MAJEURE : Europe constituante ?
LA FAILLE ATLANTIQUE DES RELATIONS EUROPE / ÉTATS-UNIS
By YANN MOULIER BOUTANG.
The episode of the Convention failed to achieve what some desired: an end to federalism and the continuing expansion of Europe. Last February 15, after several months ring against the military option in Iraq, the constiuent people of Europe showed their presence in the streets. Henceforth, any attempt to divide Europe from the outside will make it apparent to this public opinion that one of the objectives of American foreign policy is to stop Europe front asserting itself as a political power. The Atlantic rift of Euro-American relations can only widen. The construction of a European model of life as an alternative to Americanization is gradually taking form around the issues of social protection, health, the relation to living organisms, art, education and culture. To achieve this, Europe must become a federal political project.
POUR UNE EUROPE MINEURE
By BIFO.
A political innovation capable of reshaping the world’s political landscape is the real issue behind European unification. To make it happen, Bifo calls for the European project to attain autonomy front the unlimited extension of the liberal principle developed by the dominant global forces. A « European nationalism » would be a dead end. On the contrary, the European construction will be extensive, postnational, bottom-up. To constitutionalize European space is to constitutionalize the development of networks. In the network, the government of minorities is the issue.
COMMENT ALLER VERS PLUS D’EUROPE ?
By DANIEL COHN-BENDIT (ENTRETIEN AVEC YANN MOULIER BOUTANG)
In this interview, Dany Cohn-Rendit and Yann Moulier Boutang survey a number of questions in reaction to the last phase of activity of the European Convention: although unavoidably disappointing, the Convention, along with the war in Iraq, provides an opportunity to foster the development of a European public sphere. The discussion revolves around the economic, fiscal, institutional and social means Europe needs to give itself in order to promote the constitution of a truly multi-polar world.
L’EUROPE DES DROITS APRÈS LA CONVENTION
By GIUSEPPE BRONZINI.
Giuseppe Bronzini draws up the balance sheet of fifteen months of fully public work by the Convention that brought together the European countries for the drafting of a political constitution. Even though the debates have not clearly decided between an as-yet-to-be defined federalism able to give new impetus to the European social model and a functional, strongly liberal interstate cooperation, still we see all the signs of the decline of sovereignist positions, along with the subversive potential of some of the constitutional texts.
FAIRE L’EUROPE DANS LA MONDIALISATION
By TONI NEGRI.
In this article, Toni Negri seeks to define the way that Europe takes its position inside the constituent process of global imperial government. To do so he looks « from above » – at the constiuent schematisms of the European constitution, then analyzes – «from below » – the constitutional tactics of the movement. In conclusion he turns to the problems around which it is immediately possible to create both Europe and the political and social movement.
VERS UNE EUROPE POST IDENTITAIRE
By YVES CITTON.
In reaction to the manifesto signed’ in May 2003 by Habermas and Derrida, calling for « an appealing vision of the Europe to come », this article identifies six blind spots which make the dominant forms of cosmopolitanism backward-looking (the appeal to moral duty, the, fetishism of the law, the attachment to the Nation-State, the focus on identity, an implicit Eurocentrism and the reference to Kant). It then attempts to turn them around: front duty to power, from a sacralization of Justice to the poster of the lass, front Super-Nation-States to globalized regulation, front identity politics to imitative invention, from Eurocentrism to the interaction of the multitudes, and from Kant to Spinoza. The goal being to invent a post-identitary Europe, which would situate itself beyond moralism and confederalism.
VERS UNE SCIENCE DES ÉTRANGERS?
By MICHAEL HARDT (ENTRETIEN RÉALISÉ PAR BRIAN HOLMES ET JON SOLOMON)
In this interview Michael Hardt analyses the changes in the balance of Imperial power brought about by the war in Iraq. American unilateralism has led to an untenable military situation; but European multilateralism would only mean a division of the spoils among a few other great powers. The demonstrations of February 15, 2003, whose organizational mode prolongs the cycle of counter-globalization struggles, are more promising for the multitude. The latter, Hardt notes, is « a concept of social singularities that… are able to communicate, collaborate and act in common. » Its development is oriented by the major characteristics of immaterial labor, which exerts its hegemony across the global division of labor. Writing « multitude » without an « s » indicates the « decision-making capacity » required for the multitude to become a social project. One way to conceive this project would be through a science of foreigners, a « becoming foreign in one’s own and every country ».
L’EUROPE EN GUERRE
By HEIDRUN FRIESE & PETER WAGNER.
Europe as a political entity is born with the general public disagreement against the Iraqi war, while governments were divided on that point. Those linked with European opinion are going to build politics together while the others will remain in a corm on market. This new political stage is supported by the global movement.
LA POSSIBILITÉ EUROPÉENNE (LE MONDE, LES MULTITUDES ET L’EUROPE)
By FRÉDÉRIC NEYRAT.
The European Constitution risks promoting a Europe cut off from two fundamental realities : the multitudes and the world. A double denial that could only be carried out in the form of a deadly neonationalism. In the face of that, let us recall that a Constitution is only one element in the self-organization of our societies. In the framework of the Great Deterritorialization of the planet, societies must now compose forms of reterritorialization open to the worlds that overflow them, and they must give rights to all the forms of life they include. This inclusion, which is not assimilation, is what the author calls residence. A Europe able to encourage the powers of being would be quite the opposite of a power-hungry Europe.
L’EUROPE PEUT ELLE NOUS FAIRE RÊVER?
By ROSI BRAIDOTTI (ENTRETIEN RÉALISÉ PAR ANTONELLA CORSANT)
Rosi Braidotti, interviewed by Antonella Corsani, describes her dream of a post-national Europe, napped by plural and flexible identities. Feminists and post-colonial studies give good examples of situated ways of thinking which permit those new social cartographies. She does not urge to push margins in front; she thinks of building new transversal roads in a world whose center is wholly under capitalist power and no longer able to lead any positive transformation.
HORS CHAMPS
UN FUTUR QUI EST DÉJÀ LÀ
By LULA ET FÉLIX GUATTARI.
This dialogue took place at the beginning of the process through which Lula became president of Brazil. It analyses the empowerment capacity of the Workers’ Party: it is made of collective discussion and free speech, working class embedding, openness to the whole
society, welcome to minorities, respect and distance front other parties, sense of uniqueness. The French socialist party lacks those qualities, which one could, find also in Solidarnosc.
MINEURE : L’Argentine, pour l’exemple
CAUSES ET HASARDS (DILEMMES DU NOUVEL ANTAGONISME SOCIAL)
By COLLECTIF SITUACIONES.
The long year-and-a-half span which goes front the insurrectional days of December Zoos to the presidential elections of April-May 2003 in Argentina requires a « spur of the moment » reading of the current condition of the « new social leadership ». Rupture, dismissal and visibility have been the typical features of its emergence. Although some interpretations of the election’s results consider that these might prove the « neutralization » and the « ebbing » of the movement’s power and its motto « Let them all go away, let not even a single one stay », the phenomenology of counter-power in Argentina shows, on the contrary, that the multiplicity of situations can resist without any need for external organisation.
DIFFICULTÉS ET SUCCÈS DES MOBILISATIONS SOCIALES
By MARISTELLA SVAMPA.
During the nineties, Argentinian society has gone through a process of transformation and reduction of politics which can be summed up in four distinct ways: the succeeding regimes have shorted how far the enslavement of politics to the economy could extend; a transformation has occurred in the relationship between Peronism and the popular classes; politics has reduced itself to the proliferation of personal and leadership decisions, contributing to the foundation of a media-centered bond with the electors; and finally, the nineties can be defined as the years in which politics became self-referential. In the end the achievements of the new movements are, in spite of all difficulties, unmistakably positive.
PIQUETEROS : LIMITES ET POTENTIALITÉS
By GRACIELA HOPSTEIN.
The Argentinian piqueteros are an unmistakably new type of political movement which has been able to carry out not only new types of disobedience and resistance actions, but also political practices based on direct democracy, self-management and autonomy. They are a political subject which, far for being unitary, has found in the struggle against social atomization and exclusion a tool for the recognition of a multiple, plural and hybrid identity. They have created networks and established spaces of empowerment in which the « new » is able to create truly constituent political and social dynamics.
TRAVAIL ET PROCESSUS CONSTITUANT: EN SUIVANT LE FIL D’ARIANE
By RUBÉN ESPINOSA.
How can we picture the days of December 19th and 20th 2001 ? Where can we trace its origins and driving force? Which has been the leading subject? Are there any clues which enable us to recognize the movement as well as the obstacles it will have to overcome? The labour of the movement in Argentina does not only show the peculiarities of our history, but it also refutes the series of arguments on universal circulation asserting that the passage front fordism to post fordism implies the inevitable destruction-disappearance of all social achievements that can be credited to the movements action in the past. The ungovernability that began in 1955 is today more serious than ever, because it is not the result nor of the incompetence of the succeeding governments nor of the imposition of the international financial centres, but, on the contrary, it is the result of the movement’s action through the years.
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LE MONDE ENSEIGNANT EN PRISE DIRECTE AVEC SES VIEUX DÉMONS.
By MICK MIEL.
During the struggle of Spring 2003, teachers had to face questions which are essential both for themselves and for the future of schools. Confronted simultaneously with the establishment of a transnational state and with a transfer of decision-making power toward territorial communities, they must revise their old ideological models and to survive, they must confront these models with realities on the ground, which some of them are already exploring. But it was above all on the occasion of the struggle over the exams that the Republican structure, founded on the morality of work, revealed its obsolescence. The teaching world must henceforth responsibly consider its political role in the disaster of social selection.
LIENS
LE CRÉOLE ET L’ÉCOLE
By JEAN YVES MONDON.
The aim of this paper is to draw attention on the connection between wanting Creole to be taught at school and, forgetting something that probably belongs to the fact of speaking and thinking, of making sense in Creole, i.e. the power of producing some idea about what an institution might be. It seems to me that this question is worth asking. The paper is about that worthiness.