The Manifesto was penned whilst Spinelli and Rossi were being held on the island prison of Ventotene by the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini. Because they were denied materials to write with, the entire document had to be scrawled on cigarette paper and smuggled out of the prison in a tin box with a false bottom. It’s fairly lengthy for something written on cigarette paper, which makes you wonder why the guards weren’t suspicious of the massive A4 cigarettes Spinelli and Rossi must have been smoking.

The text is more or less divided into three parts. The first part briefly charts the historical development of the nation state as Spinelli sees it; the middle part discusses the inevitable evils of nationalism in its current manifestation (i.e totalitarianism – the Ventotene manifesto having been written whilst the battle against Hitler still raged); and the final part talks about the brave new world of European Federalism which Spinelli thought was the only way out of the nationalist trap.

The Ventotene Manifesto reminds me – in both style and substance – of another famous manifesto written almost exactly one century earlier; The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels (though mostly written by Marx) also gave a determinisic analysis of history. For Marx, revolutions in the means of production drive growth and lead inevitably to social revolution. For Spinelli, individuals form nations for protection and the common good, but the nation inevitably evolves towards totalitarianism and war.

Marx believed that society could be divided into two great camps: beorgeoisie and proletariat. Spinelli believes that all political groups can also be divided into two camps: those for a federal Europe and those against it. He also shares Marx’s prejudices against the clergy, writing in the Ventotene Manifesto that priests exist just to “keep the masses docile.”

Unlike many Communists writing at the time, however, Spinelli did not deny the horrors of Stalinism, and was critical of at least some Marxist thought. He wrote in the Manifesto that:

General collectivisation was nothing more than a hurried and erroneous deduction…

But Spinelli nonetheless had strong socialist sympathies, going on to write approvingly that:

The truly fundamental principle of socialism… is the principle which states that the economic forces must not dominate man, but rather – like the forces of Nature – they must be subject to man, guided and controlled by him in the most rational way, so that the broadest strata of the population will not become their victims.

Which is, of course, a great, just and noble thing to say… but hardly unique to socialism. Most contemporary economic philosophies, including neo-liberalism, profess mankind’s mastery over economic forces. Critics of socialism would argue that the best way to serve the broadest strata of the population would be to allow the people the freedom to choose between goods and services in an open market. But, I digress. The main point of The Ventotene Manifesto concerns the evils of nationalism.

For Spinelli, nationalism is the coming together of a group of people based upon shared linguistic, geographical, ethnic and historical ties. He even affords it some positive role in the development of society, writing that:

The ideology of national independence was a powerful stimulus to progress. It helped overcome narrow-minded parochialism and generated a deeper sense of solidarity against foreign oppression. It eliminated many of the obstacles that hindered the circulation of people and merchandise and, within the territory of each new State, it extended the institutions and systems of more advanced societies to less developed populations.

Pretty soon, however, “The Nation” becomes more than just the sum of its parts. It becomes an independent and holy thing, and starts to act in its own interests rather than the interests of its constituent members (or so Spinelli, who witnessed first-hand the evils of nationalism, would have us believe). The state starts trying to dominate its neighbours, and the most pure and aggressive form of this domination comes from the totalitarian state. Once one state has adopted totalitarianism, then all others must surely follow or be dragged behind it into the hell-fires of war.

Totalitarianism, however, was a failure. It burnt itself out trying to eat the world. Spinelli believed that the defeat of totalitarianism would offer an opportunity to break the cycle of nationalist violence if only the people of Europe would pull down the arbitrary barriers seperating them and unite under a federal government. Spinelli believed in the importance of democracy – to a point. During the revolutionary transition between systems of government, Spinelli criticises democrats for being too slow to take decisions.

They think it is their duty to realise a consensus and they present
themselves as exhortatory preachers, where instead there is a need
for leaders able to know what they want and where they are going.

This is bound to provide ammunition for the eurosceptics. Not only is socialism enshrined in one of the most important foundational texts of European Federalism, but democracy takes a backseat. True, we may not be as hysterically anti-socialist in Europe as they can be in the US – one could even argue that welfare is a European tradition – but after WWII what Europe needed was more democracy, not less. What exactly seperates Spinelli’s approach from the approach that was taken by the Bolsheviks? He even uses the same language as Marx, calling for a temprorary dictatorship of the revolutionary party before “genuine democracy” can be instituted:

This dictatorship by the revolutionary party will form the new State, and new genuine democracy will grow around this State.

What a champion idea, Signor Spinelli. Thank God nobody listened to you. And thank you for your token attempt to assuage the fears of the weak-willed democrats amongst us:

There are no grounds for fearing that a similar revolutionary regime will develop into renewed despotism. This may develop if a servile society has been forming. But if the revolutionary party continues with determination from its very first action to create the conditions necessary for individual freedom, conditions under which all citizens can really participate in the life of the State, it will evolve towards increasing comprehension of the new order, even though moving through possible secondary political crises, and acceptance of it by all the population. It will be growing, therefore, towards an increasing possibility of functioning, and of free political institutions.

So, there we have it. Despite criticising collectivism, Spinelli’s Manifesto seems almost a carbon copy of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine: a deterministic approach to history leading to social crisis and then a revolutionary party seizing power and ushering in a benevolent and perfect new dawn for humanity. The problem is, we tried that approach in the Soviet Union. It didn’t work there, and it wouldn’t have worked in Europe.

The failure of Spinelli’s predictive power is perhaps demonstrated when he threatens that, unless we follow his advice and federalise immediately, Europe will descend inevitably into another war. German nationalism, Spinelli believed, could not be kept down.

[Germany cannot] be broken up into pieces once it is conquered.

But, of course, that’s exactly what happened. Germany was broken up into pieces. The Eastern half followed Spinelli’s advice and adopted a revolutionary dictatorship and the Western half ignored him and plumped for democracy. It may be easy with hindsight for me to criticise Spinelli (who, we must remember, suffered personally under fascism), but the truth is that what he was proposing in his manifesto would have led to the ruin of Europe.

Now, despite having just ranted against Spinelli and his manifesto, I am not a eurosceptic. I believe there is a good case for some sort of regional integration in Europe (though I’m not saying it should be full-blown federalism). But the anti-democratic current that runs through European Federalism, from its historical inception to the contemporary supranational institutions and their “democratic deficit,” is poisonous. It is an attitude born, I think, of anti-nationalism. It can sometimes be difficult to detangle nationalism, populism and democracy, and considering that Federalists of Spinelli’s generation saw Hitler democratically elected in Germany on a nationalist platform, perhaps their frustrations with democracy were entirely reasonable. However, whilst they may also have been aware of the horrors on the other hand of totalitarian Soviet Russia, they didn’t seem to realise they were walking into the same trap with European Federalism.

I would argue strongly, then, that with the benefits of hindsight we have no option but to reject if not the entire text of the Ventotene Manifesto, then at least large parts of it. We can admire the spirit behind it, certainly, but the call to arms that Spinelli gave was a product of his troubled times, and we should be very glad it went unheeded.

So, Farage’s comments were rude and dishonourable, and I’m sure they served to cheapen the reputation of the European Parliament in the eyes of the public (not something which Farage probably cares about). However, to then turn around and levy a fine against him of almost three thousand euros for his poor behaviour is even greater madness! His actions, by themselves, were punishment enough. He looked like a bully in the eyes of Europe, and yet now we are turning him into a martyr.

Farage’s comments were extremely distasteful, but fining him will change the focus of the story. There has to be respect and order in any political system, this is true, but at the same time politicians need to be free to attack their political opponents. If they come across as a bully and an idiot, then that needs to be shown to the world – and they should be voted out of office. Everyone congratulated Danny the Red on his fierce attack against Barroso’s “Coalition of Hypocrites.” Hannan’s speech, too, was widely regarded as successful. Farage, however, put his foot in his mouth and made a fool of himself. But fining him makes him come out of this a winner.

I only had to read one chapter for my presentation, but I may as well read the whole thing. For now, though, I’ll just give some of my thoughts on the first chapter: “Bourgeois and Proletarians.” It opens with the famous line:

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.

Marx defines history as a struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed. This struggle periodically results in progression up the chain of development – from barbarian slavery, to medieval feudalism, to modern bourgeois to the eventual dictatorship of the proletariat and finally to true communism. Failure to progress up the chain results in:

The common ruin of the contending classes.

So, for Marx, this is a scientific cycle of progression that we are all locked into. You either go forwards and up the chain, towards Communism, or your civilization is destroyed. Also, as you progress up the chain the struggle simplifies. The lower orders (slavery and feudalism) have complicated social arrangements. When you progress to the modern bourgeois order, however, society begins to divide into two great classes: Bourgeoisie (those who own capital) and Proletariat (those who do all the actual work).

Under feudalism, the merchant class started to become very wealthy. The Age of Discovery brought with it new resources and new markets (in Asia and America, for example) and the old system of guilds and princes became too restrictive for the enormous rate of economic growth. Technology continued to advance, bringing with it the steam engine and vastly superior methods of production. The bourgeoisie became rich and powerful, and pushed aside all the other classes of the old feudal world.

So, the engine that drives progress up the chain of society is simple economics. For Marx, the supremacy of the bourgeoisie was the end result of:

A series of revolutions in the modes of production and exchange.

Marx believed, however, that the bourgeoisie are worse than anything that came before them. They have reduced everything to a selfish calculation for profit. The chivalry, honour and religious piety which ordered societies in the ancient and medieval eras have been replaced by naked greed. Marx was no fan of feudalism or slavery, but at least serfs and slaves had a sustainable existence. Under capitalism, Marx believes that the lowest classes are gradually being priced out of the market (but I’ll come to this later).

Capitalism has created a new, international market – undermining the traditional nationstate. It draws people into the cities from the surrounding countryside and it also fosters the industrial development of every region of the globe:

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.

It has also made “barbarian” and “semi-barbarian” countries dependent on “civilised ones.” Capitalism has centralised control into the hands of powerful governments, so creating an international order which favours a few, strong states against a majority of poor, underdeveloped nations that provide markets and raw materials. However, just as economic growth brought about the overthrow of the restrictive feudal systems, the unprecidented growth of the Age of Capital was, for Marx, to bring about the rise of Communism.

Marx argues that advances in technology drive the price of labour further and further down, until wages are so low that conditions for the workers become completely unbearable. At this point, the proletariat will revolt and smash the bourgeois.

So where is our great Communist revolution? It never happened. International Communism has been smashed, and what little support it had has evapourated. Instead of being the saviour of mankind, the ideology of Communism turned totalitarian and barbaric and brought about some of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century. It also proved to be horribly inefficient at organising the production and distribution of goods and services.

Marx failed to understand that the proletariat are not just the producers of goods for the market… they ARE the market. As Henry Ford discovered, if you pay your workers enough to buy your products then you can sell more goods. Also, goods increase standards of living. So Marx was wrong when he said that better technology would lead to worse and worse conditions for workers. In fact, it raised standards of living – making workers less, not more, likely to revolt.

In developing countries we are seeing the same thing happen. As the economies of China and India grow, billions of people are being lifted out of poverty. Standards of living around the world are going up on every continent (with the exception of Africa). The only constraints to this growth are the finite resources of Earth and the strain we are placing upon the environment.

Anyway, that’s my brief summary of the opening chapter to The Communist Manifesto and a couple of points of criticism. If you have any thoughts about my summary, or any criticism to add, then please let me know as it would help me out tomorrow!

“Augmented reality” and “geo-tagging” are two of the buzz terms for 2010. When map-coordinates are appended – manually or automatically with GPS – to a photo, video or piece of text (such as a Twitter “tweet”) then that object has been geo-tagged. “Augmented reality” makes use of those geo-tags. Using an application on an internet-enabled smartphone (such as an iPhone or Android phone) a user can see geo-tagged objects around her. She might point her phone towards a restaurant and see a review floating next to it. She might read a blog post from someone who lives in the area and learn about the local issues facing the community. She might see photos people have taken of a local landmark (which is really going to annoy some people – why would you look at a photo of a landmark that is RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU?).

It is a bit spooky, having all this information floating around you in the air like ghosts. Imagine stopping over at a normal airport and seeing a geo-tagged video of someone horsing around on the abandoned escalators the night before. It’s going to add a new layer to reality, showing locations from different perspectives. There are already geo-tagging games, like FourSquare, that get users to “check-in” at different locations to unlock badges. There is also a “Google Buzz” layer on Google Maps than can be accessed from a mobile phone, letting you see people’s Buzz near you.

The thing is… geo-tagging is just going to add to a problem already facing the social media sphere. It’s all good and well to add another dimension to media, but it’s starting to get very noisy in here. The problem of “signal” versus “noise” is one of the biggest debates in social media right now, and geo-tagging will only make things worse. How do you cut out all that useless noise about what flavour sandwich people are having and get to the good information?

Geo-tagging and augmented reality are mostly being used by early-adopters at the moment, so the noise problem isn’t too bad, but that’s definitely going to change. When everyone and their mother starts tagging the location of photos, my smartphone’s viewfinder is going to fill up pretty quickly. Clouds of geo-tags are going to feel like pollution. Life will become even more cluttered. And how do you cut through the clutter when the same thing one person calls “noise” another person calls “signal”?

You could try some sort of aggregation – like Digg or (in the Euroblogosphere) Bloggingportal – but these are brute-force methods that require people-power. For Digg to work, it needs a lot of users on the service, voting for the best items. This works in the popular categories, like “Technology,” but more obscure categories (like “Art”) are woefully undernourished. More specific categories (like “European politics”) often don’t exist at all. You could try a more customisable aggregator, like Reddit, but the same problem exists. If you want to use crowd-power to aggregate interesting information on a specific topic, then you need a critical mass of users. Unpopular topics do not generate big crowds.

You could try to automate aggregation, but computer algorithms are still far from perfect at choosing the things people find interesting. They have a tendency to offer you spam when you want only the tastiest morsels of ham. Some sort of combination of automated aggregation with crowd-sourcing might help things along, and the system of “tagging” objects with their subject helps users to navigate through the swamp of augmented reality. You can set up your phone to only display the subjects you’re interested in (like “history,” “dance,” or “llamas.”)

However, there’s probably a better way. One of the most important qualities a person can have in this new augmented reality of ours is surely going to be good taste. If a friend that you trust recommends an article or website, then you are more likely to read it than if a complete stranger recommends an article. Building up good social contacts with similar tastes to your own is going to be an important way to hone in on signal.

At the Temple of Apollo in Delphi – one of the most sacred places in the ancient Greek world – there were, according to legend, two sayings carved. One was “Know Thyself,” and the other was “Moderation in all things.” We should take these things to heart today. Know thyself; know what sort of person you are, what you want, what you can give and what interests you. But do all things in moderation (“including moderation itself,” the Roman satirist Petronius was supposed to have quipped).

Applied to social media, I interpret these philosophies like this: do not subscribe to 10′000 contacts. Do not digg 200 articles a day. Do not send out 200 tweets a day. Do not spam your followers inboxes. Instead, know thyself and use that knowledge to focus your efforts on those people whose tastes you share. Tweet and digg and interact with people, but in moderation – and hunt out those people who do likewise to add to your contacts. Follow those people instead of the noisy folk.

One last piece of Greek philosophic arsery to sign off with. Plato would have hated augmented reality. It’s full of distractions. It leads the prisoner only further into the cave. But there is truth out there. Follow the interesting people.

Post-Copenhagen, there are serious questions about Europe’s place in the world. The US under Obama appears to be pursuing a policy of ignoring the EU until it gets its act together (or, at least, a policy of engagement on his terms and only when it suits him). From the perspective of a UK citizen this is deeply troubling. What on Earth are the Tories going to do if they get into power at the next election? If they’re hostile towards the EU and ignored by the US then they don’t have a meaningful foreign policy!

When Obama (rightly) ignored the pathetic EU-US summit in Madrid arranged by the obsolete Spanish rotating Presidency earlier this month, The European Citizen wrote that

If Ashton can’t even slap down member states for floating policy ideas as policy fact, then what does that say for the credibility of the Lisbon institutions?

I wonder if he would reconsider his posts last year about why Blair was unsuitable for the EU Council President.

Van Rompuy is the perfect consensus politician, but the EU needs strong, united leadership at the moment. Would a Blair have been able to get Spain’s President Zapatero to shut up and stop drawing attention away from the Council Presidency? Julien Frisch was right to criticise the foul comments made by the UK Independence Party MEP Nigel Farage – but when Farage asked Van Rompuy – “Who are you?” I wondered if he maybe had a point. If Farage hadn’t so idiotically called Belgium a “non-country” and insulted Van Rompuy’s appearance, he might have been taken more seriously (but probably wouldn’t have made it to YouTube). BTW, see Belgium’s excellent response to Farage on Kosmipolito’s blog.

The bottom line seems to be that nobody paid attention to the Lisbon treaty, nobody knew what was in it and so now that we’re living in the post-Lison Lisbon world, nobody has a clue who’s in charge. The first post-holders were supposed to define their roles, and Ashton and Van Rompuy have simply failed to do that yet. To be fair, Zapatero should have just let the rotating Presidency shrivel up and die instead of trying to keep it relevant. He was worried that he would be outshone by Van Rompuy. But Zapatero was so public about keeping his Presidency relevant, and Van Rompuy avoided publicity so well, that the Spanish Presidency ended up positioning itself as even more relevant than the new Council President!

At least not everything is completely broken. The European Parliament should be commended for voting down the unreciprocated sharing of SWIFT banking data with the US. But the EU needs strong, united leadership right now. If the Tories get into power in the UK, then the EU will only be in an even weaker position, with one of its most important member-states only half-engaging with Europe.

Perhaps the eurosceptics are right. What the UK honestly needs is a referendum on Europe – in or out. The threat of the UK pulling out of the Union might actually spur politicians (from all three parties) and business leaders to come out in support of the EU. It might get people off their arses and force them to explain to the British public just WHY the EU is important for us. And if the “Yes” campaign loses the referendum and the UK leaves the EU and sits out in the cold for a few years (ignored by both the US and Europe) then maybe it’ll wake everyone up.

The site will be back soon in some form or other.