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New Commonplaces after Heiligendamm*

By Thomas Seibert
Translated by Eric Canepa


Part I: Movement, Organization, and Left Intervention

Large mobilizations carried out by broad alliances always provide an opportunity to raise questions on the state of social movements and of their left wings. They also allow us to revisit answers previously given to such questions.¹ Post-Heiligendamm organizing therefore will require a review of the previous G-8 Summit in Germany, which occurred in Cologne in 1999, and this affords us an opportunity to draw an interim balance sheet of the movements which since that time have been known as “anti-globalization” or “global justice” movements.²

Only a few months after the disappointing Cologne mobilization the Seattle demonstrations took place. These had enormous and sustained, although uneven, resonance in the immediately ensuing period: in Prague (2000), in Göteborg and Genoa (2001) and in Evian (2003), and also in the process of the European Social Forums (Florence 2002, Paris 2003, London 2004, Athens 2006). Linked to these are of course the global anti-war days with several million participants (2003, 2004), in which the “Porto Alegre Internationale” of the Social Forums defined itself as the world-wide political protagonist. In Germany, the November 1, 2003 nation-wide mass demonstrations, as well as those of April 3 and October 2, 2004, were important (the week-long Hartz-IV protests occurring between them). However, this list would be incomplete were it not to include the date that prohibits us here from thinking in a straight line: September 11, 2001, the day the “War On Terror” officially began.

From Cologne to Seattle to...

As mobilizing began for the 1999 Cologne G-8 Summit, many thought in terms of a re-birth of social movements. The defeat of the Kohl government (1998) appeared to mark the end of the “decade without alternatives” which followed the collapse of actually existing socialism (1989). Of course, nobody had illusions about the red-green coalition government: It had long been clear that the post-Fordist (biopolitical, high-tech, neoliberal) transformation of capitalism would not even begin to be questioned. Nevertheless, the end of the “Kohl Era” seemed to announce a break, although the turn in Berlin was preceded by that of Thatcher to Blair and by the shift from the bourgeois- to the socialist-dominated “cohabitation” in Paris (both occurring in 1997).

The failure of the Cologne mobilization was consequently ambiguous. On the one hand, Cologne simply came too early: what many at that time expected to happen, first became a global event in Seattle. On the other hand, Cologne stands for a problem which today still confronts the global justice movements and their lefts. For the spike in mobilization followed the entry of the red-green coalition into the imperial(ist) War in Kosovo (March - June 1999). In this respect Cologne anticipated what became irrefutable in Florence, this time after September 11 and the attack on Afghanistan (October 2001) and with the expectation of an attack on Iraq (March 2003): that the development of a social opposition to capitalist globalization has to coincide with the development of an opposition to global imperial war. This means we need once more to reflect on the specific character of the global justice movements.

The Movement of Movements

If Seattle marks the end of the decade without alternatives, it also became apparent there how much resistance there had been in the preceding decade: “This decade saw the workers’ struggles that had set the large Korean automobile factories ablaze, the resistance against the multinationals in Nigeria, the struggles of the landless in Brazil, the resistance in Los Angeles or in Zapatista Chiapas. To understand the alchemy that characterizes the great proletarian revolts, it is well to recall that 1994 was not only the year of the Zapatista uprising but also that of the greatest worldwide number of general strikes in the 20th century.”³

The particularity of the global justice movements can be identified by their three constitutive moments: their internationalism, their pluralism, and, in view of these two, the fact that they were and are separated from the socialist, communist, and anti-colonial, anti-imperialist tradition of the 20th century by a break. To begin with the latter: the 1990s were without alternative because with the collapse of actually existing socialism any anti-capitalist alternative appeared to have failed. This was not just due to the neoliberal drum fire. It had become too obvious that central tenets of the Marxist-Leninist as well as the social-democratic tradition were definitively no longer sustainable: the notion of an inevitable progressive development of history occurring in stages, of the homogeneous revolutionary subject and its embodiment in the one party and its “science,” the concept of reform and/or revolution as tied to the “conquest of state power,” and the internationalization of reform as well as revolution on the path of catch-up development.

It was however also clear that the social movements, which had emancipated themselves from the labor movement and its “alternative” or “autonomous” lefts of the 1960s to 1980s, had only completed the turn away from Marxism-Leninism and social-democracy, but had not at all managed to solve the problematics associated with the latter. To this disappointment the “alter-mondialist” [other-world-is-possible] movements counterpose a pluralism whose common denominator was the regaining of the mere possibility of “another world,” and an internationalism whose coordinates were no longer the East-West confrontation, but the North-South context, that of globalization itself.

The “War on Terror,” as the anticipated counterrevolution of imperial governance, however, put the “movement of movements” through the first of several tests: How would its internationalism relate to the global scope of the empire, assuming that the latter’s inner contradictions are also, or could become, those of the movements? Does the World Social Forum, as well as the continental, national, regional and local social forums, really provide the model of free commu-nication and coordination of intrinsically plural struggles and their subjectivities? Does this model suffice (if I may “move forward while questioning,” as Subcomandante Marcos would say) to develop a (world-) societal alternative to global capitalism, an alternative that recognizes no one subject, no one party and consequently no “main contradiction” and no royal road?

The Dark Side of the Multitudes

The success of Hardt & Negri’s Empire (2002) is also due to the fact that in this situation it has supplied conceptual points of orientation which though indisputably vague in a dazzling sort of way has at the same time an enduring actuality. Globalization? The global empire, despite its claim to world order, crisscrossed by competition (between the “Caesarist” power of the USA and its – in the last resort – “willing” aristocracies, that is those of the EU, Russia, China, India and, last but not least, transnational capital). The multitude? According to its “generative,” creative side: the movement of movements itself as the multitude of multitudes without subject and party. Not only explicitly political movements, but also originally social ones, above all migration movements, are part of this phenomenon. According to their “corruptive” side, often already completely separate, at least tendentially, from the spontaneity of the multitude: the “plebeian” powers of the empire, above all the NGOs, trade-unions and parties of the traditional left, part of the international organizations of the UN complex, and the subaltern states. An antagonism (empire vs. multitude), which despite all novel divergence, is still connected to the “old” antagonisms (imperialism vs. world proletariat and anti-imperialist liberation movements), through an institutional gray zone which belongs at once to both empire and multitudes and for the moment has concentrated itself especially in the “left” Latin-American states.⁴

But is this picture at all accurate, even if only as a rough sketch? Not quite. Because it lacks what can be called the dark side of the multitudes, or even the savage powers of Empire. This applies to the Iraqi and Afghani “resistance” and the social, economic and political forces directly and indirectly tied to it (Iran, for example, along with the friendly relations which connect it to Venezuela). It applies also to the “insurgents” and “rebels” of many armed conflicts especially in Africa and Asia – although these are not always so easily comparable – as well as to the innumerable protagonists of the violence, who have long since let everyday life in the wretchedly poor peripheral metropoli and territories turn into a social war. It is these more than disquieting powers which daily set new limits on the Empire and – taking the part for the whole – on “Operation Enduring Freedom,” limits that are de facto more effective than those set by the global anti-war days. The northern counterparts of this nihilist – “post-political” – southern syndrome, no less dark and hardly less savage, are also part of this phenomenon: the nationalisms and racisms of the European and North-American right and their not always silent reservoir of “disenchantment with politics” pervading all subaltern and middle classes.⁵ If we put this rather dark prospect – which moreover fits effortlessly into the calculations of imperial governance, and indeed has long been taken into account – into relation with what is more than just foreshadowed by the term “ecological catastrophe,” apocalyptic thoughts do come to mind, I admit. Nevertheless, he who thinks of apocalypses does well to think of the next steps in order to evaluate the remaining options for action.

Movement and (Yes, Still) Party and State

Just as the radical break between the social movements and the political struggles of the 20th and 21st centuries cannot be denied, so too it ought not to be made into an absolute. The same applies to the heart of the difference, the question of subject, party and state. Mention has already been made of the Latin American regimes; now we should address the question of the post-socialist or -communist parties, all of which aim at state power. Their growing significance is also, and importantly, seen in Europe, where there is a Rifondazione-type party in almost every country.⁶ In Genoa and Florence there was a harmonious exception: movement and party acted in concert, the masses cheered Fausto Bertinotti, and rightly so, as he came up with clearer and more meaningful words than did the “prominent people from the movements,” including the somewhat flowery subcomandante from Chiapas. The Florentine festive mood is over; the old and the new are once again in sharp contrast. First point: There will continue to be left parties and therefore left regimes as well, and “left” nation-states; it is good and even desirable that they exist. Second point: There is no way back from the pluralism of the movements and subjectivities, no way back to the subordination of the movements to state and party. The latter are specific media of social and political struggles, but only one medium among others and definitely not the most important. A principled rejection of either is invalid; each rejection has to be justified concretely, i.e. in each individual case, or the rejection will be anarchism, i.e. an ideological position in the negative sense of the word. More work has to be done on the distant goal of the “withering away of the state,” indeed precisely in the here and now of the struggles. But, truth be told, that was always the basic consensus. Sonority makes the music.

And Action: Heiligendamm and Beyond

To end with the German situation and especially with that of the radical and therefore non-party lefts – here there ought to be no more of the debates which a short while ago caused so much pain, because the Anti-German mania has become a curiosity that hardly requires more criticism, even if it has great influence in Antifa (anti-fascist) circles; it is a canceled show.⁷ That is why there is an Interventionist Left, which will clarify its position in various respects⁸– beginning of course with the main thing, namely the regaining of an activist and, in traditional terms, “mass-political” based strategic conception of left activity.

Here there is still a good deal to clarify in view of the loss of such a conception since (at the latest) the 1990s, and in view of what can be called the “post-autonomous⁹ organization question.” What is involved is the relationship of the Interventionist Left to the movements (which as such are not necessarily left and certainly not radical left), to the party (which in this case will probably be called Die LINKE and be hardly less problematic than what Rifondazione has be-come) – and to itself. For what will a radical left become if it does not see future struggles as the generalization of its own left radicalism because it knows that the pluralism of the struggles and subjectivities will resist any kind of unification, even a “radical left” one? And what of a radical left which must be oriented to the global multitudes and precisely for this reason has to achieve a relationship to its darker side which can no longer be “anti-imperialist” and yet can never be allowed to become “northern,” whatever version of the “culture wars” are involved?

This is also what is at stake in Heiligendamm and what will be at stake if, after Heiligen-damm, the “suitability for everyday use” of left intervention (once again) becomes a focal point, globally and locally. To give just one example in conclusion and for further reflection: As promising as “Shutting Down the Agency” and “Euromayday”¹⁰ may be, they were nevertheless unrelated to the students’ protests – and to the first political strikes in decades in the Federal Republic of Germany, in which up to 250,000 people participated in January of this year. As we said, just an example.

Part II: Global Social Rights and Left Intervention

At the conclusion of the week at Heiligendamm, the Interventionist Left (IL) summed up the events in this way: “Pictures say more than a thousand words. (...) The G-8 bubble has burst, its time is over, ours is dawning.” It has to do with the left’s esprit de sérieux that the IL’s obvious irony was promptly met with a reference to the world’s misery and the weakness of the good. Since not all readers will grasp this irony, it is all the more important to go further into the questions confronting the movements and left: What period is over? What period is beginning?¹¹

For the radical left in Germany the Heiligendamm mobilization, despite the way the Saturday demonstration developed, was a success – period. A second success was the foundation only two weeks later of the party Die LINKE – both for those who want to be involved and for those who do not. We need to gauge what is now at stake in the global justice movement, but we need first to recall what could be said about it up to now. This concerns its programmatic input, its subjective composition, its strategic approach, and its current state.

In Necessary Brevity

The programmatic call to arms of these movements is indicated by their central slogan: “another world is possible!” Its indeterminacy is reflected by its historic point of departure: the collapse not only of actually existing socialism, but of the whole 20th-century left in the face of neoliberal capitalist globalization. At the same time, it reflects the fact that the movements up to now were held together only by their opposition to the neoliberal regime. This is also expressed by the subjective composition of the movements: for up to now they are no more, but also no less, than an alliance of all anti-neoliberal protagonists. They are made up of social and ecological associations as well as NGOs, trade unions and church organizations, the remnants of the peace and environmental movements, activists of various social protests as well as the remnants and the new breakthroughs of moderate and radical left parties and organizations – all of this of course in variants specific to continents and countries, but the general mixture is always approximately the same. In Latin America even individual governments or states relate to the “movement of movements,” not only because they hope to have their support but also because they too are primarily defined by their oppositional, specifically anti-neoliberal, role in the global system of states.

The subjective composition of the movements is matched by their strategic approach. This lies in a commitment to an internationalism and pluralism that is fundamental because it is understood at once strategically and programmatically. It can be of decisive significance that this pluralism aims at a new way of dealing with the historic as well as structural division of the left into moderate and radical tendencies.

This is important precisely in view of the level it has presently reached. This is determined by the open crisis of neoliberalism, which is expressed no longer just in ideology but also at the level of realpolitik. To prevent any misunderstanding, we should always bear in mind two points: 1) Even if the crisis shows itself initially in concrete political terms, it is still a crisis of hegemony, i.e. of the ideological dimension of domination. 2) Even though the movements contributed to the crisis, they are not its only cause. Neoliberalism’s weakness rather has several causes, internal as well as external. Not least among them is the increasing influence of states or governments which, like China or Russia, are part of the capitalist Empire but were not involved in the construction of neoliberal hegemony and are thus open to alternative modes of regulating capitalism.

Global Social Rights

Should the crisis of neoliberalism accelerate and the possibility of another world become practical, the movements will in any case urgently need to exercise a more specific influence. In doing so, they will have to take account of the uniform failure of all attempts at overcoming capitalism. In fact, with the 1989 Wende, what has become impossible is not only a direct relationship to the names socialism and communism, but also continuing to relate to the form of social change designated by these names insofar as this meant “alternative systems” existing in two fundamentally different Gesamtgesellschaften (“complete societies”). That does not mean that in the future we can only think of changes within capitalism. However, overcoming it no longer can be thought of as the succession of different “systems,” not even if it is mediated by transitions.

In the movements themselves, the problem is being addressed in international discussions over “global social rights.” Even if these discussions at first involve a literal understanding of rights as being “only” of transnational application – a familiar yet debatable idea within the field of human rights –, implicit in the expression “global” nevertheless is a more extensive meaning in which the struggle for these rights points to another world, the one with which the movements are concerned. Before and during Heiligendamm this discussion was carried on by a typical global justice alliance, which included, along with ATTAC, the development-policy NGOs, medico international and FoodFirst Informations- und AktionsNetzwerk (FIAN), the anti-racist network kein mensch ist illegal [no person is illegal] (kmii), the policy department of IG Metall as well as at least provisionally Greenpeace, on the one hand, and the Euro Marches, on the other, and finally the Interventionistische Linke. In the context of its own activities the Linkspartei, then still under the name of PDS, took part. In the process, it became clear, on the one hand, that it is always a question of specific rights to be demanded concretely – the right to an unconditional basic income (ATTAC) or to food (FIAN) and to globally equal access to health (medico), and in the context of transnational corporations the enforceable rights of workers (IGM), the right to worldwide freedom of movement and free choice of location (kmii) and finally to global ecological justice (Greenpeace). On the other hand: Despite their at times considerable differences, all participants agreed that the various demands for global social rights involved not only the rights chartered and stipulated in each case, but also the struggles themselves – and not only the struggles institutionalized on the state level, i.e. “from above,” but also those “from below,” rights claimed autonomously on one’s own authority. At the same time, it became clear that the participating movements and organizations would also have to engage in long-term political cooperation and work out a common demand for, and vision of, societal change. Finally, the participants were and are agreed in identifying the European unification process as the next dimension of the realization of this project of change, at least for us in Europe, and seeing the struggle around the EU Constitution as the next test case, the word “constitution” being understood in a double sense: as a formal Constitution and the process of constituting.

On Your Marks, Get Set,...

If the internationalism and pluralism characteristic of the global justice movements in the cycle now ending always depended on the political weaknesses of its various protagonists (stemming from the collapse of actually existing socialisms), this could now change for some of their participants in the near future. Indeed we can no longer preclude that even outside Latin America there will soon be anti-neoliberal governments – or at least anti-neoliberal societal majorities – and consequently an anti-neoliberal realpolitik. In the process, the pressure of the most urgent social challenges, such as the ecological challenge or the challenge of mass misery in the South, is so strong that it will almost inevitably create a constellation of protagonists. This will put the internationalism and pluralism of the movements – and thus especially the cohesion of their moderate and radical lefts – to the test.

Inasmuch as realpolitik will always also be politics of the state and therefore the business of statehood (one which today is at the same time transnational and, depending on context, also imperial), it follows that a part of the anti-neoliberal alliance will itself become part of the state. This will naturally be the case with the movement-linked parties whose common character, to put it crudely, is to be willfully either “post-social-democratic” or “post-communist.” Taking just the most prominent examples – Brazil’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and Italy’s Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) – there is no cause for optimism. On the contrary, if one realizes that such parties – in Germany Die LINKE – can at first only govern with parties positioned further to the right, concerns about ominous things come to be certainties. This is not changed by the fact that the majority of NGOs, the larger social and environmental associations, and probably also the trade unions will be openly oriented to these parties and in so doing will have an influence on them.

Does this mean that despite the commonality of the movements and their lefts, which has been constantly reconfirmed from Seattle to Heiligendamm, we still are dealing with the old story, i.e. the inevitable split between “reformists” and “revolutionaries,” meaning the more or less unhesitating “system integration” of the realpolitical (realpolitischen) majority and the more or less voluntary (self-) marginalization of the radical minority, along with the increasing depoliticization of those who are the most important: the people themselves? Does it mean, from a radical perspective, that we can only trust in the spontaneous and autonomous mass action encapsulated by Holloway’s expression “anti-power”? Or is the test to which the movements are now being put tending toward a political invention which can only succeed if it is tried out in a continuous and contradictory collaboration – or complicity – of moderates and radicals? Such an invention would essentially consist in a new relationship between moderate and radical lefts, which no longer looks to the victory of one over the other; instead, the difference would be purposely maintained by both sides for a long period, in order thus to define a kind of division of labor which is structural and deadly serious, although to be borne with irony.

...Go!: Phase Two of Globalization Critique

It is in no way accidental that a decisive role in this invention is played by the party. However, this is only so (a) if its precise character is negotiated adequately by all the participants and (b) if it is not given the decisive role. It is likewise in no way accidental that this apparent paradox (that the party and state play and at the same time do not play the decisive role) can once again be explained within the perspective of global social rights. Such rights will only exist if they are fought for in autonomously organized struggle against the state or at least at some distance from the state. Further, such rights will not exist at all if the people for whom the rights are intended do not claim these rights themselves. A paradigmatic example for this is autonomously organized migration, insofar as the right to global freedom of movement and residence only exists because the people have themselves long been here (that is, everywhere). And on the other hand: If the demand inscribed in this right were really to be realized it would also have to become a chartered, stipulated and state-guaranteed right – because only in this way would it really apply in each individual case and at the same time also for all.

If one wants to question the participants in the actual discussion of global social rights, one should ask them how they view the constitution for the European Union. For the majority of participants it a reformist project; for a radical minority, it is an attempt to wrest a “class compromise” from transnational capital, which can no longer be arrived at within nation-state boundaries. The central protagonist in this discussion will be an alliance of the new left parties in coalition with the social-democrats “modernized” on the model of the American Democrats and the at best social-liberal Greens. This is approximately the constellation which is just beginning to emerge in Italy, but also in Germany.

Would such a scenario mean the end of the kinds of coalitions made up so far by the global justice movements? Not necessarily, which is to say that such a turn could only succeed if the moderate and radical left were in agreement that what is feasible for the party, and with it the state, is only that which autonomously organized struggles are able to fight for. If the struggles are intense, some things become possible; if it dies down, little or nothing is possible. In the struggle around the European Constitution this could be the case for example around the definition of European citizenship, in the question of who has what kind of claim on it and why, and what rights will be linked to it.¹² If there can be complicity here between moderate and radical lefts, would it not have to be of a kind that goes beyond sterile denunciations of “reformist” limitations or “revolutionary” lack of a sense of reality? How would trust in the possibility of such complicity be created on both sides? How could such an exchange be organized and institutionalized, in what media, in what forms? How therefore should a “merely reformist” party that is ready for such collaboration be constituted, and how should it relate to the movements and the struggles (and vice versa)? How should a radical left behave in this relationship, a radical left that is itself neither party nor movement?

These are the most important problems; a good or bad-sounding coalition program is secondary. The mobilization for Heiligendamm already showed that the “consensus of Porto Alegre” on the separation of party and movement, or rather civil society, needs now to be relativized. Clearly: things remain complicated and can only be dealt with if there is a sense of irony. In all this we still have not spoken of what is in the last instance the decisive matter: the configuration of the forces of production as the aspect that underlies all politics and which therefore represents the actual politicum itself.

Notes

*Site of the June 2007 G-8 conference, on Germany’s Baltic coast.

1. See Kein Gipfelsturm, Graswurzelrevolution [No Assault on the Summit: Grassroots Revolution] 241, 1999; The People of Genova. Plädoyer für eine post-avantgardistische Linke [The People of Genua. A Plea for a Post-vanguardist Left], in BUKO (ed.), radikal golbal. Bausteine für eine internationalistische Linke [Radical, Global: Building Blocks for an Internationalist Left], 2003; with Werner Rätz, “Fünfzehn Thesen zur vorläufigen Beatnwor-tung der Frage, wie man in nahezu aussichtsloser Lage wenigstens eine andere Richtung einschlägt” [Fifteen Theses on a Preliminary Answer to How One Can, in a Nearly Hopeless Situation, Establish a New Direction . In A. Exner, J. Sauer et al., Losarbeiten – Arbeitslos, Globalisierungskritik und die Krise der Arbeitsgesellschaft [Getting to Work – Jobless, Globalization Critique and the Crisis of Labor Society], 2005.

2. [The author labels these movements globalisierungskritische (globalization-critical) throughout. We will render this here by the label most widely used in English: “global justice.”]

3. “Gemeinsame Orte. Bewegung, Organisierung, Untersuchung: ein Vorschlag von Derive-Approdi” [Common Places. Movement, Organization, Investigation: A Proposal by Derive-Approdi] in: analyse + kritik 481/2004. The Italian text reads “luoghi comuni” and does not mean “common places” but “commonplaces,” to which the German title should be corrected.
On “corruption” and “generation” as the borderland within the antagonism of multitude and imperial governance, see Empire, p. 370ff (English edition: Harvard University Press, 2000).

4. The North-South difference is here, as elsewhere, only provisional and disintegrates to the extent that the “North” spreads into the “South” and vice versa.

5. The Partito della Rifondazione Comunista, one of the successor organizations of the former Partito Comunista Ital-iano (PCI). In its first years closely tied to the social movements, trade-unions, and even to the Italian autonomous left, it became the model for the new foundation of left parties in Europe. Through its participation in the current center-left government it has become co-responsible for the crisis of the Italian left and movements.

7. The “Anti-German Left” is, or happily was, a faction of the German radical left that was very influential in the 1990s and even the first years of the 21st century. For the “Anti-Germans,” World War II became the paradigm of politics itself, as a conflict between fascism and the Jewish people, in reference to which the left has to uncondition-ally support Israel and the USA as the only protectors of the Jewish people. The term “Germans” designates not only German people in the literal sense, but also Palestinians, the Iraqi or Iranian, and even the Latin American people, all mutually equatable because of their position on Israel.

8. The Interventionist Left (IL) is a network composed of two groups of activists, the first group consisting of former Maoist, Trotskyist and autonomous groups of the 1970s and 1980s, the other deriving from the so-called “post-autonomous groups,” which have emerged from a process of self-criticism of the “Autonomen” of the 1980s and 1990s. The IL was one of the leading forces in the Heiligendamm-mobilization and will re-group itself in a congress planned for March 2008. For the time being, it can be reached through http://g8-2007.de/

9. in the sense referred to in footnote 8.

10. “Agenturschluß,” or “shutting down the agency” was a campaign in which activists occupied employment agen-cies in several German towns in order to get media attention and get their message to the unemployed who congre-gate around these agencies. “Euromayday” is a Europe-wide campaign to re-define Mayday from the vantage point of the unemployed and precariously employed. The idea is to foster communication between movements of the latter (and radical left groups supporting them) and the trade-unions (along with the more traditional leftists within them). Although up to now strongly shaped by “autonomous” habits, it appears capable of growing into something broader.

11. See Thomas Seibert, “Connecting Words and Struggles. Wie und wozu man auf der Straße und im Saal ‘Bündnispolitik’ betreibt” [Connecting Words and Struggles. How and Why We Should Practice ‘Coalitional Politics’ in the Streets and in the Meeting Halls], analyse+ kritik 518 (June 2007).

12. For this reason prominent radical leftists such as Toni Negri or Étienne Balibar voted for the constitutional draft negotiated by the EU governments, a decision which remains groundbreaking, although it was wrong in the context of the situation obtaining at the time and the related struggles. See Étienne Balibar, Sind wir Bürger Europas? [Are We Citizens of Europe?], Hamburg 2003.