Don Flynn discusses two significant books on Europe’s approach to migrants and borders, arguing that collectivist counter movements can be the motors of socialist change
The UK’s Brexit back in January 2020 has not reduced the need to maintain a close watching brief on the workings of the EU where it stands in relation to all the powers that govern the fate of humanity in the twenty-first century. For many people on the left, that can be reduced to it being a regional plank in the global neoliberal system with which we want nothing to do. The pressures and strains the 27 member countries are coming under as crisis piles on crisis don’t require much in the way of analysis since its standing as a monopoly capitalist power transcends all other considerations.
Life is more complicated than that. Interpreting political developments in the bloc remains just as important today as it did when British ministers were attending high level meetings with their counterparts. There is no advance for the left in Britain that doesn’t run through collaboration with progressive forces working to influence the direction of governments in the other member states.
What does ‘influencing’ look like? Obviously left wing parties aim to win elections to government wherever they can and then wield this state power to the best advantage within the EU structures. But there is also the level at which civil society operates, and plotting a role for its engagement across the political landscape is also a task that needs to be taken seriously. Two recently published books give us something of an insight as to what this might look like.
Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from the Financial Crisis to the Covid Emergency is a formidable title for a multi-authored text which has its origins in academic research. Its key idea rests on the work of Karl Polanyi, famous for his version of the obscure life of the commodity in The Great Transformation, first published in 1944. For Polanyi, the central dynamic of the capitalist system was to transform all goods and services into commodities to facilitate trading in markets. This entailed a struggle since a large range of useful things, like land, water, and the brain and muscle power of human beings, are not the product of a labour process combined with capital, the usual source of a commodity, but the gift of nature itself. Originating from this background, they resisted being reduced to mere market exchange values and, at most, became what Polanyi referred to as fictitious commodities.
The authors of this book urge us to see struggles associated with the construction of the EU’s single market under the terms of the Maastricht Treaty and the Single Market Act. The heterogeneity of the way European states had organised their economies prior to this date, from the wealthier having some version of a welfare state through to the poorer sheltering some parts of their economy, such as agriculture, from market forces, was seen as an obstacle to the project of unification. The reduction of, ideally, all goods and services to commodity status would eliminate this patchwork and allow the market to rule supreme.
Double movements
The distinct contribution of this study is to draw attention to the resistance to commodification – in Polanyi’s language, the ‘double movement’ which matched marketisation with real human need for specific good as services – and to spell this out as the form the struggle between classes took within the EU as it developed. The authors draw attention to three sectors where this double movement played out in EU policy: transport services, water services, and healthcare.
In each of these areas, the authors find evidence of a class struggle which pits the human need for the goods against its embedment in profit-seeking business structures. They mark out how a ‘Six-Pack’ of laws, adopted in 2011, laid out a regime which they characterise as new economic governance, or NEG. Commodification of things in the transport sector, including railway, dock services, truck transport and airports were pushed ahead through regulations and directives but encountered stiff resistance from trade unions, which mounted scores of actions ranging from strikes to demonstrations.
Similar accounts of resistance are set out in the other case studies, with the campaigns mounted by the European Federation of Public Service Unions and Right2Water scoring significant success in asserting access to water as a human right, which trumped business interests. Healthcare suffered more damage with the infamous Bolkestein directive framing reforms as a matter of patient rights which required healthcare organisations to function with private sector levels of efficiency and productivity. The book clearly intends to be a resource for labour movement organisations fated to be a part of the counter-movement against commodification and can be usefully read in that way, though further texts specifically addressed to trade unions will need to be adapted to reduce the academic thrust of this book.
Commodifying immigrants
The second book, Europe without Borders – A History, is very different in tone and substance but in its own way furnishes a case study of another commodifying project. Some commentators, notionally on the left, such as the Blue Labour current, have come to see immigration as a commodification project par excellence in the epoch of neoliberalism. In their view, it works by privileging the supply of cheap labour over the forms of community life that have emerged from the struggle of native wage-earners. This is very much like the legend of the blind man who concluded that an elephant was a creature very much like a snake because he happened to grasp it by its trunk. For the immigrant, the opportunity to move across a frontier is more likely to look like an escape from the most brutal form of commodification and at least the first step in acquiring rights that will allow resistance to be mounted against the tyranny of the market.
Uprisings
It is not the core of Stanley-Becker’s history, but he manages to provide an example of a social process that winds its way from commodification, in the form of the Schengen Agreement facilitating the unimpeded movement of goods, services and people, across Europe’s internal borders but which then goes through a period of a struggle for rights in the country of settlement. This involves an immaculate presentation of all the key moments in which the task of reducing border controls was taken on by the European Community/Union, driven by the desire to complete the single market, but at crucial points by what the author describes as “labor uprisings”. Prominent among these was the truckers’ action of February 1984, which blocked the movement of goods from the English Channel to the Austrian Alps. It was the example of angry freight lorry drivers protesting at delays, which required them to spend hours or even days waiting to clear border checks, which pushed the governments of the five original Schengen agreement countries to scrap their border controls a year later.
Borderless Europe draws on this elemental sense of the need to adjust working conditions to the realities of a system which trades goods across the whole EU region every bit as much as the business imperative to reduce transaction costs. The point, whatever its origins, was where was Europe without borders going to go next?
At this point, the story takes a downward turn. Commodification (though Stanley-Becker does not use this term) attempted to regain its grip by balancing movement across borders with the turbo-charged surveillance of populations made possible by new information technologies. Schengen freedoms turned into the shackles of the Schengen Information System and the enhanced powers of police bureaucracies to monitor and exchange information about people across the length and breadth of the continent.
Bad news for the civil libertarians certainly, but mitigated by perhaps the most significant counter-movement of all: the resistance of the sans papiers – the undocumented – movement which grew from a collective of African migrant rights activists in the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood of Paris into an uprising which moved tens of thousands of people into activity, continuing today in the form of a diverse and vigorous migrant rights movement which exists in all the countries of Europe.
An account like this shows that European politics is not to be understood solely in campist terms which demand that, first and foremost, we align each and every event with forces playing out at the global level. If there is any hope for emancipation from the rule of capital, it will emerge from the counter-movements that bring ordinary people into collective actions which advance their rights and interests. A spotlight on what Europe means at this level is what the left principally needs at this time. Armed with that we have the chance of coming up with a socialist politics for the European region which is adequate for the moment.