Essays and Research Papers

Yes We Can! Or Can We?

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In: Dublin Review of Books, Issue 162, August 29, 2026

Who is the Moses who will lead Europe? Marsh’s candidate is Germany. Not ideal, Marsh knows, but better than nothing, he seems to say.

Can Europe Survive? The Story of a Continent in a Fractured World, by David Marsh, Yale University Press, 515 pp, £25, ISBN: ‎978 0300273007.

This is a book that comes armed to the teeth. Its author, a former Financial Times European editor, has assembled thirty-six endorsements for a five-page overture, ten by central bankers, past and present, the rest by ambassadors and former ambassadors and all sorts of ‘global heads’ of whatever, senior fellows and advisers, the procession being led by Gordon Brown on the front cover (‘A privilege to read’) followed by, going by protocol, Lord David Owen. For good measure, a foreword is contributed by Joachim Nagel, president of Deutsche Bundesbank and, perhaps soon, of more.

David Marsh interviewed an astonishing 167 people, listed at the tail end of the book with their credentials described in loving detail, over two years from mid-2023 to mid-2025. Most of them, one is tempted to say, are from the Anglosphere but this is, after all, where things happen. Even larger is the share of those that are ‘from finance’ – private, semi-private, public, semi-public, national and international finance. Thirty are from Germany, none is from Russia; I will return to this later. Some were interviewed more than once, mostly at their place of residence but sometimes, if unavoidable, by video conference. Sociologists and political scientists, who in their humble ‘projects’ try to make sense of and extract something like ‘theory’ from a maximum of fifty ‘expert interviews’, can only express their admiration or abstain from doing so out of sheer envy. (…)

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Integration jedenfalls nicht. Über die Aussichten des „Europäischen Projekts“

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Dimitras-Tsatsos-Institut für Europäische Verfassungswissenschaften, DTIEV-Online Nr. 1/2026.

„Verfassungsprozesse in Bewegung“, so das Thema unserer Konferenz, vermag ich nicht zu erkennen, schon gar nicht teleologischer Art, etwa in Richtung auf die vielbeschworene „ever closer union of the peoples of Europe“. Eher Ent- statt Verfassung, ein Ende von Verfassbarkeit im Sinne von Rationalisierung gewachsener und durch Verfassungsreform weiterzuentwickelnder Strukturen. Juristen lieben das Rationalisieren, Kodifizieren, kohärent Machen, widerspruchsfrei Zusammenfassen. Das kann ich nicht bieten. Wenn überhaupt, kann man sich die EU mit Hilfe des Garbage-Can-Modells komplexer Organisation2^2 als anarchische Sammlung von „choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they may be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, decisions makers looking for work“ vorstellen – nur mit dem Unterschied, dass die EU nicht einfach eine Organisation ist, sondern eine internationale Organisation ohne demokratische Legitimationsbasis, mit demokratisch verfassten, also von der Zentrale aus gesehen risikoträchtigen Mitgliedstaaten, für sie eine Art Zufallsgenerator, unberechenbar sogar für Juristen. Von unten betrachtet hat das Handeln der EU zunehmend Konsequenzen für ihre Mitglieder, aus deren Sicht sich die EU von einem politische nice to have zu einem zu beherrschenden Problem entwickelt, das immer größeren Teilen der nationalen Wählerschaften unwillkommen ist: siehe das andauernde Wachstum „rechter“ Parteien, dass die EU sich statt auf Integration auf Desintegration hinbewegt, weil sie sich mit für sie unlösbaren Problemen, selbstgemacht oder aufgedrückt, überladen hat und die „organisierte Anarchie“ des Mülleimers anfängt, die Mitgliedsstaaten nicht nur Geld, sondern auch die Zustimmung ihrer Bürger zu kosten.

Heute fehlen der EU und ihren Mitgliedstaaten überzeugende und vor allem konsensfähige Antworten, wenn es um die zukünftige Rolle der Union nach der „Zeitenwende“ geht. (…)

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Notizen zur politischen Ökonomie des Krieges

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Berlin Review, 25. Mai 2026

Vorveröffentlichung aus «Gewaltbereit: Essays zur Zeitenwende» lmverlag, August 2026

In Kriegen geht es um Töten und Sterben. Das macht sie zu leidenschaftlichen Angelegenheiten, die an das Metaphysische grenzen. Vor Ort auf dem Schlachtfeld gibt es keine technokratischen Kriege, die sauber und kühl mit der Haager Landkriegsordnung in der Hand abgewickelt werden. Wenn Soldaten vor der Wahl stehen, ein Kriegsverbrechen zu begehen oder zu sterben, denken sie nicht lange nach. Sie können auch nicht anders als diejenigen zu hassen, die Befehl haben, sie zu töten, was es einfacher macht, sie vorsichtshalber zuerst zu töten. Die Familien in der Heimat werden es verzeihen; es ist besser, wenn der Feind stirbt als der Sohn, Ehemann oder Vater. Strafverfolgung von Soldaten aufgrund von Kriegsverbrechen durch ihr eigenes Land ist selten; noch seltener kommt es zu einer Verurteilung; im Krieg geht Kampfmoral vor Moral.

Kriege ernähren sich selbst, von sich selbst…

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English version:

Notes on the Political Economy of War

In: Berlin Review, May 25, 2026.

Excerpt from Zeitenwende: Prone to Violence by Wolfgang Streeck, forthcoming from Verso Books in the fall of 2026.

Wars are about killing and getting killed. This makes them passionate affairs, bordering on the metaphysical. When it comes to combat on the ground, there are no technocratic wars, clean and cool, conducted on the battlefield with the Hague Land Warfare Convention in hand. If the choice is between committing a war crime and dying, soldiers don’t think long. They also cannot but ultimately hate those who are out to kill them, which makes it easier to kill them first as a precaution. Families back home will forgive; it is better if the enemy dies than their son, husband, or father. Prosecution of soldiers by their country for war crimes is rare; even rarer is conviction, morale being more important in war than morals.

Wars feed on themselves. (…)

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No end in sight: Reflections on recent literature on the destruction of Gaza

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In: European Journal of Social Theory, 1-12

Will the destruction of Gaza, the extermination of its society end before it is completed? Not if the government of Israel, the majority of its citizens and the United States have their way. Israel will never make peace with the Palestinian people, not in Gaza, not in Jerusalem, not on the Westbank. As long there are Palestinians between the river and the sea, they will stand in Israel’s way—mission not accomplished. In fact, now, after 2 years of slaughter, peace, whatever its terms, would be nothing short of a national catastrophe for Israel, a devastating defeat. Peace would have to end the blockade of Gaza, which has by now lasted almost two decades, subsidized by four American presidents: Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump. Gazans would have to be released from their open-air prison, visitors allowed in. Pictures, many more than now, would find their way out of a ravaged landscape of irreparably damaged homes, schools, hospitals, churches, and universities. Stories would be told, of children without parents, parents without children, families without mothers or fathers, emaciated, starved, crippled in body and soul. Investigations would get under way, and not just by the corrupt, Israel-paid so-called Palestinian Authority: witnesses would be heard, memories recorded, events reconstructed, Israeli commanders responsible for the worst crimes identified, and genocide would cease to be a legal abstraction. The state of Israel would finally end up a pariah state, as Germany might have after 1945 had it not been for its American friends needing an ally-vassal against the Soviet Union and for the Korean War. “Enjoy the war, peace will be terrible,” Germans used to whisper to each other as WWII drew to a close.

No end in sight. The nightmare will go on, and will be allowed to go on, as long as there are still Palestinians that refuse to be ruled by the likes of Netanyahu. (…)

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Social Contract or Expert Rule: Capitalism, Democratic Politics, Economic Expertise, and the Battle against „Populism“

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In: Critical Review, 1-21

The German Wirtschaftswunder was not the result of economic expertise applied by Ludwig Erhard to postwar West Germany. There is no universally applicable theory-cum-practice of a “social market economy.” A capitalist economy is a political economy that requires an – always fragile – political settlement between capital and labour, one that needs to be re-negotiated on a current basis in the light of changing relations of power between the classes. To the extent that this requires expertise, it is the expertise of political practitioners, not of economists.“The economy” is not a second nature but a social battlefield..

François Godard’s book Germany, France, and Postwar Democratic Capitalims: Expert Rule – based upon his doctoral dissertation at the University of Geneva – could not be more ambitious: a history of post-1945 economic policy, indeed political-economic state-building, or democracy-building, in the two largest West European countries, Germany and France, complemented by two shadow cases, the UK and Italy, stretching out over nearly three decades. What we have here is, in short, high-grade historical institutionalism, driven by a dual program: empirically-historically, to show that West European postwar prosperity was owed, not to political compromise between capital and labor, but to states and governments applying expert knowledge on the economy to the economy; and theoretically-paradigmatically, to suggest that what counts in the world of democratic capitalism, and presumably not just there, are expert ideas, or “ideational models,” adopted and realized by government, rather than economic interests or the deals struck with and between them. (…)

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The Road Right

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In: New Left Review, issue 152: On the German election of February 2025.

A high-turnout election, sharply polarized around immigration, has brought another centrist coalition to power in Berlin. Wolfgang Streeck offers an unsparing analysis of Germany´s political situation as its hardline incoming Chancellor rams through an expansive fiscal revolution and the far-right AfD doubles its seats..

In early march 2025, as Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz laid the groundwork for a massive German military build-up, sidelining the newly elected parliament to push through fiscal reforms that would double the annual defence budget to €100 billion, the Euro-establishment was in celebratory mood. Merz’s rearmament drive was ‘a stroke of commendable boldness’ and ‘a fantastic start’, declared the Economist. ‘From Paris to Warsaw, Brussels and beyond’, Merz’s move had understandably produced ‘giddy excitement’. The Guardian hailed it as a ‘bold and necessary leap’, a ‘chance to renew mainstream politics’ and ‘unleash the radical centre’. For the FT, it represented nothing less than ‘the reawakening of Germany’; for Le Monde, a ‘major and welcome turning point’. The measures may have required certain ‘democratic gymnastics’ to bypass the freshly elected Bundestag, Le Monde conceded, but ‘the times call for boldness’, and ‘the new dynamic in Berlin should be encouraged’. For El País, ‘“Germany is back” means “Europe is back”!’ Merz’s leadership ‘points the way for the rest of Europe.’ (…)

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Overextended: The European Disunion at a Crossroads

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In: American Affairs, Volume IX, No. 1, Spring 2025, pp. 100-122.

With hindsight, one might consider Brexit, consummated after long haggling in 2020, the last, and lost, opportunity for the European Union to mend its ways and become a viable political entity, if not community.1 The departure of the United Kingdom did not register as a warning that the Union had become too internally diverse to hold together, having rapidly expanded both territorially and functionally. To the contrary, Germany under Merkel and France under Macron saw an opportunity, or pretended to see one, to push the old integration project—the “ever closer union of the peoples of Europe”—forward, now that “Euroskeptic” Britain, one of the Union’s Big Three, had left. But then, they arguably had little choice as the EU’s de facto constitution (two international treaties each hundreds of pages long) is practically unchangeable as any amendment has to be agreed by all member states, which some can do only after a referendum. One may assume that this rigidity was exactly what was desired when the treaties in their present form were signed in Maastricht in 1992 and Amsterdam in 1997, to cast in stone the logic of neoliberal political economy that was at the time considered the ultimate stage of economic wisdom. (…)

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A Matter of State: The Politics of German Anti-Anti-Semitism

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In: European Journal of Social Theory, online first, 5 December 2024.

Accessing and explicating the complexities of the collective subconscious that underlies a culture requires a hermeneutic skill and a richness of concepts and examples that is not at my disposal. I have nothing to add to Heidrun Friese’s insightful psycho-analysis of the Tätervolk that wants to draw a Schlussstrich by insisting that it doesn’t want to draw a Schlussstrich, offering reparation, Wiedergutmachung, for what cannot be repaired, hoping to be forgiven the unforgivable by declaring it unforgivable. I will instead focus on a simpler subject, one that lends itself, I hope, to be treated with the less sophisticated toolkit of the political scientist: not the depths of culture but the heights of politics, of government, of state, in particular the contingencies and constraints faced by a German state which had chosen to be the successor state of the Drittes Reich, in its dual relationship with its international context and its domestic society. (…)

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The Transformation of German Politics

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Comments by Molly O’Neal and Wolfgang Streeck, moderated by Anatol Lieven.

Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, September 25, 2024.

The latest state election results in eastern Germany mark a tectonic shift in Germany’s political configuration. The surge in support for the rightwing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the even more striking rise from nowhere of the leftwing Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) reflect deepening public dissatisfaction with levels of immigration, support for Ukraine, and the state of the economy. According to polls across Germany, support for the parties of the existing governing coalition is sinking fast. If this pattern is sustained, the coming national elections may lead to radical changes in key German policies. (…)

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Notes on the Political Economy of War

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In: Review of Keynesian Economics, 12(3), 293–307.

Written in an essayistic style, this paper explores some of the facets of the complex dynamics of modern warfare, probing the dynamic nature of conflicts; the role of technology and technological progress – the means of destruction as distinguished from the means of production – in modern war; the role of the United States in the globalization of warfare; asymmetric war between civilization and barbarism; and new distinctions between good and bad war, together with new concepts of heroism and mercenaryism. The paper also touches on the socio-cultural impacts of war, including its potential to foster unity or exacerbate divisions within societies.

Wars are about killing and getting killed. This makes them passionate affairs, bordering on the metaphysical. When it comes to combat on the ground, there are no technocratic wars, clean and cool, conducted on the battlefield with the Hague Land Warfare Convention in hand. If the choice is between committing a war crime and dying, soldiers don’t think long. They also cannot but ultimately hate those who are out to kill them, which makes it easier to kill them first as a precaution. Families back home will forgive; it is better if the enemy dies than their son, husband, or father. Prosecution of soldiers by their country for war crimes is rare; even rarer is conviction, morale being more important in war than morals. (…)

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