July 9: ATM queue near Greek pro-EU rally with homeless man. Demotix/Chrissa Giannakoudi. All rights reserved.The project of Europe has transformed from
one of collective liberation from war, poverty and brutality to one of nauseating
inhumanity for the sake of maintaining our comfort and welfare. This is
presented to us as an a-political matter: not an ideological choice made by
politicians, but an economic necessity carried out pragmatically. In the
process, there is an Orwellian inversion of terms, such that the failure of the
euro is presented as success, oligarchy is presented as politically representative,
democratic protest as disruptive and irrelevant, human suffering as a
side-issue, sovereignty as the freedom to agree and submit, austerity as
realistic, our self-interest as the same as that of banks and the
corporate-political elite, and alternatives as non-existent.
In other words, the neoliberalization of
Europe is being presented to us as the solution to the very disorder and
violence it itself produces. The policies, relations, privileges and
humiliations this entails are driven by an alliance of north European
politicians, global financial institutions and transnational corporations.
These present the profit they derive from this arrangement as a form of
disinterested ‘good management’ practice. The only future they can imagine is
that of their own hegemony, a hegemony they imagine as gentle and noble. The
fact that, like any hegemony, it can only be held in place by dint of force and
destruction – descending at moments to ferocious barbarity – is literally unimagineable
and unspeakable.
Deadly
fractures
So, one of the most striking features of
Europe’s Greek crisis has been the sludge of self-deceptive thinking sustaining
Europe’s top negotiators with Greece. In a recent interview, Donald Tusk, the
former Polish prime minister and head of the European Council, countered
the widespread criticism that he has heard:
“I can’t accept
this argument, that someone was punished, especially Tsipras or Greece. The
whole process was about assistance to Greece … When we discuss facts, deeds and
numbers, this is the only number on the table: €80bn for Greek assistance, and
quite soft conditions. Not only [soft] financial conditions, but political
conditions — in fact, without collateral. Come on: what is the reason to claim
it’s something humiliating for Greece, or this is punishment for Tsipras?”
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
The comment is striking not only for what it tells of Tusk’s position, but for
getting to the heart of the fundamental questions about Europe that have been
laid bare by the Greek crisis.
Like so many crises, the conflict over how
best to address the economic conditions of Greece did not so much come into
existence ex nihilo as rudely tear
away the veil of politeness masking evolved fractures, tensions and corruptions
at work for many years.
Fractures: over the question of how to
relate the incommensurable social, political, economic and idealist yearnings
of the European project; questions over how to distribute and direct the mass
of power at Europe’s center; over the place of democratic principles and the
agonistic politics they produce; over how to engage the national and cultural differences
within Europe’s bounds and, ultimately, over the value of human life to Europe.
After all, Tusk’s distance – and that of
the entire Troika and Eurogroup – from the Greek people is literally deadly.
Just to recap some numbers that have been
common knowledge but which Tusk brackets – austerity measures imposed since
2010 have meant Greek minimum wages slashed by 20%, pensions and wages by up to
50%, while increasing unemployment to 25%; cutbacks in the health sector so
deep they
have led to exponential
rises in infant deaths, HIV, and malaria; a near-doubling of suicides and a
250% increase in depression; and a host of obstacles for Greeks requiring
medicine and medical care, from closing hospitals and shortages of medication
to insufficient
wages to pay for the medicines and care that are available. The more than
40 free community health clinics run and staffed by volunteers that have sprung
up across country are both admirable and completely inadequate to the crisis. 100,000
businesses have gone bankrupt, 200,000 Greeks have emigrated, 50% of youth are
unemployed. The lower middle class is being wiped out. Homelessness, previously
negligible, has surged to more than 20,000 former homeowners without jobs or
permanent shelter, while 30% of all Greeks are now living below poverty levels.
The new measures demanded by the Troika,
measures Tusk played an important role in pushing on Greece, will make this
worse still. Knowing all this and calling it “soft” while forcing the new
measures on the Greeks against their express, democratic will is gratuitous,
vicious inhumanity.
Indeed, in another Europe, a Europe we have
yet to make, this would be criminal.
It would be criminal precisely for the
reason that bad policies by politicians are not: the policies of the Troika and
the Eurogroup have no political or democratic legitimacy but were born of
informal alliances and backroom agreements by a small oligarchic clique, a
center of power answerable to no one. Under such conditions – of governance
without normative or democratic grounding – legal culpability is essential if
we in any fashion take the notion of a humane, rather than vicious, Europe
seriously.
It is as if there is a vast, insurmountable
wall: on one side stands Tusk with his single essential number – €80 billion in aid – which he would like to
have make any and all other numbers irrelevant. This side corresponds to the
future Europe Schäuble has proposed, along the lines of an intensified
political and economic union of the “powerful and disciplined” under German
leadership and shorn of the euro’s southern appendages. On the other side stand
the living, breathing human beings who will be made to pay for all this with
their health, homes, labor, minds, bodies, social and political lives.
Beyond
left and right?
Crucially, the European political parties
that once would have resisted this – Labour and Christian Democrats – now have
either joined in or simply stand aside. So, the head of the Eurogroup, Jeroen
Dijsselbloem, is a member of the once-powerful Dutch Labour Party that has
shrunk precipitously since it has joined the Liberals in a coalition. A loyal ally of Merkel and Schäuble – known to
some as their “water carrier” – and a firm believer in the neutrality of
neoliberal policies “beyond Left and Right”, Dijsselbloem’s clashes with Varoufakis
during negotiations were notorious. Praised by Dutch media for being “stubborn
as an ox” and cheered for standing with the greats of Europe, Dijsselbloem has
been one of the fiercest implementers of the demands on Greece, deeply
convinced of the irrelevance of all for which Labour once stood.
This has cleared the way for a radical politics
of dehumanization. A Neoliberal realpolitik.
A realpolitik that in the name of
Europe negates the Europe that gave birth to it: the Europe of democracy,
solidarity and equality.
One of the most striking statements Tusk
makes in his interview is to warn us of the dangers of radicalizing
anti-European ideologies that he perceives on the Left as well as Right. It
reminds him, he says, of the darkest moments in European history when radicals of
all stripes made common cause.
What Tusk misses is that this
radicalization – most especially the growing aversion of the Left and
progressives more generally to Europe – is a reactive radicalization, a response to a radical Neoliberalism
which he himself represents and enforces.
In contrast to neoliberalization at the
national level in democratic countries, the conditions imposed by the Troika
and Eurogroup on Greece go much farther, much more quickly. They are both radical
and revolutionary in forcing policies on Greece explicitly against the democratic wishes of the Greeks through the use of raw
and unselfconscious threat (if the Greeks do not do what is demanded of them
Europe will blow up their banking system).
Sustaining this endeavor is the fantasy
that the economic policies of the Troika supersede politics itself. Tusk
himself asserts that there are no alternatives. The neoliberal conceit is precisely
this: that its policies are not politics but the neutral application of invariant,
impersonal and transcendent economic mechanisms. (A standpoint that suggests a
striking relation of filiation between Neoliberalism and Marxism in this
regard.) Tusk and his ilk fail to perceive how destructive of the social,
civic, and ethical fabric of our societies these policies are because they are
not destructive to their own social,
civic and political rights, their own access to justice. Indeed, if anything,
they expand them.
A
Faustian bargain
In other words, Greece has exposed the raw split
between Europe’s ethical and political core. While Europe’s formal ethics are
those of inclusive human equality in diversity, dignity and security, the
political ideology is one of socio-economic precarity and inequality, harsh
realist politics, nationalist chauvinism, Calvinist discipline and punishment.
Two visions for the future of Europe are increasingly clearly delineated: one
which follows Schäuble’s fantasies for an intensified political and economic
union of Europe’s rich few and another that reconfigures a future Europe along
the lines of its original values, willing to pay the price, quite literally,
that it will take to make Europe more egalitarian, inclusive, diverse and
humane.
At its most reductive, this is an economic
calculation that conceives of wealth and value according to a highly limited
set of monetary and financial terms, a calculation that, as it were, reduces
the value of human life and a nation’s capital to the strength of the euro. The
alternative is a calculus that understands wealth to entail not money and
finance as such, so much as cultural, social, political, and environmental
welfare. It is the question of whether Europe’s economic riches are to be at
the service of its welfare, broadly and humanely conceived, or whether such
dynamic welfare is to be sacrificed for a punishing, raw economy that benefits
the few at the expense of the many.
This condition in which we find ourselves
marks the coming to fruition of arguments and policies tried out elsewhere for
the last three decades and now making their way into Europe’s heartland. Until
now, their objects have been those most distant from us: far away, in Third
World countries subjected to the rapacious incisions of the IMF and World Bank;
closer by in the East Bloc countries subjected to a ferocious liberalization
after the Cold War; and closer yet, along our borders, extending into the inner
reaches of our cities, in the regimes that have sprung up to control, exploit
and expel poor people from beyond Europe when and where they seek entry into
what is considered to be “ours”.
Until now, the preeminent guinea pigs of
neoliberal realpolitik in Europe have
been those who are not yet, are not completely or will never be the citizens of
Europe.
The Faustian bargain offered by Neoliberalism
has been that of increasing Europeans’ socio-economic precarity – displacing
national states’ commitment to the welfare of the people by a concern for the
welfare of corporations, banks, trade and financial flows – in exchange for
maintaining a chauvinist commitment to national identity and cultural
superiority.
This comes at a time when national cultural
and racial identities have been under pressure from two fronts: the global market
and global migration. The market, to the extent that it is translated by
national elites into projects of self-enrichment, is largely experienced as a
domestic phenomenon connected to international flows. Migration, to the extent
that it is translated by national elites into existential threats to the future
of the nation, is largely experienced as an external invasion of alien bodies, races,
ideas and lifeworlds.
Another way of putting this is this: given
the choice between multiculturalism and marketization, our societies have
overwhelmingly and rather consistently preferred the insecurities of the neoliberal
market to the precarities of diversity.
The fact that this is the deal being made
has largely been hidden from our societies by the fact that it is bodies conceived
as brown, alien, poor and Muslim – and correspondingly dangerous – that have
been made to feel the
most intense impact of Neoliberal policies. Precisely for this reason,
those who are white and (still) middle class can imagine that neoliberalism
entails the disciplining of the other to the benefit of its own welfare, even
at the moment that its own welfare is shrinking.
Just
numbers
Demonstration in Rome against migrant tragedy in the Mediterranean. Demotix/ Giuseppe Ciccia. All rights reserved.We see this in its most extreme form at
Europe’s external borders, where the poverty of those who attempt to enter is
sufficient, in and of itself, to justify their increasingly brutal and deadly
exclusion. No other argument is needed today, other than simply their economic
inferiority as this is linked, according to our society’s common sense, to the
inferiority of their race, culture and religion. If only they would make their
culture more like our own, they would not be poor, not need to migrate, not
bother and threaten us.
In this way, the deaths of the
20,000 migrants who have perished on Europe’s iron doorstep in the face of
ever more stringent surveillance, policing, and legislation – barbed wire
fences slicing feet, hands, grazing any bit of brown skin, border guards beating
those they catch; whole seas and generations of fish fed on their drowned
bodies; roads stained by their truck-crushed carcasses – all these dead are
said to have only themselves to blame.
As do, it is said, the countless others
transported across the continent, to be fed into our sexual, agricultural,
construction, and service machines, while they are milked for the profit to be
squeezed from their bodies’ needs for sleep, food and shelter; if, at least,
they do not want to become one of the thousands informally hunted down,
harassed, beaten, raped and killed across our continent’s cities and
countryside. Or simply forgotten, for years on end, in isolated asylum centers,
to the point that they go mad, become ill, kill themselves or threaten others.
There is no way to tell this story without
it sounding overdramatized and emotional. Precisely because we already know all
this. By now, this is just background noise to the public lives of our
societies, a newsflash here and there, more faceless bodies and little more
than bodies pressing in at our borders. Our politicians, our news, our
legislation has been drained of affect towards undocumented migrants. They have
no names, no faces and do not speak a tongue we know. As far as our politics
are concerned, they are just numbers.
Much like Greece today.
That is to say: part of the shock of the
moment is to see a European country and people treated as if they are a dark
Third World (Muslim) one. To see the Greeks treated as a people that do not deserve to be European and must prove
their intent to reform, to be disciplined, to earn our good graces. As a people
that does not deserve the full palette of recognition, dignity, democratic
self-assertion, and protection from exploitation that are the birthright of
(white, middle-class, elite) Europeans. The invisible boundary that divided the
world between the West and the poor, brown, Muslim Rest has been breached.
Which is not to say Europe has not been
practicing. On those who live in between. The poor, brown and Muslim
semi-citizens of our inner cities.
A few days before the Greek crisis broke,
another crisis erupted in the Netherlands. The police in The Hague killed a
brown man, a visitor from Aruba, one of the Dutch kingdom’s four countries.
Mitch Henriquez was just leaving a summer music festival, being rowdy with his
friends. The police told him to tone it down and move on. A minute later five policemen
were sitting on him, then put him in the car in handcuffs to take him to the
station. The next day he was dead.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office sent out a
press release. It said that Mitch Henriquez had become unwell in the car, the
officers had tried to reanimate him, but that this had ultimately failed. None
of this was of interest to any news media – as Holland’s one Black TV show host
tweeted.
Until a video appeared.
On the video, one of the officers is
choking Henriquez. By the time, the officers massed on his body step away, he
is unconscious, head lolling, handcuffed body limp. The police do not do
anything to care for him and keep at bay anyone else wanting to go to his aid. The
video suddenly exposes for all to see that the police killed him and then
blatantly lied to cover their tracks.
July 4:100 protesters at death of Mitch Henriquez in police custody arrested. Demotix/ Geronimo Matulessy. All rights reserved.Protests are organized by anti-fascists,
anti-racists and others, concerned citizens. They gather not in the
neighborhood where the killing happened, but slightly to the west, in front of
the police station of the “Painter’s Neighborhood.” Its streets named for the
famous artists in Dutch history, the recent history of the neighborhood itself
is rather infamous. One of the most thoroughly poor in all the Netherlands,
struggling with unemployment, physical degradation, social isolation, and
criminality, it has regularly been in the news. Its sizable pre-war Jewish
population decimated, it has since the 1980s become home to 110 nationalities,
many of them Muslim, many others Hindustani (the descendants of labourers
brought from India to Suriname in the late nineteenth century).
A reporter last year secured the neighbourhood’s
infamy by revealing that one area was dominated by orthodox Muslims who
harassed anyone not abiding by their strict rules of dress, behaviour and
consumption. Even people walking their dogs were scared. And the police did not
dare to interfere. The area was dubbed a “Little Caliphate” and the “Sharia
Triangle.” Days after the article appeared, Dutch ministers and politicians
appeared as well to inspect this travesty. It became international news, there
were debates in Parliament: it was a national scandal. Some ISIS supporters
from outside the neighbourhood thought this was a good moment and place to
demonstrate their affiliation. A nationalist Dutch far-right group immediately
countered with its own plans. For publicists, politicians, media and people
across the land, the Sharia Triangle became Holland’s name for all it feared:
Islamic orthodoxy and Islamic radicalism; recruitment of youth for Jihad in the
Middle East; women’s religious and cultural oppression; the erasure of Dutch
culture, norms and neighborhoods by immigrant ones; the creation of parallel
societies and legal systems; and migrant criminality.
And then it was discovered the entire
article was made up.
Completely made up. By a Hindustani-Dutch
journalist who in recent years had become expert at delivering the quotes and
stories his editors wanted, especially ones relating to minorities to which
white journalists lacked access, by inventing sources no one could trace. No
such thing as a Sharia Triangle existed anywhere in the Painters’ Neighborhood
or in The Hague or in the Netherlands. Nowhere.
Crucially, what was not news during all
this time, was the repressive profiling, surveillance and violence applied by
the police to discipline and punish residents in the Painters’ Neighborhood. In
an interview the city’s Chief of Police implied that Moroccans were barbarians,
genetically predisposed to be more violent. A local grassroots organization in
the Painters’ Neighborhood, the “Action Committee to Restore Trust” had begun
collecting accounts of police violence and harassment in an attempt to get
authorities at the national level to address the problem. Stories of
spontaneous police violence – broken bones, hernias, bruised ribs, torn
ligaments, wounded men repeatedly untreated for hours, then dumped barefoot on
the street; stories of denigrating insults and populist racism; and stories of
active collusion, obstruction and harassment of residents by police when residents
lodged complaints. Local journalists, taking an interest in these stories,
investigated too: their documentaries, news reports and articles supported the
stories.
But these were not a scandal. They were not
even national news. Any more than the killing of a young Hindustani man running
from police in The Hague some years ago was national news. So most Dutch do not
know about those stories or those documentaries, much less about the former
police officers who have publicly confirmed the violence, harassment and racism
they saw within the police force when they worked in this neighbourhood.
The first reaction of the mayor, Jozias van
Aartsen and the Chief of Police to the killing of Mitch Henriquez, then, was to
deny fervently that this had anything to do with structural police racism or
violence or that any such problem even existed. When pushed to explain the
riots, the mayor blamed the heat wave. And Ramadan. And, as an afterthought,
unemployment. He added, rather nonsensically, that actually Muslims were not
allowed to riot during Ramadan. In any and all cases, racism had nothing to do
with what happened, he declared. The Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark
Rutte called the rioters “stupid morons,” declared their behaviour unacceptable
and squarely supported – he said looking directly into the camera at one point
– authority, the police and the mayor.
The denials infuriated those concerned with
what happened even more. Night by night, the protests grew, turned into riots, people
pouring into the Painters’ Neighborhood from Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Utrecht and
farther afield. Plate glass windows were smashed, a theatre trashed, lighter
fluid poured on policemen, stones and bottles thrown, bus stops and refuse
burned on the streets. For the first time, the Netherlands had its own riots
against police brutality and racism, joining Ferguson, Baltimore, Tel Aviv,
Paris, London, Stockholm, Ürümqi, Singapore. The city was forced to bring in
police from other cities, a general curfew was announced for the neighbourhood
and mass arrests were carried out: all men, women, and children found outside
locked up. Since then the police have been tracking down all the rioters and protesters
they can find, going to cities across the land: in some cases in groups of 6
and 8, in plainclothes and their faces covered, to grab those they have
identified; in other cases breaking roughly into homes late at night and early
in the morning to nab others.
A few days later the Greek protests against
Europe’s austerity regime erupted.
* * *
One of the distinctive aspects of a
hegemonic, repressive system is that it presents itself as the solution to the
chaos it itself creates. It is no different with Neoliberalism.
There is a deep fundamental blindness in
our society to the violence that is being committed in its name, whether that
name is “Europe” or “The Netherlands” or “The Hague.” Blindness by those living
in white, middle-class European society, to the increasingly segregated,
discriminated, hyper-surveilled, harassed and policed lives of those living in
poor “black” neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods we need to understand both in the
urban and in the continental sense.
Within the context of a neoliberal Europe,
“Greece” is a backward neighborhood. Think of the culturalist clichés of
Greece: lazy, corrupt, recalcitrant, disruptive, irrational and dangerous to
the future of Europe. Think of the treatment of the Greeks: the legislature
bereft of its national sovereignty, forced to agree with any and all policing policies
handed to it by the Troika, the people’s democratic right to representation,
legitimation and protest pushed aside. Increasingly, full civil and social
rights at both the local and the (inter)national levels are imagined to be the
rights only of those conceived as economically “productive.” Rights are treated
as something earned, like and alongside income, rather than inherent.
Correspondingly, those dependent on the state, a drain on “our welfare”, see a
cut-back in their rights, along with a cut-back in state support and welfare.
Austerity entails not just economic
belt-tightening, but also a constriction in the civil rights a state extends to
its economically “backward” citizens and in the social life that it allows
them. (We might recall here not only the structural disruption and harassment
of youth hanging out on the streets or the police’s forced entries into homes
that offer no resistance, but also a number of court cases now making the
rounds in the Netherlands on whether those receiving benefits from the Dutch
state – grandparents caring for their grandchildren and parents visiting their
children while at work – are criminally negligeant in not reporting such family
life as “work” to the Dutch state for which they are expected to demand
payment, pay taxes and reduce their state benefits.)
This structural blindness of our media,
politicians, pundits and scholars – ensconced in a lack of contact and context
– will make the stories that occasionally spurt out of these neighborhoods intuitively
feel like an exception rather than like everyday life. Certainly not like our everyday life and relation to our state, our politicians and our
police. This lack of lived experience with the violence of our state entails an
almost inevitable blindness to the deepening divide between those our states
protect and those whose life it represses, expels, and humiliates. A blindness
even to the fact that our state and our society expels, represses and
humiliates those who are economically vulnerable, who are brown, who are Muslim
in the name of safeguarding us and our
interests, whether or not we agree to
that.
Much like Tusk was blind to the violence
austerity has brought to Greece, in our name.
* * *
Malta. Coast guards unload body of migrant drowned in Mediterranean. Demotix/ Christian Mangion. All rights reserved.Each of these crises have very particular histories,
different actors and institutions, all played out at different scales. None
will be entirely or even easily comparable to any other. Yet still, the basic
mechanism is one that we must see, namely this: our welfare is being traded for
their equality.
We have no way to speak of this in a
serious and engaged public fashion.
And that silence is deadly. Time and again, this is the basic failure of our
politicians, media and pundits: they do not see what is happening, they cannot
name it. They think the choice is between order and disorder; between respect
for the law and its violation.
What they do not see is that this disorder
and lawlessness they perceive mimics the disorder of the power they represent.
In The Hague: a local police force that for years has been making its own laws,
violating the law and has put itself above the law. In Europe: an informal
group, elected by none, making its own laws, violating international
sovereignty, and putting itself above the law. In all cases, that is to say, at
all the levels at which today we experience the reorganization of our lives –
in our neighbourhoods, our work, our social life, our national systems and the
European project itself – the effect is to discipline and suppress those
formally enfranchised but informally disenfranchised by a neoliberal
realpolitik that couples power, force and rights to economic success.
For a long time, we have not wanted to
choose. We have wanted to maintain both our
welfare and their equality and
thought this was possible. The riots in our cities and Europe’s crisis with
Greece make clear, however, that we do have to choose if we do not want things
to get worse before they get better. Which will come first: our welfare or
their democratic equality? For how long will we let our states choke others in
our name?