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Europe Where the Right and Left Converge
Historian Perry Anderson is one of the luminaries of the so-called Western Marxists, that is, Marxist theoreticians who were based in Western and Central Europe, rather than the Soviet Union. He’s now a professor of history and sociology at UCLA. He used to be the editor of the New Left Review. This pedigree, I should think, would be sufficient for most on Ricochet to consider calling in an exorcist.
But I’m going to ask you to read him anyway. Just one essay, actually. It’s a piece about the EU in Le Monde Diplomatique, titled “Why the System Will Still Win,” in which he predicts that the European center will hold and the EU will survive. This is an outcome that as a revolutionary he deplores, of course.
What struck me reading it was how similar his arguments against the EU, and against Europe’s center-right and center-left parties and coalitions, are to those I’ve heard here on Ricochet — another forum where many (not all) of our members seem devoutly to hope “the system” will lose, too.
In some places, he uses a different vocabulary than Americans on the right would use. But I’m not sure he’s meaningfully describing different concepts. For example, he relies heavily on the word “neoliberalism,” which he defines this as “deregulated financial flows, privatised services and escalating social inequality.” But I don’t think this definition succeeds in distinguishing “neoliberalism” from “capitalism.” The word, it seems to me, has simply taken the place of “capitalism” in the Left’s vocabulary because after the fall of the Soviet Union, it sounded antiquated — and clueless — to say that one was “against capitalism.”
When you read what he’s written, mentally replace the word “neoliberalism” in every case with “capitalism.” I’m curious to know where, and how, his analysis substantively differs from yours. I stress that I’m asking in good faith, and I hope you’ll read his article in the same spirit, with an open mind.
The whole article won’t take long to read, but I’ll point out some of the passages that struck me:
The term ‘anti-systemic movements’ was commonly used 25 years ago to characterise forces on the left in revolt against capitalism. Today, it has not lost relevance in the West, but its meaning has changed. The movements of revolt that have multiplied over the past decade no longer rebel against capitalism, but neoliberalism — deregulated financial flows, privatised services and escalating social inequality, that specific variant of the reign of capital set in place in Europe and America since the 1980s. The resultant economic and political order has been accepted all but indistinguishably by governments of the centre-right and centre-left, in accordance with the central tenet of la pensée unique, Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that ‘there is no alternative’. Two kinds of movement are now arrayed against this system; the established order stigmatises them, whether from the right or left, as the menace of populism.
These “movements of revolt” in Europe, I’ll add parenthetically, now receive financial and political support from both Russia and the United States. For example, the largest donors to Geert Wilders’ campaign, by far, were Americans.
Also parenthetically, while he’s right to say that financial deregulation and privatisation were policies championed by Margaret Thatcher, many people overestimate the extent of financial deregulation she championed, wrongly associating the kind of reforms she advocated with those that led to the 2007 financial crisis. As I argued in this piece for the Washington Post, that’s a myth.
Like many on Ricochet, Anderson holds the European Union to be an unaccountable, massive bureaucracy that robs national parliaments of their sovereignty and subordinates them to Germany’s will.
From monetary union (1990) to the Stability Pact (1997), then the Single Market Act (2011), the powers of national parliaments were voided in a supranational structure of bureaucratic authority shielded from popular will, just as the ultraliberal economist Friedrich Hayek had prophesied. With this machinery in place, draconian austerity could be imposed on helpless electorates, under the joint direction of the Commission and a reunified Germany, now the most powerful state in the union, where leading thinkers candidly announce its vocation as continental hegemon. Externally, over the same period, the EU and its members ceased to play any significant role in the world at variance with US directives, becoming the advance guard of neo-cold war policies towards Russia set by the US and paid for by Europe.
So it is no surprise that the ever more oligarchic cast of the EU, defying popular will in successive referendums and embedding budgetary diktats in constitutional law, should have generated so many movements of protest against it.
He reviews these forces in broad outline: In pre-enlargement Western Europe, protest movements of the far-right predominate. In post-enlargement Western Europe — Spain, Greece, and Ireland — protest movements of the far-left predominate. Italy has both.
He takes it as given that pooled sovereignty and the Continent’s domination by a peaceful, democratic Germany are undesirable. These are both points that I think need to be argued, not assumed; and I think they’re both wrong. But it’s his article, not mine, and I know many on Ricochet take his side of this argument.
All the significant movements of the far-right, he correctly notes, save Germany’s AfD, predate the economic crisis. Some have roots that date to the 1970s or earlier. But they grew in influence, he argues — and Syriza, M5S, Podemos and Momentum were born — as a direct result of the global financial crisis. This, in his view, is a reaction to “the structure of the neoliberal system,” which finds “its starkest, most concentrated expression in today’s EU,”
with its order founded on the reduction and privatisation of public services; the abrogation of democratic control and representation; and deregulation of the factors of production. All three are present at national level in Europe, as elsewhere, but they are of a higher degree of intensity at EU level, as the torture of Greece, trampling of referendums and scale of human trafficking attest. In the political arena, they are the overriding issues of popular concern, driving protests against the system over austerity, sovereignty and immigration. Anti-systemic movements are differentiated by the weight they attach to each — to which colour in the neoliberal palette they direct most hostility.
Movements of the far-right, he argues, now predominate because if their focus on immigration. But as he notes, and I agree, “this is typically linked (in France, Denmark, Sweden and Finland) not to denunciation but to defence of the welfare state; it is claimed the arrival of immigrants undermines this.”
In some countries, he argues, particularly France, the far-right has another advantage over the far-left:
The single currency and central bank, designed at Maastricht, have made the imposition of austerity and denial of popular sovereignty into a single system. Movements of the left may attack these as vehemently as any movement of the right, if not more so. But the solutions they propose are less radical. On the right, the FN and the Lega have clear remedies to the strains of the single currency and immigration: exit the euro and stop the influx. On the left, with isolated exceptions, no such unambiguous demands have ever been made. At best, the substitutes are technical adjustments to the single currency, too complicated to have much popular purchase, and vague, embarrassed allusions to quotas; neither is as readily intelligible to voters as the straightforward propositions of the right.
Now, what I think I detect in his tone is a reluctant admiration of the far-right: They’re the only ones, he seems to be saying, who are really willing to tear the whole system down and to use whatever levers need to be used to do it. We’ve seen a lot of this, historically: the far-left has always been vulnerable to co-option by the far-right; the segment of the population that for temperamental or socioeconomic reasons is drawn to revolution tends to be drawn by the group that promises it more convincingly, rather than the one that’s ideologically most pure. Modern nationalism was one of the earliest leftist ideologies; it emerged in the French Revolution. National Socialism was called National Socialism because that’s what it was. And so forth.
But to Anderson’s dismay — and to my relief — he concludes that anti-systemic parties have no hope of succeeding in Europe:
Polls now post record levels of voter disaffection with the EU. But, right or left, the electoral weight of anti-systemic movements remains limited. In the last European elections, the three most successful results for the right — UKIP, the FN and the Danish People’s Party — were around 25% of the vote. In national elections, the average figure across western Europe for all such right and left forces combined is about 15%. That percentage of the electorate poses little threat to the system; 25% can represent a headache, but the ‘populist danger’ of media alarm remains to date very modest.
I hope so, although I worry he may be wrong.
Now, he attributes the lack of enthusiasm for anti-systemic movements (or in more traditional vocabulary, the Revolution), to the widespread fear (justified, in my view) that it would make things much worse, economically:
The socio-economic status quo is widely detested. But it is regularly ratified at the polls with the re-election of parties responsible for it, because of fears that to upset the status, alarming markets, would bring worse misery.
He seems to dismiss this fear of “alarming markets” as a form of cowardice, whereas I see it as common sense. His seem to be standard far-left assumptions: the capitalist (or neoliberal) system should be destroyed; “the markets” and their judgments are bad things, rather than the only tool humanity’s ever successfully employed, ever, anywhere, to achieve First World standards of living; and the preference of most Europeans for “less misery” is somehow vaguely contemptible, given that it’s at odds with Revolution.
I’ll let you read his explanation for Brexit, which he believes will be the last success of the anti-systemic movement in Europe.
He then proceeds to write a paragraph that might have been written by a member of Ricochet:
Trump’s victory has thrown the European political class, centre-right and centre-left united, into outraged dismay. Breaking established conventions on immigration is bad enough. … [But] Trump’s lack of inhibition in these matters does not directly affect the union. What does, and is cause for far more serious concern, is his rejection of the ideology of free movement of the factors of production, and, even more so, his apparently cavalier disregard for NATO and his comments about a less belligerent attitude to Russia.
Whether Brexit or Trump succeed in tearing down the capitalist system that he so deplores, he writes, remains to be seen. But he concludes there’s little hope of revolution in the rest of Europe:
The established order is far from beaten … and, as Greece has shown, is capable of absorbing and neutralising revolts from whatever direction with impressive speed. Among the antibodies it has already generated are yuppie simulacra of populist breakthroughs (Albert Rivera in Spain, Emmanuel Macron in France), inveighing against the deadlocks and corruptions of the present, and promising a cleaner and more dynamic politics of the future, beyond the decaying parties.
There are some obvious differences between his view of Europe and those I’ve seen here. He views Europe as the hellish apotheosis of capitalism, whereas many on Ricochet seem persuaded it’s an exemplar of a socialism no less horrifying than the Soviet Union.
It’s a lot closer to the first than the second. I saw the Soviet Union with my own eyes, and I live in Europe: Europe is nothing like the Soviet Union. Europe is tremendously capitalist and prosperous by comparison with most of the rest of the world. I think this is a good thing. There’s a lot of room for reform, but a revolution, anywhere in Europe, would be insane.
This, I’d say, is the difference between the conservative view and the populist or far-right view. My view: Revolutions never deliver on their promises and result in something far worse than what preceded them. (And if I thought that before, I think it twice as much since the Arab Spring.) Don’t tear down a fence until you know why it was built in the first place. In other words: It’s insane to dismiss as irrelevant the reasons the EU was built, and particularly to dismiss as irrelevant Europe’s history as the most bloodthirsty, aggressive and violent continent in human history. Changes to any political system, especially in an ecosystem as prone to war as Europe’s, should be made gradually and incrementally. If the EU is to be dismantled, it should be done as slowly as it was assembled.
Anderson concludes that the Left must become more radical if it’s to have any hope of destroying the system in Europe:
For anti-systemic movements of the left in Europe, the lesson of recent years is clear. If they are not to go on being outpaced by movements of the right, they cannot afford to be less radical in attacking the system, and must be more coherent in their opposition to it. That means facing the probability the EU is now so path-dependent as a neoliberal construction that reform of it is no longer seriously conceivable. It would have to be undone before anything better could be built, either by breaking out of the current EU, or by reconstructing Europe on another foundation, committing Maastricht to the flames. Unless there is a further, deeper economic crisis, there is little likelihood of either.
I don’t believe committing Maastricht (or anything, for that matter) “to the flames” is apt to result in “something better” being built. Ever.
I’d like to know — and again, I’m asking this in good faith, I’m genuinely curious: If you believe the destruction of the EU and the far-right have something to offer Europe, why? Have you lost faith in the kind of conservatism I describe, and if so, why? If you’ve lost confidence in capitalism, why? (I think many have, in the wake of the financial crisis, and not without cause.) Are the steps in your argument very different from Anderson’s? If so, where?
Published in General
I added it to the conversation to provide a scale by which to provide context for the others.
Over the years I’ve often compared Stalin’s treatment of kulaks with the way we in the west and Japan have neutered our own kulaks through ag subsidies and price supports. And by compared, I mean emphasized the similarities. On all the social media forums where I’ve made this comparison, I don’t think I’ve gotten a single “Like” or other positive acknowledgment. So maybe it’s just me.
But when I read Lugutko’s book I realized that somebody else understands. It’s not just me!
Germany and Italy have frequently been composed of provinces of European superpowers. If you prefer, Scotland is not too dysfunctional. It is a general principle that good people can sometimes associate beneficially without either of them being particularly dysfunctional.
Do you mean that Claire hasn’t explained why not being ruled by Russia is a good thing, but losing the common market is a bad thing? I’m willing to accept that you don’t understand her argument, but I cannot accept that you don’t understand that she’s made one, nor that you don’t understand that the Russians are abusive in ways that the EU is not, nor that you don’t understand that there are benefits to EU membership that are not paralleled by Russian overlordship.
If you’re not convinced by Claire’s position, fine. I voted for Brexit because I’m not with her, either, although she was a victim of my vote (sorry, Claire). That’s not the same thing as her not having articulated reasons.
But not because the British or the Poles are a problem. At the height of that argument neither the British nor the Poles were members of the EEC.
@jamesofengland made a very convincing case for the great care and effort that went into drafting TPP, and argued persuasively that it was basically the codification and institutionalization of multiple more limited agreements.
I read the part dealing with the only industry I know enough about to reach a semi-informed conclusion about. I concluded that it would set up an unaccountable bureaucracy that would use intellectual property regulations to stifle accountability and innovation. @jamesofengland said that that was a real possibility.
My conclusion was and is that if that were true of one section of such a carefully constructed agreement, it would strain credulity to conclude that it was accidental or an isolated problem, particularly when the proponents of TPP regard it as a feature rather than a bug.
Fair enough, although for the industry most closely related to me this was not the case, or perhaps I prefer some bureaucratic accountability to the prospect of having my company’s intellectual property appropriated. However, even if I did share your concerns, which to a certain extent I do (you convinced me), I think on balance the economic and foreign policy gains from the TPP would far outweigh the negatives. No agreement is going to be perfect and as James has pointed out – a series of bilateral agreements is going to have an even more confusing and burdensome regulatory scheme than a holistic one.
Who said anything about losing the common market? I’m talking about jettisoning the supra-national government. If the Europeans insist on kicking the British out of the former because they reject the latter, then they’re only hurting themselves.
Just remember: at one point “holistic” and “totalitarian” were basically synonymous.
And yet it’s the British desire for independence that’s set everyone’s hair on fire.
I don’t follow…
While I respect your desire to agree to disagree, I’d encourage you to follow a few of Claire’s links and read through her comments again. It might also help to read through some of the rest of her work. Claire is not unconcerned about the health of Europe, nor about the ill effects of immigration. Precisely because she’s interested in these things, she’s researched these issues to a degree that allows her to be useful to others who would like to understand them. I’m not saying that you’ll necessarily end up agreeing with her, but you are likely to arrive at a more informed and grounded disagreement.
Yea, I think ethnic cleansing and mass murder don’t make a real obvious comparison to subsidies and price supports.
Both encompass the whole of life. A holistic agreement that covered everything imaginable would be totalitarian. The Nazis and Mussolini were heavily into both concepts in a variety of different senses.
Obviously, you meant an agreement that covered everything that would be covered by the bilaterals, but there’s a pun there that allows for you to be misinterpreted.
It’s Legutko, not Lugutko.
Just now, for the first time I thought to google him to see what else he’s done. It’s a long time since that book was written. The Soviet Empire has fallen since then, etc. Here is an item from last December in which he (now a member of the European Parliament) is blasting that body for its meddling in Poland: The absurdity of the debate on Polish democracy – Ryszard Legutko’s speech in PE
Got it.
Can we look forward to some pushback from you the next time that libertarians on the site talk about all policies being about violence from men with guns, Cato? My understanding is that acknowledging the difference between Stalin or Hitler and Reagan is the first step on the slippery slope towards statism. Even H&S didn’t consider pot to be a primary threat to the state, etc. ;-)
Open scientific communication has been the foundation of all scientific progress, and so of the modern world. I am therefore a strong advocate of the open data movement in biomedical research; I think that datasets should be published in parallel to all papers published in refereed journals. I think that the damage done to science by the use of TPP’s intellectual property regulations to (for example) suppress studies failing to reproduce cherry picked favorable ones, and, even worse, suppressing evidence of serious adverse drug effects will irreparably harm science in general and human health in particular. This isn’t speculation; these things already happen.
This part of TPP is drilling a hole in our lifeboat. If it’s integral to the holistic scheme, that’s enough to utterly condemn the whole thing in my eyes.
Out of curiosity how do you think government enforces its policies? That particular characterization has also been used by folks I know you respect like Jonah Goldberg, Charlie Cooke and Kevin Williamson.
You don’t think that biomedical corporations have proprietary control over the data they generate through their own efforts?
“Obvious” is a little too much for even me to ask for at this point.
Depends on the data. They want it both ways: to hide bad stuff, get patent protection, and now use TPP to stifle whistleblowers without having to risk violating federal whistleblower laws (or maybe worse things) – and publish cherry picked data to get drugs approved.
Protecting manufacturing processes? A period of patent protection on the structure of your drug? Fine. But clinical trials data is proprietary for drugs or devices submitted for approval or on the market? No way.
We’re beginning to see the damage done by the problem that journals underpublish negative results. A 95% confidence interval means 20:1 odds that your results are not due to chance. So you do 20 or 30 studies, pick the one or two that shows the effect you want, get those published and suppress the rest. You especially suppress the ones showing that your drug did bad things: remember, it’s not a placebo even though it didn’t do what you wanted it to do (and sold it as doing) any better than placebo.
OK, it allowed your drug to be marketed, OK, it promoted a spurious model (that delayed scientific progress) of why it purportedly worked, OK, it made you scads of money, OK, the adverse effects you hid killed people. Whatever. The payouts to the victims are a fraction of your advertising budget. Omelettes, eggs.
The British desire to leave the EU is a big deal because someone has successfully left the EU and the British were one of the primary sources of sound governance for the EU. It’s not because the UK is incompetent and poor but because it was competent and rich that Brexit is a blow to the EU. If you’re aware of a prominent voice suggesting that there is a concern that Britain will either invade a member state or that a member state will invade Britain, by all means link to it. I’m pretty sure that that concern is not animating the spirits of those with their hair on fire. So far as I know, members of a state from which a significant chunk is seceding have always found that secession to be animating. Even the withdrawal of an ally from an alliance is generally a pretty big deal.
It’s probably not possible to maintain the common market without a substantial amount of supranational government. The UK could have an FTA with the EU, but at a minimum that would take a while. It is also possible that it would not be a net benefit to EU members to offer that opportunity (it depends on the impact on the remaining members’ actions). I’m not particularly optimistic about that.
I do not recall saying that. Could you remind me of the body of bureaucrats that I thought might be set up by the TPP? In general, the TPP does not change US IP law.
Edit: I should clarify that this is a literal “I had forgotten this, and would appreciate being reminded”, not an “I never said this” statement.
Off to the salt mines shortly, I’ll try to get to it tonight or tomorrow. I think I remember our exchange correctly, we’ll see.
I think that government generally enforces its policies through the consent of its citizens. I don’t think it is particularly unusual for Charlie or Kevin to take a libertarian maxim and apply it beyond the degree to which its application is useful, although they sometimes object to it.
Jonah’s formulations tend to use the term “or billy clubs” or “or go to jail”, which emphasizes the degree to which you or I would be incredibly unlikely to be shot if we, for instance, failed to pay our taxes, murdered our spouse, sold cocaine to our friends, were involved in the creation of Green Lantern, or committed some other infraction of the law or of human decency of the sort that people in our demographic occasionally commit.
You’re saying that the TPP alters US domestic IP law to make it easier to stifle domestic whistleblowing?
I appreciate your kindness in this and apologize for not slaving at the coalface myself (is it still a coalface if the mine is of another mineral?)
Can you give me an example of a policy or law that 100% of citizens consent to?
Of course not. Getting to 100% is the goal of utopians and totalitarians. But I repeat myself.
So what is the method by which you get those who don’t consent to a policy or law to comply?
It took me a minute to figure out what you were asking, but I think I got it and the answer is “no” you can’t. Even two things of the same kind can differ in degree.