Review of ‘The Left Case Against the EU’ by Costas Lapavitsas

By Paul Murphy

This book is a powerful polemic about the undemocratic and structurally neo-liberal character of the European Union. It takes apart the arguments of the former social-democrats who talk about the EU as a ‘social Europe’ and a force for progress. It also effectively dismantles the arguments of those further to the left, who hold out hope that the EU institutions could be radically reformed and filled with a progressive and left content.

Costas Lapavitsas makes a clear and convincing case that: 

“The EU and the EMU are not a neutral set of governing bodies, institutions, and practices that could potentially serve any socio-political forces, parties, or governments, with any political agenda, depending on their relative strength. Rather, they are structured in the interests of capital and against labour..”

Those familiar with Lapavitsas’ earlier works will recognise similar themes and ground that is retraced. It deals well with the history of the EU, rejecting both mainstream schools of European history, ‘intragovernmental’ (considering the EU to be fundamentally a set of interstate institutions, which do not challenge the sovereignty of each state) and ‘neofunctionalist’ (which places emphasis on the dynamic created by the institutions of the EU driving integration further). 

Instead, Lapavitsas injects class analysis, both of relations within European states, but also between the capitalist classes of Europe. He makes the correct point that “sovereignty has not drained away from individual member states to remotely the same degree”. This is particularly clear when considering the emergence of the German capitalist class as the hegemonic force of the EU in the course of the crisis. 

Fundamentally the dominance of the German capitalist class is based on the suppression of wages within Germany from the late 1990s. This defeat for the German working class resulted in a collapse of the income share of the German working class, with all productivity gains going to the German capitalist class. The gave German capitalism a significant advantage in the common currency area and enabled it to implement a policy of neo-mercantilism, keeping domestic demand weak by suppressing wages and seeking growth through exports.

Lapavitsas also explains well how the economic crisis was used to impose a neo-liberal agenda with austerity programmes for the ‘bailout’ countries. Combined with that was a further “hollowing-out of democracy” within the EU, as these policies were imposed by a series of unelected and unaccountable institutions like the European Commission and European Central Bank, and combined with a “series of institutional steps to embed the principle of fiscal austerity in the EMU”.

It is in dealing with the political conclusions that flow from this analysis that the book is at its most interesting. Greece acted as a laboratory not just for the imposition of brutal austerity by the Troika, but also for the strategy of the ‘left Europeanists’ who led Syriza.  In advance of the election of the Syriza government, Lapavitsas in ‘Against the Troika’ highlighted the strategic dilemma that would face them, predicting that it would not be possible to remain in the euro and break with austerity and that if “a Left government attempted to play a bluffing game [with the EU on debt and austerity], it would fail very rapidly.”

It is to Lapavitsas’ credit that as a Syriza MP, he opposed this sell-out. He is scathing, not just of Tsipras who led the betrayal, describing it as a “shameful historical event”, but also of former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis who effectively advocates a repeat of this failed strategy on a European-wide basis through the DiEM25 movement.

His conclusion is that a “left government must instead prepare for rupture with the EMU, and for a direct challenge to and even rejection of the EU. That is the only positive lesson for the Euroepean Left from the debacle of SYRIZA.” This is correct, but it is in the application of this strategic approach that flaws appear.

Effectively, while Lapavitsas does put forward policies that point to a socialist transformation of society, raising the need for public ownership of banks and key resources as well as economic planning, he separates this out from the question of exiting the euro. 

He effectively argues that a country should first exit, then it can start to implement these necessary policies. In doing so, he repeats the strategic approach of the main left current in Syriza, the Left Platform which went on to form Popular Unity in August 2015.  Yet unfortunately, Lapavitsas passes over the failure of the Left Platform, not just to block the road of betrayal of Syriza, but to organise a substantial alternative in the aftermath of that sell-out, by simply referring to “the organizational and political weaknesses of the Left Platform”.

Just as the defeat of Syriza was a failure of the strategy of the ‘left Europeanists’, there was also a failure of these ‘left sovereigntist’ ideas, as well as the parliamentary focus of the Left Platform. A key reason for Popular Unity’s failure to cross the 3% threshold to elect candidates to Parliament in the 2015 elections was that they were easily painted into a corner of being simply anti-euro in their election campaign. Instead of separating out the struggle against the EU and the struggle for socialist policies, they need to be intertwined. 

Exactly how a socialist programme will be put forward in different countries will differ according to consciousness and attitudes to the euro and the EU. However, the essence everywhere should be advocacy of the socialist policies that are necessary to transform people’s lives, along with an explanation that the rules and forces of the EU will be used, together with the power of domestic capital, to try to thwart that project. In that way, people can be prepared for the inevitable clash between a left government and the EU, and the likelihood that it would result in exit from the euro as well as the EU. While pursuing these struggles on a national plane, it will also be essential for the left to advocate joint action today against the capitalist classes across Europe, as well as popularise the need for a new democratic and socialist Europe.