In recent years, EU leaders, Brussels bureaucrats and political commentators have often spoken of the emergence of a “two-speed Europe.” The idea refers to the fact that different EU members participate in the common project at different levels of integration, with some countries moving faster towards fiscal and political union than others. This kind of “variegated geometry” has long been advocated by the German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who first called for the establishment of a Kerneuropa – or “Core Europe” – in 1994.

Today, however, with leftist parties poised to take power in Greece and Spain, the notion of a two-speed Europe has rapidly attained a very different meaning. Suddenly, we will have a progressive periphery pushing for debt cancellation, social reforms, popular empowerment, migrant rights and an end to the fiscal masochism of austerity — squaring off against a reactionary core governed by an extreme center that keeps insisting on further budget cuts and that desperately tries to appease the rising anti-immigrant sentiments of the far-right.

This is a remarkable reversal that turns the ideological narrative of Europe’s neoliberal cosmopolitan project upside down. Powerful EU figures like Wolfgang Schäuble and Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the Commission, have long delighted in the self-congratulatory view that the countries of the North are somehow more prudent and more advanced than their weak and profligate cousins in the South. The only way the latter can advance, it was argued, would be for Greece and Spain to become more like Germany and the Netherlands.

The logical conclusion of this line of reasoning was that, if the countries of the periphery were unwilling or unable to make the requisite reforms and become more like “the rest of us,” the European family as a whole would probably be better off without them. This is why Schäuble has consistently been the most vocal German government official arguing for a Greek exit from the Eurozone. According to his monetary “chain theory,” the single currency can only be strengthened by the elimination of its weakest link.

The problem, of course, apart from the dangerous Germanocentrism implied in this view, is that it rests upon a strictly teleological conception of the European project and a complete inversion of what it means to “move forward.” Like old Hegel, Schäuble and the neoliberal cosmopolitans of Core Europe are standing on their head. They still believe that the only way to take the continent forward is to fiscally cut and structurally reform it back into the 19th century. And with our Great Recession, it seems that we’re about halfway there already.

The dramatic consequences of this dangerous ideology are becoming clearer every day. Under the German austerity regime, hinging upon the systematic repression of wages and the constitutional entrenchment of strict spending limits, even Core Europe itself is fast regressing back to the 1930s. Where a few years ago we might have warned that the “dark clouds” of fascism were rising on the horizon, today these clouds are right over our heads. Golden Dawn, horrific as it is, is suddenly the least of our concerns. We have bigger fish to fry.

Le Pen’s National Front now leads the polls in France. The xenophobic Freedom Party of anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders polls first in the Netherlands. Last year, Nigel Farage’s euroskeptic UK Independence Party won big in EU elections. Meanwhile, the populist Alternative for Germany party is putting Merkel’s feet to the fire over the country’s euro membership, and the far-right anti-immigrant movement Pegida has been mobilizing tens of thousands – including neo-Nazis – against the “Islamization” of Europe. Salient detail: Pegida’s leader just resigned after posing for a photograph with a Hitler mustache.

So the contours of a new two-speed Europe are rapidly emerging: a dysfunctional union in which the periphery is moving ever faster towards progressive social change – which includes not just the electoral rise of leftist parties but especially the deep social transformations brought about by the innovative bottom-up practices of grassroots movements, worker-owned cooperatives, mutual aid networks, solidarity economies, autonomous spaces, etc. – while the alienated and grumpy citizens of the core are slipping ever deeper into despair and reaction.

Of course we have been here before. A century ago, the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg made a poignant statement that turned out to be tragically prophetic: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads,” she wrote in her Junius Pamphlet of 1915: “either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.” As the left rises in the South and the far-right takes the North by storm, the neoliberal cosmopolitans of the extreme center have made it clear where they stand at this juncture: if given the chance, they will take us all back into the Dark Ages.

Today, only a radical cosmopolitan project emerging from the grassroots and the periphery can cast a different light on the notion of human progress and carry the Old Continent forward into a promising new direction. As another German revolutionary once wrote, it is time to “turn Hegel back from his head on his feet, so we can start walking again.” From Athens to Madrid, and then to Berlin.

Jerome Roos is a PhD researcher in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute and founding editor of ROAR Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @JeromeRoos.

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