Alex Foti on Sun, 20 Feb 2011 05:47:09 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> euromed revolution vs club euromed |
(tentative - lemme know what you think about it - best ciaos, lx) Ben Ali and Mubarak have bitten the dust. Gheddafi and Berlusconi, the bunga bunga twins, hang on, but not for long. The mobilization first on social networks, then on the streets by the precarious generation has sparked the whole of society into a fiery camp of opposition seizing the main public spaces of the nation for day on end, until the autocrat is finally toppled. The 2011 insurrection of Maghreb's youth against their despotic regimes speaks to the multiethnic generation of Europe that fought against austerity from London to Rome, from Paris to Athens in the fall of 2010. We have an enemy in common: the European neoliberal and monetarist oligarchy didn't want the pharaoh to go. Ben Ali and Mubarak were their men, people they could do business with. Tunisia and Egypt have turned democratic thanks to people power. Yet the EU is turning its back on them. But aren't Europe's fundamental rights enshrined in freedom and democracy? Fact is, the euro-elite doesn't like democracy. It has lost three referendums, but it has stayed in power in spite of the Great Recession and millions made jobless, cutting spending to pay homage to the bankers the financial markets which caused the crisis. Society is rebelling against cuts, but we have yet to tip the scale of power to push for a new mode of development, free higher education, poverty reduction, ecological remediation etc. The lesson of Cairo is fairly simple. We, too have to overthrow our autocrats in Europe. This is particularly true of Italy, where Mr B hangs on, gaining in parliamentary power as female judges finally put him on trial for his ever-ending streak of power abuses and corruption of any idea of morality, in spite of students rioting and women taking it to the streets: they were millions last Sunday asking him to resign. And like the student movement which put up barricades to express what the precarious generation thought of the nth time that Berlusconi saved his ass, by once more buying the consent of parliament, the women made Piazza del Popolo (Piazza of the People) their square. The opposition, which had staked everything on transformism of sections of the right and the ensuing no-confidence vote, lost instead the confidence of Italian society. If you guys are so inept, how you'll ever be able to get rid of him? In fact, a faction of the PD, the main opposition party, is in talks with the racist and anti-national-unity Northern League. This is madness, all the more so in the year the celebrates the 150th anniversary of Risorgimento and national unification. Luckily the ex-communist catholic gay and Puglia governor Nichi Vendola, who leads the recent political formation Left Ecology Freedom, is trying to change the game, by proposing a woman to the post of prime minister for the center-left. Her name is Rosy Bindi. She famously confronted Berlusconi on TV (who had insulted her by saying that she was more beautiful than intelligent) and put him to shame. But the elections are nowhere near and Mr B could last until 2013 - an eternity. Only a decisive mobilization on the model of Egypt, with demonstrators willing to occupy a symbolic square like people square could do the trick of removing berlusconi and its nefarious sexist influence on Spaghettiland, where corruption and organized crime, nepotism and gerontocracy, racism and securitarianism are the order of the day. Only if students, women, knowledge and culture workers seize a square and loudly declare until the despot is toppled, then Berlusconi. Most of Italian civil society at the moment is investing its hopes on the April 6 trial, but he will buy all the time he can get and change can't wait. The same can be said about Sarkozy's and Merkel's governments, which are not as immoral as Berlusconi but are crashing the whole of Europe with their eurogovernment as duopoly bent on austerity, whose disastrous effects are already clear in the wake of the cuts in spending made by the Tories and Lib-Dems in the UK. We Italians can only do our job if we have a radical idea of Europe. This also means that we, European radicals, can only be effective as opponents of economic conservatism, social discrimination and environmental destruction, if we are radically European. In my view, to be radical europeans means being able to find mobilizing ideas and forms of collective action that propose an alternative project to the neoliberal and monetarist that has hit the wall of popular delegitimation and financial crisis. To create forms of protest for the precarious generation that plunge the whole of the Continent in turmoil and regime change. Our historical mission should then be to provide a complement and a political alliance to the precarious youth that are rocking their casbahs. I thus submit here the hypothesis that the European Union can only be progressive as a Euromed Union, a political and economic union from the Maghreb to the Fjords, encompassing the whole of Turkey and the Middle East, as well as the ports of access to the Black and Red seas. Only a Euromed Union can put an end to the current persecution and detention of immigrants, and to the xenophobic attempts to revert the history of Europe toward a darker past, where christian nationalism is the law of the land or else. Only a Euromed Union can be a truly multicultural polity. Only a Euromed Union can solve the Israel-Palestine conflict fairly for Palestinians and securely for Israelis. The emerging democracies of Tunisia and Egypt, and soon Libya and Algeria, will have better chances to prosper by joining a much vaster economic and political community and that can only be the process of European federalism that for better or worse has reshaped the culture and the society of the Old Continent. We have to defeat austerity and overthrow the élite that sings its praise. By doing that, we will have brought the possibility of a Euromediterranean Political and Economic Union closer to reality. This could be the final objective of the ongoing revolution, the one that will finally politically enfranchise the precarious youth across Europe and the Mediterranean. I am for a Euro-Mediterranean Revolution. 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