Bryn Jones on the future of Europe
Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism by Wolfgang Streeck published by Verso
As an eminent sociologist and left-wing critic of European institutions, Wolfgang Streeck’s book provides a decisive analysis of the future of Europe as globalisation declines; especially for countries like post-Brexit Britain. It aims to transcend both neoliberal dogma and narrow, technocratic “growth” fixations, as with the current UK, Labour government. Despite its prescriptive tone , it does not offer a road map to a different political economy. It does complicate Britain’s simplistic political divide between anti- and pro-EU positions. Its central message is summarised in this quote:
“Whoever wants neoliberalism must want globalisation and Europeanisation; whoever wants globalisation wants neoliberalism . . whoever wants the market to be embedded in democratic politics must oppose the globalisation of the state system, and with it global governance.”
By “Europeanisation” Streeck means the the EU’s fiscal and monetary centralisation, as “an ever closer union.” These sentiments and the book’s provocative title challenge those of us who opposed Brexit, believing that EU internationalism could limit intensification of the neoliberal project. Not so, would argue Streeck: Europeanisation aims to force national economies and their governments to reduce public spending, welfare and public sector debt, while curbing taxation and regulation of financial businesses. It is not rational choice that impels the EU to adopt these policies, says Streeck. It is because it wants to be a global economic power on a par with the United States and the emerging behemoth of China.
According to Streeck, neoliberal systems of international governance underlie the capitalist West’s “poly crisis”: pandemics, climate breakdown, wars and economic repression of communities and citizens. International organisations like the IMF and World Trade Organisation have been engineered to consolidate America’s poltico-economic empire; with the EU is a subaltern supra-state, harbouring its own pretensions to empire status. This neoliberal state system’s interlocking crises can only be solved by replacing its “world order” by the alternative of co-operating sovereign and democratic nation-states. In Europe, this means dethroning the sovereignty of the undemocratic EU institutions, especially the European Central Bank and its fixation on austerity-inducing, monetary “discipline”.
Streeck’s alternative economic order would be guided by the principles of J.M. Keynes (nation-state control of international trade and debt-financed public spending) and Karl Polanyi – the historian of capitalism’s interface with social and community relations. Nation state devolution is essential because: “The world . . . is too big and heterogeneous for democratic decision-making.” Instead, networks of “Keynes-Polanyi states” – his transformed Europe would be a kind of “ large -scale Switzerland” – could tame capitalist turmoil, subject it to democratic controls and subordinate monetary gain-seeking to a nation’s social values. Contrary to the neoliberal world-view this inevitably means some economic protectionism, but also more social and public enterprise institutions: from savings banks to multi-stakeholder co-operatives; partly to replace international suppliers and financiers. Streeck cites, approvingly, UK schemes for local “foundational economies” pioneered in Preston and Wales.
Backed by copious economic history data, Streeck’s argument creates a conundrum for the British left. Do the economic elements of Trumpism and Brexitism have a rational kernel? Could the Left propose a rival version of economic nationalism? “Stealing the enemy’s clothes’? Going with the populist grain but diverting it?
However, pinning down such strategies requires more attention to detail than Streeck offers. The bureaucratic “empires” of international economic governance and the E.U. are unlikely to accept such wholesale changes without opposition. The impact of Brexit in the UK indicates that member states would be wary of radical changes to the present EU system. Moreover, would networks of small democratic states be able to coordinate resistance to the massive new industrial power of China: producer of most of the world’s solar panels, electric vehicles and other industrial goods? Wouldn’t such empire states play off the smaller states against each other? Also Streeck scarcely examines multi-national corporate power, particularly the Big Tech’s online “empire “. Attempts to contain and reform this global monster have been patchy. Would individual sovereign states have more success than the EU?
Finally, we must ask whether Europe’s “democratic” nation states are capable of acting as the necessary vehicles? Streeck says nation-states are the “only social formations capable of being democratised.” However, in countries like France, Italy, Germany and the UK, their various political systems have strongly resisted translation of popular discontents into meaningful reforms; with some moving towards populistic authoritarianism. Without first improving their own democratic processes could these countries become the mooted network of egalitarian, sovereign states Streeck evisages? He implies that grass-roots social movements are the most productive change agents. Yet these have largely been suppressed or diluted in the last decade. A constructive reading of this book could provide many of the ingredients for a transformed social economy. What is still needed is a clearer identification of the conditions and methods to activate these.