The last 6 months have shown both the anachronistic nature of the global status quo, and the lack of a political project that genuinely changes the logic of global politics. The European project, despite certain appearances, has the potential to introduce a paradigm shift to an era of transnationalism. Niccolo Milanese We are trying to accelerate while stuck in neutral gear. The explosion in the numbers of civil society NGOs, think tanks, humanitarian actions, international media, ‘global’ forums, protests and meetings over the past 20 years following the fall of the Berlin wall has refined the demands and raised the awareness of new generations, but it has yet to produce any political project that measures up to the heights of their ambitions. As more and more problems are revealed to be ‘global’ in their complexity and implications, and become increasingly dramatic in their effects, this impotence is likely to become more and more frustrating, the gap between aspiration and possible action ever greater. Over the past 6 months we have seen and felt a new stage in this dislocation, with the spilling-over of both hope and anger at a global level. The G7 may have become the G20, the United States of America may have elected a leader exalted at least briefly in large parts of the Western World, but even we citizens lucky enough to live in the freer and more powerful parts of the world are, when we respond to global political problems we are passionate about, increasingly in the position of humble petitioners to our leaders, whether they are national politicians or unelected bureaucrats in international organisations. We have the feeling of rolling backwards from autonomy, rolling away from democracy, at the very moment when the interconnectedness of global society was supposed to assert itself. The heretical question in such a situation is to ask whether ‘global society’ is itself a meaningful aspiration, and whether in such a society either democracy or autonomy would be possible. There are many who see in all ‘globalisations’ exclusively a loss of self-determination, the rolling back of long-fought-for social rights and the emergence of, at the one end, a cosmopolitan class above the concerns of the grounded plebeians, and at the other a destitute irregular migrant class administered from one detention centre to another before finally either being propelled back to the land they came from, or disappearing into a clandestine and precarious existence on the underside of more privileged societies. But in a world of global issues it is both cowardly and ill-advised not to have global aspirations, such ambitions are the precious threads that unite humankind. It is perhaps the ‘society’ element of ‘global society’ that needs to be questioned more strongly. For there are limits to how much social partners can achieve independently of political powers, at least in current conditions, and almost all of these political powers remain resolutely national in their constitution. This is, needless to say, even the case of that most ‘global’ of institutions, the United Nations, in which each nation state has a vote in the General Assembly and only privileged or elected nation states in its other organs. The World Bank and the IMF are also structured in such a way that their members are nation states. In an age which takes as a primary motif the recognition of political problems which cross national boundaries, it is startling that the nation state remains so widely unchallenged as the primary locus of political authority. If international institutions seem undemocratic, if citizens feel they do not have any say over their own destinies, or choice about the world they live in, then this antinomy is surely a good place to start. The only existing political entity which does meaningfully challenge the nation-state system is the European Union. To take a recent example, the G20 of the world’s most powerful economies, in distinction to the other international institutions mentioned, consists of only 19 nation states and the European Union. This, of course, is completely unfair (not to mention the exclusion of the other 170 countries), because it means that France, Germany, Italy and the UK are effectively represented twice. According to the logic of the aims of the G20, however, the exclusion of the European Union would have been nonsensical: it is the most powerful single market in the world, and has powers that are to a large extent independent of the nation states in how it regulates that market. What this fact alone means is that the European Union has an enormous unrealised potential as a transformative power in global politics. As the most powerful trading bloc in the world, the European Union could be a positive force for social justice in the real functioning of the world economy. If it were to enforce decent work standards, such that it would not allow the sale of goods that are produced under exploitative conditions, whether they were produced in the EU or outside of the EU, then it would be an immense force for the positive improvement of work standards throughout the world. Likewise the European Union could enforce environmental standards so that it is impossible or very much more expensive to buy goods produced in environmentally damaging ways. At the moment a European consumer has to pay more if she chooses to buy a product that was not produced under conditions of exploitation, and pay more if she chooses a product that does not do as much damage to the environment – this is a damning indication of the values currently underlying the European free market. If the European Union were to introduce an international financial transaction tax resembling a Tobin Tax for all currency transactions carried out in Europe, if it were to introduce a cap on salaries, if it were to clamp down on tax havens, all of these would force real change in the global financial economy because other countries would simply be forced to react. No European nation state acting on its own has so much influence, and none of these policies could effectively be introduced at the national level alone. Campaigning for these measures to be introduced at a global level is entirely justified, but there is no global actor who can implement and enforce them, and without a radical change to the current logics of international power, any such ‘global’ actor would be the puppet of the most powerful nation states behind it. But the European Union not only has the powers necessary to enact these reforms at least in its own market, but also has the potential to change the logic of international relations and negotiations themselves. International negotiations are currently played out according to a fiction that the fate and interest of each nation state is independent from every other. Each ‘national’ negotiator is supposed to represent an exclusive, territorially-defined citizenry, the destiny and interests of which is supposed to be exhausted by the interests of the nation state. This is not only an increasingly untrue fiction - as more and more people have personal connections with several different countries, as multinationals operate by definition in several nation states, and as the world financial economy is increasingly interwoven – but it is also a blinkered, pessimistic and materialistic vision of inescapable human division and conflict. Furthermore, it has the implication that the more economically and militarily powerful nation states inevitably control the negotiations. If the conservative demands that the European Union should be defined by its geographical borders are effectively resisted, it could define a new notion of citizenship less anchored in the fiction of national boundaries. If the European Union were to choose to operate not only in the interests of each of its nation states (and some nation states more than others) but rather in the interests of its peoples, and if it realised that amongst its peoples are not only citizens whose lives are entirely contained in their nation states, but peoples with connections with the whole world, that it has a citizenry in a state of continual flux and change, then the configuration of the European Union could shift the logic of global relations. It would effect a paradigm shift from necessarily unequal negotiation between nation states each based on the fiction of exclusive citizenships, to intrinsically multilateral negotiations in which each negotiator is not only representing the short-term interests of those he currently represents, but is forced to consider those he may potentially come to represent in the future, no matter where they are from. This outcome has to be fought for, and there are strong forces opposing it, but at no other level of politics is such a shift a potentiality. It would no longer make sense to try count the members of the Group of most powerful economies (be it the G2, the G7, the G20, the G180...), it would be a question of forcing each of the negotiators to think increasingly in the interests of all humanity. These arguments for why Europe should matter for those who care about global politics could be multiplied, including environmental, human rights, gender equality and peace concerns. On the right is a box of just some of the possible policies that could be adopted at a European level, impossible at the national level, and which would contribute to a genuine paradigm shift in the global status-quo from a logic of national compromise to a logic of transnational aspiration. It is in these senses that it is not so much of an exaggeration to say that for an individual in Europe wanting to militate for a different unfolding of our common global future, Europe is the last remaining utopia. Yet one month before the European Elections in June, with confidence in the EU at rock-bottom and a likely record-low turnout, attaching so much importance to the Europe as a potential actor for historic change seems deluded. Not only does the European Union seem to be impotent in global politics, but when it does act it often tends to do so in favour of maintaining the status quo, even to promote a politics many would call ‘neoliberal’. In the face of the financial crisis, for example, it proved incapable of agreeing on a rescue package for its more vulnerable members, such as Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, which have all had recourse to the IMF instead as guarantor for state borrowing, on terms which neither promote investment in social justice nor welfare. Several judgements in the European Courts over recent years have favoured multinationals rather than workers. In the face of flagrant discrimination against migrants in countries like Italy, the European Union has been unwilling to enforce the standards of human rights it claims to represent. It was apparently impotent in dealing with the recent Gaza crisis, and other military crises in Congo. This list could be extended. What is important in such a situation is to understand why an institution so powerful on paper and which has so much potential for transforming the global political landscape both seems impotent and only provokes either apathy or antagonism to its very existence amongst so many people. There is a veritable new industry of research into these questions in universities, in think tanks, and in civil society, much of it funded by the European institutions themselves, but to us the answer seems straightforward: there is no visible political party or wide-ranging civil-society coalition promoting an alternative and progressive European politics at a transnational level. This is not to say that there is no difference between the major European political parties that exist and are taking part in the elections next month. Nor is it to say that the European political parties do not have very much power in Europe and are therefore irrelevant. The European parliament effectively has the power to elect the European commission, and it has the right to veto legislation proposed by the Commission. The Party of European Socialists promotes a much more socially progressive European politics than the dominant European Peoples Party. The European Left and the European Green parties promote more radical policies. But all of these parties are federations or coalitions of national parties. They do not have the structure necessary to pull political authority and attention effectively away from national politics. This has the result that although it is estimated that 60-80% of legislation effecting European citizens originates from the European Institutions, it is only discussed when it enters national legislation, at which point it invariably seems like an imposition from outside. There are also various campaigns and civil society organisations that work at European level, but they remain issue-specific, technical and often have the dull bureaucratic outlook which many consider to be contagious in Brussels. They lack the capacity to inspire sufficient imagination of the possibilities of a new society to even effectively critique the outmoded status quo. The political energies unleashed in recent months have shown the anachronistic nature of the global logic of political power but also the insufficient logic of ‘global civil society’, which lacks any project for transforming the global status quo, and remains largely issue based, even in its more popular and influential manifestations. Europe matters, then, because it is the level at which any genuinely innovative political and cultural project which seeks to change the dominant global logics of contemporary politics must articulate itself if it is launched by those of us in this part of the world. It matters because it is the only existing political engine which can drive this project beyond the exclusionary and anachronistic logics of the nation state system. And it matters because if it is ignored by those who care about global politics it will subsist in its stultifying greyness and be a deadweight on our dreams. Alternative European Transnational policies As an illustration of the potentials of transnational politics at a European level, here are several policies that the European Union could adopt to influence the shape of global politics. They are not a manifesto, they are simple illustrations of an alternative European politics. - Moralise globalisation: Europe is the most powerful single market in the world. If it enforced decent work, human rights and environmental standards for all goods produced in Europe, and all goods imported into Europe, it would both improve the global situation in each of these areas and force other states to adapt. - Provide a democratic alternative to the IMF: if the European Union agreed on a rescue package for members states of the European Union which have been victims of the financial crisis, and made this rescue package both more democratic and more socially just than those proposed by the IMF, it would not only help people in Europe, it would also provide a positive example for the democratisation of the IMF and World Bank. - Introduce a Tobin Tax : An effective transaction tax on currency speculation could only be implemented transnationally. There have already been proposals for the European Union to adopt such a tax, but they have been rejected by the European Central Bank. - Adopt and enforce a migration policy that places hospitality and human dignity at the centre of its concerns: European legislation on migration and detention has been becoming more repressive, at the same time as human rights abuses and discrimination are tolerated on Europe’s borders. By transforming this situation and working with home countries of migrants, Europe would show that supra-national institutions do not simply serve to protect the interests of national citizens, but that another way of conceiving politics is possible. For more information on the Laval, Viking, Ruffert, and Luxembourg cases see the site of the European Trade Unions congress.