Can’t live, with or without the USA.
Michael Hindley argues for a closer dialogue between European progressives and the American left.
For those who think that Europe is and should be the centre of world civilisation, and unfortunately there are many such, Europe’s record in world affairs is to say the least an embarrassment. How to explain the twentieth century horrors if Europe is the cradle of civilisation ? The short cut answer and one which still provides much momentum for European integration on the model of the European Union is that the disasters of the last century can be laid at the door of the horrible nation state.
The stark if unpalatable reality is however that Europe was liberated from Nazism by the resistance of the Russian people and the intervention of the USA - both the Soviet Union and the USA had stayed out and been kept out of Europe until 1945.
For the adherents of liberal democracy who had proven incapable for the main part in resisting totalitarianism, the former USSR and the USA proved an embarrassing saviour.
After the war it was US dollars which revived the western European economies and US dollars which provided the NATO nuclear umbrella under which the economic revival prospered. This was opposed by the Left, but unfortunately much of the Left’s credibility was fatally undermined by its support for the insupportable, totalitarian Socialism à la Uncle Joe. The final collapse of the Soviet Empire left many without a political anchorage.
The degree to which the USA underwrote and bankrolled the revival of liberal democracy is paradoxically well-document but nowadays well forgotten.
That role continues in reduced but watchful form in the subworld of Bilderberg meetings and all kinds of scholarships and freebies for transatlantic ‘opinion formers’.
Since the 1980s the USA has become the power house for the free market economy and the EU with its consensus driven economy, once seen as an alternative to le défi Americain, is increasingly under pressure from rampant Anglo-Saxon predatory capitalism. Continental Social Democrats who welcomed Tony Blair as an ally have been sadly disillusioned to find - as De Gaulle always warned - that the UK is still the American Trojan Horse in Europe.
What to do? as Lenin said. Firstly to admit that there can be no change in the world as it is without a fundamental shift in the USA, too.
Unfortunately the Left - at least in my experience - has been neglectful of developing ties with progressives in the USA. When I tried to get fellow MEPs interested in dialogue with the USA during my time in Brussels I was usually met with incredulity and at best indifference. Yet when I am in the States I am struck by the vibrancy of opposition there to free market globalisation. That hoary old chestnut that there is no viable Left Party in the USA may be true but the absence of a Left party has not inhibited the progressive agenda as much as we Europeans dogmatically insist it ought. For example, progressives in the USA managed to squeeze as many concessions for the Labour and Environmental lobby out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as their European counterparts got into the Single Market/Maastricht Treaty agenda. President Clinton’s attempts to ‘fast-track’ globalisation have foundered on an alliance of unions and progressives. Indeed there is a welcome upsurge in both trade union activity and militancy in the USA.
The US agit-prop street theatre opposition - coupled with an imaginative use of the Internet - to the Seattle WTO Summit and more recently to the World Bank and IMF meetings is both impressive and inspiring.
The free marketeers have as usual their advanced agenda. There has been a Transatlantic Business Dialogue, backed by the Commission, for some while. The British political Right are raising the idea of a Transatlantic Free Trade Area. Since the Thatcher era the right has captured the imagination of the uncommitted as being ‘innovative’, whereas the left often seems to be supporting the status quo. There is a lot to be said for a Transatlantic political dialogue with North American progressives.
So time to set aside the traditional scornful dismissal of things American on the European left.
