Thomas Fazi | The European Union and the Contemporary Left

Class Unity spoke with journalist and author Thomas Fazi about the European Union, Europe’s postwar relationship with the United States, and the contemporary crisis of the European left. Their discussion examines the Russia-Ukraine war, NATO, the Nord Stream pipeline, Europe’s industrial decline, and Fazi’s account of EU institutions as mechanisms of depoliticization and external discipline. It also considers the social blocs that benefit from European integration, tensions between American and European capital, Brexit, monetary sovereignty, austerity, populism, and the prospects for anti-EU politics from the left. Fazi writes for UnHerd and Compact and is the author or co-author of books including The Battle for Europe, Reclaiming the State, and The Covid Consensus. The original Class Unity conversation and Fazi’s newsletter provide the video and further examples of his work.

Class Unity: Hello, everyone. Today we’ll be speaking with Thomas Fazi about European politics, the European Union, NATO, and the Ukraine conflict. Thomas Fazi is a writer and columnist for Compact magazine and UnHerd. He writes on geopolitics, economics, war, and energy, and he has written numerous books. His most recent English-language books are The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left, co-authored with Toby Green, and Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World, co-authored with Bill Mitchell. He has also written a book on Europe and the European Union titled The Battle for Europe: How an Elite Hijacked a Continent—and How We Can Take It Back. Thanks for joining us, Thomas. We appreciate you coming on. You’ve recently written about the Ukraine conflict. Could you tell us about that and about how the conflict has affected European politics and the economy?

Thomas Fazi: Yes. Well, first of all, thanks for having me, guys. I think the point I’ve tried to reflect on in some of the articles I’ve written recently is why the European Union—and European countries more generally—have acted as they have vis-à-vis the Russia-Ukraine conflict, because from a realist, rationalist standpoint it doesn’t really make sense. There is a realist school of thought which says that most states tend to act rationally to increase their advantages vis-à-vis other countries. They tend to try to increase their power and wealth and, more generally, at least protect their sovereignty. If you look at the various actors in the conflict—the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Europe or the European Union—when it comes to the United States, Russia, and Ukraine, it is not hard to understand their rationales and goals in the war. It is not hard to pinpoint a rational motive behind their actions.

I would say the United States is clearly using Ukraine to fight a proxy war against Russia. It wants to weaken Russia by using Ukraine as cannon fodder. That is pretty clear in my view. I think it is morally quite disgusting, but it makes rational sense from an imperialist standpoint. Russia’s stance in the war is also quite clear. It felt that its sovereignty was threatened by what NATO was doing in Ukraine in the years and months leading up to the conflict, and it intervened to stop in its tracks what it considered a risk to its territorial integrity and national security. It did not want NATO right up against the huge border it shares with Ukraine, especially given the rather explicit anti-Russian stance that NATO had already taken by then and maintained for some time. So it is quite clear what Russia is trying to do in this war; again, one can agree with it or not, but it makes sense.

Ukraine obviously sees itself as fighting to defend itself against Russia. That is pretty straightforward. But when it comes to the European Union, what does the EU stand to gain from joining the war in the way that it has—essentially subordinating its policy to US-NATO policy and going along with the proxy-war strategy? America is very far away, so it has not really been affected by the war from a security standpoint. It has not been negatively affected economically either; in fact, it has benefited economically in many respects because it is now selling Europe gas that Europe used to get from Russia. It has benefited in a quite obvious, direct way from this war. It is also benefiting in several other ways, at least in the short term: first and foremost, by boosting NATO, which was half-dead before the conflict, and by reasserting its control and hegemony over Europe. That is another US goal in this war.

It is about weakening Russia on the one hand and reasserting American control over the vassal states of Europe on the other. The first goal—weakening Russia—has not worked out very well, but the second goal, reasserting control over Europe, has worked out extremely well for the United States. What does Europe stand to gain from this war? It has paid a huge economic price by essentially cutting itself off from Russian gas and other Russian resources, to the point that Germany, which used to be Europe’s economic powerhouse, is now effectively in a technical recession. Its industries are struggling enormously. There is open talk of deindustrialization in Germany as more and more businesses and industries are forced to close because of rising energy costs. It has been an absolute tragedy from an economic standpoint, not only for Germany but for most of the major European economies. If you look at industrial production in Europe, it has been on a downhill slope for a long time.

Europe is essentially deindustrializing as a result of this conflict. There is clearly no direct economic benefit from the standpoint of the economy at large. Of course, there are sectors that benefit from the situation—the European military-industrial complex, for example—but from the perspective of the collective interests of the European nations, as hard as those may be to define, this war has not been beneficial at all. In fact, it has been a tragedy. As always, the working and middle classes have paid the highest price, but we are also seeing European capital—big capital and industrial capital—suffering greatly from this war. So this goes beyond a traditional labor-capital conflict. Nearly all sectors, apart from a few, have suffered greatly. Then there is the even bigger security question.

How does it make sense for Europe to escalate tensions to the point where there is a real risk—and open talk—of the need to prepare for a conventional, all-out war with Russia, which could easily escalate into a nuclear war? From a rational standpoint, there is no way to see how this benefits Europe. Europe clearly has a collective interest in trying to avoid war with Russia at any cost. This isn’t rocket science; it is Geopolitics 101. You want to avoid a war with Russia, which would obviously have devastating consequences for the continent. Again, America is pretty far away, so it would not be affected as directly by a conventional war with Russia as Europe would be. The question, then, is why Europe is doing this when its overarching collective interest—leaving aside the various subsidiary interests—is clearly to normalize relations with Russia, both economically and geopolitically. That is pretty straightforward from my perspective.

We share thousands and thousands of kilometers of border with Russia; it is literally our neighbor. The idea that it makes sense to antagonize this massive, nuclear-armed neighbor, which also happens to possess many resources from which we would benefit, makes no sense whatsoever. There are a number of answers to this question, but I think they can all be traced back to Europe’s progressive loss of sovereignty and autonomy over time. This largely results from the fact that Europe has never been fully autonomous or fully sovereign. Europe’s autonomy is part of the idealized postwar narrative, but Europe has always occupied a subordinate position vis-à-vis the United States. The United States still has thousands of troops stationed in Europe and has had them there since World War II, most notably in the two countries that lost the war—Germany and Italy—but elsewhere as well.

Many of these troops are stationed in those countries on the basis of bilateral treaties that remain secret or confidential seventy years after they were signed. Even though we tend to speak of Europe and America as allies, there is an obvious imbalance of power when one of the two allies essentially occupies the other militarily. There are myriad other ways in which the United States continues to exercise enormous influence over Europe. It exercises great influence over the intellectual ecosystem through its huge archipelago of think tanks, media organizations, NGOs, and so forth, which powerfully shape public debate, especially at the elite level. More generally, the United States has long had—and continues to have—strong institutional links to Europe, especially at the intelligence, security, and military levels, mostly through NATO.

NATO is presented as an alliance of equals, when in fact it is obviously a US-dominated organization that Washington has used to maintain its control over Europe since the war—and even after the Cold War—by constantly finding and inventing new enemies to justify NATO’s continued existence. Then there is the crucial role of the European Union, which is usually seen as a counterbalance to American power. This is certainly how many starry-eyed leftists in Europe have often viewed it. They have almost attributed an anti-imperialist dimension to the European Union. In fact, the European Union is the exact opposite. The Americans were major promoters of European federalism and integration in the postwar period. I think they understood very well that, by exercising influence over a centralized system of power, they would be able to control much of the continent without having to exercise their influence over every individual government. They saw that as very effective, and it has been.

This has become increasingly apparent during the Ukraine war. We have seen the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, speak almost as an American envoy, going out of her way to ensure that all EU member states remain aligned with and subordinated to the US-NATO strategy. I think that really reveals what the EU is all about. It was never about Europe’s emancipation from America. In fact, it has always been one of the tools the United States has used to exercise control over Europe. When you combine all these elements, you begin to understand why Europe is apparently incapable of acting rationally in its own interests and instead seems to act in the interests of other centers of power—namely, Washington and NATO. Perhaps the most glaring example is the fact that virtually everyone in Europe knows that, whether directly or indirectly, the United States was behind the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline.

For those who don’t know, Nord Stream was—or technically still is—a pipeline connecting Russia to Germany, and it was one of the pillars of Germany’s economic success over the previous twenty years. The pipeline was bombed and put out of use in September 2022, a few months after the Russian invasion. It is an open secret—and even the mainstream media has pretty much admitted—that in one form or another the United States was behind it, because the United States was the actor with the most to gain from severing ties, once and for all and even on a symbolic level, between Germany and Russia, and more generally between Europe and Russia. The pipeline symbolized the growing economic and energy interconnections between Europe and Russia during the decade leading up to the war. Not a single European leader, except Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, has said anything about this. Orbán recently said, “Look, everyone knows America is behind this.

Why is no one saying anything?” There have been investigations, but they were swiftly closed without divulging any information about the conclusions they reached. It is hard to imagine a better example of the institutional—and also psychological—subordination of European elites to America. America can bomb critical European infrastructure, and no one in Europe will say anything about it. The media will cover it up, politicians and governments will cover it up, the intelligence and security services will cover it up, and the police will cover it up by not pursuing any investigation worthy of the name. That is what European governments have done. So, in part, there is your answer. Years of vassalization have bred a European political class of very poor intellectual and political quality. Vassals will be vassals.

If you have an entire system designed to block anyone with Europe’s strategic interests at heart from climbing the political ladder, while promoting those willing to serve foreign interests—American and NATO interests—then this is the political elite you end up with. There is another issue. Through the European Union, governments have delegated much of what would ordinarily be governmental competence in the economic, monetary, and bureaucratic spheres to the EU. Most of those decisions are now taken in Brussels, where the European institutions are located, and in Frankfurt, where the European Central Bank is located. All the major economic-policy decisions are taken there, not at the government level. You can see what impact that would have. It breeds a political class that has not been accustomed to making high-stakes decisions for a very long time. Politics with a capital P is, first, economic policy—and that has been delegated to the EU—and, second, foreign, security, and defense policy—and that has largely been delegated to NATO.

European governments have therefore delegated all the major aspects of politics and policymaking to supranational and international institutions. Even if you do not believe that every politician is acting in bad faith or is part of some nefarious plan, this kind of system will inevitably breed an infantilized political class. You end up with politicians who think politics is about ruling on minor, secondary issues—urban planning and things of that sort—which are of course important, but politics with a capital P is something else. Europe now has a political class that has not been accustomed to dealing with politics with a capital P for a very long time. That is how we have ended up in the mess we are in now. Sorry for the long, winding answer.

Class Unity: No, it’s great. I have a question. One way you put it in one of your articles was that what is going on is “intra-Western economic cannibalization,” and I think that’s a good way to put it. If Germany is the powerhouse of Europe, it is losing its export market in China and its cheap raw materials from Russia because it is expected to play along with this new Cold War. It is basically being asked to commit suicide. That is how I see it: Europe is being asked to commit political-economic suicide. My question is this. The answer I’m getting from you is that the European elites are basically domesticated house pets. They have inhabited this idiotic technocratic space for so long that they no longer know how to act like grown-ups. I can see that. Europe is totally depoliticized. The EU hobbles politics and depoliticizes everything.

It is totally anti-democratic and technocratic; there is no sovereignty, and no one is in charge of the currency. But then the analysis basically comes down to these people having been habituated into acting like fools or making mistakes. Can we disaggregate the groups and nations a little more? Perhaps there is a client oligarchy or a comprador element. There are probably segments within European countries that are actually benefiting. How might that work?

Thomas Fazi: Absolutely. If you look at the political elites, it is fairly obvious how they benefit from playing along with this system. Part of the problem with the internationalization and supranationalization—and I would say even privatization—of politics is that it has created a massive global ecosystem in which a politician’s career is no longer limited to the national context. In fact, the national context is nowadays seen more as a stepping-stone toward the point when your real career begins:when you are kicked out of office by the voters. That is not something you need to be concerned about, because unlike in the past, you no longer see your entire political life as something you will pursue within that nation.

Once you have finished in office, a whole array of international and supranational institutions, both public and private, are ready to open their doors to you and provide very well-paid jobs—much better paid than whatever you earned as a politician—especially if you have done your job as a comprador elite. It is not uncommon for national politicians in Europe to go to work for European institutions after they lose elections. You can almost see a hierarchy: the national level is at the bottom; after that, you can work your way up to the European or supranational institutions; then there are international institutions such as the IMF, where many of these people also end up; and after that there are the big financial institutions, where you probably make the most money. I have lost count of how many presidents of the European Commission, once they finished their mandates, have gone to work for big American investment banks—American, not coincidentally—and mostly for Goldman Sachs. A great many European commissioners have ended up working for Goldman Sachs after finishing their mandates. So that is one answer.

Class Unity: And the financial sector?

Thomas Fazi: Absolutely. Many of these European commissioners go to work for the financial sector. There are a great many ties between Goldman Sachs in particular and European political elites. Mario Monti, the technocrat who was essentially imposed on Italy in 2011 when the Berlusconi government fell, came from Goldman Sachs. Mario Draghi had worked for Goldman Sachs as well, while José Manuel Barroso and other European commissioners went on to work for Goldman Sachs. That is one part of the answer. From a politician’s perspective, you are no longer as worried as you once would have been about maintaining consensus. In fact, you may have more to gain by simply going along with the script. Of course, you have to play the part while you are in opposition and trying to get elected: you will make many grand statements about all the good things you are going to do for your country.

But once you get into power, you must play along with what your international and supranational overlords expect from you if you want to enjoy a good career afterward. That is part of the problem created by the supranationalization of politics. Then, of course, there are economic sectors that have also benefited. The financial sector—even the European financial sector—obviously benefits from this architecture, which is strongly geared toward financial capital. The European Union is founded on the free movement of capital, labor, and goods. These are its three pillars. Capital has always aimed to unshackle itself from the national level, and you can see how the European Union embodies this quintessential capitalist project: it was founded on the idea of unshackling capital from any form of national control. You can see why the financial sector, and big capital more generally, benefits from this very pro-capital institutional architecture. The European Union is geared toward an export-led economy.

If you are a large industrial company that can afford to rely on exports, then you have everything to gain from a system designed to repress labor: one that unshackles capital on the one hand and keeps wages down and undermines organized labor on the other. The EU treaties themselves are a condensation of neoliberal ideology. If you are a large exporting company, you benefit from a system that suppresses wages. Of course, that creates a problem for smaller companies dependent on the domestic economy and internal demand, because people have less money to spend. Small and medium-sized capital has not benefited as much from this system. In Italy, it is quite clear that sectors dependent on internal demand have suffered greatly, and those tend to be smaller enterprises and businesses. The large companies and industries that rely heavily on exports, on the other hand, have benefited from this institutional architecture. There are therefore clear segments of the economy that have benefited.

The entire European Union project has been a project of capital against labor—and, I would say, of big capital against labor and small and medium-sized capital. You can see that it has driven economic concentration in nearly every sector. Not everyone has lost out from this system. For a long time, major European businesses were able to compete—quite healthily, to some degree—with American businesses. That has generated growing tensions as the international context has changed. The United States is less and less capable of imposing its economic will on other countries and of using the dollar’s exorbitant privilege to survive without an industrial base, as it has done for several decades. American elites understand very well that this world is coming to an end. They are trying to fight and slow that process, but they realize it is happening. They are not complete idiots. I think this is why we have seen growing tensions between Europe and America, and between European and American businesses.

They first emerged clearly under Donald Trump, who levied tariffs on European cars and other imports. We have been seeing a growing struggle between European and American capital as the United States recognizes the need to reindustrialize—or at least attempts to reindustrialize. European industry consequently becomes much more of a competitor than it was in the past. That explains what may at first seem counterproductive: why would the United States want to weaken its strongest ally economically? It does not seem to make sense at face value, but it does once you realize that America understands that its empire is shrinking. The informal American empire—America’s ability to impose its will, militarily and economically, on virtually the entire planet—no longer exists. Increasingly, the American empire is shrinking to the so-called collective West. In substantive terms, the American empire today is really Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. It is basically NATO, or NATO-plus. That is pretty much all that is left.

In this context of heightened geopolitical tension and intensifying American attempts to preserve what remains of its global hegemony by slowing the rise of China, Russia, and other powers, reaffirming control over its vassals is quintessential. America cannot afford to lose its protectorates in Europe and elsewhere. More than ever, it sees the economic weakening of those countries as a price worth paying, even if it may hurt American businesses because Europeans then have less money to buy American products. It weakens industrial competitors, and by weakening these countries, the United States also makes them easier to control and more willing to accept an American military presence, even when that goes against their material self-interest. Weakening Germany, for example, has been very important in getting Germany on board with the US-NATO strategy in Ukraine. We are seeing a growing US presence throughout its protectorates. We see the same thing in Asia—with Australia, Japan, and South Korea. It is the same everywhere. As the United States remilitarizes its relations with virtually the entire world, maintaining these forward bases is absolutely fundamental. This also explains the changing relationship between American elites, European elites, and the elites of the vassal states more generally.

Class Unity: I do have a question about big capital, which you said is not so tied to the fate of Europe—or the rest of Europe, I suppose. You mentioned that Germany is deindustrializing. Some of the largest automobile manufacturers are announcing that they are shutting down factories and moving to the United States and China. What is the real cost to them of doing that? I’m sure there is a cost to shutting down and setting up somewhere else, but if you are a massive corporation, you can simply move your capital—withdraw your funds and put them somewhere else. The workers lose by getting laid off, and perhaps the intermediary suppliers and medium-sized businesses get the shaft as well. I can see that there is a cost for big capital in Europe, but are these even German interests we are talking about, or are they merely the shareholders of an international corporation with no real connection to Europe?

Thomas Fazi: First and foremost, when it comes to capital, it has always tried to unshackle itself from democratic control, which can only happen through the state. But at the same time, capital can never completely separate itself from the state. When people think of neoliberalism, they think of the state withering away in favor of an all-powerful market, and of capital’s ultimate dream as doing away with the state. In fact, neoliberalism shows us that capital still very much needs the state. It needs the state to enforce the legal and regulatory framework that allows capital to thrive. It needs the state to police and repress workers, to open up new markets, and even to protect the general interests of capital through central-bank monetary policy, for example. Capital can never fully unshackle itself from the state.

Germany, along with France to some degree, is one of the few countries that can say it has had an elite that pursued the collective interests of capital, if not of workers, through this collaboration between capital and the state. Simply closing shop and moving somewhere else entails huge costs. It means severing—indeed, pulverizing and destroying—a national capitalist power bloc. That is problematic even from capital’s standpoint. Of course, if you have tons of money, you can survive, but world wars have broken out because of intercapitalist conflict. What we are witnessing here is a kind of intra-Western, intercapitalist conflict. This is not something that powerful segments of European big capital are taking lightly. They are really angry. It has been interesting to see the divergence between the direction in which the political class in Germany and other countries is pushing and the demands and aspirations of the capitalist class.

Historically, of course, they tended to work in a fairly aligned fashion, but now we are seeing a divergence. Germany’s political elites, for example, appear in part to want to go along with America’s new Cold War with China by decoupling from China and antagonizing relations with it, because this is part of America’s desperate global strategy for maintaining its hegemony. At the same time, large German businesses are saying, “We cannot give up the Chinese market. Are you crazy? You have already crippled our profits by weaning us off Russian gas. Now we are paying two, three, or four times as much for gas from America and other countries, and now you want us to give up our largest export market? Are you crazy?” This is another interesting phenomenon. There are clearly very strong internal conflicts even within Western elites. You see the same thing in America to some extent.

Big capital tends to thrive on smaller conflicts; it does not thrive on world war. No one wants that. Capitalists do not want a nuclear war with China. But sectors of what you might call the national-security state, and even sectors of the military-industrial complex, are pushing to escalate tensions wherever you look: in Asia, in the Middle East, and in Europe vis-à-vis Russia. They are doing so even as sectors of the American capitalist class say, “We do not want to break off relations with China completely. We need China.” Interestingly, even Wall Street and American financial capital are trying to push back against this increasing drive toward all-out conflict with what the national-security state perceives as existential threats to American hegemony. The question, then, is who is really calling the shots in the West—in the collective West and even in America itself? It is not so clear. There are quite strong tensions within the elites in America and the West more generally. I think we will see more of those tensions as the situation escalates over the next few months.

Class Unity: Thanks for talking to us today. I have a question about the EU and the constraints it places on the political classes of its member countries. What are your thoughts about the United Kingdom after Brexit? None of the doomsday prophecies seem to have come true, but at the same time Brexit has not really been restorative for the UK. Many of the things people associated with the EU were actually expressions of the interests of the British political class. Is it too soon to say? Has Brexit been demoralizing for people? I’d like to know your thoughts.

Thomas Fazi: There are a number of issues when it comes to Brexit. First of all, I think Brexit was a fluke. Elites tend to have a fairly firm control over democratic and political processes in the West nowadays. I would say their control is almost absolute, to the point that it is out of place to speak of democracy in a substantive sense when describing what we have in the West today. We essentially have an oligarchy capable of controlling the so-called democratic process throughout and of determining its outcomes to a very large degree, in a number of ways that we won’t get into right now. Brexit was an exception. The British political class called for the Brexit referendum partly to appease tensions within the Conservative camp, which was growing increasingly restless about the European Union. It was an attempt to throw a bone to the right-wing populist grievances emerging even within the Conservative Party itself.

But I am convinced they did so safe in the knowledge—or so they thought—that the referendum would not pass, because that was what all the polls showed. Their view was: “Come on. People may be angry with the European Union, but they aren’t really going to vote to leave.” That is part of the cognitive bubble in which they live. Within the liberal-conservative elite classes, the concept of leaving the European Union was so inconceivable that they did not see it as a realistic option. But it happened, because flukes sometimes happen in history. As you mentioned, the British political and capitalist classes had every interest in remaining within the European Union for the reasons we have discussed. From a political standpoint, the EU is very effective insofar as it depoliticizes policymaking. To put it simplistically, it is very helpful for political classes to say: “The European Union is asking us to do this. It is asking us to pursue these antisocial and anti-labor policies.

We are not the ones who want to do it, but we have to because the EU demands it.” This is depoliticization 101. It is a kind of blame shifting: you create external institutions that you can then blame for policies you wanted to implement in the first place. It has been very effective and has worked very well in restructuring democratic politics in Europe. This was a system that the British political class was more than happy to live with, within limits. The British political class was smarter than the political classes of other countries in retaining its monetary sovereignty by not joining the euro, for example. Britain therefore enjoyed a much higher degree of sovereignty than eurozone countries. Being in the European Union is one thing: it makes you subject to the rules governing the free movement of capital and labor, as well as many regulations originating with the EU.

But as long as you retain your currency, you still have some relative autonomy, because managing the currency is the precondition for implementing any form of economic policy. Being in the European Union is one thing; being in the euro is another. Once you lose monetary sovereignty, you are done for: you essentially have no economic sovereignty whatsoever. The United Kingdom was therefore more sovereign than other countries. Even so, the British capitalist class had every interest in EU membership. The financial class—particularly the City of London—obviously had every interest in belonging to a union favorable to financial capital that permitted the completely free movement of capital across Europe. The elites did not want Brexit. Once it happened, they went into damage-control mode: how could they retain all the benefits they had before Brexit while avoiding the risk that Brexit would repoliticize domestic politics?

My left-wing defense of Brexit, for example, was never based on the illusion that Brexit itself would bring about the structural, pro-worker and pro-labor changes we would like to see. It was that Brexit would widen the scope of possible political action in that direction. If you abandon an institutional arrangement that is structurally pro-capital and anti-labor, you are no longer subject to a wide range of rules that tie your hands. Of course, the political class chose to have its hands tied for the reasons I mentioned, but they were effectively tied nonetheless. Imagine an alternative universe in which Jeremy Corbyn won the election and a radical left-wing government miraculously came to power. Within the EU, even that government would have been subject to EU rules and regulations limiting state intervention in the economy, nationalization, state monopolies, and so forth.

From a left-wing perspective, my argument was structural: if you can widen the structural limits of what is possible in democratic politics, then that is a good thing, regardless of the immediate fallout. Even if Brexit had led in the short term to more right-wing or anti-labor policies, it would still have been worth supporting from a structural perspective, because time passes, and at some point we could use the wider room for maneuver we created through Brexit. What we are seeing is not surprising from my perspective. It is the British political class and the British elites trying to ensure that Brexit does not bring about more democratic and participatory politics, but the opposite. One of the things that capital in every European country likes about the EU is the free movement of labor—cheap labor—which means that employers can import labor from other EU countries and legally pay those workers less than domestic workers. You can see why capitalists would like that.

The influx of immigrants from the EU was one source of popular grievances about European membership. It did lead to a large influx of labor from lower-wage countries, and in a number of British sectors—and there are studies showing this—it pushed down wages. We can have a larger discussion about immigration, but that is a fact. These grievances were not born out of nowhere or from an innate racism among the British people. People were raising legitimate concerns about the effects of some of these policies. Once the British political class could no longer import low-wage labor from the European Union, it decided to increase massively the importation of labor from outside the EU, which is what we have seen. That is only one of many examples of the way the British elite has tried to recreate outside the European Union what it had inside it. What you have today is essentially what some people have called “BRINO”—Brexit in name only.

The de facto system is very similar, only without the European Union formally present. The bottom line is that leaving these structures and institutions is not in itself a solution, but it is a precondition for the pursuit of more radical, emancipatory, democratic, pro-worker, and pro-labor policies. This is the fundamental point that many people on the left, even in Europe, fail to acknowledge despite our best efforts to get them to understand what the EU is all about. Of course, Brexit has not helped in this respect, because they can now point to Brexit and say, “You see? Now you have race riots because of Brexit,”although those riots have nothing to do with Brexit. The way the British elites have skillfully outmaneuvered Brexit has definitely not helped the cause of those of us fighting for greater national and democratic sovereignty in Europe, for sure.

Class Unity: I have a comment and then one final question. The impression I’m getting is that it is basically impossible for the populations of Europe to advocate their concrete geopolitical and economic interests as long as they remain subject to the institutions they inherited from the postwar moment. We might say that the EU has always been a pro-capitalist institution, but it has always been a specific kind of capitalist institution. It was useful during a particular postwar conjuncture, as long as the Soviet Union existed and China occupied the position it did. It was organized around a net-exporting economy: exporting more than you import—cars, or whatever—and the Maastricht rules say you can run only a small deficit relative to GDP. No world power can operate without its own currency while being limited to such a deficit.

It seems to me that all these institutions developed out of a historical moment that is now ending, and that they positively inhibit the people who occupy the European landmass from advocating their own interests. They are a straitjacket. If the European comprador, client-oligarchy elites are making a mistake, it comes at this moment when they ask: “Why would the Americans do this to us? Why would they do this to their friends?” Europe was never a friend. It was a lackey; it was useful. And now, as you have said, the European left is so fundamentally saturated with neoliberal nonsense that it loves this arrangement. There is hardly anyone left to criticize it. Does that analysis check out with you? And how should we understand both the rising right-wing movements and the neoliberal movements of the nominal left, such as the recent alliances in France that are trying to stem the right?

Thomas Fazi: In terms of the first question, it is important to understand that the European Union—and especially the euro—was always much more of a political project than an economic project, even though it has always been presented as fundamentally economic. Its goals were first and foremost political. The European Union must be understood as a fundamentally anti-democratic project. That was the driving force: it was about depoliticizing politics. It is no coincidence that we saw a major push toward supranational organization at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. It came on the heels of the greatest period of class conflict in Europe, when the postwar arrangement and full-employment regime had strengthened workers, mass politics, and democratic politics to such an extent that capital perceived a threat to its continued existence, at least in the form it had known until then. Capitalists saw a real risk that capitalism might almost be democratically transcended at some point.

They had an existential fear of losing their privileges, which they continued to enjoy even within the postwar compromise between capital and labor. That compromise risked ceasing to exist as labor’s power continued to increase. That is when we began to witness the real push toward supranational integration as a way of solving domestic problems that national elites did not know how to solve. One solution was to depoliticize the democratic process—or, more precisely, to make the decision-making process less democratic by transferring powers to supranational organizations, where decision-making could be insulated from popular democratic pressures. The neoliberal project more generally can be understood first and foremost as a political project, in which reestablishing capitalist dominance came even before the pursuit of profit. Under neoliberalism, I think business is prepared to accept lower profits than it might otherwise earn. Consider austerity.

From a strictly capitalist perspective, austerity does not make much sense: you are literally making people poorer, which means they have less money with which to buy things. It has not clearly boosted the rate of profit. In fact, we have seen profit rates fall in many European sectors as a result of austerity, especially in those reliant on domestic demand. But these policies do allow you to maintain control over the population. Making people poorer means they have less money with which to buy your goods, but it also means they have less political power. You preserve your political power even at the cost of perhaps losing part of your profit margin. That is how I view the neoliberal project generally, and the European Union project more specifically. What we are now witnessing is the unraveling of that project. A situation has been created in which the economy has been rendered dysfunctional to such an extent that social unrest is increasing.

Yet containing that unrest was the very reason the system was designed as it was. The system can therefore respond only by doubling down on repressive measures and on hollowing out democratic processes. But doing that further worsens the social and economic conditions of the masses. You have a vicious circle that can last only so long. This is also beginning to create problems even for the national elites that benefited from the system for a long time. Notwithstanding what I said earlier about their ability to find jobs elsewhere, formal democratic politics is collapsing in a way that is problematic even for national elites. Take a country such as Italy. You have increasingly short political cycles: a government comes to power promising to make things better, but it is prevented from doing so by the constraints of the system. This engenders populist uprisings in one form or another, which cause the government to fall.

A new government comes in, perhaps under populist pretenses, but it too is unable to solve the problems because of those same constraints. You get shorter and shorter political cycles—what one might call the political cycle of depoliticization. The system is unraveling and does not have the means to respond adequately. For now, it is responding purely through repressive measures. There are unprecedented restraints on free speech, for example, and a hyper-censorious regime has been rolled out throughout the European Union. That is one aspect. In terms of actual popular opposition, however, there is not much out there, which is the really depressing part of all this. I think this is partly because the left has always underestimated the extent to which the EU presents a problem for radical politics.

All the left-populist phenomena we have witnessed over the past ten or fifteen years—Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and, to some degree, the Five Star Movement in Italy, though it is not a classic left-populist party—failed because they failed to acknowledge the nature of the European Union. They thought they could operate within its constraints without realizing that those constraints exist precisely to impede the kind of politics those parties wanted to implement. Look at Syriza. It was elected on an anti-austerity platform and hoped it could convince the European Union to reverse those policies. In the end, it was forced to accept an even harsher version of the austerity policies it had been elected to fight. There are countless examples of this. The European left’s failure to appreciate the true nature of the European Union has been a huge problem and is something I have written about a great deal.

There are deep-seated historical reasons for it, but the result is that all these experiments have been reabsorbed into the system, which breeds disillusionment. Then there are the right-wing populists. Regardless of whether one likes their politics, what is important from the perspective of this argument is that they have the same problem as the populist left: even the populist right fails to appreciate the constraints of the European Union. In fact, they pretty much all accept them. There is no major right-wing populist party—among these nationalist or neo-fascist parties—that openly opposes the European Union or the euro. That is incredible, because it represents a major change from only ten years ago. Most of these parties, including Alternative for Germany, which made significant gains in the recent elections, ran on anti-euro and anti-EU platforms for a long time. But as they get closer to power, they begin to soften their positions.

I think they realize that accepting those constraints is the only way to get into power. Look at Marine Le Pen. She used to be rabidly anti-euro and ran on a radical anti-euro platform two elections ago. Now she has accepted operating within the system and has become a kind of critical pro-European. There are many other examples. They realize that if you want to get into power, you have to accept those constraints. But the paradox is that once you do get into power, you will not be able to do very much. How do you escape this paradox? It is not clear. Is there a way of democratically opting out of the regime? It is very, very difficult. First of all, you would need a political leadership prepared to engage in extremely high-stakes politics, because unilaterally exiting not only the European Union but especially the euro is not easy. I think it can be done; I have studied the technical aspects quite closely.

Currency regimes and unions have broken up in the past. When the Soviet Union dissolved, countries had to launch national currencies almost overnight, without the technical advantages we now possess. Today money is mostly electronic, which would make the transition much easier than physically printing banknotes, as many countries had to do in 1991. But it requires a political class prepared to engage in extremely high-stakes politics, and we do not see that anymore. It means making life-or-death decisions and taking responsibility for them. This relates to what I was saying earlier. Syriza in Greece, for example, never seriously considered leaving the euro because its leaders were not psychologically prepared for that level of politics. Historically, politics has always been about dealing with very high stakes. Up until the 1970s and 1980s, the European political class was an old-school political class that understood this. We do not have that anymore.

Then there is the problem of how you get elected in the first place if you run on a platform that causes the entire establishment, including the whole establishment media, to mobilize against you—as happened to Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, for example, although that was a different context. This remains an open question. The only short-term answer I can see is that we have to begin building a politics of truth. Until we start telling the truth about the European Union and the euro, we are not going to get anywhere. We are only telling ourselves fairy tales about what we can accomplish within this system, which is very little. There are very few positive examples. The Sahra Wagenknecht party in Germany that you mentioned is, I would say, the only left-populist party in Europe today that gets this right.

It has jettisoned the left-wing neoliberal politics that has dominated Europe for so long and embraced a new form of popular, if not populist, left-wing and class-based politics. It rejects the progressive-neoliberal paradigm, speaks openly about the problem represented by the European Union and the euro, and discusses Europe’s geopolitical challenges and the need to reestablish relations with Russia. I would say it is the only party in Europe today that gets it right. There are also a very limited number of governments that are at least trying, from within the system, to push back against EU encroachment on national sovereignty, the NATOization of Europe, and the drive toward all-out war with Russia. The most obvious example is Viktor Orbán in Hungary. He is clearly a right-wing politician whom many on the left consider the Devil himself.

But when it comes to pushing back against EU encroachment—especially the effort to drag Europe into the proxy war with Russia—he is one of the few very outspoken politicians doing so. Another, smaller example is Slovak prime minister Robert Fico, who survived an assassination attempt not long ago and is also a strong critic of the European Union and opponent of NATO. But these are very limited examples. Hungary is able to take this stance, first, because it has an adult political class and an actual statesman—an actual political leader. One may or may not agree with his ideas, but that is what politics should look like in terms of the risks one is prepared to take. Second, Hungary is not in the euro. That helps a great deal because the EU’s ability to apply monetary and financial pressure is much more limited than it would be if Hungary used the euro.

If Hungary had adopted the euro, I think Orbán would have been out of the game a long time ago. The EU would simply have engineered a financial crisis in the country and forced the government to collapse. Because Hungary has its own currency, the EU cannot do that. Once again, we are reminded of the importance of not surrendering your currency. It means you retain some room for maneuver and can even oppose EU policy from within the European Union. If you have the euro, that is simply impossible. If Marine Le Pen had won in France, I think we would have seen this dynamic play out. France is one of Europe’s most powerful countries, and one might suppose that a radical nationalist coming to power there would be able to change things from within. I do not think so.

We saw the European Union apply forms of financial pressure on France before the election, precisely in order to scare people away from voting for Le Pen. The European Central Bank watched a sell-off of French bonds send interest rates higher. It was covered in the press as a taste of the financial disaster France would face if Le Pen won. The European Central Bank could have stopped that immediately by intervening in the French bond market. It could have brought interest rates down and halted the panic, but it did not. I think that was a deliberate choice not to intervene. It is one example of the many ways in which the European Union can influence democratic processes in countries that have adopted the euro. All it needs to do is manipulate the bond markets slightly and create a financial panic, which is then used to discredit whichever party it does not want to come to power. So that is where we are.

Class Unity: I’m in America, and the frustration—the roadblock—I always encounter when discussing politics is that, when I say I support neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party, people respond that there is no other choice: it has to be one or the other. I’m in Greece right now, and some of my friends are asking me what I think of Stefanos Kasselakis, the current leader of Syriza. I’m running into the same problem as I try to explain that the only politics I could possibly imagine supporting is one that sees a way out of the euro and the European Union. I think I am okay with being on the margins of politics because I simply do not see how else things could improve here.

Thomas Fazi: I think it is important to be sober about how remote that possibility remains. Even if populist Euroskeptic movements are currently on the rise, they are still a long way from power. It is possible that massive geopolitical forces beyond anyone’s control could change the landscape. We are currently witnessing de-dollarization. I don’t know how the Ukraine conflict is going to resolve itself, and we have increasing disruption in the Middle East. Perhaps these developments could somehow change the landscape and weaken the European institutions. But at this stage, I think even that is very difficult to foresee.

Class Unity: Thank you very much for talking to us. We really appreciate it; it has been a great conversation. Perhaps we cannot anticipate the way things will change because the alternative is not something available to us in advance. The way things are looking, I suspect there will be a major disruption that forces everything to change in a way we did not foresee and that is not convenient. We would be curious to hear your thoughts on that. Thanks again for your time—it was a good conversation, and we really enjoyed talking with you. Do you have any closing thoughts, Thomas?

Thomas Fazi: First of all, thanks again. It was really great talking to you guys as well. I think there are reasons to be optimistic. The first thing I would say is that we need to find a way of relaunching radical anti-EU and anti-euro politics in Europe. It is paradoxical that, at a time when the European Union is proving more damaging and dangerous than ever, Euroskeptic politics—especially left-Euroskeptic politics—is at an all-time low. The European Union continues to be extremely problematic from an economic and social perspective. All the problems we have criticized and discussed—the constraints it places on emancipatory politics—are still there. We see that in the return of austerity. We are going to see more attacks on the welfare state and on labor; that is already happening. Nothing has changed in that respect. In fact, in many ways things are getting worse.

On top of that, however, the European Union has transformed itself into an extended arm of NATO and the US security state. We now face not only all the constraints the European Union imposes on democratic politics and the pressures it places on social and economic welfare policies, but also a situation in which the European Union is a prime driving force behind the proxy war with Russia. It acts as an institution that sees it as its obligation to ensure that all member states remain on board with this policy. What you have, essentially, is the European Union fusing with NATO and becoming not only antisocial but also an extremely warmongering and militaristic organization—an extended arm of NATO. This makes the urgency of getting out of the institution greater than ever before. As you mentioned, there is reason to be optimistic to the extent that the times have never been better for European national governments that want to increase their autonomy and sovereignty.

Trying to break out of this system at a time of American unipolarity would have been very difficult, because there was no global alternative. We now live in a very different reality: an already de facto multipolar world in which American and Western hegemony is rapidly shrinking and diminishing. New global alliances, systems of international cooperation, and groupings of governments are coming into being. Potentially, the time could not be better to break out of this system. There is a whole world—much larger than the so-called collective West—that is trying to build new forms of international cooperation and collaboration. Remaining within the Western system today, when a global alternative is forming and the actual material benefits of staying in that system are continually eroding, makes less sense than ever before. The international context is in such flux that the system could easily collapse much sooner than we expect. At the very least, we should be ready when that happens.

That is why the kind of cultural work we are doing through sessions such as this is so important. We have to create a vanguard ready to pick up the pieces once the system collapses, which I think it definitely will at some point—hopefully in a manner that is not too catastrophic. It is going to collapse at some point, and we should be ready when it happens.