For NLR, a new social framework is the prerequisite for a European regeneration. Already in 1989 an editorial pronounces that “socialist renewal remains the only basis on which the problems of the [Eastern European] region can be lastingly tackled”.45 The search for such a “socialist renewal” is motivated by a sense of discontent over social policy in Europe. We have already seen how inEsprit the possibility of a new beginning has been posited on the basis of discontent over the undemocratic and inscrutable decision- making processes epitomized by Maastricht. Similarly inNLR, as Chapter Three has already indicated (see Section 3.4), Maastricht serves as a springboard for advocating a vision of a renewal of Europe which incorporates - to an extent at least - the question of Eastern Europe.
While Esprit has identified the lack of democratic processes as its main concern in relation to Maastricht, NLR stresses how the treaty will tip the already markedly neoliberal policies in Europe even further towards the interests of big business. On the question of democratizing Europe, Mary Kaldor’s aforementioned article, for example, makes only passing reference to the need for a “democratization of new and existing trans-European institutions” (p. 36). This is not to say that the argument pertaining to a “lack of democracy” is entirely absent. It is mentioned in many of the articles, such as a 1992 article by Niels Christiansen which discusses the Danish No-vote to the Maastricht treaty. The author makes mention of the fact that “the bureaucracy in Brussels is too far away, and besides, is impervious to the claims of popular movements” and pronounces that, overall, “the EC suffers from what has been called a ‘democratic deficit’”.46 By and large, however, the discussion of the European democratic deficit is simply not as important toNLR’scritique of Maastricht as it is inEsprit.
45
‘Themes’,NLR, 176 (1989), 1-3 (p. 1). 46
Both journals identify civil society groups, more commonly referred to in
NLR as “social movements”, as the potential sources of European renewal. Of special importance to NLR are traditional labour movements and trade unions, though it also grants much attention also to the social movements emanating from Eastern Europe.47 Their main role in a European context is to redress Europe’s existing economic and social imbalances, which are currently under even greater threat from the Maastricht treaty. Patrick Camiller, for example, has the following to say on the issue of Maastricht.
Whatever elements of indicative planning it [Maastricht] may have contained, the programme of European integration has been progressively stripped down to a core idea that the removal of national barriers to capital movement and economic activity will clear the path to dynamic renewal of the European economy.”48
He then calls upon the European labour movements and trade unions to provide a positive counterbalance to this economic onslaught. For it is only if the “organized labour movements of continental Europe”, and the “European Left” as a whole unite, Camiller claims, that they can provide an “alternative to 1992” (pp. 10-11). Other articles, such as one by John Grahl and Paul Teague entitled ‘The Cost of Neo-Liberal Europe’, also point to the way in which Europe has been “hijacked by corporate interests”,49 resulting in a complete absence of a “social space” (p. 48). The authors then appeal for a united Europe in which the dispersed national trade unions need to rally together in order to ensure a unified European social space.
Undermining these proposals, however, is always an intermittent scepticism about their viability. Intellectual historian Donald Sassoon has pointed out that this uncertainty was characteristic of the European socialist movement which found itself marginalized during the neo-liberal resurgence of the early 1990s.50 Accordingly, Peter Gowan, in his article ‘Western Economic 47
See for example: Andrzej Walicki, ‘From Stalinism to Post-Communist Pluralism: The Case of Poland’, NLR, 185 (1991), 92-121; Petr Uhl‚ ‘The Fight for a Socialist Democracy in Czechoslovakia’,NLR, 179 (1990), 111-119.
48
Patrick Camiller, ‘Beyond 1992: The Left and Europe’,NLR, 175 (1989), 5-19 (p. 8). 49
John Grahl and Paul Teague, ‘The Cost of Neo-Liberal Europe’,NLR, 174 (1989), 33-51 (p. 49).
50
See Donald Sassoon, ‘The New Revisionism’, inOne Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century(New York: The New Press, 1996), pp. 730-755.
Diplomacy and the New Eastern Europe’, heavily criticizes the “Western” goal of striving for the quickest possible transition to capitalism in Eastern Europe without taking account of the social costs of such a development, and remains unconvinced that social forces there will be able to exert any real influence. Similarly, Italian author Lucio Magri notes that Europe is in fact marked by an inherently “weak capacity to foster and support mass movements”51 amongst workers, which will also limit the possibility for co-operation between East and West. Thus, although Magri is deeply committed to the idea that Europe’s social problems need to be addressed in a pan-European rather than national framework, he is doubtful about the chances of success. Where the possibility of a renewal is seriously discussed, however, it depends on an alliance between Eastern and Western European “reform forces”. For example, one of NLR’s
editorials pronounces that “as the West European governments prepare to give up many of their national regulatory levers, an alliance between the Western Left and socialist reform forces in the East could throw back the neo-liberal offensive of the past decade and place planned social advance once again at the heart of debate on the continent.”52
Accordingly, Camiller writes that “the European Left should in principle welcome the idea of a genuine integration of the economic and cultural resources of a continent whose fragmentation has underlaid two world wars in this century” (‘Beyond 1992’, p. 11). Note that this quotation is one of only a few occasions whereNLR refers to the “continent” of Europe, not just “EU - Europe” in the sense of a political or economic entity. When it comes to relaunching a socialist Europe, the Eastern European countries are being quite readily integrated into a European framework in order to pronounce a European social renewal. In fact, it presents the only instance in which NLR declares East and West to be part of a commonEuropeanframework and united and motivated by a common goal. Moreover, the “reform forces” not only share the same goal, but are also made out to be the carriers of expressly “European” traditions which constitute the “cosmopolitan Enlightenment ideal” (p. 9). This “ideal” 51
Lucio Magri, ‘The European Left between Crisis and Refoundation’,NLR, 189 (1991), 5-19 (p. 8).
52
encompasses the values of “liberty, equality and solidarity for all residents of Europe” (p. 15). In fact, Camiller argues, the current struggle over Europe is in his view at the core of the “destiny of the three-hundred-year tradition of the Enlightenment” (p. 16). For the socialist movement is the carrier of these ideals: “the socialist movement could rightly claim to be the inheritor of the Enlightenment ideal of a Europe in which national antagonisms had been overcome” (p. 6).
In a similar vein, Mary Kaldor’s article stresses the role of social movements throughout the 1980s and discusses the future part that they might play in establishing a new sense of pan-European solidarity and social justice. The Western peace movements in the 1980s built “links with peace, green and human rights groups in the East”, as a result of which “the individual isolated dissident gave way to social movements as a new form of opposition in East- Central Europe” (‘After the Cold War’, p. 34). Kaldor asserts, like Camiller, that these movements represent the “proud and honourable socialist tradition in Europe – of workers’ movements, ideas and education” (p. 37).
On the basis of these existing links between Eastern and Western groups, Kaldor asserts that a new direction for Europe might be viable. Currently, she detects a trend of an “Americanization of Europe”, marked by “high levels of military spending, high levels of private consumption, a kind of unifying materialist culture, and pockets of poverty especially in the European periphery” (p. 35). However, she also envisages a second possible direction for Europe.
The second direction, proposed by the new social movements, emphasizes their concerns about peace, the environment, gender, multiculturalism and democracy. This would involve a more equal relationship between East and West Europe in which there was change in the West as well as the East (p. 36).
As Kaldor sees it, Europe in its present form is a dystopia, marked by materialism, capitalism, and militarism. The realisation of a socialist, pacifist, and green Europe will depend crucially on the re-uniting of Eastern and Western social movements. These social movements, she maintains, will be the
main factors in European renewal, rather than the integrating forces of shared history and democracy as propounded inEsprit.
The social renewal which NLR advocates here might build on the involvement of Eastern Europe, but it is in fact restricted to promoting NLR’s
predetermined agenda of a social Europe. Thus, whileNLR criticizes “Western” discourse for its allegedly narcissistic gaze in connection with a democratic renewal, it in fact appropriates Eastern Europe in a very similar fashion when it comes to calling for a European social renewal.