L’Europe en otage
Dostena Anguelova-Lavergne is a woman who writes with a sharp pen. And while certain interpretations unquestionably merit discussion and nuance, this work provides us with an inside perspective of think tanks. It brings us right into that universe, giving us an insight into how they work, their interactions, influences and confluences, including their most negative consequences: conflicts of interest, collusion, cronyism and manipulation. The analysis is comprehensive and highly precise, right down to the mirror game between the institutions, which are supposed to defend the general interest, and the think tanks, self-appointed representatives of what is described as “civil society”. In this game, the human and real society disappear, giving way to ideological concepts. It is a game – and Anguelova-Lavergne hits the nail on the head with this point – that eliminates the political communities, once known as “the people”, and sideswipes democracy. It is, ultimately, a game that is indeed “taking Europe hostage” as per the title of this book.
But should the response be to condemn all involved and abolish think tanks? As somebody who has had a lot of involvement with them, I do not think so. They can be very useful, in some cases due to the quality of their researchers, in others as echo chambers for the debates of concern to society, as long as their activities are regulated by a strict code of ethics. On its own, this will not be enough to restore the citizens’ faith in a democracy that has been snatched away from them and in which they no longer believe. The entire institutional architecture needs to be overhauled, starting with the software, which needs to be replaced so as to ensure that the general interest is no longer seen as a sum total of individual interests adjusted by purely financial reasoning and that the human being and the ecosystem in which he lives become the principal concern of politics once again.
Anguelova-Lavergne is a journalist, holds a PhD in social and political anthropology and lectures at the University of Strasbourg. Her long and in-depth study covers Bulgaria (360 pages of the book), Greece and France – three very different member states of the European Union whose languages she speaks fluently – before a detour to Brussels and think tanks European style.
“In 2020, the Covid-19 crisis simply shed light on the parlous state of democracy and the intellectual climate of our societies. We are gripped by a permanent sense of powerlessness against the inevitability of a fleeting world, but which goes as far as to making us into passive spectators of its headlong rush to the commodification of life, the destruction of social connections, nature and humanity”, writes the author in the introduction to her work, before going on to add that “Hegel’s principal that the truth of the process is revealed in an advanced phase of its deployment seems highly relevant to the way we could, for instance, examine today the meaning of the so-called ‘Velvet’ revolution of November and December 1989 in the countries of the East, or the events in France of May 1968. This book aims to clarify some of the processes that led to the current crisis: a radical divorce between reality and its political representation, a crisis that it is now proposed to ‘treat’ not by rectifying this representation, but by replacing reality with virtual versions, that can modify an updated without reference to any democratic or ethical principle” (our translation throughout). This introduction very much set the tone for the rest of the book.
“Programmes such as PHARE-Democracy and PHARE-Lien (…) have funded initiatives of Bulgarian social society from the beginning of the transition. Even so, the control tower of NGOs, think tanks, are principally financed by the United States. American think tanks set the agenda for the projects that go on to be co-funded by the European Union”, Dostena Anguelova-Lavergne writes in the section of the book given over to Bulgaria and the “democratic transition” of the countries of Eastern Europe. “This political reality of ‘control’ aligns perfectly with the geostrategic vision developed in 1997 by Zbigniew Brzezinski in ‘The Grand Chessboard’”, she stresses, reminding readers that in his book, Brzezinski observes that “Western Europe is still largely an American protectorate”. It must therefore “play the role of a kind of outpost of the export of the American democratic model to the world” and this, according to the author, is what happens when the money of European taxpayers goes to pay for projects and purposes identified by American foundations or their subsidiaries in Europe.
“The French think tanks that sprung up on the media scene of Metropolitan France in the 2000s (nearly ten years after their Bulgarian counterparts), and the Greek think tanks developed in the early 1990s, produce narratives that are similar to their Bulgarian equivalents. They stressed the need to modernise Greek and French society, most notably by means of liberal reforms of the fossilised social state – reforms of pensions, public administrations, the healthcare system, education, research, etc.”, writes the author, going on to stress that the “Greek transition is different from, but still similar to the one that took place in the former communist states of the Balkans, where think tanks play an important role in the political transformation process. According to contemporary historians (…), the transition to modernity started in the mid-1970s with the fall of the colonels’ regime. However, like the Bulgarian transition, the ‘Greek transition’ seems to have been drawn out over time with a permanent conflict described by many anthropologists, sociologists and historians as the ‘profound ambivalence’ of Greek culture, which involves the coexistence and clashes of the ‘underdog culture’ (roughly corresponding to the modern Greek, Balkans, traditionalist or post-Ottoman culture) and the ‘reformist culture’, technocratic and liberal, of the West”. She further observes that “unlike their counterparts from the former Communist countries of the Balkans, Greek think tanks are not created directly from the outside to become an intellectual and political opposition’ of a State considered the heir of the Communist and totalitarian period”. Therefore, “in the ‘conflict’ between the State (a moderniser) and society (traditionalist), the Greek think tanks are on the side of the State, even though it is seen as unjust and ‘alien’ to society by the popular classes, a section of the intelligentsia and small and medium-sized business owners, who see themselves as ‘victims of a robber State’”.
The portraits sketched by the book of heads of think tanks and their connections with the institutions includes the highly characteristic one of Loukas Tsoukalis: “an alumnus of the College of Bruges and lecturer in many similar European establishments (University of Athens, London School of Economics, the European Institute of Florence, King’s College), the current president of ELIAMEP, Loukas Tsoukalis, is firmly anchored in the networks of the senior management of the European Commission, where he held the post of special adviser to the President of the Commission, José Manuel Barroso (2010-2014), a resolutely right-wing politician who is well known for his backing for a radical austerity policy in the context of the financial crisis. Whilst broadly supporting the European social democratic movement, Tsoukalis belongs to that new generation of thinker/businessman, the ‘flexians’ who systematically breach ideological boundaries. As a member of the high-level expert group on the modernising of higher education in Europe launched by the Cypriot Commissioner Androula Vassiliou during her term in office (2010-2014), Tsoukalis also works in the neoliberal ideological context that produces political proposals aiming to lay ‘emphasis on the development of skills related to entrepreneurship and innovation in students’. It is worth a passing mention of the professionalisation of the university syllabus, one of the key ideas of liberalism in this field”.
In France, think tanks were presented in the early 2000s as the “emergency doctors of the political system while pushing politicians into vice and sin: being spoonfed briefing notes provided by experts (policy papers), facing the obvious fact of their powerlessness against economic lobbies and subscribing to the proposed reforms (pensions, social security, unemployment law) put forward by the think tanks funded by multinationals as the defenders of their interests”, writes Anguelova-Lavergne, adding that “think tanks, which are both the poison and its antidote, participate in what the researcher Olivier Labouret (2012) describes by the concept of ‘neoliberal perversion’. It is based on the affirmation that ‘all politics is useless’, that “History is finished’ and that ‘only the egotism of profit makes the world go round, at the expense of any moral and democratic thinking’. This perverse functioning consists of civil society, represented by the think tanks, cleansing and renewing the norms and standards of democracy: getting the citizens to accept that their votes no longer count, as they are only good for electing politicians who are just puppets in the hands of the companies… financing the think tanks. It is a ‘system of psychological alienation as much as economic alienation’, alarmist words leading the citizens towards a form of pessimism that is resigned ‘to the worst’”.
“Having been bled dry by French networks playing the game of other powers out of personal interest, the French Republic is no longer capable of defending itself from its ‘allies’”, the author writes, referring to American destabilisation operations aimed at strategic groups such as Airbus, Alstom and Alcatel, “not forgetting the fact that since 2008, the United States has exploited the ‘extraterritoriality’ of its anti-corruption laws to target the economic interests of France”. She rightly adds that “France, but also the European Union, is being overtaken in almost all strategic sectors by the United States exploiting the soft power of the private networks”.
From Sofia to Paris and Brussels, via Athens, we find the same themes, the same sources of financing, the same consanguineous connections with American foundations, Anglo-Saxon think tanks and networks, the same relationships with the worlds of finance, media and institutions. “Think tanks, the European institutions and the world of finance therefore constitute a common field, a kind of auto-referential and redundant system. The organisations representing the interests of workers and employees or the less-favoured groups of society are included from this system. They are invited to participate in certain events simply as a sort of decorative pluralism”, the author writes.
Anguelova-Lavergne goes on to argue that “this means that we are in the presence of a politically endogamous environment that reproduces by pretending to be different. A bit like the range of brands and packaging in a supermarket creates the impression of always better and always more, the experts at the helm of all types of power, executive and symbolic, indulge in permanent marketing that adapts to the reality of any given moment. There are thousands of think tanks that claim to innovate, to propose unexpected and revolutionary ideas when ultimately, one can see that they represent nothing more than a symptom of a feeding frenzy of the existing capitalist and neoliberal model. The new ideas are nothing more than the old ideas dressed up as ‘the latest thing’, in which the virtual space helps to permanently delete and consign to history the way they looked yesterday”.
She concludes by stating that “it is time to become aware of the challenges we face, by carrying out an uncompromising analysis of the social and political mechanisms that have taken Europe hostage politically, economically, ideological, intellectually, but also artistically, since the Second World War, and even more so since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Repenting, if necessary, of our blind conformity and our spiritual and pseudo-rationalist primitivism that produces social and political pathologies, even forms of terrorism (Gori, 2017). And then, taking action… Firstly, by having the intellectual and ethical courage to take our responsibilities, collectively and individually, in the onward march of the system, by becoming aware that today’s tiny compromises, our intellectual and spiritual laziness, will look like enormous betrayals tomorrow. It is only at that price that we will be able to avoid the scenario of the ‘cosmic denial’ and return meaning to society and our common humanity. It is time to imagine a different Europe, to break away from pseudo-rational, egocentric and sterile stereotypes, by putting the metaphysical question, in other words the meaning of life, back into social thinking, from where it has dangerously gone missing (…). When crises call our lives into question, this is in fact a golden opportunity to start to produce meaning, not on the basis of sentences and concepts that ‘pay’, but with the spirit of impetus that connects us to others, history and humanity, to ourselves”. (Olivier Jehin)
Dostena Anguelova-Lavergne. L’Europe en otage (available in French only). Le murmure éditeur. Collection Humanités. ISBN: 978-2-3730-6049-2. 611 pages. €24,50