Nigel Farage launches a pamphlet on a trade exit from the EU, June, 2015. Demotix/ Guy Corbishley. All rights reserved.Expect an invitation from Nigel Farage soon. If you are on the British left and support democracy, the UKIP leader, no doubt full of mock-pathos, will ask you to join him in opposing the European Union. Arguing that the EU has crushed the democratic hopes of tiny Greece, he will say it is better to be outside altogether. But although the European Union in its present neoliberal form depends on the single currency to enforce its brutal political logic, the problems of the EU and the euro are not the same. Different policies will be required to answer the challenges of two different problems. Farage's solution - rejection of all internationalism in favour of pure national sovereignty - is no more equitable a solution than remaining in an unreformed EU.
The British left is deafeningly silent on European Union membership because decades of Blairite social liberalism have silenced its national-democratic instincts. Moreover the radical right, in the form of UKIP and much of the ruling Conservative Party, dominates the debate on Europe. Many on the left prefer to believe that the EU is a simple blank slate that reflects the predominant ideologies of whoever happens to be in charge, instead of accepting that it has an institutional and socio-economic logic of its own.
There is a clear line out of this confusion. The research of Alan W. Cafruny and Magnus Ryner, especially in the book they edited, A Ruined Fortress?:Neoliberal Hegemony and Transformation in Europe (2003) helps us grasp the current impasse. These unorthodox historical materialists present an overwhelming amount of evidence that the Europe of social welfare and corporatist labour relations is dead and buried. The tipping point was the 1999 launch of the single currency, since when "a novel and qualitative transformation in the nature of the Union" (4) has taken place. Which is to say, the euro did not simply supplement a pre-existing institutional mix, but was rather introduced as the means of securing radically new directions of policy.
