Europe is experiencing radical change. The civil war in Ukraine shows just how quickly events can take a dramatic and negative turn. That issues of domestic and foreign policy are to blame for this outburst of violence is just as true as the fact that this conflict is one between national communities, the origin of which dates back many centuries.

However, this is not the only example of the new relevance of national questions in Europe. Who would have expected that almost half of the Scottish population would vote for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom or that Catalans would hold a referendum on seceding from the Spanish state?

While at the end of the last century the dissolution of multi-national states such as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union was understood as part of a catching-up process, which sharply contrasted with the peaceful integration of the European Union, it is now the European West which is experiencing disintegrative tendencies.

At the end of the last century, Eric Hobsbawm, doyen of left historiography, counted 42 regionalist movements in Western Europe.¹ Today we have to acknowledge that the crisis and austerity policies have not only fuelled nationalist resentments between the member states of the European Union but have destabilised existing states along national fault lines.

The proposition that the single market and the currency union have led Europe to abandon the concept of nations and enter a post-nationalist era has proved to be utopian and wrong. If there are no supranational democratic counterbalances to the transnationalisation of capital, the social disintegration this transnationalisation causes is expressed in a crisis of national relations. This and only this is what the ubiquitous term ‘crisis of European integration’ means. Only a policy change in the states and the European institutions can prevent any further expansion and deepening of this crisis. For the time being, however, this is not in the offing, which is why the left has to brace itself for a long debate on nationalism.

The current nationalist wave in Europe had a predecessor at the end of the twentieth century when immigrants seeking jobs, along with refugees, from the global South led to the formation of new national minorities, some of which, dispersed over several countries, have a larger European population than some individual European states.

The presence of national minorities, however, generally contradicts the nationalist idea, connected to the concept of the nation state, that every nation forms its own state and every state is populated by only one nation.

European reality has never corresponded to this idea, which had become hegemonic in the nineteenth century, because European states were home to an increasing number of nations and national minorities. This incongruity of states and nations thus provided a permanent cause of European conflicts and wars.

Since 1945, some of the national relationships as well as the situation of many (but certainly not all) indigenous minorities have improved. This is an achievement of the consolidation of the social state as well as European integration. However, as compensation for this, as it were, the new national minorities from Kurdistan, Turkey, sub-Saharan Africa, or Asia were asked to culturally assimilate, which corresponds to an outdated concept of social coexistence and creates the possibility of reactivated nationalist turmoil. This is exactly what we are experiencing in the war on terror declared by George W. Bush in 2001, which has taken on the character of a global cultural struggle.

In this way, the classical setting of the old conflicts is recreated, and it is used by nationalist populists as a sphere where they can project their conception of social and political conflicts.

Conversely, the new minorities are expressing themselves with increased self-confidence today. This was seen in the demonstrations of tens of thousands of people of Turkish background in Germany and Austria, both in favour of and against Turkey’s President Erdoğan. These demonstrations were more than just a domestic conflict imported from Turkey; they also expressed the national identity of the resident Turkish populations.

The same can be said of the protests of Muslim youth all over Europe against the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip. The emergence of anti-Semitic resentment is of course unacceptable, and the state has to combat it by utilising the laws that apply to all people who live in the state in question. However, the youth rebellions in the suburbs did not only relate to Israel and Palestine but also to the social and cultural disintegration of a major group of young people living in the EU. It is not enough to simply use police repression against them.

The conflicts we are experiencing today and, more importantly, can expect in the future, show that the social coexistence of people with different cultural backgrounds does not work spontaneously, but needs political regulation.

The national relationships in Europe are all the more complex because there is a coincidence of growing interstate nationalism and national disintegration with the existence of supranational national minorities. The political regulation of these increasingly complex and difficult relations lies beyond the capacities of individual states; the appropriate dimension for dealing with this is European integration. This means, however, that a democratic conception of the coexistence of nations and national minorities in Europe, which represent a social reality, is a key element of a democratic programme for European integration.

Nationalism and social disintegration

The European Union has resolved neither the contradictions within societies nor those between states and nations, but it has moved them from the battlefields to the conference rooms in Brussels. This represents a step forward for civilisation, and we cannot allow it to be reversed by newly incited nationalism.

It is easy to condemn European nationalisms by looking at the suffering and chaos they have caused. It is harder, though, to identify their social origins and the political mistakes which have led to their victories. Answers can be found, as the Hungarian-Austrian economist and social historian Karl Polanyi put it, on the one hand, in the market economy, which has produced mass unemployment and general misery instead of being functional and, on the other hand, in political measures which have further exacerbated social contradictions instead of mitigating them.

Barely a century later, the memory of these effects of European nationalisms has faded, and millions of people are observing that states, as well as Europe as a whole, are failing to protect them from unemployment, from losing their homes, and from being excluded from social security systems. The inhabitants of Europe, who are still enjoying relatively comfortable living conditions, are told that the victims of the crisis are themselves to blame for their dire situation and that they are living off everybody’s tax money now. Is it, therefore, really surprising that Euroscepticism and nationalism are sprouting up everywhere?

Here the left faces a twofold challenge. It has to uncompromisingly oppose populist nationalism, because never in history have discord between peoples and xenophobia helped in solving social problems. But the social problems caused by government policy, which millions of Europeans are forced to face, are real. That is why the left has to intransigently oppose the policies enacted in the member states in the name of Europe – policies responsible for the current misery. They have allowed nationalist and right­wing extremist groups to flourish.

How can we face this challenge?

The majority of European citizens are neither anti-European nor nationalist, but the results of the European elections show that their approval of European integration is not irreversible. The window of opportunity for peace in Europe on a solid economic and political foundation can also close again. For now, the siege mentality haunting pro-European forces is no help. Something else is necessary: to acknowledge the fundamental fact, which drove European reconstruction, that Europe can only be unified if it is a social Europe.

The radical left’s strategic dilemma

The strategies of radical left-wing parties to deal with European policy are still diverse. Most parties’ attitude can be described as Eurosceptical, but not anti-European. Only in the Scandinavian countries, whose accession to the EU coincided with the implementation of neoliberalism, are there radical left parties for which opposition to the EU ‘in its present form’ is their main identity marker, which they use especially to dissociate themselves from the social democrats, writes Luke March, a British political scientist working in party research. However, according to him it is an open question whether right or left-wing parties benefit more from a strong opposition to the EU. Even though right and left EU criticism are diametrically opposed to one another in content and motivation, it is hard to establish empirically whether the voters really notice the difference. On the one hand, March continues, there are indications that high EU-hostility in the population is likely to be associated with higher electoral success for [radical left parties]’.² If this is true, simplistic EU criticism could, in the long term, have a boomerang effect for the left. This is not principally about electoral politics. In view of the crisis, the left has to ask itself what role Europe should play in a concept for a transformation of capitalist societies.

The Greek political scientist Gerassimos Moschonas sees the left facing the strategic dilemma that the treaties and the institutional composition of the EU work against the radical left. In his view, Europeanisation has deprived the left’s traditional goal – conquering the state through revolution or by parliamentary means – of its meaning. ‘In the European system there is no Winter Palace to occupy or surround […], and there is no strategy of coordination of the national lefts […], nor a common social base ready to be mobilised around the same strategic objectives.’³ In a system which is governed on several levels, he concludes, the strategy of seizing power cannot find a target.

For Moschonas, if the radical left acts rationally, it must play on the European level. But in doing so it will make a frustrating discovery: The operating principles specific for Europe based on unanimity or qualified majorities in the different institutions work conservatively and technocratically, just like multi-level governance, and are closed to change.

The two central links of this chain ‘can be called “grand coalition” and “reform”’.⁴ However, they are both the opposite of radical. Moschonas’ recommendation of adopting a clear pro-European strategy implies for him a ‘de-radicalisation’ of the radical left. Leftists who advocate an anti-EU strategy would agree.

Does this mean we have to choose between Europeanisation and radicalism? Also, must the radical point of view really be attached to the defence of national sovereignty?

If we want to change the balance of power we have to identify intermediate steps and transitions. This is nothing new. For the specifically European path, as described by Moschonas and defined by compromises and coalition­building, Gramsci used his famous concept of the ‘war of position’, which he proposed as the rational substitute for the failed 1920s communist strategy of armed uprising.

In a political war of position it is never useful to adopt the opponent’s either-or position. This is also true of the juxtaposition of European federalism and souverainism. This dichotomy, however, is abstract because the implied question of the appropriate division of labour between the different political decision-making levels completely depends on the context of social problems at the heart of the specific conflict. This is why most left parties refuse to take a side in this dichotomy. In his work on European politics of the radical left, Richard Dunphy also rejects ‘as too simplistic the tendency to divide the world into rival and mutually exclusive camps of “Eurosceptics” and “pro-Europeans”’.⁵

Differences of opinion became clearly visible in the debate on the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe in 2005. There, most parties agreed that the EU should prioritise a social-state orientation but made different proposals for its political-institutional future. This strategic disagreement still constitutes one of the limitations of left politics in Europe, even though the debate on European integration has continued for several decades now.

Europe and the radical left

One of the most prominent buildings of the European Parliament in Brussels bears the name of the Communist resistance fighter Altiero Spinelli. In 1941, during his time in the prison camp on Ventotene island, he, together with two fellow prisoners, wrote the Ventotene Manifesto, in which he proclaimed the revolutionary establishment of a federal Europe founded on socialism.

The Manifesto was intended as a platform for a broad socialist and pro-European movement and reflected the convictions of many anti-fascists who ‘became Europeans’ through the suffering they shared in prisons and camps. The Manifesto of the Democratic Socialists of the Former Buchenwald Concentration Camp is a similar document. Its first and foremost goal was ‘to achieve a European community of states in collaboration with all countries led by socialist governments, which guarantees order and prosperity by introducing a common European economy on our long-suffering continent’.⁶

In 1976 the Italian Communist Party sent Spinelli – who, by then was no longer a member of the party – as an independent representative to the European Parliament where he was elected deputy chairman of the Communists and Allies Group. In the early 1980s a draft for a European constitution, which originated with Spinelli, led to the Single European Act (SEA). At SEA’s core, however, was not the democratisation of the EC – much to the disappointment of Spinelli and the left – but the implementation of the common market.

Because of the Cold War and the division of Europe, it is hardly known today – not even within the left – that the idea of a united Europe goes back to the left. But the Cold War has been over for a quarter of a century now, and it does not make sense to interpret today’s world from its perspective.

In the debate on European unity, however, we can go back even further in the tradition of the radical left. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, all of the great personalities of the left – Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, and Bauer – spoke about the idea of a ‘United States of Europe’.

The points of view they expressed in the debate were controversial and often polemical, but they shared the common belief that the contradictions which allegedly pitted the European peoples against one another were an expression of social problems that they faced internally. According to the socialist view, if these are social contradictions which emerge in the form of the national question, then nationalism has to be countered above all by social-policy measures. This is also what the passage quoted from Otto Bauer at the beginning of this essay expresses, and it constitutes a major contribution of socialism to the reconstruction of European societies.

The EU is on a collision course with the social state – and no effort by an intellectually enlightened minority to teach the lower classes political correctness will be able to change this. Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s and Guy Verhofstadt’s Manifesto for Europe serves as a typical example. ‘Be proud of being a European’; ‘do not fear what scares us, but fear fear itself’; ‘do not ask what Europe can mean to you, but what you can mean to Europe’,⁷ is what the authors call out to 26 million unemployed people in Europe, as though the EU were a crazy sect and the authors its gurus. Just as with other gurus, this is above all about money and control. They write, ‘in the Eurozone, more than in any other currency union, discipline is absolutely essential’,⁸ and luckily ‘automatic sanctions have been introduced now’ for members who do not comply with this discipline, ‘because today there are only three member states – Finland, Estonia, and Luxembourg – which actually implement the strict standards of the Eurozone’.⁹

However, instead of applauding the ‘automatic sanctions’, would it not make much more sense to ask what the point of standards is that have led to excessive unemployment and cuts in social services, and can only be adhered to by three out of 28 states?

Nation – Project and destiny?

The critique of nationalism was already an important issue 25 years ago, when nationalism was aimed against immigrants arriving in Europe at the time. Two monographs, which are still worth reading today, on nation and nationalism were published at the time - Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein’s Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities and Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 – Programme, Myth, Reality.

Balibar’s¹⁰ essay followed the post-structuralist discourse which was very common in social sciences at the time. His thesis was that nations are mainly intellectual structures, which under certain circumstances achieve institutional reality in the form of states.

According to Balibar, national identity rests on a twofold illusion: firstly, that the generations which have succeeded one another in one territory have passed on an unalterable essence to each other; and secondly, that the members of a national community are the results of a predestined development, the only one possible. According to Balibar, project and destiny are the two symmetrical figures of the illusion of national identity.¹¹

And, I would add, it does not matter whether the disastrous coupling of project and destiny results from ethnic descent, as in the traditional right’s understanding, or from cultural identification and/or difference, as in the new right’s understanding.

Dissolving this illusion, above all the ‘symbolic difference between “us” and the “foreigners”’¹² created by the nation and the state was what Balibar focused on. He was reacting to a political dilemma which not only the left in France faced. While the conservative section of the left felt that the social rights acquired through the nation state must be defended even against the newly arrived immigrants, the other part developed a morally motivated, post-national discourse in order to assert the universal validity of individual human rights for the immigrants arriving in our societies. Balibar must be given credit in this debate for having defended human rights, their universal character, and therefore also immigrants.

Still, social state or human rights – could this represent an acceptable dichotomy for the left? In order to resolve this contradiction, we need a different perspective.

The left has never looked at the social state only from the standpoint of individual civil rights, but has seen it as a collective achievement, which has limited the negative impacts and risks of the market economy. As a left project, and already under capitalism, the social state was meant to implement elements of the emancipation of the working class – the people who are in one way or another dependent on the labour market.

However, this has always been hard-fought ground, in which any achievement was subsequently challenged by every technological or economic change. Whenever the working class’ representatives confined themselves to defending achievements and did not call for the further development and universalisation of the social state in relation to gender equality and immigrants, they even called the achievements into question.

Moreover, solidary relations in a state do not require only equal economic and social rights. Democracy only works if different ways of life are recognised through collective laws and their practice accepted; this includes the right to use one’s native language in public or when interacting with the state, the right to education in one’s native language, to the free practice of religion, and finally to the autonomous administration of cultural matters.

The concept of nationality to which these rights refer has nothing to do with an illusory identity but involves practical everyday needs. Their consensual solution constitutes the precondition for social coexistence and democracy in multinational societies.

From a social policy as well as a democratic perspective this confronts the labour movement and the left with new questions.

Just like Balibar, Eric Hobsbawm assumed the illusory character of most national narratives, which tend to equate two very different phenomena: a group or collective consciousness and the development of a specific form of state, the ‘nation state’ which is allegedly based on this consciousness.¹³

Unlike Balibar, for Hobsbawm, a British historian with Austrian roots, it made sense to proceed in his book from what he calls ‘the important and underestimated debates among the Marxists of the Second International on what they called the “national question”’, namely the debates between Kautsky, Luxemburg, Otto Bauer, and Lenin.¹⁴

What can we learn from classical Marxism with regards to the politics of nationalities? First of all, we can learn that nations – in whatever way they may be constructed – form a part of social reality from which they cannot be removed or ‘deconstructed’. Nations exist and a post-national era – if at all realistic – is a distant utopia which is of no use for today’s politics. Are we really living in an era of ‘post-nationalism’, just as, for example, the Austrian writer Robert Menasse maintains? ‘The nations are dead, but they are the only ones who don’t know it’,¹⁵ he said in a recent lecture. Such a statement, however, cannot be demonstrated empirically. Even in Austria with its wide open economy, sixty per cent of the economic output is consumed within the country’s borders, and the state takes half of the domestic product in order to fund its expenses and redistribute wealth. From the point of view of the total national accounting, the ‘nation state’ as a social and tax state thus remains an important fact and a challenge for democratisation.

The critique of nationalism cannot consist in the denial of the existence of nations. What it does have to confront is the claim that every modern nation has to coincide with a state. This is impracticable. No state can be inhabited only by the members of one nation, which also means that the right to self-detemination by no means always implies the founding of a state. The killing that takes place in the name of nationalism is connected to these misconceptions.

One of the great cultural achievements of socialism is that it has removed the national question from the realm of destiny. The nation does not determine the collective destiny of the people.

Socialism and nation

The right to self-determination supported by socialists primarily meant that people should have the right to determine their fate in the framework of nations. They considered as secondary and variable the particular state forms, and other conditions, in which this self-determination occurred. Therefore, the controversies among socialists did not mainly relate to the principle of self-determination, but to the way in which it could be implemented so as not to obscure their programmatic goals whose character was social as opposed to national.

In this context it is interesting to come back to Bauer’s special concept of what he calls ‘national-cultural autonomy’. Very often it is assumed that this involves territorial self-determination for the different nations coexisting in Austria-Hungary. However, this was really the relatively easily solved part, as the successful example of the autonomous region of South Tyrol shows today. If Bauer’s idea were limited to this, however, he would have missed the main problem which kept blocking state reform in Austria-Hungary. The problem was not solely the coexistence of nine nations, but the fact that they were intermixed. According to Bauer, ‘the mixing of nations is something no form of national delimitation, however carefully it is carried out, will be able to get rid of’.¹⁶ To the territorial principle – either ius sanguinis in Germany or ius soli in France¹⁷ – the Austro-Marxists counterposed a different principle, the personal principle, which does not organise the nations in territorial entities, but in ‘pure associations of persons’,¹⁸ entities which everybody, irrespective of their place of birth or residence, could be part of.

According to Bauer, in the framework of a common democratic state, however, ‘it is not the case that Germans are allotted power in one territory and Czechs in another territory, but nations – wherever they live – should form separate entities, which independently administer their own national concerns. This way, in one and the same city two or more nations would be able to establish their own national self-administration and national educational institutions – just as Catholics, Protestants, and Jews manage their religious affairs in one city, alongside each other.’¹⁹

Bauer and Renner were aware of the revolutionary character of their ‘new socialist principle of nationalities policy’. According to Bauer, this national­cultural autonomy could become the blueprint for an ‘innovative social structure’, a ‘state of states’, into which individual national communities are incorporated.²⁰

In terms of civilisation, there could be considerable progress if national problems relating to national-cultural autonomy and the personal principle were negotiated not in the form of drawing state borders, but in terms of the political and cultural rights of persons within states. The dissolution of multinational Yugoslavia serves as an example of the tragic alternative. Not only did it trigger a terrible war between the republics, which separated from one other; it also led to hatred, murder, and rape even in the most remote regions and settlements, where the different ethnicities had lived peacefully in a common state for decades.

Multinationalism is the common reality of European states today. In light of the growing problems, what level could be more suitable than that of European integration to craft the institutional framework for the civilised solution of these problems?

Moreover, Bauer, who had dedicated his study to the resolution of the complicated problem of nationality in Austria-Hungary, concluded by saying that the ‘United States of Europe’ constitute the ‘final goal of a movement’, which ‘the nations have long since initiated and which will be greatly accelerated by forces that are already becoming visible’.²¹

A new blueprint for integration

Today, the left is facing a similar challenge at the European level. Just as in Bauer’s time it is clear that rampant nationalism can be countered only if Europe is redefined as a social integration concept. Social policy provides the key for integration.

If the left, however, wants to prevent national conflicts from once again becoming the projection of social contradictions and therefore an obstacle to the social struggles necessary for their resolution, it needs an independent and concrete programme for the democratic integration of Europe. It has to be based on real conditions, that is, the continued existence of nations, and not on the assumption that they are disappearing. Therefore, we should not imagine a united Europe as a large ‘post-national’ unitary state which reproduces the model of a national state on a larger scale.

Instead, we should construct a well thought-out balance of self-determination, subsidiarity, and autonomy, which regulates the relations between existing democracies in a new way and provides methods for resolving the growing number of domestic and inter-state national conflicts that prove to be intractable on the basis of the nation state concept.

But how can a democratic Europe be institutionalised?

Starting from the necessity of a social and environmental reconstruction of Europe, what we need is a European Union which defines new social and ecological priorities. For this it has to provide the necessary instruments and policies in the form of banking oversight, redistribution policy, European public services, and European transfer payments. Also necessary are a substantial increase of the Community budget and the introduction of new financial instruments (‘Eurobonds’).

However, a strengthened and reprogrammed European Union also needs new legitimacy resting on the sovereignty of the European peoples.

No taxation without representation! Europe needs a concise and coherent Basic Law which defines a common legal space in which there is division of powers between the different levels and institutions on the basis of subsidiarity. This requires European citizenship based on equal rights for all people living in the Union and a uniform, proportional electoral law for the European Parliament.

Europe must be a space of parliamentary democracy. In such a democracy the national parliaments and the European Parliament are not pitted against one another as rivals, but must become allies in defending, reclaiming, and extending their rights and stand up against the prerogatives of non-elected executive bodies – such as the European Central Bank, the European Court of Justice and the European Commission – which on both the state and the European levels are accumulating power in an unregulated way. EU treaties such as the Stability and Growth Pact, which legitimise non-elected bodies assuming legislative functions, must be abrogated.

The European Parliament must have the right to freely decide on the European budget, to pass European laws, and elect the European Commission as its executive body. It has to be given full responsibility for fiscal and monetary policy at the European level and exercise control over the European Central Bank.

In order to confront nationalism, it is necessary to recognise that the European Union is a multinational region made up mostly of multinational states whose borders are open. In such an area, national rights are by the same token personal and collective rights, and every individual has the right to join or not to join a national community of her or his choice, in order to exercise her or his cultural, national, and religious rights in a common juridical framework.

We will still need political representation of the states, nations, and national minorities. It is not so important whether such an institution develops from the European Council or from a possibly newly created second chamber of the European Parliament, but it is important that the principle of checks and balances between these institutions and the European Union is recognised. We could imagine the EU’s renewal as a Commonwealth of European Nations which is based on voluntariness, democracy, and subsidiarity.

Such a Europe will only be an option worth striving for if it defines itself as a project of peace and good neighbourliness. Alongside its commitment to non-military conflict resolution, its Basic Law must declare the EU’s fundamental openness towards all states of the region that want to commit themselves to its principles.

* * *

Instead of integration, however, Europe is facing the threat of comprehensive social and political disintegration. Such situations have been seen several times in history.

In 1918, Rosa Luxemburg wrote indignantly in her (then unpublished) essay ‘Fragment on War, the National Question, and Revolution’ about burgeoning nationalism in the dissolving multi-ethnic states: ‘From all sides nations and semi-nations who had never formed independent body politics, feel a powerful urge to form a state […]’ ‘Mouldered corpses from hundred­year-old graves, filled with new spring fever – today is Walpurgis Night on the nationalist Bald Mountain’.²²

Luxemburg could be wrong when she wrote about the development of the European system of states. But she was right about one thing: twenty years later, conflicting national ambitions and the Great Depression of 1929 had tied the Gordian Knot in European politics, which the Nazis wanted to cut through with the sword of a world war.

Europe is still far from such a scenario. However, the dangers are now visible, and there is urgent need of solutions to the two most important problems in Europe: the multiple crises which still have not been overcome and the lack of real democracy, which characterises all sectors of society and political institutions.

In these struggles, the left in Europe will either stand the test or go down with Europe.

translated by Veronika Peterseil

Literature

Balibar, Étienne and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London and New York: Verso, 1991.

Bauer, Otto, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie [The Nationalities Question and Social Democracy], Vienna: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1924.

Cohn-Bendit, Daniel and Guy Verhofstadt, Für Europa! Ein Manifest [For Europe! Manifesto for a Postnational Revolution in Europe], Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2012.

Dunphy, Richard, Contesting Capitalism? Left Parties and European Integration, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004.

Hobsbawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalisms Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Luxemburg, Rosa, ‘Fragment über Krieg, nationale Frage und Revolution’ [Fragment on War, the National Question, and Revolution], Gesammelte Werke vol. 5, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1918.

Manifesto of the Democratic Socialists of the Former Buchenwald Concentration Camp (1945), <http://www.tenhumbergreinhard.de/taeter-und-mitlaeufer/dokumente/ manifest-der-demokratischen-sozialisten.html> (accessed: 20 October 2014).

March, Luke, Radical Left Parties in Europe, London: Routledge, 2011.

Moschonas, Gerassimos, ‘The European Union and the Dilemmas of the Radical Left’, transform! 9/2011, <http://www.transform-network.net/en/journal/issue-092011/news/detail/Journal/the-european-union-and-the-dilemmas-of-the-radical-left.html> (accessed: 20 October 2014).

Murmelter, Gerhard, ‘Die Nationalstaaten sind tot’ [The Nation States Are Dead], salto-magazin 2014, <http://www.salto.bz/article/05072014/die-nationalstaaten­sind-tot> (accessed: 20 October 2014).

Notes

1. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalisms Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
2. See Luke March, Radical Left Parties in Europe, London: Routledge, 2011, p.187.
3. Gerassimos Moschonas, ‘The European Union and the Dilemmas of the Radical Left’, transform! 9/2011.
4. See Moschonas, ‘The European Union’.
5. See Richard Dunphy, Contesting Capitalism? Left Parties and European Integration, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004, p. 7.
6. See the Manifesto of the Democratic Socialists of the Former Buchenwald Concentration Camp (1945).
7. See Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Guy Verhofstadt, Für Europa! Ein Manifest, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2012, pp. 55, 60, 62, 64.
8. Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt, Für Europa!, p. 24.
9. Cohn-Bendit and Verhofstadt, Für Europa!, p. 25.
10. See Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London and New York: Verso, 1991 (1990), pp. 107 ff.
11. Balibar, Race, Nation, Class, p. 107.
12. Balibar, Race, Nation, Class, p. 116.
13. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalisms.
14. See Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalisms, p. 2.
15. Gerhard Murmelter, ‘Die Nationalstaaten sind tot’, salto-magazin 2014.
16. See Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie, Vienna: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1924, p. 328.
17. Ius sanguinis, ‘right of blood’, that is, the right to nationality based on parentage; ius soli, ‘right of the soil’, that is, the right to nationality based on place of birth.
18. Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage, p. 353.
19. Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage, p. 354.
20. Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage, p. 519.
21. Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage, p. 520.
22. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Fragment über Krieg, nationale Frage und Revolution’, Gesammelte Werke vol. 5, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1918, pp. 367ff.