By Etienne Balibar, Emeritus Professor at Paris X Nanterre and Anniversary Chair of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He has addressed such questions as European racism, the notion of the border, whether a European citizenship is possible or desirable, violence, identity and emancipation. His books include Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser, New Left Books 1970), Race, Nation, Class (with Immanuel Wallerstein, Verso, 1991), The Philosophy of Marx, Spinoza and Politics, Politics and the Other Scene (Verso, 2002), and We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton UP, 2004). Originally published at openDemocracy
English version of the political philosopher’s interview with Vadim Kamenka of L’Humanite Dimanche (21 June)and Ana Maria Merlo for Il Manifesto (15 June).
IM/HD: We are today witnessing the advance of nationalist, xenophobic and extreme-right groups in every successive European election. They have even managed to enter government, for instance, in Italy. What’s going on?
Etienne Balibar (EB):This trend has been ongoing for years and reveals a crisis in the current form of European construction, which is probably irreversible. It is moving from one country to another, but the formula is the same: the effects of austerity measures on the poor and middle classes as well as the development of social and territorial inequalities are the logical result of so-called free and undistorted competition. These elements crystallise within the malaise created by the technocratic government of the EU and its member states. They foster nationalism, xenophobia and a loathing for democracy.
But ever since the Greek crisis and Brexit, it has also become clear that it is neither possible to leave the EU, nor to expel a member state. Obviously, some political forces believe in an exit from Europe, but no government can impose it. I think the situation will further deteriorate as we head towards a mutual neutralisation of hegemonic forces in Europe due to the lack of an alternative project on the part of new individuals, emergent groups or political movements. The consequences of this development are unpredictable.
IM/HD: Will we see an EU showdown with Italy, similar to the one in 2015?
EB:The statements of the president of the EU Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, are revealing. He has said that he wanted to avoid the errors made in 2015. But what errors is he referring to? Is he talking about the content, about the wilful destruction of an economy and a society? Or is he merely talking about the form this took, which hadn’t respected the procedures? The European leaders know that they cannot show the same open contempt towards the choice made by the Italians with which they treated that of the Greeks. But I do find it telling that they want to avoid a conflict with the extreme-right while they deliberately sought it with the left-wing government.
IM/HD:Do the suggestions for an overhaul of Europe put forward by French president Emmanuel Macron during his speech at the Sorbonne or the plans laid out by German Chancellor Angela Merkel really take into account the full extent of the crisis that Europe is undergoing?
EB: What plan? It’s mere window dressing. Of course cultural exchanges are important. But it won’t take us very far if it’s only to proclaim once again the common destiny of the European peoples. The crux of the matter is the EU economic and financial structures. Banks have already been consolidated. The project to transform the European solidarity mechanism into a monetary fund was inspired by the rules of the IMF. And Germany and the Netherlands still don’t accept a common budget without guarantees against transfers.
Ever since the crisis of 2008, economists have repeatedly said that a single currency cannot work without a common budget. But Germany only accepts minor adjustments, and it is likely that the French government will head in the same direction. This will seal the sovereignty of financial institutions instead of limiting competition between European states and producers and thereby strengthening solidarity.
The project that is here outlined certainly doesn’t attempt to ward off the splitting of Europe into hierarchical economic zones: attractive zones for foreign capital, subcontracting zones, zones for the supply of a cheap workforce and holiday zones for the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. What happens in Greece today is striking. The salaries and pensions have collapsed, current accounts are picking up, and the tourism industry is running at full capacity. The environmental and sociological consequences are terrifying.
IM/HD:Macron’s Sorbonne speech at least mentioned the necessity to fight against the rise of the extreme right. Does nothing in the project that is currently under discussion pick up on this dimension?
EB: Frankly, I find it astonishing that no debate on the crisis besetting European construction is taking place in the European Parliament. Maybe it would be a cacophony, speeches with fascist leanings would be delivered by populist forces, some of which are already in power or about to enter government. But we can’t ignore the fact that the crisis of the system is also its lack of democracy. The more profound it gets, the more technocrats will argue that the population should not have its say. They fear that their capacity for action will be paralysed.
But what arethey doing about it? I wonder when the time will be ripe for public debates about the problems of Europe on a European level and not in a small committee of the Commission or of the heads of states. The situation is certainly worrying enough for a debate to take place in the European Parliament without waiting for a common agreement between Macron and Merkel on a minimum programme.
The “reconstruction” programme won’t get Europe out of its current crisis. Let’s stop the hypocritical discourse dividing Europe into those who pay and those who receive. As if German, Dutch or French tax payers were subsidising southern Europe. This really is the true “populism”.
All creditor countries are profiting from the differential salaries and interest rates. Germany is able to export everywhere because it is producing in national conditions while selling on the global market with a currency that is not too strong. This explains the entire opposition of German capitalists to amending the contract of 1992. It is the foundation of their European governance. Macron has never even contemplated attacking it.
IM/HD: Why are left-wing factions so unable to weigh in on the current debate?
EB: If the left wants to rebuild itself, this can only happen in many countries simultaneously. The left has to conceive of itself as a European Left, despite the many difficulties. In this sense, the idea of a trans-European campaign launched by Varoufakis seems right.
Such a campaign is necessary in order to break down the barriers and bring the debate onto the citizen’s level. But this is not self-evident. Many believed (myself included) that unification from above would exert sufficient pressure to trigger off a cross-border debate despite the many obstacles such as language, political cultures, organisational crises, the rise to power of technocrats, the monopoly of national political elites. All this made people withdraw into their own territories which are slipping from their grasp. And this is exploited in demagogic and backward discourses. But the left must face the real world.
It was also an error to believe that the European construction would render the national question obsolete or relativize it. The current crisis proves the opposite. No nation or region has the privilege of nationalism to themselves. The purely negative conception of national interest remains the most commonly shared matter in Europe. Every single country is afraid of being exploited by a neighbour or dissolved by a globalisation in which Europe would merely be the humble instrument.
IM/HD: Are such examples as the Aquarius and the 600 people who cannot find refuge on a continent as rich as Europe proof that conservative ideas and nationalist movements deploying the mythical threat of massive immigration have won out in our societies?
EB: The only advantage in this appalling episode is that Europeans cannot perceive of the problem as purely Italian any more.
For years, France has had an attitude of repugnant hypocrisy. It gives lessons to others, but from Calais to the Italian borders migrants and those who help them are being harrassed. Inequalities and humiliations are creating this identical “hostile environment” to the one the British government made a hue and cry about. What I’m also scandalised about is the fact that France hasn’t even accepted a tenth of the refugees it had promised to take, while Angela Merkel accepted hundreds of thousands of them. Finally, we have to admit that the policies of the Visegrad group are not so very different from our own: they’re only more sincere.
The question everybody is asking is how to balance all the dimensions of the problem. Rationally, looking at the number of displaced persons and the capacities of member states, there is nothing irresolvable. It’s not an invasion. It is necessary to create the proper means to receive them, teach them the language, help them get through… The other aspect is the Mediterranean hecatomb which is taking genocidal dimensions. It’s an extreme phrase, but how else are we to define the elimination of thousands of individuals based on their race – an elimination that is tolerated, anticipated and organised by default. It’s a rampant genocide, taking place not in a closed territory but in a borderland between states. History will hold us accountable for this.
IM/HD: What would your main propositions for the genuine rebuilding ofEurope look like?
EB: Europe can only be relaunched by addressing three questions. First, the question about the role it plays in globalisation: can it change its course and if so in what direction? Secondly, faced with neoliberalism, can a social European project be revived, and if so with which supporting forces ? Thirdly, can an equilibrium be found between the representation of the citizens by and large and the representation of nations or nationalities. In other words, can Europe invent the representative, participative and pluralist federal framework that it needs?
I insist on this question because it is the key to the other ones. Each one of our countries suffers from the pathology of representative democracy, because the formal powers are not localised at the same place as the real powers.
But the era of representation won’t end as long as public institutions exist – Habermas is certainly right on this point. The question of European finances needs to be linked to the question of the political representation of the European people.
There, in one sentence , you have the dilemma.
The reason a EuroFederation is a problem is that it would be a federation of former federations. It’s not like the USA where all the states pledge aliegence to the USA and submit to a national financial system that is based on sovereign money. In the EU there is no sovereign money, only Germany. So where do they go from here? Merkel would simply have everyone act on good faith, open their hearts to immigrants and obey the laws of austerity without the benefits of sovereignty. But the big problem is that without sovereignty there is no democracy. So it’s a technocrats’ isolated stronghold. We’ve looked at this 1000 times. It can’t change until there is political equity and there can be no political equity until it changes. I’d feel sympathy for them if they weren’t so stubborn. They took the ill advised step of doing the European Stabilization Mechanism and basing it on the IMF’s policies even when there were plenty of analysts (aka Yves) saying it was futile. Without democracy the EU is a gonner. The tragedy is that they all have a European sensibility. They could be a sovereign organization. If only.
Since the majority of the people are monetarily illiterate they wage a class war against themselves!
I agree very much with the conclusion that a unified European left is very important, but it seems to me that there are many statements in the article that are little more than confirmation bias, for example:
There is in reality very little obvious connection between austerity and the rise of xenophobia and the far right. The far right has risen in countries which have gotten away comparatively lightly, such as Denmark, Finland, Poland and Germany, while countries which have suffered severely, such as the Baltic States, Ireland and Spain have seen relatively little electoral growth in those groups. Many minority nationalist parties such as those in Spain and the UK (Sinn Fein and SNP) are very pro EU and often pro immigrant. I think all the evidence suggests that national politics is just that – national politics. The EU rates very low in most peoples concerns when voting. And when people are impacted by bad EU (or more precisely, Eurozone) policies, they are more likely to blame their own governments for it (except of course in England, where the exact opposite seems to happen).
The far right represents the “winners” view of austerity, afraid of what the “losers” might do, so anxious to denegrate, isolate and marginalized them, all with superior access to broadcast media/propaganda.
Yes projection
I’ve lived in Italy for the last 8 years (and a couple other stretches since 1980), and this piece seems to me to fit Italy to a tee. Nonetheless, your list of exceptions is thought-provoking, and it seems reasonable that details of national politics are a key determinant. I still don’t think that negates this piece’s fundamental focus on the toxic consequences of austerity and immigration. Instead, I’d postulate:
1. the ground-level consequences of EITHER austerity (e.g., decaying national health care; only precarious employment opportunities for anyone under 35, and many who are older) or an increasing immigrant population (e.g., “African tax collectors” at every supermarket entrance; Arabic “parking attendents” seeking tips in every large public parking lot), combined with …
2. the increasingly obvious fact that EU states are no longer capable of acting effectively due to their loss of sovereignty in nearly every field
are sufficient to break trust in national political establishments and encourage citizens to favor any available alternative.
Democracy in EU states has been rendered visibly impotent to improve the circumstances of the average citizen, “democracy” at the Union level is not even a somewhat convincing mirage, and the established Left has fostered (or at least not vocally opposed) that drift for fully four decades, rendering it anything but a perceived alternative to citizens’ current problems. What other expression of profound dissatisfaction remains?
That still doesn’t explain the cases you cite in which there has NOT been a xenophobic reaction, but perhaps both Spanish and UK politics are so roiled by strong regional movements that they captured all the insurgent energy long before austerity and immigration became such obvious issues.
You can’t assume that just because the country as a whole looks OK, that means that everyone there is doing fine and dandy. In the case of Germany (where I live), the media may well tout the country as some economic ‘overachiever,’ but this doesn’t translate into economic benefits for all alike. In fact, the German govt. has been cutting back on the social safety net for years now, with the Hartz IV laws abolishing the old welfare system (Sozialhilfe), and then hiking the retirement age. Each time, the German citizenry was told that the govt. had to do that because there ‘wasn’t enough money,’ so you can easily see why they resent Merkel’s breezy attitude toward the tidal wage of refugees back in 2015–Wir schaffen das!
Moreover, if you break down the 2017 national elections by state, you can easily see that the anti-immigration (and also anti-euro) AfD did best in precisely those states that had the highest unemployment–mostly in East Germany.
As far as Greece, Spain, and Ireland are concerned, why would immigration be a hot topic there? Being so broke, they don’t attract much.
Oh, and it should be noted that Poland and the Baltic states have all lost a huge percentage of their populations to emigration, precisely because there’s not enough work there. Estimates range as high as a quarter of their national populations that have, since joining the EU, left either to work or look for work elsewhere. Easy to see why immigrants would avoid them …
Didn’t Sinn Fein urge a ‘no’ vote on the Lisbon Treaty? I realize that there are no truly anti-EU parties in Ireland, but wouldn’t that fact–at least on the Irish political scale–make them somewhat more ‘Euroskeptic’?
They still have over a 10 % of foreign population, according to Eurostat Greece 11.3, Spain 12.7, Ireland 16.9
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/File:Foreign-born_population_by_country_of_birth,_1_January_2016_(%C2%B9).png
Austerity policies began in Germany in 1928.
well as long as they continue to call the facts myths because they don’t fit their worldview the Europe’s left has little chance of building a convincing message that will attract voters
Agree. What we’re seeing in the surge in refugees is not a one-off event but the end result of overpopulation, environmental destruction and the uncontrolled free- flow of international capital.
… not to mention US and NATO interventions that replaced corrupt, autocratic and dictatorial but relatively orderly regimes with unmitigated anarchy.
Looks like a typo:
They meant “longing” for democracy, not loathing.
Technocratic government that gets called “democratic”, which is the case with the EU, has, demonstrably in public opinion surveys created loathing for “democratic” government: what gets called that has actively been making lives worse for majorities.
Like in the US, the EU has democratic institutional forms, like in the US the actual use of those forms is to suppress rather than express popular will. So people are rejecting the form because the content it has delivered sucks.
I don’t think people are rejecting the form of government of democracy, they are rejecting the hollow charade that calls itself democracy, and the gatekeepers of opinion prefer to paint this longing for democratic representation as anti-democratic, because that’s what they do. Ask Orwell.
Yes, I agree, but I believe EB intended the language as recorded. It would have been useful for him to unpack the semantics, but he didn’t.
There have been a series of international opinion polls showing “democracy” is increasingly rejected because the systems the West covers with that fig leaf are screwing everyone but the Western elite.
Most peoples attention to politics does not go deep enough to track the often and increasingly antithetical relationship between political language and political things, but with this usage it’s pretty clear EB is aware of this polling and referring to it.
I have to agree with JSN and Skip. After all, Greece voted for an end to austerity, or at least a relaxation of it, and look where that got them. Similarly Spain with Podemos, will o’ the people clearly not happening. I draw attention to an example on this side of the pond: citizens voted for hope-and-change and they got same-on-steroids, voted for Bernie, got Hillary, so they voted for a Strongman type (well, turns out he’s not so strong, but still, seems like that was the reasoning. People all over the world are victims of neoliberalism and The Market as God, while the priesthood and their acolytes always seem very well fed. Didn’t some dead guy once remark, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” ? I think he was on to something.
In times of strife, humans find themselves looking for a strong leader. I believe that’s a human instinct.
I’be been spending the past week in England, and there is almost no understanding of MMT here. What passes for the left — from the British Labour Party to the Trotskyist and other left — seems committed to balanced budgets and austerity. Money and budget deficits seem to be based on a psychodrama, instead of looking at balance-sheet relations.
Nobody speaks of banks “running deficits” by borrowing to create credit –that is to say, creating endogenous credit and creating a liability on the other side of the balance sheet. No idea that governments can operate like banks, spending money by issuing bonds to the central bank in a self-financing process just like the private banking sector in practice.
There seems no idea that if governments guarantee bank deposits, they can tell banks what to lend for and what NOT to lend for. And there is an idea that even reckless loans should be written down, but the creditors (bank bondholders and large depositors in excess of deposit-guarantee levels) should be paid in full — a guarantee for junk mortgages and other fraudulent loans.
So the problem is how to spread the US awareness to Britain and other countries?
Dear Mr Hudson,
Many thanks for your comment, particularly as it applies to the present Labour Party, which as you can attest too, is well split between neoliberal, neoconservative elements and its majority Left element.
For your info, many members and supporters of the Labour Party have a reasonable grasp of both heterodox economics, of which MMT is a valuable component, and MMT itself, which has gained good traction over the past few years – just look at Stephanie Kelton as a classic example of this.
Regrettably, its true that actual Leftist representatives within the PLP need to actually understand what heterodox economics is, and the many components there are to it – and this applies as much to Mr McDonnell as the rest of the front bench team, and many on the backbenches. However, please don’t think for a moment that the membership itself is ignorant of these facts, or, some who advise the Labour leadership – social media is full of MMT’ers who support Labour and are active in pushing a Heterodox Economics message – I’m one of them I’m happy to say.
Yes, definitely. And it’s worth noting that, while MMT is an important part of the discussion on post-neoliberal capitalism and what that might look like, McDonnell is — wisely I think — not going to get too beholden to it. MMT, or the lack of it, isn’t the problem and adoption of it would not, then, be the solution.
How businesses are managed, who makes decisions on capital investment and on what basis those decisions are made are equally, if not more, important. This was drawn out in a surprisingly considered Economist article.
In short, McDonnell is more concerned with bringing about collectivism than potentially getting ensnared in overly-technocratic cul-du-sac of moving MMT out of the theoretical and into the practical realm. In some ways, MMT even represents a trap which the left could be lured into by the right — if it becomes a distraction and / or a source of divisions.
“MMT, or the lack of it, isn’t the problem and adoption of it would not, then, be the solution.”
I think that’s true. A neoliberal economic regime could exist with MMT; only the current ‘balanced budget’ excuse for neoliberalism’s ‘inevitability’ would need to be changed. Neoliberalism is, I think, more a willful misrepresentation of finance than a misunderstanding. I’m glad to see the current ‘balanced budget’ excuse get debunked by Prof. Hudson and MMT.
Indeed, and thank you Professor Hudson for sketching an easily comprehended elevator talk on the policies that a responsible govt should be doing with or without general understanding of MMT. Judging by how hard it is to get MMT across to folks here at NC, I have to agree that Bernie was right not to step into thtat briar patch, same as with reparations, where the mechanics of implementation would be very likely to divide people of colour at a time when solidarity is what we most need.
And thank you also, Professor Hudson, for saying that the money sovereign govts and the banks creatte money in the exact same way, but the banks with the burden of interest.
I disagree with you that Bernie Sanders was correct in refusing to accept that Government Spends first and taxes later. I nominated Warren Mosler for President saying that if I’m supposed to be the nobody explaining MMT to Sanders, well he sure doesn’t demonstrate any interest in hearing it from me. You know somebody reads Tweets when they out of the blue fasten on one. Usually it is a compliment. I can say for a fact he is ignoring what I have to say, and his statement to Stephanie Kelton that he had been and would forever be a deficit hawk, was, simply, depressing.
Democracy depends on a love of the truth. There are journalists that so love it and mean to share it for the power it gives us together in our fight for justice that they will be murdered before spreading lies. I suppose “Well Dressed Professional Liar is so much a definition of politicians it is just a DC habit.
MMT is at the same stage that Climate Science was in the 70s. It is just now that more than one and a very few are teaching it in the Universities. & people care about more that happens in the water & the dirt than they do in the Treasury and the Fed. Mathematics is so badly taught in our schools anything having something that depends on them is what they call a “turn off”.
(I know a fair number of academics, poets, long form & fiction writers. I have no personal friends who even want to understand economics and finance. It does kind of heart to be called a “crackpot”, to tell the truth.) I’m better off telling them I’m a poet. “No wonder you’re poor.” Then they know everything. “Tell me a poem.”
Warren went to Italy and with fine bearing and sincere reserve spoke to many Italians. He said that withdrawal from the EU needed to be a last resort. He said that Italy needed to issue it’s own currency. He said that if the EU wouldn’t accept that Italy had the right and duty to its own people to do so, then withdraw. (On Warren Mosler’s Twitter the Heading is “The Most Important Video You Might See this Year”, or “all like that” like they say in Maine. I saw as good or better a video of Mosler in some airport or convention center. There was a video of Warren Mosler in a Plaza with a rock star stage whereupon was a huge graph.)
In the end the Italian Finance Minister basically did nothing. What? “Everything is fine.”
My world is run by blockheads and hopheads.
All Bernie Sanders had to do, or even has to do, is say, “This is the truth: “Congress Votes the Bill & the Treasury provides the money.”
He could go on and just say, “If you don’t believe me look at the budget of the DOD and ask yourself who you know has a secure good paying job. They are the ones working for some CIA front (IN-Q-TEL) or doing R&D for a University with a big Gov. Contract. -Deficits are the money in your pocket.”
What good is Sanders if that promised hope that he finally was the champion and teller of the Truth if he is afraid of it?
Warren Mosler is down in the US Virgin Islands running for Governor.
I’m sorry, but your tense and syntax are… off. (to say the least) Are you a USian? Are you a person and not a bot?
There are bots now writing sports columns for newspapers since someone decided such columns could be reduced to an AI algorithm, factual details inserted into formula text as required. Standard format, insert specific nouns and pronouns. You get the idea. If it wouldn’t compromise my ‘nom de keyboard’ I’d even include an AI translation of a Skype vmail message. You would howl with laughter at the nonsense it made of a normal vmail-to-email text message. ha.
Clive,
Within the membership a dialogue actually exists and many actually have a grasp of the Heterodox School, which is why I was clear MMT forms but one branch. The problem, as I see it, is not the lack of interest in heterodox economics by the members, rather, and much like HM Treasury, a majority of PLP members having a lack of economics knowledge period, and those few who have some knowledge seem stick in the neo-classical mode, or, as we refer to it, neoliberalism – it does not help when economic advisors to the Shadow Chancellor keep resigning over the issue of Brexit. At least Ann Pettifor has stayed on side, but we need advisors like Steve Keen, Stephanie Kelton and other leading heterodox economists to push their case, whilst being mindful of shortcomings of their own strands. I’m just happy with a return to actual Keynesianism if I’m honest, whilst acknowledging its shortcomings, which are now well known.
Yes, I too would “settle” for a return to good, old-fashioned Keynesianism!
“…There seems no idea that if governments guarantee bank deposits, they can tell banks what to lend for
and what NOT to lend for…”
Thank you for this comment, Professor Hudson.
Currently there is a thread on moonofalabama which is discussing a parliamentary report in Germany.
I attempted to raise the point made in your sentence with a european who felt countries needed to combine
in order to have one big bank in order to ‘combat’ neoliberalism in the form of megacorporations.
My post was to the effect that they were part and parcel of the same malaise. Unfortunately my post was
blocked for some reason.
(Could have been my own computer glitch, but I did try several times.)
Alex,
Sarah Wagenknecht, of Iranian descent, whom it would be hard to accuse of racism, who is head of the Linke in the Bundestag has been vilified for exactly your view. One cannot have a socialist society with a robust safety net with open immigration that will last for long. Each boat person crossing the Mediterranean, most of whom end up in Germany, costs the taxpayers an estimated 500,000 Euros. Very few work at jobs that would pay taxes and it is anticipated that over their lifetimes very few will work. That kind of money would be better spent in their countries of origin. German citizens do not get that sort of largess. Of course, Trump complains that Germany does not spend enough on defense,,,,,but Germany spends a fortune on the consequences of bad US policy in the mid east…..a fair trade might be for the US to take the mass of migrants and Germany could pay another 5% of its budget for defense. Of course, the migrants would not want to go to the US because the social safety net is so poor.
Ah, so he was a mate of Louis Althusser.
I’ve long argued that the equation made between austerity and the rise of extreme-right parties is far too glib, and doesn’t even properly reflect the experience of the 1930s, where everyone goes to hunt for prior examples. It also confuses the traditional conservative Right, often linked to the Church, with populist right-wing parties. One or both of these can arise when one or more of the following cases are met. When you have a country with a strong and aggressive national identity and long history of oppression and resistance (Poland), when you have a small country nervous about losing its prized sense of difference (Denmark – think of the 1991 referendum), and most of all when you have PR (Germany) , or a system of small, fluid parties that rise and fall easily (France). By contrast, in a country like Britain, with a two-party stronghold, the extreme right never made much of a breakthrough.
But the real problem is one of analysis, and as long as pundits fling words like “xenophobia” around (“irrational fear and dislike of all outsiders”) the actual nature of the problem is obscured. It’s clear that traditional left-right distinctions are of little use now, not because the underlying ideas are irrelevant, but because the organisation of the political system no longer corresponds to them. Most countries now have two or more neoliberal, pro-Brussels, parties, with minor differences on social issues. They are middle-class elite parties, that do not even pretend to cater for the interests of ordinary people, still less to protect jobs and services. At a time when services like health and education are under stress everywhere (and there is the link with austerity) people who use these services are being told by their leaders (who don’t) that even more strain will be put on them as a result of migration, but that anyone who protests is an evil racialist. There was a time when parties of the Left would have been worried about the consequences of mass immigration for jobs and living standards. Now, they don’t care. So voters start to support parties outside the neoliberal-Brussels consensus, and some of those parties are labelled “extreme right”, and have, among other characteristics, a history of opposition to immigration. Are we supposed to be surprised?
Thanks David, my thoughts exactly, you just expressed it much better than me. I think the left is making a serious error in ascribing the rise in the far right to ‘austerity’ alone. Of course people go to more extremes when times are hard, but that simple explanation just doesn’t match the data. Every far right movement has its own unique characteristics in each country, embedded in its history and political system. As one example, its arguably the UK’s electoral system that led to the mainstream right assimilating and largely taming the far right – up until the Brexit revolution of course, which I believe is largely an English nationalist revolt, not the anti-austerity or anti-globalisation movement its sometimes seen as.
I’d also note that the far right has a very distinctly different flavour when its arising in a large country, especially those with an imperial past, compared to smaller countries, who are used to being the victims of imperialism. And there are distinct differences between the catholic south and the protestant north.
Personally I think the key factor is the abject failure of the left to provide an alternative. You can see this particularly in France where the FN has grown particularly fast in parts of France formerly associated with radical left politics.
Yes, the Left is continuing to fulfil its historical role of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. You’re absolutely right about the FN hoovering up votes in former leftish strongholds – quite a few ex-communists voted for the FN last time, and if you take off the left-right blinkers, that’s not so strange.
I think a half version of this got away from me as anonymous.
Thank you to PlutoniumKun, and the others who give a view of the world from an Irish standing.
My intuition is that neoliberalism is causing a loss of autonomy at too many levels and that this is driving people into seeking a strong-man solution. Neoliberalism is just a suitably plausible for concentrating power into an elite. It is their power over finance that gives NeoL the appearance of inevitability, not it’s own internal logic.
So converting all economic thinking to MMT would just cause them to adapt the plausibility of their theory; it would not change their drive to concentrate power. Both NeoL and financial power have both become highly abstract explanations of our realities.
I hate depending on intuition, but one has to start somewhere. It is possible that their abstraction is their weak link and that we need to develop organisational processes that are based on what is happening on the ground. We need models for autonomy that start locally with a focus on real material benefits now.
Again, it’s intuition but the desire for autonomy is a real driving force at all levels from the individual to the national. The PTB are confidant that it cannot be expressed at the national level, nor within established structures, but I can see many local structures that could be quite openly developed into autonomous entities that deliver real material benefits.
Excellent comment David. I was up on the coast over the weekend and even in little Ouistreham there are Sudanese refugees camped out everywhere, looking to somehow get on the ferry to Britain. There’s no way that this doesn’t disturb and distress people as much or more than austerity.
Also, calling the experience of the 1930s austerity alone erases the history of decades of mass immigration that preceded it, from the east.
“The question everybody is asking is how to balance all the dimensions of the problem. Rationally, looking at the number of displaced persons and the capacities of member states, there is nothing irresolvable. It’s not an invasion. It is necessary to create the proper means to receive them, teach them the language, help them get through…”
Absolutely wrong.
Consider just Yemen. In 1985 it’s population was just 10 million. It has a sky-high fertility rate, and with enough food its population will double about every 20 years.
1985: 10 million
2005: 20 million
2025: 40 million
2045: 80 million
2065: 160 million
2085: 320 million
2105: 640 million
And Yemen is not a large country with a lot of rain, like India or China, it’s small and has ALWAYS had very little water.
And Yemen is just one of many countries with this population dynamic…
The bottom line: the overpopulated third world has an infinite capacity to overwhelm anything that it comes into contact with. The numbers of refugees into europe are perhaps not so large today: but there is no end to them. You can’t just import a few millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions etc. and solve the problem. “Teaching them the language” is a cop-out, a way to hide from painful truths. Admitting what is really going on here is admittedly short-term painful: it would recognize that, indeed, refugees from the overpopulated third-world really are a threat to europe. But it would be a necessary first step to actually solving the problem for real, rather than just slapping bandaids on it, pretending all is well, while every year the pressures and the poverty continue to build…
And solving the problem for real would require the first world nations to stop turning all the third world nations into parking lots, stop propping up their puppet dictators, stop stealing their resources and stop dumping subsidized commodities on them whether they like it or not. But that’s going to cost some titans of industry some money so it will probably happen a couple days before never.
Pre WW1 Pogroms in Russia led to large numbers of unassimilated Jews escaping for their lives to Austria Hungary which provoked grass roots political antisemitism there. Especially in Vienna. Bad situation all the way around. The pogroms were a home grown effect of the crumbling regime of the Tsar, sometimes known as the “crowned imbecile”. In our time, the migrations to Europe are very much caused by the sublime calculations -wars- of European & American political leaders. How many of them will claim the title of “elected imbecile”? None of this “determined” history but it certainly didn’t help. Milton Friedman once remarked that welfare states and open border immigration are incompatible since immigration would eventually overwhelm the ability of states to provide services. Of course, Milton favoured open borders, both to destroy the welfare state and to create that wonderful reserve army of unemployed workers, at least that’s what he thought. I guess Milton was thinking only economics and profits and not politics or History, which we were all assured were both dead. There’s a spectre haunting Europe and the world and it’s called the Return of History.
The essential civic lesson from Bill Mitchell and Thomas Fazi. Nothing else will save the European Union.
Re-imagining the 21st Century National State
[In the 21st century] the NATIONAL STATE [is] a place where citizens can seek refuge ‘in democratic protection, popular rule, local autonomy, collective goods and egalitarian traditions’, as Wolfgang Streeck argues, rather than a culturally and ethnically homogenised society. This is also the necessary prerequisite for the construction of a new international(ist) world order, based on INTERDEPENDENT but INDEPENDENT SOVEREIGN STATES.
For the vast majority of people that don’t belong, and never will belong, to the globetrotting international elite, their sense of citizenship, collective identity and common good is INTRINSICALLY and INTIMATELY TIED TO NATIONHOOD. Ultimately, being a citizen means to DELIBERATE WITH OTHER CITIZENS IN A SHARED POLICAL COMMUNITY, AND HOLD DECISION MAKERS ACCOUNTABLE.
As Michael Ignatieff writes:
Most citizens don’t love the state, or identify with it, and thank goodness they look to their families, their neigbourhoods, and traditions for the belonging and loyalties that give life meaning. But they also know that they need a SOVEREIGN with power to COMPEL COMPETING SOURCES OF POWER IN SOCIETY to SERVE THE PUBLIC GOOD. People don’t want big government, but THEY DO WANT PROTECTION. They are PERFECTLY WILLING TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEMSELVES, BUT THEY WANT SOME POUBLIC AUTHORITY TO PROTECT THEM FROM THE SYSTEMIC RISKS IMPOSED ON THEM BY THE POWERFUL. They refuse to see why large corporations should privatise their gains, but socialise their losses. They want a COMPETENT SOVEREIGN, and what goes with this, THEY WANT TO FEEL THAT THEY ARE SOVEREIGN.
[The] conditio sine qua non for [a] NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY BASED ON POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY, DEMOCRATIC CONTROL OVER THE ECONOMY, FULL EMPLOYMENT, SOCIAL JUSTICE, REDISTRIBUTION FROM THE RICH TO THE POOR, INCLUSIVITY AND MORE… [is as follows]:
1. A correct understanding of the capacities of monetarily sovereign (or currency-issuing) governments, and more specifically, an understanding that such governments are NEVER REVENUE OR SOLVENCY CONSTRAINED, because they issue their own currency by LEGISLATIVE FIAT, and therefore can NEVER ‘RUN OUT OF MONEY’, OR BECOME INSOLVENT. These governments always have an UNLIMITED CAPACITY to spend in their own currencies; that is they CAN PURCHASE WHATEVER THEY LIKE, as long as there are goods and services for sale in the currency they issue. At the very least, they can purchase ALL IDLE LABOUR and put it back to productive use (for example through a Job Guarantee [programme]). This also means understanding that there is NO SUCH THING AS A BALANCE-OF-PAYMENTS GROWTH CONSTRAINT in a flexible exchange economy in the same way as it exists in a FIXED EXCHANGE RATE environment…A monetarily sovereign nation that floats its currency … can pursue rising living standards [for its citizens], even if this means an expansion of the current account deficit, and a depreciation of the currency… Through capital controls and other instrument, the aspirations og global finance can be brought into line with the DEMANDS OF A GOVERNMENT INTENT ON ADVANCING THE WELL-BEING OF ITS CITIZENS.
2. A DRASTIC EXPANSION OF THE STATE’S ROLE – and equally drastic downsizing of the private sector’s role – IN THE INVESTMENT, PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM… A broad renationalisation of key sectors of the economy – including the FINANCIAL SECTOR – and a new and updated notion of planning, aimed at placing the commanding heights of ECONOMIC POLICY UNDER DEMOCRATIC CONTROL [is necessary] for the SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION OF PRODUCTION AND SOCIETY that is desperately needed to deal with the ongoing – and worsening – environmental crisis.
Reclaiming the State
William Mitchell & Thomas Fazi
1. Delete everything that isn’t already capitalized.
2. Take all the capitalized ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME DAMMIT? words, remove ALL CAPS and turn them into bullet points. Add a couple of conjunctions (and, or, vs, =>)
3. Readable rant in the new Scott Adams style
Yup, or just learn how to use the bold or italic buttons.