TOWARDS A SOCIALIST EUROSCEPTICISM
As the year 2025 draws to a close, we must reflect on the state of our politics and collective struggles. As the US war machine pushes us closer to nuclear confrontation, and our biosphere is pushed past the limits of what is habitable, we must ask in which way we can create a mass movement against this exploitation and destruction. We cannot succumb to escapism.
As a false ceasefire is utilised to keep Gazan blood off the front pages, the question we must now ask, as put by Barry Murray of the Peadar O’Donnell Socialist Republican Forum lately: “Will those who were motivated to scream “STOP THE GENOCIDE!” on the streets, now join the dots and begin shouting: “STOP IMPERIALISM AND CAPITALISM!”?
In Ireland, will all those who were motivated into activism by the genocide, and who campaigned for Catherine Connolly and for keeping the triple lock, now campaign for true sovereignty, against political rule from Brussels? This is the burning question which will decide if we can create a mass movement.
As the ravages of the free market decimate working class communities, right wing ideologues and agitators take advantage of the retreat of left wing intellectuals to the safety of panel rooms and conference halls. European institutions have embedded themselves deeply into the academies and the most effective tool of silent coercion for the white collar left is the career path, and the system of rewards and punishments that it dispenses. As the crisis of western imperialism intensifies, this soft coercion turns to hard power, as Germany, and other European countries reintroduce conscription. The EU now imposes draconian sanctions to not just punish foreign enemies but also (at the time of writing ) at least the 59 activists and journalists with European citizenship who are brave enough to confront and document this creeping tyranny. As European leaders bang the drums of war and defend the genocidal Zionist colony, the burning question now is: who on the left will stand with the aspirations of working people and take an explicitly Eurosceptic position, from a progressive standpoint?
STOP CETA, OR SOMETHING WORSE?
The passing of the second stage of the Arbitration (Amendments) bill, at 1 AM should have caused unrest the likes of which has not been seen since the water charges. Instead it went unnoticed by the masses of working people. The opposition decided that it was not worth explaining to the public, never mind warning them. A panel which included two Sinn FĂ©in TDS, one Labour and one Independent Ireland waived legislative scrutiny on the bill. The media was wall-to-wall coverage about a vote on fox hunting just two days prior to the vote, and the parliamentary left went along with this smokescreen. People Before Profit decided a cinema closure was more important to draw attention to on the week of the vote, which had been announced in the summer. Even after the vote and with the final vote inevitable, there is scant attention paid to it beyond zoom calls and conference halls.
The Arbitration (amendments) bill will give corporations unprecedented influence over Irish policy through mechanisms like investor-state tribunals, which will enslave our people further into the imperialist war machine, with finance capital extracting a pound of flesh from each worker if their bourgeois government dares to pass laws which impedes its advance in any way. The manner in which this, the most far reaching and draconian of legislation passed in recent memory in the 26 counties was passed, pulls the veil off the illusion of liberal democracy and shows the true face of the 26 county bourgeois dictatorship, and the “non-majoritarian” rule of Brussels.
Much of the campaigning on the bill had been moribund and based around CETA, which is already passed in European Parliament and just awaits the ISDS component to be constitutionally allowed. Much of the activism on CETA has been done through the realm of environmental activism, even though the consequences of ISDS arrangements span far beyond environmental issues.
In general, environmental activists let strategic use of EU law in environmental objections cloud their judgements as to the true nature of the European project. Through the campaign to Stop Shannon LNG, I have been involved in the environmental movement for many years. It is full of very committed, intelligent and capable people. Nevertheless, class privilege, illusions about liberal democracy and a fear of rejection from mainstream media prevents many from joining the dots, and keeps environmental causes out of reach for the majority. Many environmental activists can’t tell the difference between a planning objection and a political campaign. They write press releases as if they are planning objections, assuming the level of environmental or scientific literacy of their middle class echo chamber in the general public, and ignoring the wider social effects and imperial geopolitical strategy at play.
Their strategy inevitably becomes ideology. European law becomes their salvation, as they buy into the belief that “We need EU law to protect us from our own crooked ways”. They falsely assume that the 26 county state is a democratic sovereign entity and that it is the democratic will of the people to pollute that we need protection from.
The EU common agricultural and common fisheries policies have destroyed our lands, rivers and seas and taken our basic rights to feed ourselves and to control and protect our common resources, a right that we never truly had anyway. The EU has colonised the minds of people by giving a little with one hand in the form of European law and subsidies, and taking the lot with the other with its anti-democratic free market agenda, and rump parliament in which policymakers are not elected. In this way, the EU, in much the same way as the US military industrial machine, is the sower of chaos, while it pretends to be arbitrator of restoring order. Brussels rule over the 26 counties is seen by those fighting individual causes as unbreakable as the divine rights of kings in former times.
Rather than building a mass movement for sovereignty which extends past environmental issues, many in the environmental movement still moderate their language for NGO type respectability and acceptability to national news outlets. In doing this, they alienate themselves from the mass of working people of this country. The greatest success for the ruling elite of the Green Party coalition is that it made environmental issues synonymous with green austerity, poisoning many towards environmental issues. Even the activists with most disdain for Eamon Ryan end up appearing like they are aligned with establishment Greens because of the procedural, ideological norms which have been drilled into them.
The attention on CETA obscures the real prize here for financial capital: a future EU-US trade deal, the details of which were ironed out by Trump and Von Der Leyen in Scotland. The EU not only agreed to a highly unequal trade deal, it committed to buy five times the LNG, oil and coal as it currently does from the US. The US is using LNG as a weapon of hybrid warfare, but they are overplaying their hand. They have been using their fracked oil and gas reserves in an attempt to economically weaken and encircle Russia. But they cannot keep it up. The US is not a petro-state. It has limited resources. Hydrocarbons obtained trough hydraulic fracturing (fracking) have an energy return on investment (EROI) much lower than conventional oil and gas, as well as being environmentally much more destructive. The “AI revolution” is fuelling this excess energy demand but this is also an elaborate Ponzi scheme as Microsoft, Open AI and Nvidia buy and sell each others’ shares in a billion dollor bubble of circular transactions. An ISDS clause in the EU-US trade deal would signal an escalation of this exploitation, as the burden of these obsolescent industries would fall not just ecologically but also financially on future generations of working people under the thumb of Yankee-Zionist domination and Brussels rule.
In their moonlight operation, the Dublin government has laid the groundwork for the next round of austerity and super exploitation against the working class of Ireland on behalf of global capital and the imperial system that upholds it. To challenge the economic chains of imperialism and gain true sovereignty, neutrality and liberation, we must confront not just the war machine but the political rule of Brussels.
CULTURE WARS AND THE EU MIGRANT MURDER MACHINE
2026 will be ten years since the year of Brexit and the rise of Trump. It is essential that we honestly face and confront the way in which Western governments and their media and intelligence apparatus have colonised the minds of people, by replicating the same culture war on immigration that intensified since 2016. We must think past this knee jerk reaction on the left; it is “right wing” to be against immigration, the left wing position is to be “for immigration”. This template which has been repeated across the global north. Geopolitical analysis and class consciousness are absent from this moralistic positioning, and the conditions that fuel mass migration are ignored. Legitimate concerns from working class communities about resourcing issues get exploited as the theatre for a culture war where nobody seems to know who their real enemy is. This culture war keeps the liberal left fighting marginal right wing agitators rather than the brutal EU system which has murdered thousands of refugees in the Mediterranean.
Capitalism needs a reserve army of the unemployed to keep functioning. This was observed by Marx over 150 years ago, but seems to be forgotten by these supposed anti-capitalists. Anti-imperialist economists like Patnaik and Patnaik have observed that there are indeed two reserve armies of labour, one in the global north and one in the global south, and that global capitalism needs the global south to have a much higher level of unemployment and underemployment, not only to mobilise labour reserves, but to turn small commodity producers into price takers, where the fruits of their labour and land are expropriated at non-increasing prices, for the consumption of the global north economies. The global capitalist system rests on this imperialist arrangement.
The EU asylum system is a system of labour mobilization, geopolitical coercion and population control. Asylum seekers, whether genuinely seeking shelter from persecution or not, get fast tracked if they denounce the enemies of NATO, while those who oppose Western imperialism withstand years of slow violence within the system. This template, which Washington pioneered in relation to Cuba, became very apparent when Syria was deemed a “safe” country by the EU after Western backed Islamic fundamentalists took Damascus last winter 2024. As these Western backed ex-ISIS warlords went about massacring and disappearing Christians, Alevites and Druze, those Syrians who had denounced Bashar Al-Assad’s government as their reason for leaving, in order to gain access to Europe and avoid being locked in camps in Turkey, or on Greek islands, were told that their country was now safe to go back to. Approximately 9% of Syrians went home after the so-called liberation of their country, this despite Demascus regaining access to their oil, which had been withheld and siphoned off by US-backed Kurdish-led forces and all the brutal sanctions lifted. Georgians had been a priority country in the EU asylum system, despite the fact that there was no conflict there. The reason? It would seem so that the EU would have another country in their asylum system to denounce Russia.
This imperialist management of asylum became hugely apparent to everyone with the asylum apartheid introduced at the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, but it had been going on, albeit in a more subtle manner, for years. To question whether some of these priority countries are genuinely fleeing conflict or persecution, or whether who they are denouncing is really who they are running from, is not racism. It is not dog whistling to ask if people are being used, and if so, to question why. People from the global south are generally appreciative when people from the north show geopolitical awareness about imperialism, despite them being fearful about their immigration status. Fighting for true sovereignty would mean that we are not held hostage to an asylum system which violates basic rights and does not align with Ireland’s historic anticolonial stance. When “Coolock says no”, the answer should not be to gaslight Coolock, but to create a deeper understanding so that the working class can see who their real enemy is.
Meanwhile, a closer look at how Europe treats its dissidents reveals that the proscription of Palestine Action and the recent sanctioning of EU citizens are not without precedent. Republicans who have hosted Palestinian POWs for years before October 2023 know this all too well. Because of the EUs alignment with NATO and US imperialism, opposition groups from other NATO members become targets of repression within the EU because of the bogus terror lists they blanket adopt. In Ossendorf prison, the same prison where Hitler locked up communists, “democratic” Europe has been locking up Turkish and Kurdish communists. These activists, some of whom for years bore the marks of torture and persecution in Turkey, then get the same treatment when they seek safety in “democratic” Europe, precisely because they will not capitulate on their politics in order to get fast-tracked through the EU asylum murder machine. When we unquestioningly adopt terms like “the far right”, we are conceding there is a “far left” that is equally extremist. Thus we legitimise bogus terror lists which have taken away basic rights.
FOR A 32 COUNTY SOCIALIST REPUBLIC IN THE JUNGLE OF FREE PEOPLES
To move forward from here and gain a true peace, free from imperial war and class exploitation, we must build a popular socialist movement against the undemocratic rule of Brussels. The European political structure has shown its genocidal character, its undemocratic nature and its disregard for human life as well as our land, rivers and seas. We need a movement which sees past European grants and scholarships which are used to keep us compliant and mould us in their image.
Fighting for sovereignty does not mean turning away from the world. It means controlling our own destiny in order to take our place among the free nations of the world and build a socialist world order. A socialist republic would need to have the organisational depth in order to implement democratic centralism when faced with imperial threats, as well as reactionary forces within, yet be able to decentralise in times of calm. The world is full of examples of successes and failures to learn from in this regard. Leaving the European Union is not choosing isolationism, it is choosing freedom, justice and aligning with the working class and the global majority. Fortress Europe, with its support for Zionist aggression and its disregard for human life, is the isolationist monster.
Joseph Borrell revealed the true racist face of this monster when he said that Europe is a garden, and that: “the rest of the world is not exactly a garden, the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could take over the garden, and the gardeners should take care of it.”
Let’s make this monster’s garden irrelevant and choose the vast beautiful jungle.