A different kind of Europe – Europeanism from below

Paolo Gerbaudo reports on the Routes of Europe conference in Florence, arguing that the Italian left must embrace the participatory democracy of the Indignados to achieve political purchase.

The city of Florence is one of those privileged observation spots from which one can read the health of the Italian left and its international standing. Back in 2002 it was in this city that the first European Social Forum was organised. The event came a year after the bloody battle of Genoa, the event which marked the culmination of the anti-globalisation movement. Hundreds of thousands of members of social movements, trade unions, NGOs and activist groups gathered in what remains, to date, the biggest and most successful European Social Forum. The event testified to the cultural influence of Italian social movements in Europe, and of their espousal of a Europeanism from below.

On 9 December 2011, Florence was again the venue for a forum assembling key progressive intellectuals and activists of the Italian left, convening to discuss the future of Europe. Almost a decade after the first ESF, this forum was staged against a background of political demobilisation, in which Italian activists appear incapable of facing up to the politics of austerity pushed by the new Italian prime minister Mario Monti, who has been de facto chosen by the European oligarchy to reassure the financial markets.

The Florence meeting was titled ‘Routes of Europe’ (punning in Italian on ‘rout’) and sought a new progressive agenda for the old continent. The end result was a draft appeal, ‘Another Road for Europe’ (signed, among others, by Donatella Della Porta, who writes on the following page). This proposes economic recipes resembling those outlined in the Euromemorandum, among them an abandonment of the ‘stability pacts’, a shift in taxation from labour to wealth, the establishment of a European public rating agency, the creation of eurobonds to refinance public debt and investment in the green economy. To this, the Italian appeal adds an emphasis on the need for democratic reform of EU institutions to make them accountable and representative.

To date the Florence appeal represents one of the most advanced policy platforms on European reform. The problem is that it does not identify who should campaign for the demands it puts forward. The organisers of the Florence meeting mooted the idea of a new European Social Forum for this purpose, but this suggestion is a symptom of the degree to which Italian activists are out of tune with what is happening around Europe.

The organisational form that is en vogue across Europe is not the social forum as a convergence of progressive civil society organisations but the popular assembly used by the Indignados: a convergence of individuals who do not feel represented by any organisation, including progressive ones. The policies emerging from the Florence meeting resonate with some of the proposals that have been agreed by the assemblies of the Spanish Indignados through complex consensus procedures. Yet the organisers of the Florence meeting did not seem to acknowledge that this is currently the only movement that can halt the politics of austerity in Europe.

What made Italian social movements so influential during the anti-globalisation cycle was their capacity to combine a high level of intellectual analysis with the inventiveness of grass-roots organisational practices. The meeting in Florence demonstrates that this cultural capacity is still there. What is now missing is the connection between intellectual debate and organisational practices reflecting the direction that social movements are taking around Europe and beyond: popular participation and assembly democracy.

‘Italian activists continue to wallow in nostalgia for the anti-globalisation cycle,’ I was recently told by a member of Democracia Real Ya, one of the initiators of the Indignados movement in Spain. If valuable proposals such as the ones advanced by the Florence meeting are to have any political purchase, they need to find legitimacy in the movements of the present rather than in those of the past.

Source: http://www.redpepper.org.uk/a-different-kind-of-europe-responses/