He is one of the emerging political minds of the “Democracy in Europe Movement” (DiEM) (http://diem25.org/), just launched by the former Finance Minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis to reform the European Union before it is too late in view of the unprecedented economic, political and security crises that Europe has been facing in recent years. The Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat has contributed to DiEM from the very start: an immediate supporter of Yanis Varoufakis, Horvat is a columnist for the “Guardian” and co-author of “What Does Europe Want?” together with the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and the author of “The Radicality of Love”. This Wednesday, Horvat will be launching DiEM in Rome together with Varoufakis, Julian Assange, Cecilia Strada, president of the well-known Ngo “Emergency”, Luciana Castellina, icon of the Italian left, Lorenzo Marsili of “European Alternatives”, and many other prominent speakers. “L'Espresso” has asked Srecko Horvat to tell us how DiEM can really change Europe before the European Union collapses.


Yanis Varoufakis effectively summarised the current European crisis saying: “Europe will be democratised or it will disintegrate”. Problem is: where to start to democratise Europe?
«We must start everywhere, because we can see the lack of democratic decision-making in every aspect of the current state of the European Union. In order to arrive to a possibility of democracy as such, what citizens should need to have is information, which is the reason why the first public pan-European campaign that we are going to start precisely in Rome is a big campaign titled “Transparency in Europe Now!”. We are convinced that if the citizens of European Union don't have information on what actually is going on behind the closed doors of the European Council, of the Eurogroup, of the Ecofin meetings, and behind the closed doors of the European Central Bank, then citizens don't even have the possibility of deciding on it. We immediately asks that all meetings in the Council and in the Eurogroup will be livestreamed which wasn't the case until now, so that the citizens of Europe an Union will have the opportunity to look at the publication of official transcripts for all such meetings, then the next step is also a full set of minutes for each European Central Bank governing council meeting, which should be published two weeks after the conclusion of each regular meeting, and the complete transcripts of these meetings to be published within two years. We also demand an exhaustive list of the all Brussels' lobbyists and a register of everyone's meetings both for elected and unelected European officials. These demands are not so radical because all we ask for is full transparency, but the tragedy of the current state of the European Union is that such demands actually sound radical».

To launch the DiEM transparency campaign, the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, will talk at the Rome event. Working with WikiLeaks, our newsmagazine has been able to reveal crucial documents such as the “Trade in Services Agreement” (TiSA), currently under negotiation in Geneva by the European Commission and by some of the world's greatest economic powers. Had it not for WikiLeaks, this crucial agreement which will have an impact on millions of workers and citizens, would have been negotiated in full secrecy. How does DiEM plan to change this?
«I think all the WikiLeaks' leaks, from the documents on the refugee crisis to the Hillary Clinton's emails, are very important: everyone should have access to this information and we need newspapers which are not afraid to publish. This is called Transparency. TTP, TTIP and TISA form a new economic bloc of 52 countries and 2/3 of the global GDP: this “triumvirate” of secret agreements will change the laws, it will make big corporations more powerful than countries, which is already the case, but it will be legal at that point. It will also have effects on the intellectual property, on the internet, on medicines. It is not a coincidence that in 2012 Hillary Clinton called the TTIP “an economic Nato”, because what they are trying to do is precisely economic warfare, which will have effects on daily lives. Only thanks to WikiLeaks we have a glance into these treaties and this is the reason why Julian Assange will be present in Rome. Unfortunately, he will be there only by videolink, because he is in the Ecuadorian embassy and he has been there for four years already».

We have seen the difficulties experienced by movements like the “World Social Forum” and “Occupy Wall Street” to unleash actual changes. What can DiEM learn from these movements?
«I think it can learn a lot and personally I learned a lot. I was part of the World Social Forum for years, from Dakar to Tunis, I have been at Occupy in the Zuccotti Park. The first thing that DiEM can learn is: if we live in global capitalism, and we have these problems of global capitalism – which is huge unemployment, de-industrialisation, new privatisations – then the answers have to be global. Take the refugee crisis: it is not a problem of Croatia or Italy or Hungary, what you can see is that these countries are building fences or asking referendums. These countries are trying to solve a fire, but they are not putting water at the very origin of the fire. The origin of the refugee crisis is a problem of geopolitics, economy and also a problem of the current wars. Even if you want to challenge the refugee crisis, you cannot challenge it just by building wall or by outsourcing the crisis to Turkey: outsourcing won't solve the problem, and won't solve the wars in Syria and in Libya. The solution for the current deadlock is not a retreat to the nation state, because power doesn't reside in the nation anymore, and unless we are able to build a pan-European movement, and also a global movement, we cannot get out of the current deadlock. The second lesson which we can learn from such movements like Occupy Wall Street, but also the Indignados, the Syntagma movement, and also the “plenums" in Bosnia, for instance, is that we need horizontality more than ever, we need democratic participation, but at the same time we also need a structure, a decision-making process in order not to lose the momentum, as Occupy and other movements lost, precisely because they decided only to stay at the square. We will not stay only at the square, and we will not enter Parliaments and stay only there: we need a combination of these methods today in order to change the situation».

You mean DiEM need both squares and Parliaments…
«Not only that: I think we need more. At the same time we need trade unions, organisations such as WikiLeaks, intellectuals who are able to produce policy papers, we need big campaigns. I think one of the failures of the movements which we mentioned is that they only went into one direction: if you have radical political parties, they would end up in the parliament and they would very soon forget about the square. Or the movement of the squares would never join the fight at the level of representative democracy, and their energy would soon vanish. What we are actually doing is trying to interconnect all these political methods and experiences».

After presenting DiEM in Berlin, you opted for Rome: why? I mean, Italy is not the most international venue for such kind of political initiatives...
«Why not? DiEM is a pan-European movement. Italy is a very important country in the European Union, and when it comes to social movements, I think we can learn a lot from Italy. Just remember the water referendum in 2011, and how the current government of Italy is ignoring the result of that referendum, or we should also mention, for instance, a very important referendum that you will have in Italy on the 17th of April against the oil drilling. DiEM supports the referendum against oil drilling because it is a pan-European problem: I come from Croatia, and we don't have such referendum, but our government is also planning oil drilling in the Mediterranean, which will change the Mediterranean completely. So I think all these aspects are interconnected: what is happening in Italy is not only an Italian problem, but it is a pan-European problem. This is the reason we are coming to Rome by the help of “European Alternatives” and others who invited us. After that we will have a meeting in Vienna on the refugee crisis, then a meeting in Madrid, and we are actively participating on the referendum in UK. Everything that is happening in Europe is interconnected».

How do you look at the Italian left parties?
«In Italian politics and especially in the left politics, as you know, everything is very complicated. You have a very interesting history and we can learn from it. What I think is lacking in Italy, but this is not an Italian problem, this is also a German problem, it is also Croation problem, is precisely a unity of these social movements, because what you need to get rid of is the classical and most dangerous illness of the left: “sectarianism”, which means everyone in his own corner, and they don't want to cooperate with other groups because they don't like someone who is part of the other groups and then in the end nothing happen. I see the Italian movements as something that can enrich DiEM, on the other hand I see DiEM as a possibility for existing social movements in Italy to work together».

What about the Five Stars movement?
«What I can see is that Transparency and mainly the TTIP is also important for the Five Stars movement, so we invite them to join our campaign, because we invite everyone who is dealing with this. On the other hand, as far as I can see, the Five Stars movement is not really coherent about the European Union, in the sense that sometimes they advocate the Exit and sometimes they advocate the democratisation of EU. DiEM is very clear: we do not advocate the Exit, because we think that in this moment of such a huge crisis a retreat to the nation states would actually only give a possibility for the right wing extremists to gain power. I also believe that a retreat to the nation states, which means Exit, is not a solution: it is part of the problem, because by exiting the European Union, you will not exit global capitalism, what you will have is a very strong Germany, a very strong France, and you will have Russian capital, Chinese capital. You can see this already in Greece: non-European capital really uses the crisis to penetrate inside the European Union and to buy companies. Retreating to the nation states would only accelerate this process».

DiEM is very critical about the European answer to the refugee crisis. Does DiEM think that the model should be Angela Merkel's answer?
«I think that Angela Merkel did the right step at the beginning by inviting the refugees, but what the European Union is doing now is completely unacceptable and it is a disgrace for the very ideals of the European Union. They are outsourcing the problem to Turkey, spending 6 billion euros, and the bigger part of this huge amount of money will not be based on the budget of the European Union, but on particular member states. Why are we citizens not informed about the negotiations? And why don't we have a possibility to decide whether we want to invest all this money into Turkey or whether there is any other solution? Angela Merkel's decision at the beginning was the right decision because if you have someone knocking on the door in the middle of the night and he is hungry, and he is escaping from war, the only proper thing is to open the door, but I think that just opening the doors you are still not solving the problem of this human tragedy. In order to solve it, I think we should go even a step back, and the step back was the war in Libya, and the step back were the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq. In order to actually solve the refugee crises we should pose a question on the European foreign policy, which is, if you ask me, completely non-existent, and we should also ask questions about the NATO, the alliance between the European Union and the US».

Does DiEM think that Europe should become a healthy counter-weight to the US?
«I think the current elections are very important not only for the US but also for Europe: they have such an influence on European economy, politics and daily life that the European citizens should also vote for the president! If Hillary Clinton wins, for instance, what you would have is an acceleration of the trends I just described: we will have even more wars. WikiLeaks just published the emails of Hillary Clinton showing how interventions in Libya and Syria were prepared, and showing her connections to the Silicon Valley companies. On the other hand, Bernie Sanders shows there is a possibility at least to create a counter-discourse, even if you do not win, something changes in the US politics. DiEM is closely following what is happening in the US, and just recently Noam Chomsky supported DiEM: our next phase would be building better connections and convergencies not only with the US, but also with the Mediterraneans countries which are not part of the European Union, and also with the Latin America. It is a global crisis and we need global answers: the US elections are part of the problem and maybe part of the solution».