In: Jürgen Kaube / Jörn Laakmann (Hg.): Das Lexikon der offenen Fragen. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart 2015, S. 106-107.
Essays and Research Papers
Brutish, nasty – and not even short: the ominous future of the eurozone
Appeared in The Guardian, August 17, 2015
Now the dust has temporarily settled over the ruins of Greece’s economy, it is worth asking if there wasn’t a brief moment when the actors had found a way to cut the eurozone crisis’s Gordian knot. At some point in July German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, appeared to have realised that his dream of a “core Europe” with a Franco-German avant-garde would vanish into thin air if Greece was allowed to remain in the economic and monetary union. Rewriting the rules of the union to accommodate the Greeks, Schäuble realised, would pull the euro southwards, and France, Italy and Spain with it – forever breaking up the European core. (Continue)
Book Chapter – Comparative-Historical Analysis: Past, Present, Future
Epilogue: Comparative-Historical Analysis: Past, Present, Future. In: James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen (Eds.), Advances in Comparative-Historical Analysis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2015, 264-288.
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Griechenlandkrise: Gefangen in der Eurozone
Debattenbeitrag für Spiegel Online, 8. Juli 2015. English translation published on Verso Books Blog.
Es gibt noch Fortschritt in Europa. Als der damalige griechische Ministerpräsident Georgios Papandreou 2011 ein Referendum über die Austeritätswünsche seiner europäischen Kollegen abhalten wollte, wurde er von diesen kurzerhand abgesetzt.
Als Nachfolger entsandten Brüssel und Berlin einen gewissen Loukas Papademos, Vertrauensmann der internationalen Finanzindustrie, der Anfang der Nullerjahre als griechischer Zentralbankchef mithalf, sein Land mit Hilfe von Goldman Sachs Euro-würdig zu rechnen. So etwas ging diesmal nicht – dank eben jener Restbestände nationaler Demokratie, die die deutschen Europhilen zugunsten einer zukünftigen „europäischen Demokratie“ suspendieren wollen. Weiterlesen
The strikes sweeping Germany are here to stay
Appeared in The Guardian, May 22, 2015
German strikes once seemed like German jokes: a contradiction in terms. But no more: this year, Europe’s largest economy is on course to set a new record for industrial action, with everyone from train drivers, kindergarten and nursery teachers and post office workers staging walkouts recently. The strike wave is more than a conjunctural blip: it is another facet of the inexorable disintegration of what used to be the “German model”. Weiterlesen
German Hegemony: Unintended and Unwanted
Appeared, in an abbreviated version, in Le Monde diplomatique, May 2015. Italian translation appeared in il Mulino 4/2015 (PDF here).
Germany’s new European hegemony is a product of European Monetary Union in combination with the crisis of 2008. It was not Germany, however, which had wanted the Euro. Its export industries had since the 1970s lived comfortably with repeated devaluations of the currencies of Germany’s European trading partners, in response to which much of German manufacturing moved out of price-sensitive into quality-competitive markets. It was above all France which sought a common European currency, to end the felt humiliation of having to devalue the Franc against the Mark and, after 1989, to bind united Germany firmly into a, hopefully French-led, united Europe. Weiterlesen
Kunde oder Terrorist?
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2. Juli 2014. Abgedruckt in: Frank Schirrmacher (Hg.): Technologischer Totalitarismus. Eine Debatte. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2015, S. 247-256.
Es steht nicht gut um die Demokratie. Die Wahlbeteiligung in den Ländern des Hochkapitalismus geht seit Jahrzehnten zurück; die Parteien verlieren Mitglieder und überaltern; den Gewerkschaften geht es genauso; fiskalische Konsolidierung und sklerotische öffentliche Haushalte treiben den politischen Handlungsspielraum gegen null; die „Märkte“ disziplinieren die Staaten, nicht umgekehrt; Sozial- und Wirtschaftspolitik sind längst in die Hände von Zentralbanken, Ministerräten und internationalen Organisationen übergegangen, wo sie vor dem Volkswillen sicher sind; in der Mitte der „marktkonformen Demokratie“ (Merkel) gibt es zum Neoliberalismus „keine Alternative“ (Thatcher); als Folge haben Rechts- und Protestparteien Zulauf wie nie zuvor seit dem Krieg; und was an Wahlprogrammen in Umlauf gebracht wird, wird für teures Spenden- oder Steuergeld von Marketingspezialisten hergestellt, denen egal ist, dass die Pakete, die sie verpacken, alle gleich leer sind. „Postdemokratie“, so weit das Auge reicht. Weiterlesen
Piketty, the Global Tax on Capital, and the Fiscal Crisis of the State
To appear in Labor History, 2015
There has hardly been a book recently whose strengths and weaknesses have been as extensively discussed as Thomas Piketty’s „Capital in the Twenty-First Century“ (2014).[1] I have little to add to the Marxist critique that Piketty’s concept of capital is somehow underdeveloped, or to Piketty’s quite reasonable response to it. Nor will I repeat that Piketty may be underestimating the role of trade unions and collective bargaining in the era of the Great Compression between the First World War and the mid-1970s, when unions and the institutions that sustained them began to be rolled back. Instead I begin by reminding readers of some of the book’s unquestionable merits: the fact that it focusses on the commonalities rather than the differences between the countries of advanced capitalism; its emphasis on the basically unearned nature of great wealth; the attention it rightly pays to the impact of the two world wars (with, among other things, the great upswing in trade union organization and trade union rights in the two „postwar settlements“); its rejection of the „convergence thesis“, according to which capitalism will on its own even out social and economic inequality through, among other things, competition (in fact, Piketty impressively proves the presence in capitalism of what Robert K. Merton has once called the „Matthew effect;“[2] Merton 1968); and the observation that large wealth can expect to draw a better rate of return than small savings, due to its access to more sophisticated financial advice. Weiterlesen
Heller, Schmitt and the Euro
European Law Journal, Vol. 21, No. 3, May 2015, Special Section: Hermann Heller’s Authoritarian Liberalism, pp. 285-383, here: 361-370
Abstract: Heller understood that Schmitt’s ‘authoritarian state’ was in fact the liberal state in its pure form, weak in relation to the capitalist economy but strong in fending off democratic interventions in its operation. Had he lived, Heller would not have been surprised by the close affinities between Schmittian economic authoritarianism and postwar German ordoliberalism, as mediated by a figure like Alexander Rüstow. Neoliberalism as today we know it drew heavily on ordoliberal doctrine, in particular through Friedrich von Hayek who managed to merge it with Austrian economics into a powerful ideological force to replace Keynesianism after the 1970s. Today the European Union, especially in its incorporation as monetary union, closely follows the liberal-authoritarian template as devised by Schmitt and others in the final years of the Weimar Republic. The paper shows this with reference to the five European-level institutions that today govern the European free market while protecting it from democratic interference: the Parliament, the Council, the Commission, the European Court of Justice and the European Central Bank.
Comment on Francesco Boldizzoni, „On History and Policy: Time in the Age of Neoliberalism“
Forum Debate on The Uses of History, Journal of the Philosophy of History, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2015, pp. 1-50, here pp. 33-40
The paper by Francesco Boldizzoni has appeared as MPIfG Discussion Paper 13/6. To be downloaded here.
Abstract: It is not only economics that needs to regain a sense of history but also much of social science. Like economists social scientists need to liberate themselves from a Newtonian clockwork view of the world, and from a view of social reality as an emanation and arbitrary illustration of universal laws governing social life in general. Social science needs a renewed awareness of its origins in a systematic theory of historical social development and evolution, of endogenous social dynamics, and of directionality of social and institutional change, especially in contemporary capitalism, free from historical teleology and economic determinism.
Wolfgang Streeck 