PREMISE: WAR IS RAGING, DYSTOPIA IS LOOMING The early 21st century is dark and barbaric, as war, inequality, irrationality, xenophobia, and ecological collapse spread unchecked over the planet, and over our troubled region of the world, Europe, governed by the EU and the nation-states, i.e. by the present (dis)Union of euro and non-euro states, of old and new member countries.
Bushism and political islamism are reshaping world politics, India and China are reshaping the global economy. South America has broken free of the Monroe Doctrine, but political Europe is in shambles: the french-dutch no has left it shaken and hollow at its core, while rising social conflict and disillusion are questioning its sustainability as a political entity, traversed by powerful capital
and migration flows (the former set free in the Single Market, the latter differentially discriminated and persecuted), and conservatively governed by a neoliberal technocracy and national governments sharing feeble if not negative legitimacy.
The old Spinelli-inspired and Monnet-initiated federalist project of catholic/socialist orientation has become a spent force in the 21st century, but a new European cosmopolitanism of radically democratic orientation must take its place, with horizontal federalism, social action, green politics and gay rights at its core. Strong-armed nationalists and right-wing populists are present
dangers in many countries of Europe, while either the socialdemocratic or the communist left are generally unable to find new solutions to the gigantic challenges posed by geopolitical and economic instability, the full spread of networking and digitalization, climate change and environmental damage, accelerating biotechnological innovation and its societal consequences.
SOCIAL STATES OF EUROPE
Over the last 20 years, precarity and inequality have broken the christian/social democratic political bargain of the postwar period -- rising incomes for employees and rising power for their unions in
exchange for acceptance of capitalist system-- on which modern Europe was founded, and left in its wake the rise of immense corporate and private wealth next to escalating exclusion and social angst. Acting for radical Europe means mobilizing decisively against social inequality, labor precarization and the arrogance of the elites and their privileges, as millions have recently done in France and Denmark.
The limitations against freedom of expression online and on the streets are on the increase, in a climate of state-induced fear and paranoia inviting ever more draconian securitarian regimes:
libertarian principles in information and communication must be constantly asserted online and offline and freedom of movement and protest constantly practiced and defended. Queer activism is rising, but gender rights are under unprecedented threat by reactionary catholic and muslim clerical establishments. In spite of the achievements of feminism, women are still intimidated, abused and
killed in native and immigrant families, and discriminated in the public sphere and at the workplace. The persecution of immigrants and refugees at the gates of and within Europe is a burning shame for all demoradicals of Europe: transnational solidarity and transethnic alliances are moral duties for an enlarged idea of Europe which includes also people once subjected to rapacious European imperial rule.
Europe's multiethnic youth is economically discriminated and increasingly alienated. The European younger generation is caught between unemployment and labor precarization, and unattainable basic social goods (home, higher education, welfare). Gerontocracy of the elites and consequent privileges for the rentier classes are killing Europe 's future by unfairly burdening European young families and excluding the creative class from economic and political decisions.
Financial and corporate power is still formidable in Europe, and tenaciously defended by monetarist Trichet and freemarketeer Barroso, but has lost the aura of credibility and indeed invincibility it had in the 1990s, thanks to the manifold pressures of the antiglobalization movement. The global movement for social and environmental justice which developed in Europe with the huge protests at Prague, Goteborg, Genoa, peaked on Feb 15, 2003 with the truly giant demonstrations against the invasion of Irak in Europe's major cities, but has been declining since, although new, less ideological, social movements seem to have taken the relay over the course of 2006.
THE IDEA OF RADICAL EUROPE
In an age of intellectual obscurantism and global dimming, we want to go back to the radical spirit of the Enlightenment and the radical birth of democracy. In Europe, through the centuries, the very idea of political philosophy and thus the form the state should take has been decisively shaped and altered by collective action and social conflict. Our idea of radical Europe takes inspiration from the great moments in Europe's history of democratic mobilization and social liberation, which we summarize here below.
The French Revolution, as interpreted by a girondist like Thomas Paine or a jacobin like Gracchus Babeuf and his follower, the sworn enemy of the Holy Alliance Filippo Buonarroti; the Chartist movement pushing for universal suffrage in England and the rise of trade unionism; revolutionary 1848 and the idea of a non-dynastic Young Europe; 1870 and the communards' brave experiment with self-governing urban democracy of elected officials; the 1890-1920 period that saw great
hopes and major defeats for the radical democratic left in a Continent torn by general strikes, rocked by women's suffrage movement, sucked dry by the ghastly trenches, traumatized by revolutions and counterevolutions, with the socialist second international and revolutionary syndicalism holding the scene before the Great War, replaced after 1917 by the more sectarian communist third international and revolutionary leninism (which soon turned into totalitarian stalinism); 1936 was the year of the social and electoral victory of the french popular front and of franco's aggression against the republican, socialist and anarchist spanish popular front; it was
the year when european and international fascism unleashed genocidal war in Europe and Asia: only a global popular front could manage to finally defeat nazis and fascists in 1945, after immense suffering and civil wars of liberation. From the ashes of fascist defeat and the horrors of total war, the political idea of Europe first emerged out of European resistance movements, whose ideas where distilled in the Ventotene Manifesto for a federal and peaceful Europe. As Hannah
Arendt wrote in the 1940s on the Partisan Review:
"The underground movements…were the immediate product of the collapse first of the national state, which was replaced by quisling governments and second of nationalism itself as the driving force of nations. Those who emerged to wage war fought against fascism and nothing else. (But) all these movements at once found a positive political slogan which plainly indicated the non-national though very popular slogan which was simply EUROPE."
After the war, European economic, and then political, institutions started to consolidate. 1956 was the decisive starting point, since it proclaimed the end of European imperialism and the birth of European federalism after Suez, revealed Stalin's crimes, thus unleashing Eastern Europe's democratic anti-Soviet rebellion. In 1968, simultaneously, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Prague rebelled, setting off the explosion of identity politics in the 70s (hippies, students, women, gays, punks, oppressed ethnic groups and peoples), and ultimately defeating the two-bloc partition of Europe with the 1989 democratic uprising in Berlin, prepared by the antinuclear movements of that
decade. The Fall of the Wall led to the implosion of Russian communism and its geopolitical bloc and thus prepared the scene for the launch for the Single Currency in Western Europe and enlargement to the east for the whole of the EU.
We are proud inheritors of the history of radical Europe. We have absorbed Europe's traditions of democratic politics and critical philosophy. We are descendants of the secular approach to reason and nature, of all the strands in socialist thinking and progressive politics that have invariably opposed all forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. We are the children of ecological and
post-patriarchal Europe and it is from this radical heritage that we want to build a shared rad-dem political culture that can make people experience meaning and purpose back again in their lives and environments.
We declare ourselves radical europeans. We want to fight to assert the fundamental human, civil, social, gender, information rights of the multitudes living in or coming to Europe. We will work toward a rebirth of the European project on principles of radical democratic participation: from intellectual dissent to social protest, from civil disobedience to labor picketing, from consumer boycott to media campaigning. We declare nationalism and fundamentalism our foes and
enemies. We denounce political neoconservatism and economic neoliberalism as untenable and immoral philosophies and ways of government. We are fierce enemies of private monopoly in technology and knowledge industries and enraged by unprecedented levels of economic concentration in all sectors of the economy. Nevertheless, we are not unqualified anticapitalists. We strenuosly oppose the economic interests that are accomplices in the reactionary and ecodestructive turn the world has taken, but not the market and private enterprise as such, which in our view can either have progressive or regressive effects according to the periodically shifting balance of social andideological forces among capital and labor, state and society. More
strategically, we think the magnitude of the historical challenge before us --staving off environmental and social disaster-- is such, and the risk of a malignant social mutations and political bifurcations so great, that we cannot afford not to speak to and enlist, not only the creative and service classes we intend to give voice and articulation first and foremost, but also the middle-classes and the enlightened sectors of capitalism.
We are not a political party and we are not a union, although some of our members could run for office or be union delegates. We intend to be a Pan-European association giving expression to a demoradical social and political movement. We want to go beyond anarchist spontaneity and communist nostalgia. Horizontalism and egalitarianism are not sectarian totems, but ideals than need to be transformed into common practice and legal protection. On the other hand, queer,
ecologist, cyber subjectivities need to find a larger social and political horizon to truly challenge established state power. In this respect, we naturally look onto the European Greens and the European Left as the political forces that need to be prodded to come up with demoradical solutions to the current historical impasse. But our social action and political advocacy will be free of any reverence with respect to parties or unions, and totally independent in its intellectual elaborations.
We are the generation the tore down Berlin's wall and went illegal when Thatcher, Wojtyla and Reagan tried to restore family values (for Deng, it was party values). We are the harbingers of the Internet revolution and market globalization. We are the low-cost generation, still dominated by cold-war elites who would rather turn Europe into a giant Switzerland, where shady dictators and
mafia bosses can safely put their money and immigrants, even those born in Europe, are excluded
from citizenship. Against the liberal-democratic, or worse national-democratic, policies for Europe that promote inequality and subservience to US militarism, we propose a new radical-democratic
horizon for Europe capable of creating a new political culture and social landscape. We proclaim ourselves wobbly and queer, peace-loving, tree-hugging and computer-savvy, democratically active radicals of Europe.
WHAT'S NEEDED TO BUILD RADICAL EUROPE:
A SOCIO-POLITICAL ORGANIZATION USING ALL POSSIBLE RESOURCES&TACTICS TO ENFORCE THE RADICAL DEMOCRATIC VALUES OF POLITICAL AND CULTURAL FREEDOM, AND SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL JUSTICE ACROSS EUROPE!
OUR BASIC AIMS
To create a peer-to-peer radical and ecological democracy in Europe.
To affirm the secular, feminist, solidaristic identity of Europe.
To open the borders of Europe to all cultures and peoples.
To promote stronger European political integration and horizontal federalism and regionalism around these values.
To render the Commission an expression of the European Parliament, accountable to and petitionable by the European public.
To drastically reform the statutes and policies of the European Central Bank.
To levy a European corporate tax and a European carbon tax to endow the EU with autonomous fiscal resources.
To returntto keynesian, expansionary fiscal and monetary policies, thus abrogating the stability pact and its provisions.
To promote pan-European referenda on constitutional issues, EU directives and legislation.
To reform the European Court, so that it can be directly addressed in lieu of national justice in case of the violation of European fundamental rights.
To promote a new global trade system, in alliance with the progressive forces in South America and India.
To get Europe out of NATO, so that it can projects its international weight in favor of just peace and international justice, such as the protection of people from genocide.
To protest against all human rights violations, and promote solidarity with democratic movements facing repression worldwide.
To expand the role for public health, public education, public space.
To protect immigrants from persecution and discrimination.
To secure a European basic income as the keystone a truly European welfare system.
To set a European minimum wage, defend unionization rights and the right to strike, as the only re-equalizing forces on the European labor market today.
To ensure freedom of expression and communication and protect the free exchange of knowledge.
To ensure neurochemical freedom and the legalization of THC.
To assert gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights, and the rights of all unmarried couplesb to family life and social benefits.
To work toward greener, bike-oriented and kid-friendly cities, by adopting alternatives to fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine in private and public tranportation.
To promote informed and democratic discussion around science and technology, in order to build a strong demoradical position on bioethics and other scientific issues affecting society.
To decrease the material, i.e energy, content of consumption and wealth as the only viable way to survive as a cosmopolitan, digital civilization on a planet with limited land and water resources and fast-heating atmosphere and oceans.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF ACT 4 RADICAL EUROPE ( A4RE)
To achieve these aims, Act for Radical Europe (A4RE) is a federal, transnational, umbrella organization operating at the urban and European levels, taking the form of a card-carrying, fee-charging European association composed of 4 autonomous but networked branches, coordinated by electronically electable and removable delegates to be drawn from the association's constituency. Any city in Europe and the Mediterranean can join A4RE: it will be considered a hub, if features the any or some of the following 4 departments, and a hub if if hosts
them all. Hubs and subhubs contribute federal delegates and resources to A4RE for its actions of political and social pressures at the Europen level, while networking autonomously on metropolitan and transnational projects of their choosing.
Here are A4RE 's initial four deparments/subnetworks.
THE PRECARIOUS SYNDICATE: a social advocacy and media subvertising group assisting temp workers and part-timers, pink collars and networkers, in their struggles against governments and corporations.
Also provides legal counseling and political lobbying against precarity at the Union and state levels.
EUROPEAN FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS GROUP: a civic and legal advocacy group defeding, before the courts and public opinion, the right to protest and civil disobedience, the rights of first-generation Europeans and migrants, queer and women's rights, the cyber rights of free spech on the Web and the cell phone.
ECOACTIVE CONSPIRACY: a network of direct action collectives practicing urban ecology, permaculture, barefoot economics, guerrilla gardening, environmental hacks and protests, and the like.
PINK PUNK HACKS YOUR THINK TANK: a hub of intellectual discussion and social science research around demoradical europe: movements, subcultures, conflicts, policies, borders, cartographies and realities of power, geopolitics,transnational alliances, creative+service class, and other politically relevant issues and questions.
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