The Greek Left

Attention has turned back to Greece. The results of the May 6^th elections have made it difficult for any party to form a coalition. The pro-EU/IMF bail-out parties lack a majority, as do the anti-austerity parties. After attempts by the first three parties in last Sunday’s poll to form a coalition, new elections look most likely. And as polls give the radical left party, Syriza, around 27% of the vote, making a Syriza-led coalition possible, many have begun to look in detail at the modalities of a Greek exit from the Eurozone. The Financial Times is running a series of articles this week on the topic of “If Greece goes…”.

In a thoughtful piece, Paul Mason recounts the emergence of Syriza from the fragmentation of the traditional Greek left. After a definitive split between Stalinists and Eurocommunists in the early 1990s, Syriza has emerged from the combination of the latter wing with a bundle of other groups and interests. Benefiting from the radicalisation of young people during the anti-globalisation heyday of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Syriza has managed to sustain its momentum. It mobilized around anti-government protests in Athens in 2008 but its main gain has come from the crisis itself. The mainstream centre-left party in Greece, PASOK, committed itself to the EU bail-out in a way that opened up space on the left for Syriza. Something in between PASOK and Syriza was formed two years ago: the Democratic Left, a small parliamentary group that had been supported by some PASOK members and which won 19 seats in the recent elections. However, as the split between pro and anti-bailout positions deepens, Syriza is picking up the most votes.

Given this history, Syriza’s position on the current crisis is a curious one. It seems that Syriza leader, Alexis Tsipras, is not advocating a Eurozone exit for Greece. Rather, he claims that what is being demanded of Greece by its creditors is unacceptable and should be replaced with far more lenient terms. His criticism is of the austerity measures and his position does not extend to a wider criticism of the Eurozone as such. As Mason notes, many Syriza supporters are in fact strongly attached to the idea of a “social Europe”; what they are unhappy about are the measures being implemented in Greece today. Tsipras’s strategy is in essence one of calling Merkel’s bluff: rather than letting Greece leave the Eurozone, he thinks the Eurozone’s main creditors would rather soften their austerity demands and cut Greece some slack.

As a political position, there is a lot to criticize. For a start, it seems curious to be vehemently against the EU/IMF bail-out agreements and yet to support Greece’s membership of the Eurozone. The bail-out agreements are after all consistent with the underlying philosophy of the Eurozone: balance budgets, maintain competiveness through internal devaluations when necessary, and achieve long-term harmonization of the Eurozone economies through structural reform. The bail-out for Greece is thus a concentrated and speeded up version of the Eurozone’s basic principles. Secondly, there is something spineless about Tsirpas’s position. It seems that if Syriza were to come to power and form a coalition, and if it were then to fail to renegotiate the bail-out terms with the EU and the IMF, it would eventually oversee an exit from the Eurozone. But this would appear – from Syriza’s point of view – as evidence of their hand being forced. They didn’t want to leave the Eurozone but their hand was forced by evil creditors. Equally, from the side of the remaining Eurozone member states, the story would be one of Greece being given all the chances of remaining within the single currency zone but choosing in the end to jump. The Greeks would say they were pushed; the Eurozone members would say they jumped. Greek exit would thus happen rather in the manner of the Czech-Slovak divorce of the early 1990s: accidentally, with no one claiming responsibility for what happened. Or as the FT puts it, “In a game of brinkmanship, neither Athens nor the rest of the Eurozone would want to take responsibility for a Greek exit from the single currency. Recriminations would fly”.

A more consistent position for Syriza would be for it to assume fully its criticism of austerity policies. This means arguing for a Greek exit from the Eurozone and proposing a clear growth plan after the exit. At the moment, Tsirpas is playing a dangerous game of assuming that Greek membership of the Eurozone is important enough to the country’s creditors to force a revision of the bail-out terms. There is little in that position beyond opportunism and Tspirpas may find himself presiding over the consequences of his own miscalculation.

End of austerity Europe ?

The victory of François Hollande in the second round of the French presidential election, combined with a very strong showing for the leftwing anti-EU bailout Syriza party in Greece, has led some to believe that austerity Europe is coming to an end. In France, some believe that Hollande’s victory has “strong echoes of 1981”: the year François Mitterrand was elected. The elections on the 6^th May were preceded by a series of reports suggesting that the austerity policies enshrined in the EU’s fiscal compact were increasingly seen as inadequate by those who had promoted them so vigorously only a year earlier. The head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, made a speech to the European Parliament where he explicitly called for a growth component to be added to the fiscal agreement – a proposal that was already at the heart of Hollande’s electoral programme.

Though the election results are significant, it would be wrong to suggest that this signals any definitive shifting of political tides. Firstly, what the French and Greek elections demonstrate more than anything is the strength of anti-incumbency feeling in Europe. Sarkozy was the 11^th leader in Europe to lose his place at the head of government since the beginning of the economic and financial crisis of 2008. Anti-incumbency, however, is ideologically indeterminate. In Spain, it brought a rightwing party to power. In the UK it threw up an unhappy liberal-conservative coalition. In Greece, the election results point to a collapse in the basic contours of Greek political life but in a way that has swelled support for both the radical left and the radical right.

The dynamic is thus one of disintegration, with diverse ideological effects depending on the national circumstances. Current elections in Europe express frustration with existing governments more than the dawning of a new political moment. This was most evident in France: anti-Sarkozy feeling was the motif of the campaign. It was the building bloc for Hollande, who in many respects embodies the adage about “being in the right place at the right time”. And it galvanized an otherwise fissiparious left. The far left party, Front de Gauche, led by the charismatic Jean-Luc Mélenchon, told its supporters all to vote against Sarkozy in the second round. Mélenchon pointedly avoided mentioning the Socialist Party candidate by name. Much of the forward momentum for Hollande is thus really the flipside of a movement against Sarkozy. This suggests that Hollande may struggle to maintain momentum once he takes over the presidency and it makes the upcoming legislative elections much less of a shoe-in for the Socialists than we had come to expect.

A second reason is that there is no real intellectual alternative to austerity being pushed by these new leaders and parties. What might otherwise have been a great opportunity for genuine political renewal has in fact contributed little by way of new ideas. The socialist campaign in France was focused on Sarkozy’s record as president. Its own economic programme was far weaker. The main thrust was to halt reform at the domestic level, bringing things back to the status quo ante, and to kickstart growth at the European level by using the credit worthiness of Germany to fund a new round of government borrowing. Hollande himself did not contest the need for cuts in government spending, he merely disagreed on the timetable according to which the cuts should be made. What was left unaddressed was perhaps the major question of our time. Since the collapse of the postwar Keynesian consensus in the 1970s, European societies have relied on either public sector borrowing or on borrowing by private individuals in order to maintain their basic social contract. The crisis since 2008 has fundamentally challenged this model and yet no real alternative to it has emerged. New governments in Europe, including the French Socialists, are relying on yet more borrowing to promote growth. This is not the end of austerity Europe so much as a continuation of the underlying trends that brought about the crisis in the first place.

Yesterday’s elections continue the theme of anti-incumbency sentiment in Europe. They do not signal a fundamental ideological shift as ideas do not emerge, readymade, out of frustration or dissatisfaction with existing governments. Judging the new arrivals by this standard, rather than just celebrating the exit of chastened leaders, there is little reason to celebrate.

Europe’s implementation problem

In recent days, we have seen an unravelling in the political foundations of the Eurozone’s fiscal compact. The most recent casualty was Mark Rutte’s government in the Netherlands. Precarious at the best of times, the government’s proposed budget cuts of up to 16 billion Euros failed to win over the Freedom Party leader, Geert Wilders. Wilders withdrew his support for the government, leaving it to rely on a spattering of small parties across the Dutch parliament. Rutte claims that the country must pass the new budget by the 30^th April, the deadline given to the Hague by the European Commission, the latter donning its hat as agent of budgetary approval for national governments. Many in the Netherlands disagree and any election is likely to be cast as a referendum on the Euro.

In France, the success of the far right National Front in the first round of the Presidential elections last Sunday has put France’s role in Europe under the spotlight. One of Marine Le Pen’s most publicized demands was that France leave the Euro. Turning their attention to National Front supporters, both second round candidates – Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande – have taken the anti-EU sentiment on board. Hollande promises to redesign the fiscal compact so that it focuses more on growth and job creation. Sarkozy has begun to speak about politically controlling the European Central Bank and has taken a tough line on Europe’s immigration laws.

In Ireland, as a referendum on the fiscal deal approaches, a large part of the population is undecided. Recent polls suggest that up to 40% of the population is unsure how it will vote on the 31^st May. And in Greece, the forthcoming elections may well challenge the political consensus built up behind the country’s deal with its creditors.

This unravelling of political support for Eurozone agreements is not just a product of a far right surge across Europe. Many of the criticisms of the austerity measures reflect divided opinion at the very top of public life. That more austerity only leads to lower growth, which in turn leads to higher debt levels and thus a need for even more austerity, is recognized by many as a downward spiral associated with extreme cost-cutting by governments. The IMF has for a long time warned against draconian cuts in government budgets that could stifle rather than encourage growth. In Greece, we have heard this argument coming from the opposition for some time and in the UK the Labour and Conservative Parties agreed in the run up to the 2010 election on the need for balanced budgets but disagreed about how quickly budgets should be brought back into balance. Elite opinion lacks consensus on the modalities of austerity policies and today’s disagreements reveal some of the problems with the deficit-reduction assumptions of the EU’s fiscal compact.

It is also clear that implementation problems are an inherent feature of European governance. Taking the case of the Eurozone, the fiscal compact reflects the way in which political decision-making has become separated from the ugly business of implementing unpopular policies. EU crisis management concentrates policymaking powers within the hands of executives. In the form of agreements between heads of state, brokered behind closed doors and in ways that are intended to mutually support each other in the difficult task of ruling in uncertain times, these policies are then passed down to the level of national ministries where the cuts and belt-tightening takes effect. And it is not coincidental that the focus at the EU level is on government spending. The far more difficult and longer term task of raising competitiveness is left up to national governments.

Such a radical separation between the decisions made and their implementation is evidence of the weak authority national governments command across Europe. They hope that by presenting at the domestic level something that has already been agreed by most member states, implementation will be made easier. The pan-European nature of the deal thus reflects the crisis in authority felt by national governments. They need this separation of policymaking from implementation in order to make implementation easier at the national level. We are seeing today that it does not always work.

Interview with Hillel Ticktin

Following up on last year’s Current Moment interviews, today we are publishing an interview with Hillel Ticktin, Emeritus Professor of Marxist Studies at the University of Glasgow. An internationally renowned Marxist scholar, Professor Ticktin co-founded in the early 1970s the journal Critique.  He has published numerous books and articles over the years. In 2010, Critique published a special issue on the current crisis to which Ticktin and others contributed.

Eurozone leaders are going on record saying that the worst of the sovereign debt crisis is over. Are they right to be so optimistic?

No. But then, the Eurozone country politicians are not going to tell the truth as to what they think, as it would spook the markets. Without growth, it will be impossible to solve the indebtedness problem, and Germany is insisting on harsh terms for giving loans, so harsh that there will be negative growth. This is clear in the case of Greece, where the newspapers are talking of the need for a future Third Bailout. But in reality it is highly likely that other countries will require further substantial loans. While Portugal will not be too much of a problem, a Spanish or Italian bailout cannot be financed on present Eurozone funds.

Yields have fallen on sovereign debt as the European Central Bank (ECB) has injected over 1 trillion Euros of liquidity into the European banking system in the form of longer-term refinancing operations. How has the crisis changed the ECB and has the ECB been the saviour of the situation?

The ECB has clearly put off the day when the crisis will have to be faced down. Banks have acquired sufficient liquidity to avoid problems and have invested money in their governmental bonds. The rational solution would have been the issuance of sufficient Eurobonds which would be used to fund the various countries involved. Since the Eurobonds would be backed by the successful Eurozone countries, investors will buy them. The ECB has produced a temporary measure but the amount of money involved is insufficient. Until the ECB can act as the Central Bank of an independent country in order to issue as much liquidity as it sees fit, and can help to issue Eurobonds, it is not fit for purpose.

The European approach has combined the backdoor provision of liquidity to its banking system with a frontdoor assault on government budget deficits and on national labour markets. What is your assessment of this approach overall?

Crazy. It is not really a European approach so much as a Conservative policy supported by the UK Conservative party, the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats in Germany, the Republican Party in the USA etc. It is not supported by the social democrats in France or Germany. Hollande has made that very clear. Of course in practice the social democrats do not live up to their promises, but they would ease the situation and might be pushed further by popular pressure. The question is why such a policy is being adopted at all, given that it cannot possibly work, and indeed is not working. It looks as if a section of the bourgeoisie has decided to take the opportunity to attack the working class so far that they would end up with a 19^th century approach to social relations. That, in turn, would ultimately destroy the social democratic parties and replace them with revolutionary left wing parties. Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.

A feature of the politics of the Eurozone crisis has been the replacement of democratically-elected governments with technocrats. This occurred in both Italy and Greece. Does this signal a trend of some kind, that economic imperatives are being placed above political ones for instance? And does it suggest that European integration today is really about preserving the Euro?

This is an inevitable feature of the present. Once the majority of the population began to turn to the left, as in Greece, the capitalist system itself began to be threatened. The use of the army is not possible at the present time. Nor is a far right popular movement based on the so-called ‘middle class’, So they have had the ingenuity to invent a new undemocratic category of a non-political government,  which makes a mockery of the Parliamentary system.  This is much like the idea that US judges of the Supreme Court are above politics when they pronounce on political measures, even though they have been specifically appointed for political reasons. It does not fool the working class but people may be grateful that it is not worse. Since it will not work, there will have to be even more undemocratic solutions. In the UK during the Great Depression, there was a National Government. In effect a coalition of all the large parties. The fact is that the Parliamentary system was already cracking, so this is another stake in its heart.

There is no question that ‘economics is being placed above politics’. The only rational way to run a union with a common currency is to accept that the richer areas will help fund the poorer areas, in order both to help them catch up but also to maintain cohesion, based on principles of human rights. European countries usually accept such obligations, unless they accept that parts of their country will break away. After all, Germany taxed the West Germans to help the absorption of East Germany. Today, however, the ruling parties in Germany, the Netherlands and Finland appear to reject such an approach. The reason ultimately lies in the fear of instability in those countries. So, economics is not really being placed above politics, depending on one’s definitions of politics and economics. Instead one politics is replacing another. The reason is discussed in the answer to the next question.

Is there an alternative to this approach of national budgetary austerity combined with a pan-European fund intended to offset any threats to Europe’s banking system.

As the current approach is being widely applied and is widely distrusted, and can only fail, there has to be another alternative if humanity is to survive, whether in or out of the Eurozone.

We are in a downturn of depression proportions. The last Great Depression only ended with the World War. War, on that scale, is however, excluded at the present time. The only way out of the present impasse is for a rationally planned economic reconstructive process, with governments playing a leading role. As the ruling class supports small government and the extension of private enterprise, it will oppose any such move. On the contrary, it is afraid that any attempt to go for reflation with government participation will lead to a political upheaval. In my view, they are right that the population will demand increased economic and political participation under conditions of full employment. That is in effect the immediate alternative, which is why the ruling class wants to take the opportunity, instead, to achieve a defeat of the working class of epochal proportions. Looked at this way, the policy of austerity is a defensive measure to preserve capitalism. Seen this way the policy is not crazy but rational, even if its application is mad.

The future is not as apocalyptic as it might seem from that last sentence, since the most likely result for the present is that the austerity policy will be pulled back, even if only by social democrats. Growth will be low, poverty increasing and discontent rising. Ultimately there will be a denouement, but when is not yet clear.

A European approach to the crisis

Largely because of electoral reasons, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has suggested recently that Europe is “turning the page” in its financial crisis. At a European summit at the beginning of March, he declared that it was the first summit since August 2011 not to have been a “crisis summit”. A few days ago, he declared the financial crisis over.

There is certainly a sense that the urgency and the gloom of 2011 has lifted in early 2012. The risk premium demanded by investors to hold the government bonds of countries like Italy and Spain has fallen considerably and stories of bank runs and Eurozone atrophy have fallen away. It is worth asking then what has been Europe’s approach to its crisis and whether we right to think it has been an adequate response.

Two features stand out. The first is the emphasis – policed by European institutions and formalized in the EU fiscal pact – on budgetary austerity and labour market reforms. Cutting government spending has become the prime goal of national governments across Europe, closely followed by reforms of national labour markets. Budgetary austerity runs across all the Eurozone: from the Netherlands where pressure to cut budgets looks like it will bring down Mark Rutte’s coalition government, to the UK, France and elsewhere, not least in Greece where it has been the basis for a fundamental assault on the country’s social fabric. National labour market reforms have been pushed mostly in the southern European countries: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal. There has been some change in Northern Europe: in France the retirement age was raised and the Sarkozy government has argued for shifting the burden of social security contributions from employers onto taxpayers in the form of a “social VAT”. Elsewhere, labour market reform is deep and painful and may yet lead to an unravelling of the alliance between national technocrats and EU-backed reform. But the sense in Italy, where Monti is fighting the unions, and in Spain where Rajoy faced down a general strike yesterday, is that changes will go through.

The second feature is the backdoor use of taxpayer Euros to prop up the continent’s financial system. Whilst the public assault on spending programs and on labour market regulation is an explicit policy of European governments, this latter feature is more hidden. It is nevertheless a key element in the European approach to resolving the Eurozone crisis. It has two elements to it. One is the commitment to European sovereigns in the form of the “bailout bazooka”. In an angry letter to the Financial Times last Wednesday, Klaus Regling, chief executive of the Luxembourg-based European Financial Stability Facility, took issue with the description of his Facility as a “toy gun”. He pointed out that in fact the sum of the bailout provisions provided by European governments is considerable: almost 1 trillion Euros in total has been disbursed since the start of the crisis. This includes the two bailout packages for Greece, the write-down of Greek debt (the so-called Greek private sector involvement operation), the Irish and Portuguese bail-outs, the European Central Bank’s secondary market purchases, 250 billion Euros of uncommitted EFSF resources and promise of 150 billion Euros to the IMF.

The second element is something Regling didn’t include in his list, namely the ECB’s longer-term refinancing operations (LTRO). These operations have been in two stages, first last December and again in February of this year. In essence, LTRO has involved the ECB in providing cheap three year loans to banks. This was intended as a way of injecting liquidity into the European banking system so as to avoid any bank collapsing altogether. Over time, the hope is that this liquidity will work its way into the real economy in the form of bank loans to business. The amount of liquidity provided by the ECB is huge: 1.019 trillion Euros in total.

Taken together, the European approach to the crisis has been to mix frontdoor assaults on government spending and labour laws with a backdoor taxpayer-funded bail-out of banks and of embattled sovereigns. There are two, deeply troubling elements contained within this approach. The first is the hypocrisy: a focus on austerity on the one hand and the provision of largesse on the other. The only way to understand this is as a massive wealth transfer away from taxpayers. It isn’t as simple as saying that cuts to social security provision are being used to fund the bail-out of banks since some the bail-out money has gone to pension funds who have faced serious losses on investments in southern European countries. But there is a wealth transfer at work that reflects a balance of forces within society and the transfer is not towards European labour.

The second is the doubt about whether throwing more money at the financial sector can really solve a more endemic problem. Debt-fuelled growth was a characteristic of the years leading up to the crisis: either government-debt in the case of southern European societies or private debt in places like the UK. The idea that issuing more debt can lift Europe out of the crisis seems ungrounded. More likely is what we are seeing: banks that have taken up the offer of the ECB’s loans have parked them back at the ECB rather than using them as a basis for a renewed round of lending to business. The economics of the European approach seem naïve, the politics are just plainly anti-labour.

Guest Post: Europe’s Soft Coup d’Etat Part 2

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two part analysis of the politics of the euro-crisis by James Heartfield. Part 1 found here.

In this current moment some of those who are standing up to the EU’s austerity packages have shouted about the attack on democracy. They think that the EU is attacking democracy so that it can push through its spending cuts. So it is. But much more so it is using the debt crisis to push through the abolition of national sovereignty. So often it has.

Two and a half years ago a very prescient sociology professor Ulrich Beck wrote ‘The crisis cries out to be transformed into a long overdue new founding of the EU’. Beck went on: ‘until now there has been no joint financial policy, no joint industrial policy, no joint social policy – which, through the sovereignty of the EU, could be pooled into an effective response to the crisis’. The only real barrier, thought Beck was ‘the national self-delusion of its intellectual elites’ who ‘bewail the faceless European bureaucracy’. (Guardian, 13 April 2009)

December’s Brussels summit, drawing its moral imperative from the sovereign debt crisis, ended with a commitment to create a much-greater coordination of economic and financial policy. Under the agreement national governments must submit balanced budgets, and face ‘automatic penalties’ if they do not. The thesis behind the agreement is that the southern European countries’ spending and indebtedness has undermined confidence in them and because of that in the Euro.

Shifting the blame onto Greece, Spain and Italy for the Euro crisis twists the truth. Throughout the buoyant years of the noughties the success of the European periphery was cited proof that the European Union was working. More, exporting countries, including Germany, were glad that easy credit boosted Greek and Spanish buying of their goods.

Apart from the economics, though, the important shift is towards ‘stronger economic union’. When the crisis began Greece’s troubles suggested to many that the European Union would ‘fall apart’.Professor Beck’s intuition that the crisis would drive the greater integration of economic policy proved to be as insightful as the fears that the whole thing would fall apart. Where he misleads us is in portraying this movement as a greater democratisation ofEurope. On the contrary, the trajectory is towards a much-diminished role for democratic oversight, and a much enhanced role for unelected officials dictating terms to elected governments. ‘Automatic penalties’ is European code for ‘not subject to political negotiation’.

The reason for the ‘automatic penalties’ is that as national elites European governments do not have the authority to see through tough measures. For many years now, governments have leaned on the European Union as an extra-national source of authority. Governments that are not willing to make the case for tighter budgets honestly in their own terms, have hid behind the claim that they must make adjustments to meet the external restraints imposed by Europe.  That is what Italian Minister Guido Cali meant when he said that ‘the European Union represented an alternative path for the solution of problems which we were not managing to handle through the normal channels of government and parliament’.

Not just Italy or Greece, but Britain and Germany sought again and again to ‘tie’ or ‘bind’ themselves into European Union rules that would limit the political temptations of excessive spending. Quite why sovereign states should choose to bind themselves and their successors in obligations that they cannot change or renegotiate is a conundrum for students of international relations. The answer to the puzzle is that these elites no longer derive the same authority that they used to from national electorates or constituent assemblies that once they did. Instead it is in the international summits, most notably the European summits that leaders feel secure, bound together in their mutual fear of the unruly electorates.

Fear of economic crisis is driving the integration of European policy, and it is not being consolidated as a democracy, but as a technocracy, where officials follow procedures, rather than make policies. Six years ago the voters of France and Holland voted down the centralisation of Europe under its then proposed constitution – which was abandoned soon after. Now, using fear of economic collapse, European elites have talked themselves into submitting to a more onerous set of impersonal and bureaucratic rules.

Guest Post: Europe’s Soft Coup d’Etat Part 1

Editor’s Note: Mainstream commentators for the Financial Times, like Wolfgang Munchau, are now giving titles to their op-eds like ‘Greece must default if it wants democracy.’ Meanwhile, ECB bankers argue that you have to scare democratic publics into sado-monetarist bailout packages. And finance ministers, like the Netherlands’ Jan Kees de Jager, want to radicalize Europe’s democratic deficit: “I am in favour of more control, more supervision … Money is the thing we can control Greece with.” The conflict between democracy and technocratic management is becoming increasingly clear. Today and tomorrow we run a two part analysis of these developments by James Heartfield, who argues that this tension is embedded in the logic and political structure of the European Union itself, not just the euro and monetary union. James Heartfield is a writer based in London. His most recent book is The Aborigines Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1837-1909 (Columbia University Press).  

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Europe’s Soft Coup d’Etat Part 1

Winter 2011/12. The Greek parliament is besieged from without by angry protestors. They riot burning down banks and government buildings. The Italian government, too, faces mass opposition – a general strike in protest at government €450 billion spending cuts. InIreland,Spainand many other European countries there are angry protests. But the Greek and Italian governments are not only under pressure from the public. They are answerable to other masters than the electorate.

Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos took office on 11 November 2011, though he stood in no election. Before becoming Prime Minister Papademos had been a senior official at the European Central Bank, and an advisor to the outgoing PM George Papandreou. Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti was appointed on 12 November 2011, having been made a life senator three days earlier by President Giorgio Napolitano. Before becoming Prime Minister Mario Monti had been an economics professor and a member of the European Commission. On the face of things, both Papademos and Monti draw their authority from their own parliaments – but everyone knows that is not so. Both of these unelected experts came to power in a ‘Soft Coup’; both deals were brokered by the European Union, in the middle of a harsh public debt crisis.

In the case of Greece, the European Union had been dealing with Prime Minister George Papandreou, leader of the largest, and best-polling political party in the last democratic elections, PASOK, twisting his arm to agree spending cuts. Talks were held between the Greek government, and the ‘Troika’ of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission. Having agreed one round of cuts after another, Papandreou baulked at just how unpopular these were, and in October said that he would let the people vote on more cuts in a referendum. The European Union was outraged at the idea that the voters should be asked.

‘The announcement has surprised the whole of Europe,’ said French President Nicolas Sarkozy. ‘Giving the people a way to express themselves is always legitimate, but the solidarity of all the euro-zone countries cannot be exercised unless everyone agrees to make the necessary efforts.’ In a parliamentary session in The Hague, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte called the threatened vote a ‘very unfortunate development’ and said ‘we have to do everything to prevent it.’ (Wall Street Journal Europe, 2 November, 2011) After crisis talks Papandreou agreed to cancel the public vote and to suspend normal party politics in favour of a government of ‘national unity’, and to stand down as Prime Minister in favour of Papademos. Robbed of a voice Greek people were more willing to protest and even to riot. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble wants the Greeks to cancel future elections and have a government without any politicians, only ‘experts’.

Around the same time another European leader – of the right in this case – was forced to stand down. Silvio Berlusconi had often been attacked by the European Commission, charged with corruption. But each time the question was put to the polls the wily Berlusconi won over voters. In November 2011, though, the debt crisis gave the Commission the lever it needed to prize Berlusconi out, and he resigned. European Council President Herman van Rompuy told Italians on 11 November 2011 that ‘the country needs reforms, not elections.’ Mario Monti was appointed Prime Minister and, in turn, appointed a ‘Professors’ Cabinet’, or ‘technocratic government’. Monti’s first reforms were to cut spending and to attack trade unions.

In a single week the elected governments of two of Europe’s democracies had been swept aside. At the very moment that Italian and Greek people needed to deal with the problems they faced, they were robbed of the chance. Before they could see their own political representatives argue out the best outcome on party lines, with the parliamentary contest mirroring the contest for votes. The party political system was a lever for ordinary people to push their goals right into the centre of government. But without it, public administration stopped being democratic, or even political. It was called ‘technocratic’ – government as technique, not as a negotiation; mechanical, not through dialogue. Instead of leaders there were experts. Instead of a contest ‘national unity’ was imposed (though many outside did not feel they were a part of it).

The events of November 2011 were called a ‘Soft Coup’, or a ‘coup without tanks’. But what Junta was taking over? Even the angriest protestors were not sure who to blame. If there were no tanks, where was the confrontation?

It would be hard to avoid the role that private financiers played appearing at every corner to warn against any backsliding on cuts. The ‘technocrats’ were not experts in juggling or medicine, but in finance. Mario Monti has been an advisor to Goldman Sachs, Coca Cola and the listing agency Moody’s as well as European Commissioner responsible for the Internal Market, Financial Services and Financial Integration, Customs, and Taxation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate Papademos taught economics at Columbia University and even served as senior economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 1980, before taking up positions at the National Bank of Greece and the ECB. Not surprisingly the anti-cuts protestors have been outraged to learn that Monti is a member of the secretive Bilderberg Group – all of which adds to the sense that government has been subverted by a secret coup led by high finance. Still, pointing the finger of blame at ‘capitalism’ or finance seems too vague. Down with capitalism, for sure, but does that really tell us any more about the forces arraigned against democracy?

Greek protestors have seen a German hand behind the changes, and they are not wrong. Chancellor Angela Merkel has called loudly for tighter rules on government spending, and for wayward governments to be reined in. In Athensthe protestors have even burned the German flag (and alongside it the Swastika flag to heap on the insults) while the newspaper Demokratia reports the new austerity agreement with a parody of the sign over the gates at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp ‘Memorandum macht frei’. Greeks talk more often of the wartime occupation when the German Wehrmacht starved the country. Pointing the finger at Germanyseems to make sense, except that Angel Merkel is not alone in her demands for Greek probity. Nicolas Sarkozy (whose country was also occupied by Germanyin the Second World War) is so close to Merkel that the press have coined a collective noun Merkozy. Just before he was bundled out of office, Silvio Berlusconi, too was lecturing the Greeks on the need to stick to their promises. Greek protestors wish that their enemy was justGermany’s leaders.

The Coup d’État against democracy inGreeceandItalydoes have a shape, however soft it looks. Its shape is the European Union. The pressure brought to bear on both countries came through the European Union. The ‘Troika’ of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund brought pressure to bear on the Greek government to change its policies and make-up. Though an ad hoc body, the Troika is reported to be renting an office inAthensto keep an eye on spending there.

The Troika does not just oversee Greek spending. There is a Troika looking at Portugal’s budget, too. Jürgen Kröger, Head of EC mission, Rasmus Rüffer for the ECB and

Poul Thomsen of the IMF visited in May 2011, returning in February 2012 to spend two weeks looking at the budget there before deciding whether to release the latest batch ofPortugal’s €78 billion rescue loan.

In January 2012 all but two of the 27 heads of state at the European Summit agreed to German Chancellor Angel Merkel’s new fiskalpakt with binding limits on budget deficits and quasi-automatic sanctions on countries that breach deficit and debt limits enforced by the European Court of Justice. ‘The debt brakes will be binding and valid forever,’ said Merkel: ‘Never will you be able to change them through a parliamentary majority.’ (Guardian, 31 January 2012). From the European Union viewpoint to put questions of government beyond democratic control is a great success. Binding limits, with automatic sanctions, policed by unelected officials is what they want. ‘Parliamentary majorities’ overriding the expert officials is what is to be avoided.

Nor is it always the case that the enemy is the left. In the same month that the European Council was cooking up the fiscal compact, the European Commission wrote three separate letters of warning to Hungarian President Orban charging him with bringing in ‘undemocratic’ laws. By ‘undemocratic’ they meant that the new constitution put the Central Bank under the control of the democratically elected government, instead of leaving it in the hands of the expert technocrats, while threatening, too, that judges and information commissioners would be subject to the rule of parliament. Step through the looking glass into the EU-world where the rule of the people is dictatorial, but the rule of unelected experts is democracy.

Ex-sixties radical Daniel Cohn-Bendit stood up in the European Parliament to demand that Orban’s constitution be investigated for breaching the EU’s Lisbon Treaty. The man once known as Danny the Red ranted on that the Hungarian leader was striving to beEurope’s equivalent of Hugo Chávez or Fidel Castro (Guardian, 18 January 2012).

Cohn-Bendit as a student radical wrote

“The emergence of bureaucratic tendencies on a world scale, the continuous concentration of capital, and the increasing intervention of the State in economic and social matters, have produced a new managerial class whose fate is no longer bound up with that of the private ownership of the means of production.” (Obsolete Communism, the Left Wing Alternative, London, Penguin, 1969, p 249)

It was far-sighted indeed to spot the very trend towards bureaucratic-managerial rule for which Cohn-Bendit himself would become a spokesman. The only thing he did not foresee was that the bureaucracy that was emerging would be transnational, not just national.

“In a democracy you have to push people to do things by scaring them”

This past Tuesday, at a roundtable on ‘the future of the euro’ at Harvard University, we heard Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi utter these exact words. His Royal Smaghi-ness was a member of the ECB executive board until last November, and was advising his audience on more than his personal political views. He was giving us a glimpse deep into the technocratic vision that predominates in Europe at the moment, and the particular techniques in play to manage the situation. What stood out in the banker’s comments was, first, an extraordinary ideological commitment to the euro and, second, a somewhat delusional vision of social control.

The context for the banker’s comments was a discussion of the austerity measures being rammed down the throats of the Greek public. The measures are but one of the preconditions for a bailout package that will include other disciplinary measures, like international monitors of Greek spending decisions. The ‘people to be scared’ that B-S had in mind were, most immediately, the Greeks. They were to be scared into believing that there was one way and only one way to resolve their debt crisis, and that if everyone did not get in line, the withdrawal of European help would lead to even worse consequences. But it became clear that Bini-Smaghi’s comments applied to more or less the whole European public, perhaps minus the ‘sensible’ Germans. At another choice moment, LBS said “The Italian situation is different from the Greek one, but don’t tell the Italians. That is only something you say outside Italy. Inside, you say the opposite.” In other words, you want them to be scared, even if you have to lie to them.

Why? Because otherwise two things will happen. For one, the majority of Italians or Greeks might get the crazy idea that they don’t have to screw themselves in order to save themselves. There might be alternatives to massive austerity and a bailout of the banks. For another, the greater the fear the greater the limits on political outrage, or at least, the more the local ruling political parties will feel pressure not to attend to local outrage.

Bini-Smaghi’s comments speaks volumes both about a certain technocratic vision or political method and its limits. The method is based on the thought that central bankers and related technocrats possess the technical expertise and know-how to know what the rational response is to an economic crisis. This knowledge is supposedly value-free, and a matter of pure economics. However, most people not only lack this knowledge, they take to the streets in a mistaken, irrational pursuit of their own interests. BS dismissively called this ‘politics.’

So far, so familiar. But the most striking thing about Lorenzo’s BS is that the technocratic vision of control is far more expansive. It is not an attempt simply to apply expert economic knowledge to economic policy. It is a more radical ideological project. The delusion is that the political domain can be subject to the kind of fine-tuned control ‘at the margins.’ It is not just that technocrats ought to run national governments, or at least monitor their spending, but that national publics themselves can be pushed, pulled and cajoled with precision. Bini-Smaghi was talking about incremental doses of austerity until public outrage boiled over, and then stepping off the gas. And if outrage becomes too threatening to the background project, then more and more fear of a withdrawal of bailout funds to scare political leaders into imposing budgets and repressing unrest. One almost wonders if there isn’t some model floating around technocratic circles in which the relevant variables are ‘fear’ ‘austerity’ ‘bailout money’ and ‘outrage.’ The policy strategy being a kind of optimization function in which the aim is to get as close to ‘outrage’ without it boiling over into revolution.

Of course the dream of total social control is nothing new. It rattles around in the mental recesses of any expert claiming a monopoly on the legitimate possession of pure knowledge. But it is in play here in a substantial way. The coyness of the troika – demanding one package of reforms one day, another the next, promising money then imposing more terms, softening stances when protests get too dicey but putting the screws to national leaders, and above all playing a long game of amorphous indecision so as to maximize the space for deception – is all part of this managerial political approach.

Aims are not the same as success. The aim of total social control, especially when it becomes ideological, and especially when it sees politics exclusively as a domain of irrational, emotional behavior that has to be manipulated by various techniques, is its own foolishness. For one, it leaves actors without the ability to acquire actual political knowledge – there appears to be no knowledge to acquire, beyond that of the techniques of manipulating irrational publics. For another, the social world simply is not amenable to that kind of technical, fine-tuned control. Tweaking with the margins of outrage in relation to doses of austerity and fear is not just a creepy and outrageous political project, it is a fool’s game.

Interview with Wolfgang Streeck

Continuing our series of interviews, today we publish an interview with Wolfgang Streeck. A guest contributor to The Current Moment, Professor Streeck is Director of the Max Planck Institue for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), based in Cologne, Germany. The author of many books and articles on comparative political economy, he recently published ‘The Crises of Democratic Capitalism‘ in the New Left Review.

 

What are the stories right now that you think people either aren’t paying enough attention to, or about which we have the wrong view?

Generally the historical and political-economic continuities between the global inflation crisis of the 1970s, the widespread public debt crisis of the 1980s, the internationally agreed consolidation and financial deregulation policies of the 1990s, and the worldwide private debt crisis of the 2000s, with its commutation into another public debt crisis.

Turning to the Eurozone debt problem, a dominant view is that Greeks and Italians are corrupt, inefficient and lazy, and that is why they find themselves in this mess. What is your view of what is going on?

The Mediterranean version of the debt problem reflects a specific relationship between modern states and societies on the periphery of Europe that have become stuck, partly or wholly, in pre-modern social structures and lifeways. In Italy and Spain in particular, this relationship is furthermore complicated by deep divisions between advanced regions such as Lombardy and Catalonia, and backward regions like the Mezzogiorno and the Spanish South. In quasi-feudal areas, or in an entire country such as Greece, huge concentrations of old wealth coexist with widespread rural poverty and stagnation. Vacationers from the North romanticize this as an easy-going way of life and tend to be envious about it. They also notice that there is corruption, and clearly a lot more than, say, in Sweden or Finland. What they don’t see is that there is also a lot of oppression by local elites with more or less close connections to the legal and illegal markets offered by modern capitalism, not to mention the political parties of the modern state. To be able to catch up with capitalist modernity, these societies would in the past have needed social revolutions to expropriate the old money and clear the way for the new money of middle-class industrial entrepreneurs. But this happened in Italy only in parts of the country, and in the post-fascist democracies of Portugal, Spain and Greece in the 1970s a revolutionary response to backwardness was prevented not least by the containment policies of Northern Europe and the United States. One of the tools of that policy was admission of Greece, Portugal and Spain, first into the European Union, and then into Monetary Union.

The standard recipe for the recovery from the Eurozone crisis is austerity and structural reforms in the peripheries, plus some recapitalization of banks. Do you think this is the right way to go?

I really don’t know what the solution is. Perhaps austerity is politically sustainable for the two decades that are claimed to be required for fiscal “consolidation” in debtor countries, perhaps not. In any case it will have to be accompanied by some form of, very likely hidden, transfer payments from the North, which also may or may not be politically sustainable, in this case with Northern electorates. “Structural reforms”, in the language of ruling economists, are not much more than union-breaking and the creation of tax-free economic development zones. But nobody tells us what the sectors are where growth is to take place, in countries squeezed between high-technology competition like Germany and low-wage competition like Thailand. Structural development policies that go beyond supply-siderism are not only expensive but are likely not to work when imposed from above or from the outside on a traditional social structure; see Southern Italy where fifty years of Cassa di Mezzogiorno were by and large an unqualified disaster. There is no reason to believe that Brussels or Berlin will in a decade be more successful in Greece than Rome was in Sicily for half a century.

What do you think would address the trade and debt imbalances between Northern and Southern Europe? Do you think it can be done within the European monetary union or does it require a fundamental change or dismantling of that union?

The problem is: there will be no such dismantling. The middle classes in the Mediterranean consider EMU as the lesser evil compared to a return to national currencies, because their savings are denominated in Euros and full membership in the European Union harbors vague promises of individual mobility and collective support, however meager. In the North, the common currency ensures export industries against competitive devaluation and guarantees a favorable external exchange rate. This is why German industry, including industrial trade unions, are strongly in favor of “European solidarity,” meaning that Mediterranean countries must by all means be prevented from getting out of the monetary trap in which they have moved themselves when joining the common currency. Some sort of competitiveness tax to be paid out of public budgets or in the form of some sort of “Eurobonds” is accepted as the price for unlimited access to Southern markets, especially if it is paid by taxpayers at large and not by industry itself. Here I see an unholy alliance between Southern middle classes and state elites on the one hand, and Northern export industries on the other. It will, however, be an unhappy alliance as Southern countries will inevitably be disappointed by the benefits they will receive from the North, while Northern electorates will resent such benefits regardless how small they may be, at a time when they themselves have to accept spending cuts of all sorts. Like in Italy, the South will hate the North and vice versa. Northern clichés of lazy Southerners will be complemented by Southern clichés of Northern, in particular German, imperialism. Europe will grow together at the price of rising nationalist resentment.

The hegemony of the demand for austerity is striking. It is offered as the solution to the Eurozone crisis, as well as to the American situation – the US Congress even created a supercommittee to find savings. It seems odd to have such agreement around austerity in the midst of a potential double dip recession. Why is there such agreement on this point and what do you think of the demand for austerity?

There seems to be no way to close the gap between public expenditures and public revenue by higher taxes, in no country. This being so, what remains to reassure creditors are spending cuts. Financial liberalization has made it easy for owners of significant wealth to move abroad; right now the London real estate market, in places like Chelsea, Kensington, Hampstead and Belgravia, is booming from rich Greek families putting their money in new homes. Tax increases are resented even by the middle classes who would more than the rich benefit from a functioning welfare state; one reason seems to be that for a long time higher public revenues will have to pay for goods already consumed. Those who would have to pay increased taxes because they cannot move their money or themselves out of their country may even prefer continuing public deficits to fiscal consolidation as long as austerity is firmly institutionalized and creditors can as a result be sure to get their money back. This is because, rather than having their savings confiscated, they could keep them and lend them to the state, drawing interest on them and eventually passing them on to their children. As I said, this presupposes a “credible commitment” of public policy to giving priority to servicing the public debt over keeping the political promises inherent in social citizenship. In practice this means a suspension of democracy to the extent that it is linked to social citizenship.

How optimistic/pessimistic are you about the ability of national democratic procedures to provide solutions to the current economic crises in Europe and in the US? What do you think of the recent proliferation of technocratic governments in Greece and Italy? Does the current crisis expose some basic tensions between capitalism and democracy? If so, how exactly?

I have written about these tensions, caused by ultimately incompatible demands for “market justice” and “social justice” having to be balanced against each other. Democracy is more than democratic procedures; it also expresses itself through social movements and general strikes. Even so, in present circumstances it lacks power and the capacity for collective action on the relevant battlefield, which has become the international monetary system. Today, states and their governments are facing two sovereigns at the same time: their peoples, organized nationally, and “the markets,” organized on a global scale. The latter clearly prevail over the former: see the replacement “from above” of the elected political leaders of Greece and Italy by representatives of the “economic reason” vested in the international money industry, shifting the political economy from social to market justice as the latter is deprived of its democratic empowerment.

What has perhaps not been said clearly enough is how the postwar settlement between the two kinds of justice came to be revised after the end of the “Golden Age.” When postwar growth ended in the late 1960s, the functional needs of capital accumulation began gradually to push aside the social needs whose institutionalized recognition had been the condition for workers being prepared to live with capitalism. More and more “capital controls,” in a broad sense, were removed while one promise after the other that had been made to buy labor in after 1945 was withdrawn. Such promises included a steady increase in living standards, progressive de-commodification of labor through an expanding welfare state, politically guaranteed full employment, “industrial democracy,” an encompassing regime of collective bargaining and trade union rights, a broad public sector providing citizens with social services as well as with stable employment, equal access to education and social advancement, a moderate and certainly not growing level of social and economic inequality, and the like. All of these disappeared or were “reformed,” often beyond recognition. The almost four decades since the end of postwar prosperity were a long series of defeats for labor, and of successful attempts on the part of capital gradually to re-establish its hegemony, with market justice pushing social justice to the sidelines of the political economy. It was not the logic of democratic claim-making or social citizenship or even democratic political opportunism that undercut the postwar social compact, but the historical reassertion of the logic of capital accumulation that had for a limited period been contained and overruled by democratic politics – just as the fiscal crisis of today was not caused by ordinary people demanding more than they were entitled to, but by the winners of the market first refusing to pay for their social license to enrich themselves, and later blackmailing governments to save them from the fallout of their own recklessness.

Right now it is democracy itself that is about to be rescinded – at the national level, which is where it came to be located under democratic capitalism, without replacement at the supranational level, where it should today move but nobody knows how. Increasingly democracy is turning into an empty shell, a formal ritual, not just in the United States but also in Europe. In the camp of the Indignados at the Puerta del Sol in July 2011, I saw a hand-painted sign saying: Como se puede hablar de democracia si no se puede cambiar el sistema económico en las urnas? (How can one speak of democracy if one cannot change the economic system at the ballot box?)

What are your views of the nascent protests (Occupy Wall Street, Indignados) developing in response to the introduction of austerity packages in Europe and the US? Are these movements a continuation of or a break with the anti-globalization movements of the past? Are they likely to fundamentally change public perceptions and government policy or will they have only a small lasting impact?

I know too little about such movements. I am looking for signs of an impending cultural break with possessive individualism, competitive greed, hedonistic consumerism. This is a tall order indeed, but I feel nothing less would do. Beyond “protest” or calls for “reform,” what would be interesting to see are actual changes in people’s ways of life, some kind of separatism and recapturing of local autonomy, with people cutting themselves loose from the capitalist mainstream and becoming less dependent on it, materially and mentally: a way of life where time matters more than money, ideal goods more than material ones, and social bonds more than individual property. That may not be available without a measure of neo-romanticism or even insurrectionism. What one might hope for is a sort of cultural change that, unlike 1968 and its aftermath, would not lend itself to being transformed into a “new spirit of capitalism,” as described by Chiapello and Boltanski. At the intellectual level, I find the growing literature on low-growth, no-growth and de-growth capitalism (or perhaps post-capitalism?) intriguing and I wish one could find good reasons for believing that working for this politically would not necessarily be futile.

What, finally, do you think the appropriate political response is to both these crises and their aftermath?

What is “appropriate,” and in what sense? What I see coming in Europe seems far from “appropriate” to me but it will probably come anyway. Clearly, the United States and the UK will continue to depend economically on an overblown international financial system that happens to reside mainly on their territories, and that they regulate in their national interest rather than the interest of all. The question is: is there anything on the horizon that could break the trend of the past three decades toward an ever more unstable, unpredictable, uncontrollable – in other words, ever more capitalist – global capitalism, with an ever more unequal distribution in the historically rich countries of wealth and risks and opportunities and life chances? I see nothing.

Specterless Europe: What is the problem to which Europe seeks a solution?

A crisis of confidence says ECB President Mario Draghi, and just about everyone else. Confidence is lacking in the ability of eurozone countries, especially in the south, to pay back their debts. According to Draghi, as quoted in the Financial Times, “the most important element to start restoring credibility” and confidence is…you guessed it, austerity. The outlines of the new “fiscal compact” includes, first and foremost, agreement on “strong rules on public finances,” and stronger European control and enforcement of national budgets. The nature of this enforcement, and the punishments it will entail, are still in formation. The differences between Merkel and Sarkozy over the amount of budgetary control to allow national governments are familiar, though increasingly appear as the narcissism of petty differences.

After all, the underlying agreement about how to ‘restore credibility’ is striking – more Europe, more technocratic control, more budgetary austerity. There is no serious threat of exit from any national leadership, no major political or social movement directly addressing itself to the constraints of the eurozone or the imposition of austerity. The Spanish indignados have faded, Greek protesters pushed aside, with both countries electing conservative or unity governments to push through cuts. The closest thing to a direct mass challenge has appeared outside the eurozone, in the form of the one-day national strike against pension reductions by public workers in the UK.

But in what way is greater technocratic enforcement, at the European level, of budgetary limits a means to ‘restoring credibility’? After all, balanced budgets here are not ways of increasing productivity and restoring growth. The underlying structural problems in the economy not only remain but will be made worse in the short run. The eurozone is already in zero growth. Greece, as it prepares another round of cuts, revised growth downwards. Italy was already running a balanced budget before the sovereign debt worries emerged. But given 5% real interest rates, it would now have to run a 5% budget surplus – a surplus increasingly difficult to maintain under contractionary fiscal policies. Contraction slows growth, creating new need for more cuts to please creditors. Overall, then, the two major obstacles to economic growth, and thus ability to repay debts, are being reinforced: the monetary union, and fiscal constraint. From whence comes the ‘restored credibility,’ the new confidence?

What we are seeing is not what one might call ‘economic’ confidence, based on restoring economic fundamentals, but ‘political’ confidence. Measures, implemented by ostensibly neutral technocrats, are aimed at creating a new supranational political technology of social control, wherein investors in debt are given greater confidence that their claims will be given priority in any struggle over the stagnant or shrinking pie. The flash in the pan, halcyon days of the bubble, when a rising tied lifted all boats are gone. This is a struggle over a stagnant surplus. The new confidence is in who will control political apparatuses, both at the state and European level, and creditors have clearly won this round. They have barely faced a challenge in spectreless Europe.