The Left Case Against the EU

Many on the left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater co-operation and progress. If it has drifted rightwards, the answer is to fight for reform from within.

In this iconoclastic polemic, economist Costas Lapavitsas demolishes this view. He contends that the EU’s response to the Eurozone crisis represents the ultimate transformation of the union into a neoliberal citadel, which institutionally embeds austerity, privatisation and wage cuts. Concurrently, the rise of German hegemony has divided the EU into an unstable mixture of wealthy core and dependent peripheries. These related developments make the EU impervious to meaningful reform, particularly as its institutions are fundamentally designed to uphold the interests of capital against labour. The solution is therefore a direct challenge to the EU project that stresses popular and national sovereignty as preconditions for socialism and true internationalism.

Lapavitsas’s powerful manifesto for a socialist opposition to the EU upends the wishful thinking that often characterises the debate and will be a challenging read for all on the left interested in the future of Europe.