It was the first anniversary of the Portuguese Revolution. Fascism had been overthrown, the festivities were quietened, and the first free elections were over. I was enjoying a quiet beer along the coast from Lisbon when a local train pulled in, and a group of young people equipped with posters, paste, and brushes emerged.
Their brightly colored posters bore the slogans of an ostensibly revolutionary outfit called the Movement for Reconstituting the Proletarian Party (MRPP). The immediate and almost automatic response of the local people was to chase these privileged youths away.
The student front of this faux-Maoist outfit was the gathering place for the bourgeois youth whose animosity towards the Portuguese Communists was both performative and well-funded. They became infamous for their r-r-r-revolutionary wall murals bearing the slogan: “Death to Cunhal.”
Alvaro Cunhal was the heroic leader of the Portuguese Communist Party, long imprisoned by the fascist regime and freed in a daring operation which secured the escape from the notorious Peniche prison of him and other members of the imprisoned PCP Central Committee. Returned from exile, he became a minister in the transitional government.
Perhaps one strategic thinker behind the post-revolutionary performance of the MRPP was Frank Carlucci. He was a foreign service officer whose earlier assignment had him in the Congo the year the CIA had Patrice Lumumba killed. His stint as U.S. ambassador to Portugal ended when he went to the Central Intelligence Agency as deputy director.
The wordy law student leader of the MRPP students was José Manuel Durão Barroso, who rapidly abandoned revolutionary rhetoric and embarked on a political career that took him from the Portuguese parliamentary right to becoming prime minister, and, by 2004, president of the European Commission.
Just how consistent Barroso has proved in the defense of transatlantic Cold War unity between the ruling circles of the U.S. and Europe was illustrated when he told the newspaper Expresso that he had joined the MRPP as the best way to diminish the influence of the Portuguese Communist Party.
In this endeavor, a deluge of dollars descended on Portugal—via the German Social Democrats—to fund the Portuguese Socialist Party and separately to the MRPP, who have never shaken off the charge that they took money from the U.S.
Half a century later, Barroso has set himself up as an advocate for EU rearmament and a new unity against the perceived threat emanating from Donald Trump’s re-election as U.S. president.
As so often is the case, hard truths are wrapped up in the language of mystification. In a recent Chatham House intervention, Barroso argued that Europe must sustain its support for Ukraine.
But he goes on to state: “NATO membership is now de facto impossible and EU accession distant and problematic. If Trump fails to strike a deal [with Putin] and withdraws support for Ukraine, then Britain, France, and Germany will not be able to offer credible security guarantees.”
Barroso points out that the shift by the European Union to a military posture has “not been fully recognized by the public. Since the bloc raised £800 billion [$1 trillion USD] in debt during the pandemic, the possibility of joint borrowing for defense is now on the table.”
Barroso is giving voice to the growing consensus among the bourgeois leaders of the main EU states that they have to assure the U.S. that there exists a willingness to increase defense spending even if this entails assuming debt obligations that remain a taboo if mobilized for other areas of public expenditure—most especially health, education, social care, and the social wage.
He is emerging as a spokesman for that trend in European politics that asserts the necessity for the EU (plus Britain) to recover its position in the economic competition between “the U.S., China, and others.”
In this connection, he strongly supports former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, who was commissioned to prepare a strategy for recovering EU competitiveness, one which, incidentally, would add another trillion dollars in debt, or up to 5% of GDP.
In this Chatham House intervention, the architecture of the European Union is sketched out by Barroso.
The starting point is a new war economy, the first element of which is a commitment to a permanent war footing in confrontation with Russia. The continuities between the approach of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, U.K. Defence Secretary John Healey, and Barroso are clear.
He argues that where “it was once thought—notably by Britain—that a European defense policy would threaten NATO. No longer. The conditions are building to develop a common defense policy that can become the European pillar of the transatlantic alliance.”
Of course, there is far from unanimity among EU members about the desirability and viability of a permanent confrontation with Russia. Barroso’s response to this question is to argue: “While an asymmetry of interests exists among EU member states on these issues, the reality is that there is a critical mass for progress towards a stronger European defense.”
Upon this, he hangs a repudiation of the increasingly redundant idea that EU policy proceeds only on the basis of consensus and agreement. This is yet another breach in the delusion that EU membership entails only a marginal surrender of sovereignty.
Barroso sees in Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s abandonment of her earlier and electorally advantageous Euroscepticism a sense that a new right-wing consensus could be constructed to provide a barrier to the growth of a right-wing populism which fits uncomfortably with Atlanticism.
And there is a clear recognition that “Trump’s ability to speak to the genuine concerns of U.S. citizens, particularly on issues related to the purchasing power of middle to low-income households and matters of public security, rising crime, and illegal immigration” has an echo in European politics and one not effectively countered by the parties of the EU consensus.
What emerges from Barroso’s polemics is a deep anxiety about the viability of the political project to which he has devoted his politics: An Atlantic alliance in which a more or less perfect symmetry exists between the interests of the U.S. ruling class and ruling elites of the main European states is threatened by the generalized crisis of 21st-century global capitalism.
Behind the mannered enthusiasm for a strengthened Atlanticism lies an anxiety that the pursuit of U.S. national interests, or more properly, the interests of the competing sections of U.S. monopoly capital, might result in an economic challenge to a European economy that is already in crisis.
It is clear that the present Labour Party administration in London sees its role as reasserting the role of Britain as a key interlocutor in the changing relationship between the U.S. and Europe.
From their standpoint, as the people presently assigned by our ruling class, the responsibility to act as guardians of capitalist stability and profitability entails a recalibration of Britain’s relations with both the U.S. and the EU.
And we can be sure that none of these questions will be resolved to the advantage of working people. It is a 21st-century capitalist crisis of both economy and politics.
Morning Star
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