Europe Speaks German
Source: Le Monde Diplomatique
Wednesday, December 05, 2012
It
is becoming clear that Germany intends to be the EU’s major political
as well as economic power, and to dominate European governance to favour
Germany’s privileged position as the global economic order changes.
Ordinary citizens of other countries in Europe may refuse to comply.
The
novelist Gabriel García Márquez used to say that the Nobel Prize for
Peace would have been better named the Nobel Prize for War, given its
recipients — Henry Kissinger, Menahim Begin, Barack Obama. This year’s
award is less bellicose, but still material for satire: the European
Union has earned what might be termed the Nobel Prize for Narcissism.
But Oslo can be counted on to surpass itself: next year, we can only
hope the Nobel Committee awards the prize to itself.
The
honour conferred on Brussels and Strasbourg is timely. In the first
years of the century, European vanities reached a crescendo. These were
years resonating to the claim that the EU offered — in the formula of
the late Tony Judt, echoed by many others pillars of European wisdom — a
“paragon” of social and political development to humanity. Since 2009
the lacerations of the eurozone have left their own cruel commentary on
these outpourings of self-satisfaction.
For
all that, have they disappeared? It would be premature to think so, as
can be seen from the august example of Jürgen Habermas who has just
published another book about the EU, Zur Verfassung Europas (On Europe’s Constitution). Its 60-page centrepiece (1)
is a remarkable illustration of intellectual introversion. It contains
around a hundred references, three-quarters of them to German authors;
nearly half of these are to three associates whom he thanks for
assistance, or to himself. The residue is exclusively Anglo-American,
dominated (a third of the entries) by a single British admirer, David
Held of recent Gaddafi fame (2). No other European culture figures in this exhibition of provincialism.
More
arresting still is the theme of the essay. In 2008 Habermas attacked
the Lisbon treaty for failing to make good the democratic deficit of the
EU or offer any moral/political horizon for it. Its passage, he wrote,
could only “cement the existing chasm between political elites and
citizens,” without giving any positive direction to Europe. What was
needed was a Europe-wide referendum to endow the Union with the social
and fiscal harmonisation, military capacity and, above all, directly
elected presidency that alone could save Europe from a future “settled
along orthodox neoliberal lines.” Noting how far this enthusiasm for a
democratic expression of popular will (which he had never shown any sign
of countenancing in his own country) was from his traditional outlook, I
predicted that once the Lisbon treaty was pushed through, Habermas
would no doubt quietly pocket it (3).
Trumpeting of Lisbon
This
was an underestimate. Not quietly pocketing but extravagantly
trumpeting the treaty, Habermas has now discovered that, far from
cementing any chasm between elites and citizens, it is no less than a
charter for an unprecedented step forward in human liberty, a refounding
of European sovereignty based on the EU’s citizens, not its states, and
a luminous template for a parliament of the world to come. The Europe
of Lisbon, leading the way in a “civilising process” that pacifies
relations between states, confining the use of force to punishment of
those who violate human rights, is blazing a trail from our
indispensable (if still improvable) “international community” of today
to the “cosmopolitan community” of tomorrow, a Union embracing every
last soul on earth (4).
The
narcissism of recent decades, far from abating, has reached a new
paroxysm. What vanishes in a stupor of self-admiration is that the
Lisbon treaty speaks not of the peoples of Europe but its states, and
was rammed through to circumvent the popular will, expressed in three
referendums; that the structure it enshrines is widely distrusted by
those subject to it; and that far from being a sanctuary of human
rights, the Union it codifies has colluded with torture and occupation,
without a murmur from its ornaments.
This
cult of self sits poorly with external realities. Laden with as many
European prizes as the ribbons of one of Brezhnev’s generals, Habermas
is in part the victim of his own eminence: he is enclosed, like the
American philosopher John Rawls before him, in a mental world populated
overwhelmingly by admirers and followers, decreasingly able to engage
with positions more than a few millimetres from his own. Often hailed as
a contemporary successor to Emmanuel Kant, he risks becoming a modern
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, constructing with imperturbable euphemisms a
theodicy in which even the evils of financial deregulation contribute to
the blessings of cosmopolitan awakening (5),
and the West sweeps the path of democracy and human rights towards an
ultimate Eden of pan-human legitimacy. The habit of taking Europe as a
cynosure for the world, without showing much knowledge of the cultural
or political life within it, has not gone away and is unlikely to yield
just to the tribulations of the common currency.
Longest recession
The
disarray into which these tribulations have thrown the EU is clear.
Europe is living through the deepest and longest recession since the
second world war. To understand its drivers, a sense of the underlying
dynamic in the crisis of the eurozone is needed. Put simply, it is a
result of the intersection of two independent fatalities. The first is
the general implosion of the fictive capital with which markets
throughout the developed world were kept going in the long cycle of
financialisation that began in the 1980s, as profitability in the real
economy contracted under the pressure of international competition, and
rates of growth fell decade by decade. The mechanisms of this
deceleration, internal to the workings of capital itself, have been set
out in detail by the historian Robert Brenner in his history of advanced
capitalism since the war (6). Wolfgang Streeck (7)
has in turn shown its effects in the vast expansion of private and
public debt to prop up not only rates of profit but political
electability. The American economy illustrates this trajectory with
clarity, but its logic has been system-wide.
In
Europe, however, a further logic was set in motion by the reunification
of Germany and the design of the monetary union agreed at Maastricht,
followed by the Stability Pact, both cut to German requirements.
Presiding over the common currency would be a European Central Bank
(ECB) whose conception seems inspired by the ultraliberal theories of
Friedrich Hayek: it is answerable neither to voters nor governments, but
only to the single objective of stable prices. Dominating the new
currency zone would be its biggest economy, now enlarged to the east,
with a major reservoir of cheap labour just across its borders. The
costs of reunification were high, dragging down German growth. To
recoup, German capital enforced an unprecedented wage repression,
accepted by German labour under threat of outsourcing to Poland,
Slovakia or beyond.
The
economic consequences for southern Europe were entirely predictable. As
manufacturing productivity rose and relative labour costs declined,
German export industries became more competitive than ever, taking an
increasing share of eurozone markets. In the periphery, the
corresponding loss of competitivity of the local economies was
anaesthetised by a flow of cheap capital borrowed at interest rates held
virtually uniform across the space of the monetary union, as laid down
according to German prescriptions.
In
late 2008, when the financial crisis set off in the US hit Europe, the
credibility of this peripheral debt crumbled, threatening a chain of
state bankruptcies. In the US, massive public bailouts could stave off
the collapse of insolvent banks, insurance companies and corporations,
and the printing of money by the Federal Reserve could check contraction
of demand. But two barriers blocked such a temporary resolution in the
eurozone. Not only did the statutes of the ECB, enshrined in the
Maastricht treaty, expressly forbid it from buying the debt of member
states, but there was no Schicksalsgemeinschaft — that “community of
fate” analysed by the sociologist Max Weber — to bind rulers and ruled
together in a common political order, in which the former will pay a
heavy price for ignoring the existential needs of the latter. In the
European simulacrum of federalism, there could be no “transfer union”
along US lines.
Political dictation
Once
crisis struck, cohesion in the eurozone could only come from political
dictation, not social expenditure. Thus Germany, at the head of a bloc
of smaller northern states, could impose draconian austerity programmes,
unthinkable for its own citizens, on the southern periphery, no longer
able recover competitivity by devaluation.
Under
this pressure, governments in the weaker states have fallen like
ninepins. The political mechanisms have varied. In Ireland, Portugal and
Spain, outgoing regimes presiding over the onset of the crisis have
been swept away in elections installing successors committed to more
drastic doses of the same remedies as before. In Italy, internal erosion
and external intervention combined to replace a parliamentary cabinet
with a technocratic one, without recourse to the polls. A regimen
imposed by Berlin, Paris and Brussels has reduced Greece to a condition
reminiscent of Austria in 1922, when the Entente, under League of
Nations colours, posted a high commissioner to Vienna to run the
economy. Alfred Zimmerman, the rightwing mayor of Rotterdam and a
stalwart of the suppression of a Dutch attempt to emulate the German
revolution of November 1918, was picked for the job. He remained in
control until 1926 and demanded “more and more economies, more and more
sacrifices from all classes of the population,” pressing the Austrian
government “to stabilise its budget on a much lower level” (8).
All
but universally, the prescriptions applied to restore the faith of
financial markets in the reliability of local intendancies include cuts
in social spending, deregulation of markets, privatisations of public
property: the standard neoliberal repertoire, with increased tax
pressures. To lock these in, Germany and France resolved to force the
requirement of a balanced budget into the constitution of all 17 nations
of the eurozone — a notion long regarded in the US as a shibboleth of
the crackpot right.
Hour of a new European hegemon
The
nostrums of 2011 will not cure the ills of the eurozone. Spreads on
government debt are not going to return to pre-crisis levels. Nor is the
accumulation of debt only public, far from it: by some estimates,
unsecured bank liabilities may be as high as €1.3 trillion. The problems
are deeper, the remedies feebler, the enforcers more brittle than
officialdom can admit. As it becomes clear that the spectre of defaults
has not gone away, the expedients patched together by Angela Merkel and
Nicolas Sarkozy are unlikely to last. The partnership between them was
never of course equal. “Harsher forms of German power, pulsing through
the market rather than issuing from the high command or the central
bank, may lie in store,” I wrote before the crisis broke. “It is too
early to write off a regional Grossmacht [big power]” (9).
Germany, which is more than any other state the ultimate author of the
euro-crisis in driving through a system of wage repression at home and
capital relaxation abroad, has also been the principal engineer of the
attempts to make the weakest pay for it. In that sense, the hour of a
new European hegemon has arrived. With it, has appeared the first
unabashed manifesto of German paramountcy in the Union.
The jurist Christoph Schönberger explains in Germany’s most influential intellectual review Merkur that
the kind of hegemony Germany is destined to exercise in Europe has
nothing in common with the deplorable “slogan of an anti-imperialist
discourse à la Gramsci.” He says it is to be understood, in the
wholesome constitutional sense expounded by the jurist Heinrich Triepel a
century ago, to designate the leading function of the most powerful
state within a federal system, such as that of Prussia within Germany in
the 19th and early 20th centuries. The EU is just such a system, an
essentially inter-governmental consortium gathered in the European
Council, whose deliberations are necessarily “sound-proof” to the
public: only science fiction could imagine it might ever become “the
blue flower of democracy, clean of all earthly institutional residues” (10).
But
since the states represented in the Council are vastly unequal in size
and weight, says Schönberger, it would be unrealistic to think they
could coordinate between themselves on equal terms. To work, the Union
requires the state that is a different order of magnitude in population
and wealth to give it coherence and direction: Europe needs the hegemony
of Germany, and Germans must cease to be shy in exercising it. France,
whose nuclear arsenal and seat in the Security Council are now of little
relevance, must adjust its pretensions accordingly. Germany should
handle France as Bismarck dealt with Bavaria in that other federal
system, the Kaiserreich, soothing the lesser member with symbolic awards
and bureaucratic balances under Prussian primacy (11).
‘Halfway between an Austrian and a man’
Whether
France can so readily be lowered to the status of Bavaria in the Second
Reich remains to be seen. Bismarck’s opinion of the Bavarians is well
known: “Halfway between an Austrian and a man.” The analogy might not
have seemed so outlandish under Sarkozy, in the cleaving of Paris to the
priorities of Berlin. But a better parallel is a more contemporary one:
the anxiety of the French political class never to be separated from
German designs within the EU has become increasingly reminiscent of that
other “special relationship” — the desperate British clinging to the
role of aide-de-camp to the US.
We
may wonder how long such French self-subordination is likely to
continue without a reaction. Boasts from the general secretary of the
CDU that “Europe now speaks German” are a recipe for resentment more
than compliance. Yet for years, in good part because of the massive
distortions of the French electoral system, no political class in the EU
has been more unanimously conformist in its outlook than that of
France. To expect of François Hollande any more robust degree of
economic or strategic independence than Sarkozy would be a triumph of
hope over experience. Nor, for the same reason, is there any country
where the gulf between popular opinion and official exhortation has been
repeatedly so deep.
Hollande
has come to power in much the same fashion as Mariano Rajoy in Spain,
more as the only alternative than through positive voter investment. He
could be weakened as quickly as Rajoy once austerity sets in. In the
European neoliberal system of which he has become the local intendant,
serious popular turbulence has to date surfaced only in Greece — with
some premonitory tremors in Spain. Elsewhere, the elites have yet to
hear from the masses.
That
even acute hardship may not necessarily detonate popular reactions is
clear from Russian passivity under the catastrophe of Boris Yeltsin’s
rule. But the populations of the EU are less beaten and, were conditions
to deteriorate sharply, their fuse could be shorter. Looming at the
back of all scenarios is the bleak fact that, even if the crisis of the
euro could be resolved without steep cost to the weakest (which is
improbable), the underlying contraction of growth would remain.
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