I want to be Caliph instead of the Caliph!

'I want to be Caliph instead of the Caliph!'

This is an outline of an article from Frieder Otto Wolf, I am glad to have this via GPEX member Margaret Wright because I have been a little remiss on European eco-socialism...its all NYC, Caracas and a nod to Auckland here at Another Green World. This article, by the way is, nothing to do with Islam but it is about how the European left including Greens create an alternative

Frieder has been a long standing ecosocialist, resolutely resisting the drift to the right of the German Greens as an MEP. His analysis of the German Greens can be dound here. He is also strong on environmental concerns, here he debates the European left arguing we should not aspire to be Caliphs, not to replace one set of rulers (Europeans instead of Americans) but to create real democracy.

More of this writing here mostly in Deutsch

I notice that he has a big EU sustainability project shared with other Greens like Professor John Whitelegg.

Much to debate here.

Frieder Otto Wolf

The force of the No!
Opportunities for a renewing European left
(Abstract)

Hopefully, the failing European constitution treaty has been the high point of a politics from above using the leverage of international politics in order to promote policies of the ‘neo-liberal counter-revolution’ (Milton Friedman) against the populations of nation-states. In the case of the European Union, this neo-liberal turn had inspired a ‘second breath’ into a tiring technocratic policy of European integration by ‘objective necessities’ (Sachzwang), using the principle of mutual recognition in order to initiate a logic of amplifying the ‘imperatives of globalisation’ which has brought about the single market, the single currency and their concomitant efforts at ‘policy co-ordination’, as well as the big-bang enlargement of 2004.

A renewing left – for which there are positive signs in various places within the enlarged EU – should be able to use this largely self-inflicted defeat of the conservative and neoliberal forces governing Europe since the 1980s as an opportunity for concretising a political alternative capable of reaching out successfully to the peoples and citizens of Europe.

This opportunity will only materialise, however, if and in so far a renewing European left will become capable, in a difficult, but unavoidable process, at once
- to overcome its historic failings which have made possible the victories of the neo-liberal and conservative forces in the 1980s and 1990s,
- to fully draw the lessons from the experience of renewing popular resistances against neo-liberal ‘reform politics’ in the last years.

1. Overcoming the fordist past of the left in Europe

The left in Europe has been profoundly, and in a subalternate way, marked by the reality of fordism – from the cold war split between pro-soviet and pro-western forces, via the rather explicit statism, androcentrism, authoritarianism, technocratism and eurocentrism of both to the different, but parallel implication of the fragmented left in the crisis of historical Marxism. This has been only partially addressed by the new left initiatives of the 1970s and 1980s which have, moreover, failed in renewing the old forces of the left wherever they have tried to do so. At the most they have been able to contribute decisively to precipitating their downfall, often ‘recuperated’ by new subalternate forms of left wing politics, like ‘new labour’ or green ‘realpolitik’. The present state of demise of both of these left forces opposing each other in the crisis of fordism – i.e. of the historical new and old left alike – may open a new window of opportunity: For drawing post-fordist lessons beyond the old divides. As these confrontations have taken rather specific forms within concrete European nation states which has made trans-national transfers of experience and theory a difficult exercise, a better understanding of them will greatly facilitate a common European articulation of a political project of the left.

2. Creating a popular European left

Leaving aside the constraints resulting from subalternity to a centre-left still largely governing in the late 1990s, left wing opposition to the projected European constitution treaty has been strongly hampered from two sides – from a democratic ‘sovereignism’ repudiating any kind of trans-national politics, as well as from a politics of global solidarity wary of any specifically European politics.
The French and Dutch ‘nos’ challenge the left in Europe to overcome these positions of an abstract alternative to the European arena of democratic politics in favour of a comprehensive approach – by constructing a European dimension of alternative politics which will prove a necessary complement of national (and regional) arenas of political struggle, as well as a positive contribution to the implementation of global political objectives. This will not be possible by mistaking the existing, largely irreversible state of European integration for what is not – a necessary or even useful stepping stone towards a democratic peoples’ Europe changing towards a possible sustainable path of development. Neither will it be achieved by side-stepping or abandoning the results of past processes of European integration. There is no way of avoiding the arduous task of ‘reworking’ and ‘reconstructing’ all the existing elements of EU integration and its surrounding network of institutions, in order to transform them into arenas of a specific trans-national process of political democracy going beyond classical representation, in order to activate the creative powers of European multitudes for a macro-regional project of ‘developing sustainability’, in its economic, social, environmental and institutional dimensions. This will require opposing the neo-liberal blackmail of capitals freely operating on virtually global markets – and it will, therefore, have to be founded on a new, practical anti-capitalism going beyond mere ideological postulates.


Such a renewed project of anti-capitalist transformations in one of the key macro-regions of globalising capitalism will not remain un-attacked by the proponents of capitalist accumulation. In thinking about practical strategies of defending its development, it will be of central importance, however, to avoid the trap of lapsing back into an ‘alternative’ imperialism, the patterns of which are still only too present in European institutional memories. Instead of opposing the hegemony of the USA in a strategy of a hegemonic challenger (‘strategy of Iznogood’: I want to be Caliph instead of the Caliph!), the EU and its member states will have to develop a networking, ‘rhizomatic’, approach based upon a parallel strengthening of their global solidarities and of the ‘rule of law’ in a global order regulated by equitably transformed UN institutions. More specifically, the EU should not try to create and to expand ‘spheres of influence’, let alone try to create a ‘military capacity’ to ‘protect’, i.e. to control, such areas – it should rather try to become a specific model for sustainable solutions for those kinds of problems other national and trans-national agencies will have to solve on their own and with respect to their own specific conditions. This could begin by addressing the problems of its own internal deficits in terms of democratic participation – by inventing practical forms of trans-national democracy, e.g. finding new ways of ‘playing’ the multi-level structures of European politics ‘from below’, combining the diversity of national public spheres with a functioning common, European or global, dimension of national political debates or integrating parliamentary and civil society politics in new ways. This will have to include a re-appropriation, as well as a proper redeployment of the existing methods of making politics in Europe – from direct legislation and administration of programmes, via framework legislation and multi-level implementation of programmes, to the different forms of policy co-ordination and political consultation between member states, which have sprung up in the 1990s.
A core element and a starting point for the discursive development for such alternative European policies can be found in the existing European efforts to devise alternative strategies, like the Euro-Memo group or the initiative for a manifesto towards a Social Europe supported by the ETUC – to be reinforced by a diligent study of the critical efforts of the EEB, the European Women’s Lobby, or of the more official Advisory Bodies on Sustainable Development. There is useful knowledge here to be appropriated by initiatives of European multitudes in which a renewing European left will be able of playing an important, dynamising and communicating role.
A lot of this useful knowledge has been worked upon and synthesized during the processes of an incompletely, yet really trans-nationalising debates which have accompanied the drafting and debating processes of the EU constitution treaty – even if parliamentary and civil society participation have often been reduced to a status of mere ‘tokenism’, which has left its debilitating marks on the results communicated in technocratic and isolated forms.
It will therefore be an important effort to gain some ‘reformist’ forces which have become trapped in such far too rudimentary participation processes for an active contribution to initiatives of European left alternatives. An initiative for mutual trans-national support in national political campaigns, as well as a common and co-ordinated initiative for constructing an alternative European constitution from below, will be decisive elements for such a reaching out of a renewing European left.


3. Conclusion

This reflection is not aiming at just another enactment of the ‘new left’ vs. ‘old left’ confrontations which have played a crucial role in the historic defeats of the left since the 1960s. It rather asks for the conditions of a comprehensive renewal of the left which will be able to carry all its real elements to common capabilities of action without diminishing their diversity.