Students and workers are protesting in the streets of France, Greece, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and beyond. Poor conditions in the schools inspired the first protests in France but then spread in an overriding resentment against the general drift of European society under the rule of the neoliberal European Union and its military wing, NATO.
Teachers and labor unions have joined the students in the streets, and so have some masked militarized groups who have turned to occasional violence, a violence more than matched by the police in France and elsewhere.
Leaders like Emmanuel Macron in France and Friedrich Merz in Germany are essentially bureaucrats who could care less about popular disgruntlement with their policies. They lead at the behest of the unelected state that is the EU, which insists on a pro-corporate agenda of austerity--sharp limitations on social programs, resistance to labor unions, and an increasingly wartime budgeting that feeds the military-industrial complex and its propaganda machine against Russia.
Alex Lantier of the World Socialist Web Site summed it up nicely in a recent article. “There is deep opposition to the diversion of hundreds of billions of euros from education, pensions, and social spending to the military and the war against Russia in Ukraine; to financial speculation that drives up housing and energy prices; to social cuts dictated by the financial markets; and to police repression and the promotion of neo-fascism.”
The demonstrations are reminiscent of the May 1968 student protests in Paris that led to a general workers strike across the country. The cause then was poor university and working conditions and the government itself. Across the Atlantic, U.S. students also demonstrated in the streets and ultimately helped increase public dissatisfaction with the Vietnam war.
I was a student protester at my university, East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, in the late 1960s, even alienating some of my fellow protesters by my radical views. At one point, we had some 900 of the university’s 9,000 students in the streets demanding an end to the Vietnam War. Ultimately, burnout, no desire to escape to Canada, and the draft ended up putting me not only in the Army but also in Vietnam.
A few years later, my brother John and I traveled to Paris and witnessed a major confrontation between students and the police near the Sorbonne in Paris’ Latin Quarter. We watched from the relative safety of our corner café, unsure what the current cause was. It was a time of continued radicalism, however, with the Baader-Meinhof gang still strirring up trouble in West Germany and similar groups elsewhere in Europe.
Over the years, I’ve tried to keep alive my own protesting credentials, taking a stand against the U.S. bombing of Serbia in the late 1990s. Alas, a Serbian doctoral student and I were the only two participants in anti-bombing demonstrations at the University of Mississippi, where I was a professor of journalism. My liberal friends waved their disapproving fingers in my face because of my stand.
Conservative groups link some of the current protests in Europe—certainly the violence—to immigrants. Immigration is a real issue in Europe—and in the United States as well. It’s an issue created by the trade deals neoliberals have produced and their desire for the cheap labor immigration provides. Resentment is understandable even if the causes are not the fault of the immigrants themselves. In fact, they become worthy tools of demagogues like Donald Trump who blame them for all the world’s problems. Immigrants are mainly victims of these policies, not causes.
The 1968 protests in Paris ultimately lost steam, and Charles de Gaulle’s party eventually restored its rule. He was weakened, however, and left office a year later. Plus, the government did make some concessions to the demands of students and workers. No revolution, however.
Today’s massive demonstrations point to another uphill fight against an entrenched bureaucracy and an uncertain outcome. Still, the voices from the streets can be heard, and the “let them eat cake” attitude of Macron and crew is obviously wearing increasingly thin on the European people.
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