Charter for Europa - Madrid
Contents
Version at the 5th of March
This is the version of the Charter in Madrid, 5th of March - please do not edit this version.
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Preamble
We live in different parts of Europe with different historical, cultural and political backgrounds. We all continously arrive in Europe. We share experiences of social movements and struggles, as well as experiences of creative qpolitical work among our communities, on municipal and national levels. We have witnessed and participated to the rise of multitudes across the world in 2011.
In fact, the European 'we', we are talking about here, is unfinished, it is in the making, it is a performative process of coming together.
In the wake of the financial crisis we have experienced the violence of austerity, the attack on established social and labour rights, the spread of poverty and unemployment in many parts of Europe. We have faced a radical transformation of the constitutional framework of the EU, which has become more and more the expression and articulation of capitalist and financial command. At the same time we have lived through a profound displacement of national constitutional frameworks, we have learned that they do not provide any effective defense against the violence of the crisis. In the ruins of representative democracy, xenofobic chauvinisms, ethnic fundamentalisms, racisms, new and old forms of fascism proliferate.
We rise up against all this.
We want to initiate a different kind of constituent process on the basis of social and political struggles across the european space. This Charter aims to open up a process towards a radical political and economic change of Europe focussing on the safeguarding of life, dignity and democracy. It is a contribution to the production and creation of the commons, a process of democratic regeneration in which people are protagonists of their own lives. In the squares and the networks we have learned something simple that has changed forever our way of inhabiting the world. We have learned what 'we' can achieve together.
We invite people across and beyond Europe to join us, to contribute to this charter, to make it live in struggles, imagination, and constituent practices.
Report about the democracy workshop discussion in Madrid
This part of the charter is still a report of the discussion holded in Madrid during the New Abduction of Europe (February, 2014). It should be translated into a text by the end of March, 2014.
Democracy - ongoing discussion
The 2011 uprisings across the world have rescued the living meanings of democracy. When we claim for democracy in Europe we do not aim to restore the luster of the old national constitutional democracies, bur rather to invent the institutions that can catch up with the cry of "They don't represent us" spread by those uprisings.
So democracy in Europe means for us a two-sided process in which both "democracy" and "Europe" are intertwined, reappropiated and reinvented on the basis of the transnational social and political struggles of a new kind. In this sense, democracy must be a new word in a Europe of radically democratic multitudinous uprisings,
A democracy of this kind cannot rely on the classic divisions of european constitutional democracies: there is no democracy when a debt regime hinders any political participation of the poor; there is no democracy when a party system made out of hierarchical elites closely intertwined with the power of financial rent across Europe has decided upon the continent's destiny without any consultation; there is no democracy when citizenship in Europe is defined on the basis of the national status, hence condemning migrants, refugees and national minorities inside the member States to a permanent subalternity; there is no democracy when member states build detention camps against the freedom of movement of the poor of the world; there's is no democracy when war and terror are wielded as a weapon against the expression of the democratic will of the majority of the people.
If we want democracy in Europe, we're gonna have to take it off the hand of those who have hijacked it in the name of the Holy Trinity of Debt, technical governments and austerity.
Tensions
We addressed four tensions as crucial axes to define the body of the charter, that came out of the discussion and should serve as starting point for distributed, collective discussion as claims and as a process for discussion that should serve to circulate and to intervene in the public debates around Europe, but most of all to contribute in the determination of a constituent process for another "nuestra" Europa.
In this sense the first tension (ongoing discussion) we want to stress is the one between citizenship, as a complex and ambivalent dispositive, and the borders (of Europe), that we see as both the spaces of control and the spaces of autonomous practices of those who cross them. A second matter (ongoing discussion) is about addressing the possibility of "exploding" the institutional problem, both inventing institutions for the commons and problematising, from a radical point of view, the relationship with the (crisis of the) instituted, that is, we are proposing, the state. Third (ongoing discussion) , and as a connecting point between an institutional dimension and the "economic" cycle of social wealth and reproduction, the question of governing, as critical but affirmative engagement with governance: what does it mean to relate to the complexity of the inter-trans-or-inter/national dimension as it operates transversally among the national, continental and global level? Finally, the fourth discussion (ongoing discussion) we engaged in has been around the probably most distinctive contraposition of the crisis - a contraposition between insurgent "governed" and "abducting" governers: the relationship between debt and guaranteed (basic) income, as expression of a destitutive tension against the policies of austerity, but also an instituent practice that shifts our "understanding" of wealth from production to reproduction.
