Advocacy Capacities European checkmate: democracy at gunpoint European Alternatives Position “There is no alternative” is an imposture commonly used to cover with a mantle of inevitability clearly partisan economic decisions. Rarely has this false refrain sounded so convincing to so many people as when the governments of Italy and Greece have been given the alternative: obedience or bankruptcy. This blackmail is the result of political decisions not to take an alternative course and to obey the ‘logic’ of the market. But alternatives have always existed, they just haven’t been articulated loudly and clearly enough. Regardless of the specific opinions on Monti and Papademos and their respective governments, we cannot but remain highly preoccupied by the reduction of political and democratic life in Europe to a contest with only one possible winner. Whether Monti is a valid response or not to Italy’s crisis, the terms of the appointment are an extremely dangerous precedent: at the gunpoint of financial markets and their threat to strongarm Italy into a default. A group of elites, whether they are the leaders of France or Gemany, the ‘Frankfurt’ group, or the business and bank leaders who profit from the current system, have managed to steal power from the citizens of Europe by a deft employment of the economic crisis to hijack the European institutions and the process of European integration, which now appears more than ever to citizens and politicians in debtor countries like a strait-jacket in which no one can take decisions against an inexorable economic logic. The pretence of national sovereignty has been broken. European nation-states, in their blind attempts to block moves
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