans-Jürgen Bieling/ Jochen Steinhilber, op.cit., pp. 131-161