By Eleni Xilakis, PhD and Creston Davis, PhD
The European Union, in the past years, has shown its ruthless face to its south and now turns to the north. In the name of democracy, human rights and -yes- fraternity, Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain were forced to comply with undemocratic policies and endure catastrophic austerity in order to save northern banks and private investors. And take a look at France who is also heading towards the same disaster, and, despite a nearly complete media blackout in the USA, the French workers are fighting back and resisting austerity, making the situation difficult for Hollande.
Neoliberalism's ugly head is rearing with a vengeance and the EU is just one front in the new global order ominously enfolding all things into a dehumanizing logic of totalitarianism. We are reminded here of the lesson that what one often stands against is nearly always somewhere hidden deep within the very composition of one's stance itself: think of those who formed and are implementing the ideology of neoliberalism, Ayn Rand, F. Hayek, M. Friedman, A. Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, R. Reagan, Tony Blair, Bill and Hillary Clinton. What is it that they feared the most? It was state totalitarianism even while peddling extreme egoistical-individualism and simultaneously embracing free-markets trade deals that have undermined millions of jobs and precipitated extreme concentrations of wealth for a handful of people. In other words, their fight against state totalitarianism has quickly turned into neoliberal totalitarianism. Welcome to the desert of austerity.
From State Totalitarianism to Neoliberal Totalitarianism
We have been trained to think of totalitarianism as associated with a centralized state government apparatus, and this was true. But today as the nation-state apparatus gives way to privatization, financialization, transnational trade deals (NAFTA, TPP etc.) we need to revise the meaning of totalitarianism from the absolute control by the state or a governing branch of a highly centralized apparatus to an new autocratic rule by transnational corporations that have transcended the law, democracy and determine the state of exception through means of war and blood thirsty profit-making for themselves at the expense of billions of human beings.
On the Border between Slovenia and Austria in October, 2015 Photo Credit: Creston Davis, 2015
By now we are all too familiar with images of fleeing refugees from the war zones in the Middle East especially Syria: A drowned baby on a vacation beach frequented by wealthy European tourist in Turkey, a nursing mother who hasn't set down in days, children walking from war-torn Afghanistan to Europe. Our familiarity with these images too easily make us numb and indifferent, especially in the States where one presidential candidate wants to build a 50 Billion dollar wall and send the bill to Mexico. But look again, look behind the images and ask a few basic questions that no one is asking: Who started this Middle-Eastern crisis in the first place, and who is suffering as a consequence? What humanitarian, economic and political implications have emerged as a direct consequence of war that was in fact, by all accounts, unjustified?
If we step back and look from a bird's eye point of view, a dark picture comes into focus: the very nation(s) responsible for war in the Middle-East are the same ones building walls. Correction: multinational corporations are contracted out by the neoliberal puppet politicians to: (a) build these walls from Saudi Arabia to Israel to southern Europe and southern United States; (b) frack our earth that contaminates our water; (c) to start wars on no ethical justifiable grounds; and (d) to outsource our jobs and livelihood to make more profits that aren't taxed.
Many outcomes can be identified and characterized from these and other unmentioned acts of neoliberal injustice. But ponder this one consequence.
From war making an equation follows: War = Walls, and walls serve two equally important tasks: to keep unwanted people out whilst at the same time confining people. Walls assume vulnerability, fragility and a people in need of safety. But let's not be naïve, walls never serve their purpose, they betray their very nature. Walls by their nature are permeable and are more like a mass social therapy applied to "cure" us from our fear of the other--an "other" that is constructed by the very forces that are benefiting from the walls themselves. But what does this walled-therapy actually do to us as a people within its borders? Where does the illness in need of a cure (wall) itself come from? Think of another way that the wall between Mexico and the States is broached: The Carrier Corporation based in Indiana just sacked 1,400 jobs to save labor costs as they set-up a factory in Mexico. In other words, it's illegal for some to broach this wall but legal for others. Why can a multi-billion dollar corporate broach this wall whereas a human being worth nothing can't?
And then we have the never-ending terrorists threat that becomes more real than ever in European capitals, making Paris, London, Brussels (and now Istanbul) look like a movie set. The image peddled by the corporate media is the new tyranny stultifying any critical and sober thinking, as we stand by like fragile children spellbound. Meanwhile, European people face increasing unemployment in almost all members of the European Union, poverty, misery, inequality all contextualized within the neoliberal policies untouchable space of absolute corruption.
This is the picture of neoliberalism in general and the European Union in particular. These policies start to remind us more and more of a colonialized hegemony than a union, where any attempt of divergence gets punished and deserters destroyed so that nobody else dares do the same. It is a form of blackmail predicated on fear even as it sucks out all forms of freedom from us. This logic of fear, of a child in need of security, explains well what's happening in the UK today, and what we predict will continue to happen throughout the world in the coming years.
The main concern is that the Brexit has focused on xenophobia and one fears the rise of the far right not only in the UK but all over Europe; indeed all over the globe. But is nationalism what kills the European dream or is it rather the neoliberal European Union that creates and nourishes a quickly awakening fascism? It's time to stop thinking that the EU is based on democracy because it's very policies confirm the contrary.
Eleni Xilakis, PhD University of Paris-Panthéon-Sorbonne, is the co-director of The Global Center for Advanced Studies and Professor of Philosophy