Plan B for Europe Conference in Copenhagen – A new beginning for the European Left?

Joseph Healy, principal speaker for Left Unity, attended the recent Plan B conference in Copenhagen. This is his report.

The Plan B for Europe conference I attended two weeks ago in Copenhagen was organised by the Danish Red-Green Alliance and the Swedish Left Party. Unsurprisingly most of the attendees were Scandinavians, although there were delegates from across Europe. I was initially surprised to find that for a conference discussing the future of Europe there were no speakers from the UK and no workshops on Brexit. Indeed, having failed to get a speaking slot, when I made an intervention from the floor during Sunday’s plenary session, I remarked that I thought that Brexit had aready happened and that the UK event was organised in a small room down a corridor in the Danish parliament building where the conference was organised. The only other UK observers present were two members of Green Left who, like me, were left unimpressed by the approach to both Brexit and climate change – but more of that later.

The tone of the conference was set at the opening plenary on the Saturday, which did not have any opportunities from interventions from the floor. The panel consisted of representatives of the Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish Left parties along with a Slovenian speaker and Zoe Konstantopolou, former Syriza MP and Speaker of the Greek parliament. But the star on Saturday was Jean Luc Melenchon who guaranteed a large media presence. Melenchon gave a tub thumping speech about the neoliberal nature of the EU and referred to what seemed to have been a meeting with President Hollande about an EU treaty going to be presented in 2017 which would call for an EU military force. Melenchon claimed that Hollande told him that he knew nothing of the treaty and Melenchon promised that a resistance to war and a militarisation of Europe would be one of the main planks in his presidential campaign next year. The danger of the militarisation of Europe was one of the themes of the conference.

A Norwegian speaker began by saying that the Left party in Norway had always played a leading role in the campaign to keep Norway out of the EU. But he wanted Norway to go further and leave the European Economic Area because of the neoliberal rules forced on Norway by being in the EEA. This was just an example of how far removed the debate about the EU is situated in Scandinavia from the one in the UK. Two of his main reasons for blasting the EU were pointing out that Europe was weak on co-operation when it came to refugees or climate change but strong on economics.

Zoe Konstantopolou caused one of the main moments of controversy at the conference when she refused to speak of Syriza as comrades or friends but denounced them as “traitors”. She accused the EU of leading the witch hunt against those opposed to austerity. Plan B was a call to defend democracy. Greeks had been subjected to taxation and to a surrender to the creditors. She attacked the sell off of Greek banks and the refugee treaty with Turkey. Things were now so bad in Greece that there were organised attacks on all those associated with resistance and government officials were granted legal immunity and there was interference with the judicial system.

But a young Slovenian speaker cautioned about Plan B calling for the end of the EU and likened the situation with that in the former Yugoslavia in the 80s. In Slovenia nobody wanted independence in 1985 but wanted a reformed Yugoslavia, by 1990 all wanted it and Serbs were attacked as lazy, arrogant etc. The argument that the former states of Yugoslavia were better off with independence had been disproved – the GDP of Croatia was now less than it had been in 1980. He called instead for a move against protectionism and social dumping and forcing trade blocks to increased standards, including minimum wage standards across Europe and a European Green Deal. This speech was later denounced in one of the workshops by Eric Toussaint as being “Varoufakism”.

I attended two workshops – one on debt and the second on social dumping. At this point it must be said that the conference was suffused with the Lexit narrative, which I did my best to oppose. A young British man now living in Sweden claimed at one of the workshops that the British people had “voted against globalisation”. The workshop on social dumping was particularly interesting with a Polish speaker from the Razem party, a Danish Red-Green Alliance MP and an Irish trade unionist. The Danish MP just repeated a litany of the neoliberal sins of the EU whereas the other two speakers were much more interesting.

The Polish speaker described how immigrant labour like Poles were doing most of the unwanted work across Europe. She gave the example of the German Post Office, Deutsche Post, who had just recorded a huge profit, but who had their Polish employees sleeping in the postal vans! She cautioned against a total rejection of the EU and the resultant anti-migrant feeling and xenophobia which would result. She later told me that she was glad that I made the interventions I did as she had wanted to say the same thing. The Irish trade unionist spoke of social dumping and the driving down of terms and conditions for Irish workers, where the EU offered no support to the unions or Irish workers. When he told the mainly Scandinavian audience that trade union membership in the private sector was only 16%, there were audible gasps! Again this demonstrates the difference between the Scandinavian experience and that in the UK & Ireland and also Eastern Europe.

When I challenged some of the assumptions about leaving the EU etc and pointed out that Brexit had led to an increase in xenophobia and racism as well as the threat to set fire to workers rights the Danish MP angrily retorted: “Well there must have been something good about Brexit as the British people voted for it!” Against such unerring logic what could I say! The Irish trade unionist agreed with me that much of the progressive legislation on workers rights had emanated from Brussels and not from Dublin or London.

The plenary on the Sunday consisted of a panel with Finnish, Danish, Portuguese and Italian MPs and an MEP from Podemos, a Norwegian trade unionist and an anti-globalisation activist from France. It soon became clear that all of the Left parties want to leave the Eurozone but are divided on the issue of leaving the EU. Generally speaking the Eastern and Southern European parties do not want to leave whereas those in Northern Europe are much keener. However, the Finnish MP said that her party was opposed to exiting and a Swedish MP told me also that there was no push from the Left in Sweden to leave and that no referenda were foreseen.

The Italian MP, who is a former minister, invited the attendees to come to the next Plan B conference in Rome in March to meet at the same venue where the original Treaty of Rome setting up the EU was first signed. The Norwegian trade unionist saw the Left across Europe as being in crisis, this was reflected in the rise of the Far Right. There was a need for the Left to analyse why it fails when it is in government and suffers afterwards. Unsurprisingly he saw no hope whatsoever of the EU being reformed. He asked what had happened to Left governments in the EU who had disobeyed such as Greece? The two major problems for him were that the Left needed to be far more involved in the trade union movement and also needed to learn how to fight.

The Podemos speaker gave a fiery speech where he stressed the need of involving the social movements and criticised the conference for not including those movements. He said the Rome conference would have to be much larger and including those forces. 100 town mayors were meeting the following week in Oviedo to plan resistance and there needed to be more municipal resistance centres built up. He outlined the terrible results of austerity in Spain and called on Leftists across Europe to show solidarity to survive. He gave positive examples of solidarity such as Barcelona where a new distribution plant for natural energy was being built.

The Danish MP for once showed an understanding of the different political situations which countries in Europe find themselves in . He called for working together both inside and outside the EU. We needed to have a pan European Left perspective and not surrender to the Far Right or the neoliberals. He agreed that there was no future for the EU monetary policy but thought that the EU itself had symbolic value both positive and negative.

The floor was then thrown open to interventions. It was at this point that Susan George the famous environmentalist and anti-globalisation campaigner criticised the lack of mention of climate change in any of the speeches. Many of the speakers then rushed to rectify this in their responses. But it has to be said that apart from Podemos and the Portuguese speaker there had been almost no reference to it.

I intervened at this point to criticise the fact that there had been no session on Brexit despite every speaker mentioning it at the conference. I also criticised the tendency to “retreat into a Scandinavian paradise” and the dangers of various European countries pulling up the drawbridge and retreating into isolation. The Alice in Wonderland character of many of the foreign delegates views of Brexit was emphasised when the Finnish MP attacked Left Unity for having campaigned alongside Social Democrats and neoliberals in the referendum campaign stating that this had left the way open for the Far Right to adopt the populist mantle. I also found people at the conference who took the Lexit view that the new UK government was less Rightwing than Cameron’s. When I pointed out that this was not the case, I often got the response that they may be more reactionary socially (migration etc) but less so economically. Again I pointed out that the austerity agenda continues unabated.

The conference was a good opportunity to gauge thinking on the Left across Europe. I remain concerned about those, especially in Scandinavia, who are rushing to dismantle the EU without heeding the cautionary words of those like Varoufakis about what may replace it. All at the conference feared the rise of the Far Right and all are committed to fighting neoliberalism, which they now regard as a doomed economic and political model. The argument is how best to go about those twin battles. The ghost of Hamlet seemed to haunt the corridors of the Danish parliament asking the question: “To leave or not to leave”.