[D66] The rise of separatist agitation in Europe
Antid Oto
protocosmos66 at gmail.com
Tue Oct 30 07:46:58 CET 2012
The rise of separatist agitation in Europe
30 October 2012
Recent months have seen one example after another of gains for parties
advocating the creation of new, small states in Spain, Belgium, Italy,
Scotland and elsewhere in Europe.
The growth in support for such tendencies has been fuelled by the savage
cuts and austerity measures being imposed by central governments on the
instructions of the troika—the European Union, European Central Bank and
International Monetary Fund—at the behest of the banks and global
speculators. But the exploitation of legitimate social grievances does
not mean that the political beneficiaries represent the interests of the
broad masses who are being exploited.
All of the parties championing separatism speak for bourgeois and
upper-middle class layers that have concluded the relative wealth of
their regions will allow them a more privileged existence—provided they
too seek membership in the European Union and faithfully do the bidding
of the banks and corporations in waging attacks on the working class.
The most prominent separatist movements have all emerged within their
respective countries’ more prosperous regions. All call for an end to
the subsidisation of poorer regions through central taxation and
advocate local control of valuable assets. None of this is altered by
fairly transparent efforts to project a left face in the case of some of
the larger nationalist organisations and a plethora of pseudo-left
tendencies that trail in their wake.
In Spain, the two most powerful movements are centered in the Basque and
Catalan regions. The first is one of Spain’s richest regions in terms of
gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, and the second is the richest
region overall.
Last month, 1.5 million Catalans marched in Barcelona to call for a
separate state under the banner of “a new nation in Europe”. The
regional government has dutifully implemented every demand for austerity
made for the past two years, but still finds itself with a record debt
of 44 billion euros and a credit rating reduced to junk status.
The leader of the dominant Convergència i Unió (Convergence and Union),
Artur Mas, is advancing a referendum on independence by calling the
distribution of burdens within Spain “unfair and disloyal”. He openly
speaks for the more well-off, comparing the “fatigue” in Catalonia with
the complaints of Germany, France and other major states that they are
subsidising southern Europe’s poorer states, such as Greece, Portugal
and Spain.
The role played by Berlin and Paris in imposing crushing austerity on
these countries is glossed over, because Mas wants entry into the EU. It
is proof that an “independent” Catalonia will carry out precisely the
same attacks on workers as it has already done as an “autonomous region.”
In Belgium, the same message comes from the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA),
headed by Bart De Wever, which won decisively in local elections earlier
this month by complaining of the Dutch-speaking north subsidising the
poorer south of the country. De Wever, who became mayor of Antwerp, has
declared, “The Flemish have had enough of being treated like cows only
good for their milk.” He described Belgium as “a transfer union”
dependent upon “checkbook federalism”. Like his Catalan counterpart, he
pursues a pro-EU agenda.
In Italy, the Lega Nord (Northern League) is an openly right-wing
formation, opposing subsidies to the less prosperous south under the
slogan “Roma ladrona” (Rome Big Thief). But Italian Prime Minister Mario
Monti’s demands for cuts in regional spending have also sparked protests
calling for a Venetian republic. In South Tyrol, separatists are
demanding that 90 percent of tax revenue collected in the wealthy
province be returned to the region.
The Scottish National Party (SNP), run by Alex Salmond, a former oil
adviser to the Royal Bank of Scotland, has secured agreement for an
independence referendum in 2014. The SNP has long posed as a defender of
limited welfare measures against central government cuts by the
Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition and the preceding Labour Party
government. But its real agenda is to establish a low corporate tax
location for the European market that will serve the interests of the
financial elite and its hangers-on.
Edinburgh is the second largest financial centre in the UK after the
City of London and the fourth largest in Europe, measured by equity
assets. It sustained a growth rate of over 30 percent between 2000 and
2005. It ranks ahead of Qatar, Oslo, Glasgow, Dublin, Abu Dhabi,
Brussels, Milan, Madrid and Moscow in the Global Financial Centres Index.
The SNP claims Scotland ranks fifth within the EU in GDP per capita, if
account is taken of Scotland’s economic share of the UK’s national air
space, territorial waters and oil and gas reserves in the North Sea
continental shelf, which it says should be controlled by Edinburgh.
Scotland has been wealthier than the rest of the UK every single year
since 1980, it insists.
The various pseudo-left groups seek to dress up these movements as
progressive because their “objective role” is to break apart imperialist
nations and this will somehow, at some ill-defined future point, open
the way to a socialist development. They are carrying out a political
fraud, designed to conceal their orientation to the bourgeoisie and a
desire to share in the spoils of this new round of “nation-building”.
All these movements advance a perspective that is antithetical to the
fundamental interests of the working class. The growth of separatist
movements throughout Europe is a retrograde development that cuts across
the critical struggle to unite the working class in opposition to the
social counterrevolution being carried out under the auspices of the
European Union.
The perspective of these movements is a recipe for the Balkanisation of
Europe and its transformation into a madhouse of competing mini-states.
These capitalist enclaves would all implement policies dictated to them
by the troika and the banks and corporations, resulting in the ever more
horrific immiseration of the broad mass of working people.
Left unchallenged, they will pit workers against one another in a race
to the bottom in terms of jobs, wages and conditions. Worse still, as is
proved by the experience of Yugoslavia, bourgeois nationalism and
separatism fuel fratricidal conflict ending in war.
Trotsky once described the state system of Europe as akin to the cages
within an impoverished provincial zoo. It is not the task of the working
class to build still smaller cages, but to liberate the continent from
all such archaic national divisions and build a harmonious and planned
economy, based upon production for need and not profit.
This means waging an irreconcilable struggle against the EU and all its
constituent governments—independently of all factions of the bourgeoisie
and their petty-bourgeois accomplices—for the creation of workers’
governments and the United Socialist States of Europe.
http://wsws.org/articles/2012/oct2012/pers-o30.shtml
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