I am involved in the DIEM25 movement, a pan-european cross border democratic movement led by Yanis Varoufakis—my particular role is working on the manifesto for the UK branch.
Manifesto
For all their concerns with global competitiveness, migration and terrorism, only one prospect truly terrifies the Powers of Europe: Democracy! They speak in democracy’s name but only to deny, exorcise and suppress it in practice. They seek to co-opt, evade, corrupt, mystify, usurp and manipulate democracy in order to break its energy and arrest its possibilities.
For rule by Europe’s peoples, government by the demos, is the shared nightmare of:
The Brussels bureaucracy (and its more than 10,000 lobbyists)
Its hit-squad inspectorates and the Troika they formed together with unelected ‘technocrats’ from other international and European institutions
The powerful Eurogroup that has no standing in law or treaty
Bailed out bankers, fund managers and resurgent oligarchies perpetually contemptuous of the multitudes and their organised expression
Political parties appealing to liberalism, democracy, freedom and solidarity to betray their most basic principles when in government
Governments that fuel cruel inequality by implementing self-defeating austerity
Media moguls who have turned fear-mongering into an art form, and a magnificent source of power and profit
Corporations in cahoots with secretive public agencies investing in the same fear to promote secrecy and a culture of surveillance that bend public opinion to their will.
The European Union was an exceptional achievement, bringing together in peace European peoples speaking different languages, submersed in different cultures, proving that it was possible to create a shared framework of human rights across a continent that was, not long ago, home to murderous chauvinism, racism and barbarity. The European Union could have been the proverbial Beacon on the Hill, showing the world how peace and solidarity may be snatched from the jaws of centuries-long conflict and bigotry.
Alas, today, a common bureaucracy and a common currency divide European peoples that were beginning to unite despite our different languages and cultures. A confederacy of myopic politicians, economically naïve officials and financially incompetent ‘experts’ submit slavishly to the edicts of financial and industrial conglomerates, alienating Europeans and stirring up a dangerous anti-European backlash. Proud peoples are being turned against each other. Nationalism, extremism and racism are being re-awakened.
At the heart of our disintegrating EU there lies a guilty deceit: A highly political, top-down, opaque decision-making process is presented as ‘apolitical’, ‘technical’, ‘procedural’ and ‘neutral’. Its purpose is to prevent Europeans from exercising democratic control over their money, finance, working conditions and environment. The price of this deceit is not merely the end of democracy but also poor economic policies:
The Eurozone economies are being marched off the cliff of competitive austerity, resulting in permanent recession in the weaker countries and low investment in the core countries
EU member-states outside the Eurozone are alienated, seeking inspiration and partners in suspect quarters where they are most likely to be greeted with opaque, coercive free trade deals that undermine their sovereignty.
Unprecedented inequality, declining hope and misanthropy flourish throughout Europe
Two dreadful options dominate:
Retreat into the cocoon of our nation-states
Or surrender to the Brussels democracy-free zone
There must be another course. And there is!
It is the one official ‘Europe’ resists with every sinew of its authoritarian mind-set:
A surge of democracy!
Our movement, DiEM25, seeks to call forth just such a surge.
One simple, radical idea is the motivating force behind DiEM25:
Democratise Europe! For the EU will either be democratised or it will disintegrate!
Our goal to democratise Europe is realistic. It is no more utopian than the initial construction of the European Union was. Indeed, it is less utopian than the attempt to keep alive the current, anti-democratic, fragmenting European Union.
Our goal to democratise Europe is terribly urgent, for without a swift start it may be impossible to chisel away at the institutionalised resistance in good time, before Europe goes past the point of no return. We give it a decade, by 2025.
If we fail to democratise Europe within, at most, a decade; if Europe’s autocratic powers succeed in stifling democratisation, then the EU will crumble under its hubris, it will splinter, and its fall will cause untold hardship everywhere – not just in Europe.
Read more here