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 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.

The crisis hits emerging markets

We are used to hearing that global growth is being driven by emerging markets. In the original Goldman Sachs study that coined the term “the BRICs”, it was estimated that by 2020 the BRICs would account for 49% of global GNP. In 2010, the figure was already 36%. Increasingly responsible for propping up the global economy, many believe that the future lies in emerging economies. When European leaders recently courted China as a possible buyer of troubled government bonds, the idea of emerging economies bailing out their erstwhile masters seemed complete.

The picture is in fact more nuanced for many different reasons. In an excellent recent study, Zaki Laïdi notes that the political demands of the BRICs are ambivalent: they defend national sovereignty in ways that prevents them from developing a shared political project of their own. In economic terms, the notion of a fundamental shift from the North America and Western Europe towards Brazil, China and India also needs to be nuanced.

The dependence of these emerging markets on the state of the economies in North America and in Western Europe is striking. In 2009 the world economy as a whole went through only a minor downturn, largely because of the offsetting growth in emerging markets. In 2010 and 2011, the picture has been rather different. Looking at growth rates across OECD and non-OECD countries, what is striking is how closely matched they are. The latter group consistently post higher growth rates but these rates rise and fall in line with growth in OECD countries.

This correlation in growth trends doesn’t mean the rich world is driving growth in emerging markets. But there are some powerful ways in which the problems in OECD economies have begun to feed through into emerging markets. Two channels in particular stand out. One is a fall in consumption in the US and Western Europe, resulting in a decline in demand for primary and secondary products exported out of emerging economies. On December 1^st, it was reported that China’s manufacturing sector contracted for the first time in almost three years. As the chart below shows, after a sharp downturn then upwards spike in the course of 2008, the rate of expansion of factory output in China has been declining steadily.

The second channel is via the withdrawal of foreign capital because of the pressure on Europe’s financial system. As banks reduce their exposures, those emerging economies dependent upon foreign bank lending are in difficulties. This exit of foreign capital and a declining demand for national currencies such as the Brazilian real or the Turkish lira is having inflationary consequences: as the currencies depreciate, the cost of imports rise, pushing up the general price level. This bites into the competitiveness of these economies as wage demands respond to higher living costs (NB. this is one reason Germany wants to avoid seeing the ECB stoke inflation in the Eurozone – it would undermine its ability to contain wage demands and thus challenge its own competitiveness model). According to the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements, emerging markets owe 3.4 trillion US dollars to European banks; 1.3 trillion US dollars of that is owed by Eastern European countries. According to The Economist, as European banks deleverage downward pressure will be placed on many emerging markets. This is particularly serious for those countries – like Turkey – who run large current account deficits. They are dependent upon foreign capital to manage these deficits.

What the figures imply for the role of the emerging markets in the global economy is far from clear. But the exposure of these economies to the events in North America and Western Europe is obvious. To declare the irrelevance of these two regions in the face of the rise of China or of India is to miss the extent to which growth in emerging markets is dependent upon OECD economies.

Interview with Peter Hall

Continuing the series of The Current Moment interviews, today we are publishing an interview with Peter Hall, Krupp Foundation professor of European studies at Harvard University. Peter Hall has published widely in the field of European political economy and comparative politics. His published books can be viewed here. One of his recent papers explores the political origins of the current economic crisis.

 

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?

On this side of the Atlantic, we are mesmerized by the fiscal dimensions of the global economic crisis and not nearly attentive enough to what will be required to ensure the U.S. remains competitive and capable of robust economic growth over the longer term.  Above all, that will require large investments in human capital and public infrastructure, since these are the resources on which all kinds of businesses depend for success.  Despite the efforts of some analysts, such as Michael Spence, and of President Obama himself to argue that, by focusing on these issues, we can address the immediate problem of unemployment and long-term growth together, these issues have not yet become central to public debate.  I wish Americans could see how rapidly China is moving on these fronts and how fruitful such strategies have been in parts of Europe, such as Finland.  We are so obsessed with the short-term, on both economic and electoral fronts, that we are moving far too slowly to lay the basis for renewed growth over the long term.

In Europe, discussion of the Euro crisis is dominated by many myths.  But the one yet to be questioned at all seriously is the myth that deregulating markets in labor and goods so as to intensify competition in them will regenerate growth in the southern European economies.  Such moves are typically described as ‘structural reform’ – a term that has become the mantra of the EU and IMF.  In the long run, structural reform may make some economies more competitive, but to pretend that it will revive economic growth in the short to medium term is an illusion.  Yet this illusion is at the center of most of the plans concocted to revive the southern European economies and resolve the Euro crisis.

For obvious reasons, this is a convenient myth, but it is an empty slogan, all the more pernicious because it diverts attention from the role that government has to play in the revival of economic growth.

Let’s turn to the Eurozone debt problem. The 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?

For the most part, this is a canard, encouraged far too quickly by many politicians in northern Europe who reacted to the sovereign debt crisis as if it were an issue of morality rather than a crisis with economic and political foundations that threaten the viability not only of the Euro but of the EU.  Those politicians now realize the full dimensions of the crisis, but their initial reactions has made the task of persuading their electorates to accept measures that might genuinely cope with it much more difficult.

The difficulties from which Greece and Italy are suffering have something to do with problems of political, as well as economic, development.  Both countries would be better off with public institutions less prone to corruption.  But to suggest that that their people are not working hard enough or retiring too early is to misrepresent the problem altogether.  Comparative data suggest that the de facto retirement age is not very different in most of southern Europe than in northern Europe and that the southern European countries have taken just as many steps as those in the north to make their markets more competitive over the past ten years.

The roots of the Euro crisis lie, at a much more basic level, in asymmetries in the organization of the political economies in the north and south of Europe.  In general, as David Soskice and I observed in Varieties of Capitalism (2001), the organization of the political economies of northern Europe gives their firms capacities for wage coordination, skill formation and continuous innovation that suit them well to operate strategies of export-led growth, and EMU provided them with guaranteed markets in the rest of Europe.  By contrast, history has left the southern political economies with fissiparous trade unions and limited capacities for concerted skill formation or continuous innovation.  In the past, they coped with that by operating growth strategies led by domestic demand and then devaluing their currencies to offset the inflationary effects of such strategies on their external competitiveness.  In EMU, they were unable to do that.  Instead, not unreasonably, they took advantage of the cheap credit flowing from northern Europe to promote economic growth.  But, unable to offset the inflationary effects through devaluation, they lost competitive advantage to the north.  The result can be seen in the gross imbalance of payments between the two parts of the Eurozone.

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?

To appreciate the Euro crisis, we have to realize that there are two sides to it.  On the one side, there is the longer term problem of how to devise a structural adjustment path that will restore prosperity to both the south and the north.  On the other side, this is a crisis of confidence, notably in the markets for sovereign debt but spreading over time to the European financial system as a whole.  The European Union has remarkable capacities for muddling through, and, given enough time, I believe it can resolve this long-term problem adequately if not perfectly.  But it is never going to get to the long term if it does not effectively address the immediate crisis of confidence and, as everyone now acknowledges, its efforts to do that over the past year have consistently offered too little, too late.

The immediate crisis is what worries me.  With respect it, there are two issues.  Is there a way for the members of the Eurozone to restore confidence in the markets?  And, if that can be identified, will the member states and the ECB be willing to take the requisite measures.  At this point, I think, as do many others, that the only way to restore confidence in the bond markets is for the ECB to guarantee the sovereign debt of its member states against default, except perhaps for Greece where the markets have already priced in a default.  Various schemes have been mooted whereby the ECB might do this, indirectly if not directly.

The problem is that it will not be easy for the ECB or the member governments to do this.  Mario Draghi and the German government currently oppose such a step.  It is forbidden by Article 123 of the Treaty establishing EMU, and the German Constitutional Court likes to take that Treaty seriously.  The only ray of light here is that the relevant resolution passed by the German CDU at its recent conference does not entirely rule out such a step, describing it as ‘a last resort’.  I think the time for last resorts has come, and I could imagine a deal in which the member governments agree to much stricter enforcement of fiscal targets and long-term support for the ECB in return for a measure of this sort.  However, it is an entirely open question whether the Eurozone governments have the political wherewithal to make this move.  If they do not, I think the crisis of confidence is likely to persist and strengthen until an Italian, Spanish or even Belgian default looms, and then it may be too late to save the Euro.  It takes a confidence trick to resolve a crisis of confidence and the sooner one acts, the less costly the resolution.

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 order?

This is a question about whether balanced structural adjustment is feasible over the long term within the confines of EMU.  Certainly, the current approach of imposing all the costs of adjustment on southern Europe (of which Ireland can be considered an honorary member) is likely to fail.  Except possibly in Ireland where growth is gradually picking up, there is no reason to expect that rapid enough growth can emerge from such austerity to render the debt load of these countries sustainable.  At a minimum, long-term stability depends on a more coordinated set of fiscal policies in which some reflation in northern Europe is married to a softer adjustment path in southern Europe.  However, this will not be easy to secure.  In particular, as Wendy Carlin and David Soskice have observed, reflation poses risks to the wage coordination on which the northern European economies depend for their competitiveness.

Even then, for reasons I have noted, there is some question about whether the southern European economies can prosper within EMU.  Portugal and Greece, in particular, do not have especially strong export sectors and are not likely to grow them overnight.  These countries have long depended on growth strategies that are accompanied by moderate levels of inflation and, because the ECB has to pursue a monetary policy of one-size for all of Europe, it cannot always dampen down that inflation effectively.  In the wake of the sovereign debt crisis, borrowing costs are likely to remain higher in the south, which will help.  But the danger is that, if the southern European governments cannot pursue growth led by domestic demand for fear of its inflationary consequences, they may experience only low levels of growth for the foreseeable future.  Structural reform will help in the long run but likely only a little.

It may well be that Europe can live with persistent imbalances of payments at some level, but the question is whether more effective coordination of fiscal policies will be enough to allow the southern European economies to grow at rates that are politically acceptable to their electorates.

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. Yet it seems odd to have such agreement around austerity in the midst of a potential double dip recession. What is wrong with the demand for austerity? How do you account for the strength of this common sense?

The demand for austerity can be explained to some extent by the fact that we have just lived through a period in which financial innovation married to inadequate financial regulation made possible much higher levels of leveraging of assets, leading to higher levels of debt, whether in the public or private sectors of the U.S. and Europe.  To some extent, we are paying today for what we ate yesterday.

The best way to pay back these debts, of course, is from the fruits of more rapid economic growth and that is most likely to be secured, as John Maynard Keynes argued, by reflationary policy. Thus, in the context of global recession immediate austerity does not make good economic sense.

To explain why so many are advocating it, then, we have to recognize that economic policy, whether at the national or international level, is rarely driven entirely by concerns about how to improve overall economic well-being.  It is made by actors, who may be political parties or governments, who are also seeking distributive benefits for their constituents, and, in many cases, these distributive demands are cloaked beneath calls for austerity.  Thus, the demand of several northern European governments, including the Finns and the Dutch as well as the Germans, for austerity in southern Europe is motivated, to a significant extent, by a concern to ensure that they do not pay the costs of adjustment in the wake of the Euro crisis.   I see the demands for austerity of many Republicans in the U.S. as an effort to cut public spending programs that they think serve Democratic rather than Republican constituencies.  If distributive concerns were not at the heart of those demands, those Republicans would be much less reluctant to raise taxes in order to balance the budget.

In the US, there is an influential view that we need to have continued expansionary monetary policy but contractionary fiscal policy. That seems to be the recipe of the moment, with the Fed even contemplating another round of quantitative easing. What do you think of this approach to inadequate demand and balance sheet problems?

As the French would say, I am willing to accept this for lack of something better.  Something better would be a coordinated reflation in which more expansionary fiscal policy was now playing a larger role.  We have arrived at this situation, I think, because central banks, including the Federal Reserve and the ECB, have been willing over the past three years to do what governments have been unwilling or unable to do.  For that, they deserve considerable credit.  One can reasonably ask whether the best way to respond to an era marked by a large expansion in lending is to pump even more money into the system, but, since inflation remains low in most of Europe and North America, partly because the trade unions have been so weakened and unemployment is high, this seems to be an appropriate strategy.  In the absence of a substantial fiscal stimulus to aggregate demand, however, it is unlikely to lower unemployment much.

Debt, especially mortgages and student loans, have become a major issue over the past few years. What if anything do you think should be done about it? How should we understand the growing debt of American households in the past decades?

As Ragurham Rajan and others have pointed out, in the United States, during the 1980s and 1990s, easy consumer credit and home equity loans became a substitute for social policy.  They have been the means ordinary people with little in the way of savings used to survive adverse life events and fluctuations in the economy.  Student loans can be seen, in similar terms, as a substitute for publicly-funded education.

They can also be seen as a key component of the growth model operated in the United States over that period.  Growth in this country was led by domestic demand and the only way to sustain demand in an era when disposable income for households at or below median incomes stagnated was to promote the kind of asset boom in housing that gave many the illusion that their wealth was increasing even if their income was stagnant.

In the past two years, as home prices declined and some forms of credit became harder to secure, American households increased their savings and that, in itself, is gradually reducing the debt burden of the private sector. I do not see any need to take steps to further reduce that debt.  Indeed, it is difficult to see how the American economy can continue to grow without the availability of such credit.

However, there are serious longer-term problems on the horizon.  More than half the American populace has no savings for retirement at a time when larger cohorts can be expected to retire and health-care costs continue to rise exponentially, eating into the disposable income of many families.  Part of the problem is that most of the fruits of economic growth over the past three decades have gone to people in the top 1 percent of the income distribution.  In the long run, the solution will have to entail engineering a more equitable distribution of wealth so that ordinary working families have the means to increase both their savings and their spending.

One thing that seems to tie the American and European situation together is the considerable growth of financial activity. Is there anything to the view that the last decades can be understood as a period of financialization? If so, what does it mean to say the economy has become financialized?

Seen from a long-term perspective, this does indeed look like an era of financialization.  The share of profits in the economy going to the financial sector expanded dramatically.  With the invention of new financial derivatives and the development of financial markets, many firms ostensibly devoted to manufacturing, such as General Motors, have made an increasing share of their profits from financial activities that leverage their capital.  That has contributed, in turn, to rising income inequality at the high end of the distribution, as those skilled at financial engineering generated profits large enough to allow them to demand astronomical levels of compensation.

In my view, it would be an exaggeration to say that the economy has become ‘financialized’.  There are still many productive components of the American economy that do not turn on finance.  However, it is apparent that we are all vulnerable to the systemic risks that a large financial sector, increasingly devoted to speculation, entails, and that is a serious cause for concern.  Although some of the financial innovation of recent decades has made some markets more liquid and borrowing easier for some productive firms, I doubt that this type of ‘casino capitalism’, to borrow a phrase from Susan Strange, ultimately contributes enough to economic prosperity to justify those risks.  We are currently paying serious costs for this and, unless financial regulation becomes more stringent than is currently anticipated, I think there will be more to pay.

Related to that question, what do you think accounts for the ‘bubbliness’ of the US and European economies, and especially the scale of these bubbles? We have seen a number of different bubbles and credit crises – housing bubbles in the US, UK, Ireland, and Spain; sovereign debt events in Greece, Portugal, and Italy, perhaps even France. While there was the dot come bubble in the late 90s, and the East Asian financial crisis, those don’t seem to have had the magnitude and systemic character as the latest period. What is, or isn’t, different about what we’re experiencing now?

I do not believe that any single set of factors can explain these diverse developments.  The housing bubbles can be explained, at least in basic terms, by a long period of easy credit, made possible, as I have noted by the expansion of the financial markets in various kinds of derivatives.  That was made possible, in turn, by what I consider lax financial regulation.  It is ironic that economists liked to describe this period as an era of ‘great moderation’.  In each case, however, some ancillary factors were at work.  In Spain, the cost of borrowing was greatly reduced by the confidence effect associated with entry into EMU.  In Ireland, it was encouraged by rapid rates of economic growth.

The sovereign debt crisis has more complex roots.  In Greece, which enjoyed the same easy access to credit as Spain, the fiscal fecklessness of the government is notable.  In Ireland, some of the problems can be attributed to the government’s mistaken decision to guarantee the bonds of its banks.  In different ways, Portugal, Spain and Italy remained creditworthy on the fundamentals but fell afoul of the spreading crisis of confidence in the markets, which has yet to take its last victims.  There are some parallels with the East Asian financial crisis.  The current crisis is worse partly because it has struck the major financial sectors of the western world and we now face the question of who will rescue those who normally do the rescuing.

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?

In this as in every other case, as Winston Churchill once said ‘democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’.  The notion that governments led by geriatric Eurocrats will resolve their countries economic problems more readily than elected governments is another of those illusions that bedevil the Eurozone.  They have legitimacy in Brussels but imposing austerity is ultimately a task that demands domestic political legitimacy.  I see this as a stop-gap solution that might, at best, persuade officials in Brussels and Berlin that everything has been tried and they must pay more heed to the pain and demands of national electorates.

It is obvious that the cumbersome decision-making procedures of the European Union are not up to the task of heading off a crisis in the financial markets.  But that is not a problem with democracy.  It is a problem of international negotiation.  Democracy enters the picture to the extent that the views of national electorates limit the willingness of their governments to share the costs of adjustment, and that is admittedly a problem for Europe.  A continent so proud of the ways in which its social policies reflect ‘social solidarity’ has been unable to summon up the sense of continental solidarity that would justify a more equitable and efficient solution to the crisis.  But social solidarity does not simply bubble up from below.  It is created by inventive political leadership and we are still waiting to see if the political leaders of Europe are capable of that.

On the larger question, my view is that the global financial crisis has thrown into stark relief the importance of the state in any democratic system.  The crisis itself is rooted in failures of financial regulation that can be linked to the unwillingness of governments to assert the authority of the state on behalf of the people against powerful financial interests.  And the inadequacy of the response to the crisis, especially in the U.S., can be attributed, in some measure, to the widespread reluctance on the part of many people to trust the state with their resources.  In many respects, that is the legacy of the neo-liberal era that followed the economic crisis of the 1970s, when many policy-makers and citizens became disillusioned with the capacity of governments to direct the economy.  Hence, the American government faces the current crisis hobbled by rising levels of distrust in government.  It is not acting more forcefully on the fiscal front partly because large segments of the American population are willing to vote for politicians who claim that government is the problem rather than the solution.

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 very small lasting impact?

There have been two notable political responses to the current economic crisis.  One is marked by a backlash against immigration, in both the U.S. and Europe, reflected in the growing popularity of radical right parties in Europe and the salience of immigration to national political debates in the United States.  This is a familiar feature of economic crises.  The U.S. has a long history of nativist movements.  The other is reflected in the Occupy Wall Street movement and its European analogues.  I can only hope that the former is contained and the latter encouraged.

It is difficult to see how these sporadic protests can be translated into any immediate changes in policy, not least because they have yet to articulate clear political demands.  However, I think they are having an impact.  They have struck a chord in popular opinion.  They bring issues of unemployment and inequality to the fore.  In the short term, I think that may influence voters in American elections next year, and, over the medium term, I believe that even these limited protests will help to shift political discourse in directions that favor those seeking to address issues of inequality and unemployment.

Interview with Kees Van Der Pijl

As part of our investigation into contemporary political economy, The Current Moment will be publishing interviews with different individuals on the subject of today’s economic and financial crisis. Based on the same set of questions, these interviews are aimed at opening up a debate about the causes and consequences of the current crisis and at advancing our understanding of political economy.

Today’s interview is with Kees Van Der Pijl, professor of international relations at the University of Sussex, UK. One of the leading Marxist scholars of international relations and international political economy, Professor Van Der Pijl has published widely. His books include a three volume project on modes of foreign relations (vol. 1 and vol. 2), Global Rivalries: From the Cold War to Iraq (2006) and The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (1984). He has also published widely in the New Left Review and other journals and magazines.

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 speaking I have become more and more concerned with the War on Terror as a route to constraining civil liberties and freeing the forces of authoritarianism in the West. In combination with a stubborn adherence to neoliberal responses to the crisis, the by now almost routine resort to war as a means of regime change, the steady build-up by the West of military assets against Russia and China, and Israel’s preparation for war with Iran (in which NATO is complicit in many ways, for instance by allowing Israeli air force jets to practice on Sardinia for such an attack), this raises the frightening prospect of a larger conflict which in turn will further reduce the space for dissent.

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?

Tax evasion and the size of a black economy are real problems. But if compared to what it costs in campaign contributions to be elected to the presidency of the US, or the non-payment of taxes by big corporations in the US and the larger EU economies (just think of how the hedge fund LCTM, based in the Cayman Island, was bailed out in 1998 by the Fed with public money, or what German banks were able to avoid paying by a simple change in capital gains tax so that they could divest themselves of their stakes in other corporations), what happens in southern Europe is small fry.

What is at stake everywhere is that bank capital is able to avoid the negative consequences of low interest rates by raising the call for debt reduction, which means debt rescheduling and mark-ups in bond rates for the most affected countries. All of which works to keep the banks in a position where they can dictate to governments which economic policy to follow.

Deeper down of course is the issue that ‘growth’, that is, capital accumulation, is stalling because society is reaching the limits (which are ‘culturally’ specific in each country) of what it can absorb in goods and services, what it can perform work-wise, and the like.

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?

This is a recipe for disaster and will aggravate what I said above. Shrinking the economy will make any debt relatively larger and the ability to service it more difficult.

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?

EMU was set up prematurely to allow the strongest capitals to expand from a larger economic zone without having unnecessary transaction costs. More importantly, it served to generalize their desire to have a strong currency to diversify internationally through direct foreign investment. For German capital in particular this solution does not harm its remaining export prospects because the sectors in which production remains in Germany are not price-sensitive. A power plant or a giant turbine for hydroelectric dam is not bought at competitive prices, even a Mercedes or BMW is not subject to the same price pressures as an Alfa Romeo or a Renault.

Hence EMU was bound to reinforce the strongest German capitals, Dutch, some French, at the expense of the peripheral economies which no longer can adjust lower productivity and greater exposure to competitive pressures by devaluation. Liberal capitalism always produces inequalities; uneven development is at the heart of it.

Within a capitalist economy, Eurobonds would have a stabilizing effect. However, that is precisely where the financial fraction of US capital and politicians associated with it (Volcker, Summers, Geithner…) don’t want the Euro: it would create a real alternative to US Treasury bonds which are currently the mainstay of the global credit economy and keep the US afloat. The current Eurozone troubles work in various ways to keep the Euro embattled and prevent the Eurobond solution. Inequality is translated by the Murdoch and Springer media and the like into chauvinist sentiment (‘Greeks are lazy’, the ‘PIGS’ etc.), with the result that German or Dutch ‘public opinion’ resists shouldering a heavier interest rate burden on public debt which Eurobonds would entail. The way Strauss-Kahn, a philanderer but also an advocate of building a more complete financial infrastructure around the Euro, was removed, or the ‘mistake’ of downgrading France’s credit-rating, is a reminder of the conspiratorial dimension that is inevitably involved in keeping the Euro off-balance. Of course, the process is systemic but it evolves through concrete actions.

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?

This is about the continued hegemony of neoclassical economics, the failure of Keynesians to adjust to a globalised economy and the even more disturbing failure of Marxist-inspired or Institutionalist political economists to challenge neoclassical principles, in the way of the 1970s capital debate and so on. Only this can explain why completely corrupt mainstream economics (just look at the part on the economists’ role in the film ‘Inside Job’) can remain as the dominant intellectual force. Mario Monti is called ‘a respected economist’ and nobody asks in what sort of economics did he gain his credentials.

In the US, an influential view is to argue for continued expansionary monetary policy but with contractionary fiscal policy. That seems to be the recipe of the moment, with the Fed even contemplating another round of quantitative easing. What do you think of this approach to inadequate demand and balance sheet problems?

Dollar inflation by printing more money keeps the mass consumption economy going although it is losing steam as accumulation stalls. And as long as China, Japan, Kuwait and the like continue to buy up US Treasuries, the value of the dollar is hardly affected either. As purchases of precious metals by China and other countries outside the Atlantic heartland increase, we may be in for a surprise at some point in terms of global monetary relations. However, how the holders of US Treasuries would square a loss of value of their 2 or 3 trillion worth of holdings, with a new role for e.g. the Yuan backed by gold or silver, I cannot predict.

Debt, especially mortgages and student loans, have become a major issue over the past few years. What, if anything, should be done about this? How should we understand the growing debt of American households in the past decades?

In the English-speaking West, the debt problem is much more acute because the lowering of wages was accompanied by a credit-card culture that kept consumption going in spite of it. Also their mortgage debt is higher than elsewhere and the attempts by banks to move into new zones to create mortgage markets are more recent or even just beginning. Only some sort of socialization of debt, separating economically and ecologically justifiable repayments (that is, to institutions useful in these respects) from speculative titles, can be a way out here. The continued payment of interest to big players who are not, say, pension funds or otherwise institutions of public interest, should be suspended.

One thing that seems to tie the American and European situation together is the considerable growth of financial activity. Is there anything to the view that the last decades can be understood as a period of “financialization”? If so, what might it mean to say the economy has become “financialized”?

This has been explained by noting on the one hand the accumulation crisis which diverts investment funds to speculative circulation, quasi-liquidity, all to make commercial profit by raiding and asset-stripping. On the other hand, financialization serves as a socialization of risk, hence ‘hedge’ funds etc. of course also operating for profit but simultaneously performing a role that we later may come to see as a route to some sort of socialization of the economy as a whole.

Related to that question, what accounts for the “bubbliness” of the US and European economies and especially the scale of these bubbles? We have seen a number of different bubbles and credit crises – housing bubbles in the US, UK, Ireland, and Spain; sovereign debt events in Greece, Portugal, and Italy, perhaps even France. While there was the dot.com bubble in the late 90s, and the East Asian financial crisis in the same decade, those don’t seem to have had the magnitude and systemic character as the latest period. What is, or isn’t, different about what we’re experiencing now?

What we’re experiencing now is that speculation, hedging etc. is coming home from having raided various peripheral locations. It is now the turn of the ‘central’ bubble which contains all others. This raises profound questions about the role of the shadow economy and how it is related to shadow politics.

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 am not optimistic about the ability of the established parliamentary governing classes to come up with any solution of their own because they are morally corrupt and hostage to a defunct understanding of the economy and society. The governments imposed on Greece and Italy are instances of ‘soft regime change’ by the EU and the IMF and will fail as their elected predecessors have.

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?

The Occupy movements are the most important event in thirty years and are having an impact already on mainstream political discourse. They go beyond anti-globalization because they demand from governments (irrespective of their stripe) to restore a basic decency to social life and to disempower global finance. This conforms, unintentionally of course, to Marx’s insight in Capital Volume III that a transition to what he called the ‘Associated Mode of Production’ would come about through precisely such a movement demanding from governments that they rein in financial flows destabilizing economies, after which an economy based on cooperation of polytechnic workers would replace the capitalist one based on direction by owners. Today we would add the ecological dimension, the most urgent issue of our epoch.

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

Some form of ecological socialism, within the specific context of each particular national or regional culture and attuned to the expectations of its citizens. In such a society, education should be at the heart of social reproduction and guide people to living culturally rich lives that are less dependant on continually buying new consumer goods.

Spain: predictable results in uncertain times

The most remarkable thing about yesterday’s election results in Spain is how unremarkable and predictable they were. For weeks, the opinion polls had been predicting that the incumbent Socialist government would be trounced and it duly was. The opposition Partido Popular (PP), lead by a seasoned PP politician, Mariano Rajoy, won 186 seats in the 350 seat assembly. The Socialist Party, the PSOE, won 110 seats. In terms of percentage of the vote, the PP’s victory was all the more striking: 44.62% of the vote for the PP, 28.73% of the vote for the PSOE. The scale of the PP’s victory was no doubt a reflection of the widespread disaffection with the governing Socialists. But beyond that, there was little in the results that indicated the scale of the economic and social crisis the country is facing. No new political formations have been thrown up by the crisis. The United Left party (IU) won 11 seats and 6.2% of the vote – not an insignificant result. But generally the smattering of small parties that won altogether 54 seats were an ideological mixture: left, right, Catalan and Basque nationalist. The Indignados movement, fueled by a widespread disenchantment with the ruling political class, did not prompt any mass withdrawal from the electoral process. Their slogan – They Don’t Represent Us! – did not seem to have much impact. The abstention rate was 28.3%: higher than in the two previous elections (2008 and 2004) but lower than in 2000.

Though unemployment stands at above 20% and the country’s ability to auction its bonds on the international market is looking shakier by the day, the prevailing sentiment in the course of the campaign was that of resignation. Rajoy himself did not propose any new ideas on how to tackle the crisis. His cryptic slogan that promised to transform Spain into the “Germany of the South” could be interpreted in a multitude of ways. His promises of fiscal rectitude and public sector reform was – in the absence of specificities – no more than a vague nod in the direction of both the markets and the EU. That an election at such a crucial time should throw up so few surprises is perhaps a fair reflection of how people are responding to the crisis. But in the case of Spain, it is surprising. After all, when the global financial crisis hit in 2008 Spain was performing well. Its government did not – contrary to Greece – run up large debts in the good times. Public borrowing was low as tax receipts from high growth rates ballooned. In 2007, its debt ratio was only 36% of GDP and from 1999 through to 2008 Spain ran a balanced budget on average i.e. its borrowing was equal to zero.

Spain’s problems today are in part the result of an asset price bubble. Whilst the government did not run up debts during the boom years, private borrowing in Spain rose rapidly as individuals were able to access credit easily via national and international channels. When the downturn struck, individuals found themselves saddled with extensive debts. Regional Spanish banks have also been left with a large number of bad loans, made to finance real estate projects that will never see the light of day. Repayment of these debts has cast a long shadow over the Spanish economy as spending power is squeezed and as banks refrain from financing the private sector.

However, this does not explain why the Spanish government is today struggling to find buyers for its bonds. That is to do with the common currency union. In a downturn, governments usually run up debts in order to pay for increases in welfare payments: with +20% unemployment in Spain, those payments are large but given Spain’s position at the beginning of the crisis it should be able to weather the storm. However, because of the common currency union, the use of automatic stabilizers is limited: Spanish government borrowing is judged not on its own terms as much as in terms of the wider dynamics of the Eurozone. The fact that these automatic stabilizers would have an inflationary effect which would reduce the debt burden in the longer term is also ruled out by the currency union. The disciplinary effect of monetary union is thus not neutral but specifically kicks in to restrain some policies rather than others. As already argued on The Current Moment, the effect is to structurally lock countries into internal adaptations through domestic wages and prices instead of adapting through a mixture of internal and external measures.

A measure of success for today’s protest movements should surely be whether or not they are able to challenge ruling orthodoxies in ways that impact upon electoral outcomes. The evidence from Spain is that up until now, protests have had no such impact.

Looking for growth

We have often argued at The Current Moment that what is missing in both the US and Europe is a real plan about how to make these economies grow. The political right points to the need for tax cuts; the left prefers state-funded jobs programmes. Neither addresses the problem of a languishing private sector, where firms are sitting on cash rather than reinvesting it. Central banks have tried to stimulate the economy by pushing down interest rates as way of stimulating private borrowing. As argued before (here), quantitative easing has not had the desired effect.

One response to the current problems is to point to the need to get consumers spending again. Firms are sitting on cash because they are gloomy about the future: without more buoyant demand, more investment will only mean the production of unsold goods. Critics of the austerity measures being pushed through across Europe often frame their opposition in terms of its effect on demand: how can European economies grow if the continent’s consumers are being hit with new taxes, cuts in welfare incomes and job losses?

This consumption-oriented view of growth is worth comparing with the growth experiences of the emerging markets. Growth does not just come from consumption. In fact, things look rather different if you look outside of the US and Western Europe. Take China. In its recent World Economy report, The Economist notes that the percentage of the gross national product that is consumed has fallen steadily in China since the 1970s.

If we were to map China’s annual growth figures on the graph, the relationship between consumption and growth would be an inverse one: a rise in the latter as the former has fallen. This makes sense if we look at how Chinese investment decisions are made. Capital is channelled via state-controlled banks into production. The percentage of the GDP that is reinvested is remarkably high in China: around 50% of GDP. It is on average half of that in OECD countries.

One way of looking at the contemporary slump in Western Europe and the US is through the lens of productive investment rather than that of consumption. The Chinese model has its own limitations, not least its reliance upon the demand for its exports in overseas markets. China is also at a different stage of its development, meaning that we are not comparing like with like. But it is nevertheless useful as a way of generating different sorts of questions. In what ways are investment decisions made? By whom and with what goals exactly? And crucially, how has the role of financial intermediaries changed over time and what impact have those changes had on investment? We don’t have answers to these questions yet but they are a good place to start when thinking about the growth problems in contemporary Europe and in the US.

Escaping the past

Wolfgang Streeck’s guest post (below) points to one of the key mysteries of the contemporary Eurozone crisis: how could those Southern Mediterranean countries, economically so buoyant from the early 2000s onwards, see their fortunes change for the worse so quickly? Today we are used to deriding them as basket cases, as the “PIGS”, yet in the last decade they were among the most dynamic economies in the Eurozone. What went wrong?

The standard answer is that national governments in these countries failed to tackle the special interests that are holding them hostage. Bloated public sectors are the obstacles to the much-needed supply-side reforms. The role of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund is, on this reading, to compel national governments to make the difficult choices and to take on these special interests. Streeck’s post suggests that something else is at work. These Southern Mediterranean economies are marked by the post-fascist social compact forged between political and economic elites in these countries and the interaction between these compacts and other European economies under the aegis of the European Union. Class compromise in Southern Europe has been achieved and sustained through economic aid from the North.

This point powerfully chimes with a theme of previous Current Moment posts: that the social, economic and political development of Southern Mediterranean societies has, for a number of decades now, been inescapably bound up with wider European institutions and policies. These countries are “member states” par excellence: their national existence expressed through the wider European framework. Streeck’s post highlights the negative consequences that flow from this: the relationship with the rest of Europe has had the effect of freezing the social development in these countries such that an indigenous nationally-oriented middle class did not develop, helping explain the poor performance of these countries today.

It is worth exploring some of the wider implications of Streeck’s argument. One is whether or not the same pattern will be followed in other parts of Europe. The social development of the formerly planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe has taken its own course. These countries have certainly evolved into “member states”, their national governments deriving as much authority from their participation in European summits as from their relationships with their own electorates. Yet some of these countries have managed to carve out for themselves their own role in the European division of labour, a consequence of the highly trained and educated workforce that existed at the time of the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the relatively low wage levels compared to Western Europe. A more difficult question is regarding the Balkans. Will European subsidies substitute for national economic development in the same way as occurred in Southern Europe? The primacy placed on national reconciliation by Northern European governments suggests that any dynamic and conflictual processes of social transformation in the Balkans, necessary perhaps if economic development in the region is to really take-off and be sustained, will be snuffed out by European elites afraid of a new outbreak of ethnic violence in the region.

Another implication of Streeck’s argument seems to be that economic development in the future for countries like Greece and Spain will only come about as a result of a fundamental process of social change, where existing class relations are radically modified. The current condition of these societies, where their existence is so firmly tied to Europe, inhibits such change. The place of national governments within pan-European institutions shelters them from the contradictions and dynamics visible at the national level. The European Union itself has customarily staved off class conflict through payments made directly to its members, to individual regions and to social groups like farmers. Instead of looking to Europe for solutions, growth in Southern Europe will only come from an internal confrontation with the social structures, relations and traditions inherited from their national past.

Mélenchon on the debt crisis

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, left-wing candidate in the 2012 French presidential elections, sets out his ideas on the European debt crisis and France’s own debt problems. Currently sitting in the European Parliament, and uniting a number of those groups and parties to the left of the Socialist Party in next year’s elections, Mélenchon is as good a measure as any of what the French left has to offer by way of economic policy.

In his interview with Le Monde, Mélenchon makes a number of points, none of them very convincing. He argues that the solution to the markets’ attack on Eurozone economies is to have the European Central Bank lend to governments at the same rate at which it lends to banks. This would avoid having countries like Spain and Italy financing themselves at prohibitive rates via the markets. He also calls for a harmonization of both fiscal and social policy at the European level and the introduction of new forms of European protectionism. These could include social and ecological tariffs on goods imported from outside the EU, plus a ban on any out-sourcing of economic activity that would mean a cut in production inside the EU. Mélenchon’s left federalism is a welcome example of imposing a political project onto the economy and onto markets but two problems in particular stand-out. It may be his vantage point as an MEP that skewers his analysis but Mélenchon’s faith in European federalism poses some obvious problems of democracy. This is a point that has been made before on The Current Moment: further European integration in response to the crisis will only lead to a political crisis further down the line given the lack of any obvious democratic accountability for decisions made and institutions created at the EU level. The second problem is Mélenchon’s Euro-chauvinism. By arguing for European-level protectionism, Mélenchon resembles a sort of re-heated version of Ernst Mandel. Back in the 1970s, Mandel, a leader of the Belgian Troskyist movement, claimed in his 1970 book Europe versus America that the economic crisis was leading to a consolidation of European business such that the future would be marked by competition between Europe and the US.  Mélenchon welcomes this idea, implying that only behind a protectionist wall can the European economy survive. This kind of argument, the false hope of Euro-chauvinism, leaves us cold. It pits us against US, Chinese and Brazilian economies in the same manner of earlier nationalisms. We have already seen it emerge in Europe with German diatribes against Greek profligacy and Mélenchon’s embrace of it chimes with the nationalist traditions of the French left.

Mélenchon ends the interview with an idea about how government deficits can be reduced through higher taxes on top-end incomes and big companies rather than through austerity budgets. By doing this, he says, a clear message would be sent that there are limits to accumulation in France. Mélenchon is right to point to the problems of a tax system that systematically favours the rich. But as an alternative to austerity budgets what’s needed is not a plan for redistribution but rather a plan for growth. Mélenchon leaves unanswered the critical question of how to boost growth in moribund Eurozone economies. His analysis is made entirely within the parameters of contemporary political economy. He says the crisis is a systemic one and yet suggests that a lot more government is a solution to too much market. A real alternative needs to find a way of combining an argument about redistribution with one about growth and productivity.