Latin America, Europe and the Left: Enthusiasm and the Challenge ahead

Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales were the unchallenged stars of the Latin-American/Carribean States (LAC) summit in Vienna this weekend. The European Left was successful in shifting the focus on the Union’s aggressive international trade policy and may well have created one of the first truly European focal points for the Left. The revolutio-romantizism of the alternative summit reveals, on the other hand, the challenges of the Left that still lie ahead.

1. The Left finds its first European objective, finally
As a driving force of a neoliberal international trade politics the EU is playing side by side with the USA, as many NGOs like Attac or Oxfam have argued in recent years. (Also see my piece on WTO-EU). In some cases the Union has in fact taken over the role as the main villain, for example in the Hong Kong WTO Doha round in December 2005. The vision of the EU being or becoming a “soft world power” can, therefor, already be discarded as phantastic or simply wrong.

This weekends major effort of an alternative summit paralleling the LAC-EU meeting has finally succeeded in creating a public focus on the Union’s aggressive trade policy. But there’s more to it: it could well be the first left issue that truly gets a grip on European politics and be a focal point for the whole left spectrum (from unions to greens) and pan-European. It’s concrete, visionary, long-term and not too reactionistic.

One example: the tribunal-technique of publicly accusing specific big companies for their unethical business strategy has been used at the Alternative summit for companies like Suez. It has proven successful in a variety of (mainly American) campaigns (Killer-Coke, Nike Anti-Sweatshop, etc) and can prove interesting for unions, student groups and consumer-advocates.

2. Lessons learned from older European campaigns
There have been, of course, some recent examples of more or less successful European Left campaigns: Anti-GATS, Anti-Bolkestein and Anti-Constitution, to name the most important. But all of them have had their flaws: GATS was very technical and couldn’t reach wide publicity despite the involvement of some major labor unions. The Anti-Constitution campaign could, after all, not find a concrete Left critique of the Constitution that would have been able to unite the Left of both the old and the new member states (not mentioning the rift in eg the French Left itself) and instead relied on a blurry Anti-feeling that some Eastern European commentators have dismissed as coded xenophobia (and, to some extent, rightly so). All of the mentioned campaigns have in common that they were only a defensive reaction to a (hostile) policy.

The issue of the Union’s trade policy, on the other hand, has the potential to overcome those childhood-illnesses of European left campaigning. It is to hope that a similar development will take place for other pressing issues (Social Europe, civil rights and security, etc.)

The three keys to a successful European campaign could be described as follows: 1. Concentrate on specific policies instead on “neoliberalism” as such. 2. A successful European campaign needs to include and be attractive for the whole European Left (and not only the Western European Left). 3. A concrete policy we favor over the policy we fight.

3. Solidarity with Latin America? How?
The current left-swing in Latin America has been described as probably one of the most important left developments of today. This may well be true for Latin America, and I deem it important to sustain a feeling of solidarity towards the Left movements. After all, it isn’t too long ago that the US supported a putsch against the elected president Chavez. A conscious European public is important as a counterweight to another similar attempt.

4. The erratic First-World Left
On the other hand, the first-world Left is an erratic and moody bitch. Before the current Chavez/Morales hype there was a similar Lula-hype, but after his corruption scandal he fell from grace with the first-world Left and is now seen as something like a Latin-American Tony Blair.

The first-world left is keeping a deep sympathy for anything that smells like Che Guevara, Latin America or popular uprising (and there’s nothing wrong with that).

But here’s the problematic part: the socio-romantic semi-knowledge of what’s going on in Latin America is sometimes deeply unrealistic, as the case of Lula shows: could we really expect an instant overturn of a deeply rooted parlamentary system of corrution? Or have the high expectations rather been proved naïve and unrealistic? Now, parts of the first-world Left apply a similar black-n-white scheme on Venezuela and Bolivia.

I say that there’s a 50:50 chance that the Lula-destiny awaits Chavez, too, and that the first-world Left will find find yet another new hero to first love and then loathe. The reason for this is that Left aocio-romanticism is, I claim, still structurally racist (reminding of Edward Said’s analysis of Orientalism). As Lord Byron was disappointed that the Greek revolutionaries weren’t as pittoresque as the antique statues he knew, we are bound to find out again and again that the Latin American Left is as much trapped in the context of their system as we are by ours.

5. Working along with Chavez and Morales
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be responsive to the developments in Latin America. The alert solidarity mentioned above is certainly needed and useful. But the true lesson learned from Chavez and Morales is about applying their critizism of the economically imperialist West in our European policies. This means change in the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy), democratization of the foreign trade policy (possibly handing over the real responsibility and oversight from the Commission to the European Parliament), investment in alternative energy, and democratic supervision and possibly nationalization of water/gas/power/petrol companies. That sounds like a lot of boring and not-at-all-revolutionary-feeling work. True. But that’s what solidarity with the Left movements in Latin America is really about.