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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Today Europe finds itself in a crisis that casts a dark shadow over an entire generation. The seriousness of the crisis stems from one core political contradiction at the heart of the European project: namely, that what urgently needs to be done is also extremely unpopular and therefore virtually impossible to do democratically. What must be done - and almost everyone agrees in principle on the measures that would be needed to deal with the financial crisis - cannot be sold to the voting public of the core member states, which so far have been less affected by the crisis than those on the periphery, nor can the conditions that core members try to impose be easily sold to voters in the deficit countries. The European Union is therefore becoming increasingly disunited, with deepening divides between the German-dominated 'core' and the southern 'periphery', between the winners and the losers of the common currency, between the advocates of greater integration and the anti-Europeans, between the technocrats and the populists. Europe finds itself trapped by the deepening divisions that are opening up across the Continent, obstructing its ability to deal with a crisis that has already caused massive social suffering in the countries of the European periphery and is threatening to derail the very project of the European Union. In this short book, Claus Offe brings into sharp focus the central political problem that lies at the heart of the EU and shackles its ability to deal with the most serious crisis of its short history.
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction
Notes
1: Democratic Capitalism and the European Union
Notes
2: The Nature of the Crisis
Notes
3: Growth, Debt, and Doom Loops
Notes
4: No Return to Square One
Notes
5: In Search of Political Agency
Notes
6: Finalitées: Bases of Identification with European Integration as a Political Project
Notes
7: The Configuration of Political Forces and Preferences
Notes
8: Germany's Leadership Role for Europe: A Non-Starter
Notes
9: “Thin” Citizenship: The Ugly Face of the EU System of Rule
Notes
10: Redistribution Across State Borders and Social Divides
Notes
References
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
Preface
CHAPTER 1
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For
Zygmunt Bauman
Scholar and European Citizen
Copyright © Claus Offe 2015
The right of Claus Offe to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8751-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8755-1 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8754-4 (mobi)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Abbreviations
Preface
The Euro, for the time being, is a continental affair. Its precariousness and the crisis it has triggered have given rise to heated debates across the Euro zone and beyond. Accordingly, this is a “continental” little book that tries to understand the turbulences that the Euro has inflicted on states and societies of the Euro zone and the EU. It addresses the problem of “agency”: Are there social and political forces, inspiring ideas, or sufficiently resourceful actors who might liberate Europeans from the trap into which the Euro has led them? The member state with which the author is most familiar is Germany; it is not only for that reason that this country plays a special role in the analysis. The book draws upon and elaborates an article with the same title that I published in the European Law Journal in 2013. Among others, my colleague John Thompson has urged me to expand it into the present book-length essay.
Much of the analysis presented here has profited from the works of (and often debates with as well as written comments by) Albena Azmanova, Angelo Bolaffi, Hauke Brunkhorst, Alessandro Cavalli, Manuel Castells, Stefan Collignon, Christoph Deutschmann, Hendrik Enderlein, Gerd Grözinger, Ulrike Guérot, Christian Joerges, Jürgen Habermas, Anke Hassel, Otto Kallscheuer, Alexander E. Kentikelenis, Ivan Krastev, Augustín J. Menéndez, Ulrich Preuss, Fritz Scharpf, Wolfgang Streeck, John Thompson, Lutz Wingert, and Jonathan White. Most of the valid ideas presented here are inspired by them; all the mistakes mine. Thanks to Dustin Williams for helpful and thoughtful research assistance.
Introduction
The European Union finds itself at a crossroads between something considerably better or something much worse than the plainly unsustainable status quo; in other words, in a continuing crisis. That much is universally understood, both within Europe and beyond. So I am not alone in believing that the current crisis – a crisis that is the cumulative outcome of a financial market crisis, a sovereign debt crisis, an economic/employment crisis and an institutional crisis of the EU, its Euro zone and its democratic qualities – is an extremely serious and unprecedented one, frightening due to its complexity and uncertainty. If it cannot soon be resolved (but nobody knows how soon is “soon enough,” as nobody can tell for sure “whether we are at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the series of events”)1 through a major institutional overhaul of the EU, both the political project of European integration and the global economy will suffer badly, to say nothing about the massive social suffering it has caused already in the countries of the European periphery.
There are dozens of academic articles, policy papers, and journalistic essays in which the question is discussed: What is to be done? These often appear with titles such as “Rolling back or expanding European integration?,” charting two or more alternative ways out of the crisis, which then are ranked according to their alleged feasibility and desirability.2 Yet, while this diagnosis of a multifaceted crisis is no longer controversial and “forward” vs “backward” spatial analogies are often used to describe strategies, this is less the case with a second observation. The observation is that the crisis has largely paralyzed or silenced the forces and sources of constructive remedial agency, which are capable of implementing strategies and changes by which the crisis might eventually be overcome and its repetition precluded. Contrary to what is claimed by Marxian analysts and also self-confident technocrats, the crisis does not breed but rather paralyzes the very forces that might be capable of overcoming it; it disables agency rather than activating dynamics of learning and the capacity for resilience. The present crisis has deactivated potential crisis managers and agents of change. While hopes (for economic recovery), visions (e.g. of a federated democratic European republic) and calls for nationalist reversals are manifold, the question of who is sufficiently legitimated and otherwise resourceful to formulate and implement a strategy that might move Europe to any desirable and sustainable post-crisis future, and according to what kinds of rules and procedures, is without a widely accepted answer. One could speak (as I have done in an essay written in the 1970s) of a “crisis of crisis management.”3 Even if we were agreed on “what is to be done,” the even thornier second question is: “Is there anyone to do it?” It is not helpful to argue for desirable strategic objectives without being able to point to someone willing and able actually to follow it through. As long as we do not have an answer to this latter question, we are not only in a crisis – we are, on top of the crisis, in a trap. A trap can be defined as a condition which is itself painful and unbearable to those caught in it but where, at the same time, movement is incapacitated, escape routes blocked, and forces of liberating agency weak and uncertain. The actors have not yet arrived on a stage full of challenges.
What “all of us” are passively affected by cannot be actively shaped and managed by any agency that is endowed with legitimate power. This gap between the horizon of causation and the horizon of control applies with particular force to members of the Euro zone: they are disempowered to manage their national currencies (as there is none anymore) yet unable to establish collectively the governing capacity that would allow them to manage their interdependency in ways that are tolerable for all and capable of curbing the power of the financial sector. Sociologically speaking, the scope of functional integration is much wider than the scope of social integration, or what we are passively affected by is beyond our collective capacity to act upon. It is the question of agency that the present book tries to answer, if mostly (though not exclusively) in negative terms. There are a number of agents whose actions, as I try to show, definitely do not qualify as plausible answers to that second question. Among them are the ECB, the European Council, the German government, renationalized governments of EU member states, movements mobilized by anti-European campaigns, or the technocrats in the Commission.
The seriousness of the crisis is due to one core contradiction. In a nutshell: what is urgently needed to be done, according to whichever of many rival political preferences and strategies, is also extremely unpopular and therefore democratically, within member states as well as the EU, virtually impossible to carry out. What must be done, and everyone agrees on it “in principle” (namely some kind of sharing and re-allocating both burdens and responsibilities within the EU) cannot be “sold” to the voting public of member states of both the “core” and the “periphery.” After all, political parties who would have to do the “selling” are still largely national power-seeking organizations and as such guided by the positivistic opportunism of responding to voters' (presumably) “given” preferences, while shying away from the challenge of shaping preferences, building consensus and forging border-crossing trust relations in the first place. What would be needed for political parties to shape preferences through persuasion and argument is the capacity to overcome widespread fears, sentiments of distrust, suspicion, a propensity to victim-blaming, and the prevalence of national frames. One of those popular attitudes that parties are typically not capable of coming to terms with is the suspicion that if “we” make sacrifices in favor of “them,” “they” will use “our” generosity as an opportunity to take unfair advantage of “us.” In short, “they” are portrayed as engaging in the kind of frivolously self-serving behavior that economists call “moral hazard.” The cognitive bias of mass constituencies that parties fail to overcome is the understanding that a problem is “their” problem caused by “them,” not a problem of “all of us.”
The bottleneck variable is thus not money but consensus and political support, due to the poverty of the institutional mechanisms of consensus building. The incongruence between what “needs” to be done in economic terms and what strategic political actors find politically feasible culminates in a now symptomatically frequently invoked condition of “ungovernability.” It applies to both sides of the current and deepening European divide of core and periphery. Yet if the Euro zone falls apart as a consequence of the failure to square this circle, the EU is very likely to follow suit. I believe that Chancellor Merkel is right in saying so – although she forgot to add what by now is also evident: It is the untamed and institutionally unembedded dynamics of the EMU and the Euro itself that threatens to disintegrate the European Union.
Notes
1
Thompson 2012, 61; Rachman (2014) reports that while the end of the crisis is celebrated by some on the basis of recent Greek budget and lending data, others, such as an (unnamed) “one of Europe's most influential economic policy makers replied to the question whether the Euro crisis really is over: ‘No, it's just moving from the periphery to the core’,” meaning that “concerns about Italy and even France should actually be rising.”
2
Platzer 2014.
3
Offe 1976.
1Democratic Capitalism and the European Union
Twenty-five years after the end of state socialism, the history of EU enlargement and integration, coupled with the deepest crisis it has so far faced, have posed the challenge to rethink one classical question of social and political theory: How does the democratic state interact with the capitalist market economy? How has the putative institutional equilibrium of the post-Second-World-War “social” market economy been disrupted and how can it (if at all) be restored at the European level of the EU, i.e., an unprecedented type of supranational political entity?
Following the demise of state socialism, the EU underwent a (still unfinished) process of Eastern Enlargement after which no less than thirteen new member states (all of them, except for one-and-a-half small Mediterranean islands, post-Communist) came under the umbrella of the Treaties and the acquis of European law. So far, four of the latter have joined the Euro zone; other post-Communist transformation countries are committed to following suit in the short- to medium-term future. The economic transition they have undergone is an historically novel one, the transition from the “command economy” of state socialism to the market economy of democratic capitalism. Yet the binary conceptual code of “state” vs “market” has helped to obscure the (I would claim) universally valid condition that applies both to the post-Communist transformation and European integration: The market as the mode of operation of a capitalist economy is, on the one hand, the opposite of the state and its practices; on the other, markets are themselves creatures of state policies and continuously recreated by the latter. In Hayek's famous distinction, the “command economy” is based on táxis, the discretionary establishment and coercive implementation of some man-made positive order. Kósmos, in contrast, is conceptualized as a kind of social order, namely the market that emerges from evolutionary forces beyond human design, intention, and even potential understanding.
No doubt, the binary codes of opposing táxis to kósmos, state to market, the “artificial” to the “natural,” discretionary coercion to freedom has become a hegemonic intellectual frame since the dominance of neoliberal doctrines in economic and political thought began, on both sides of the North Atlantic, in the late 1970s. Yet the two cases just mentioned – economic transformation after state socialism and EU integration – can serve as perfect empirical illustrations of the fact that markets are themselves coercively implemented artefacts of political design and decisions, not outcomes of some alleged “natural” evolution or simply “normal” conditions. Markets, as well as other institutions of capitalist societies, are made and allowed to operate by identifiable actors at specific times and locations; at any rate, they are not “given” nor do they just “happen” naturally. If that premise is accepted, what follows is the need to re-arrange the Hayekian conceptual architecture and to complicate the picture by adding a few items. Let me briefly do so in four points.
First, the difference between the two types of political economy must be rephrased so that the state–socialist type of regime (for Hayek the quintessential case of táxis) operates the economy through the means of collectivized property, plan, command, control, and by reference to some notion of “social justice” embodied in prescriptive rules1 establishing positive duties. In contrast, capitalist states run their economies through setting the stage for spontaneous self-coordination of rational interest-driven proprietors, i.e., by granting market participants, by merely prohibiting rules establishing negative legal duties, the freedom to dispose over their lawfully owned resources according to interests they choose to pursue in competitive interaction with others who do likewise. In opposition to this conceptual foundation of libertarian doctrine, it comes closer to the truth if we understand capitalist market economies as emanating from the victorious political project of a (“capitalist”) state and social forces supporting it to steer its economy by the organizational device of private property, market freedom, and the pursuit of interests.2 Market “spontaneity,” we might say, is itself instituted, licensed, regulated, and politically set in motion, just as the planning apparatus of some dictatorial party and its coercive disposition over society's resources. The constitutive role of state authorities for capitalism becomes evident if we realize that before even the first market transaction between a buyer and a seller can take place and become a matter of routine, a state must be in place already that has institutionalized (at least) three things: property rights, contract rights with enforcement mechanisms attached, and the currency that allows market participants to enter into commercial transactions – none of which can be established by “negative” or prohibitive rules alone.
Generally speaking, virtually every move “free” market participants make in pursuing their interests is licensed, mandated, regulated, promoted, guaranteed, subsidized, protected, legally formalized etc. by political programs and legal provisions, as are the opportunities for such moves provided for by market-related state action, e.g. by trade policies, the provision of infrastructure, zoning laws, schools, research institutions, the courts, and many others.3 Again, we want to keep in mind that the capitalist market society is a political economy, or a state-instituted arrangement of economic interaction. In short, as Polanyi4 has demonstrated, kósmos (in the Hayekian sense of unplanned spontaneous market coordination of the action of interested actors) is not the opposite, but a peculiar sub-case of táxis – an arrangement for which some political authority has unleashed the freedom of owners in contrast to the discretionary power of planning authorities.
My second point here is that markets and market competition are, as already Adam Smith knew well, essentially self-subversive. As market competition always creates losers and constrains the leeway even of winners to profit, there is an ubiquitous interest of market participants to limit the intensity and adverse impact of competition through the formation of cartels and monopolies, to deny market access to potential competitors, to resort to modes of “competition” (such as violent rivalry ranging from individual violence to piracy to international war) other than the two supposedly only legitimate ones, namely competition through lower prices or better quality (including novelty) of products. These two solely “civilized” modes of competition can also be bypassed through lobbying for protectionist concessions and other privileges granted by state policies. Also, once finding themselves in competition, market participants may try to acquire (supposedly) “free” goods (provided for free of charge or below cost from state authorities, e.g. infrastructure or outright subsidies) and to externalize costs (e.g. environmental damages, employment risks of workers) without compensating those negatively affected. Market transactions are well known to generate all kinds of negative externalities that are then dumped on (uncompensated) others. In all three of these directions (hindering market access of potential competitors, absorbing productive inputs without bearing the costs, generating negative externalities without compensation) markets do not only depend on pre-existing non-market relations (the legal and monetary preconditions addressed in the previous point) but they also lead rational market participants to generate and profit from shaping the structure of markets, extracting “free” resources, and coping with competitive pressures by economizing at the expense of third parties.
All of this is to say that “fair” market competition, even once it is installed, is far from self-enforcing and self-sustaining. If a market is to stay competitive, it needs to be permanently supervised and policed. It is an on-going concern for all levels of public policy to decide and adjudicate on market participants' strategies to evade and obstruct competition, appropriate “free” inputs and externalize social costs – a never-ending task of policing and enforcing competition for which, at the EU level, the Competition Commissioner is responsible. Far from being self-sustaining, markets are utterly fragile arrangements in need of being cultivated and governed by the state's economic policies. These policies tend to be torn between two objectives. On the one hand, and within the confines of a national economy and state, they pursue the objective of facilitating profitable business for investors because doing so is expected to promote prosperity of the country, create employment, resolve social conflict through positive-sum pay-offs and provide a tax base on which the making of any policy and its implementation depend. On the other hand, policy makers try to hinder investors' moves to restrict competition (as such restrictions involve exploitative monopoly rents and interfere with “efficiency”), charge investors for “free” inputs through fees and taxes, and prevent them from generating some kinds of negative externalities; this is the point at which normative theories of “free trade” crossing national borders comes in.5 It is thus entirely a matter of policy and political compromise to determine who is granted access, what is actually allowed to happen in markets and market competition and what is not. Markets, in short, are staged and shaped by state policies.
A third
