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
Appeared, in Italian, in L’Eco di Bergamo, May 15, 2015
How do you interpret the current economic-financial crisis in part of the western world?
It is a return to the normal condition of capitalism: instability, uncertainty, unpredictability, a permanent conflict between social justice and the justice of the market. The return began in the 1970s with the breakdown of the postwar order. The three decades after the war were an exceptional period. Since then, a crisis sequence has begun brought inflation, public debt, private debt, secular stagnation and anarchic money production. The financial crisis of 2008 was the high point up now. More such high points are coming. Weiterlesen
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
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
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.
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.
Discussion Paper 15/1, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, February 2015
Abstract: The rise of the consolidation state follows the displacement of the classical tax state, or Steuerstaat, by what I have called the debt state, a process that began in the 1980s in all rich capitalist democracies. Consolidation is the contemporary response to the “fiscal crisis of the state” envisaged as early as the late 1960s, when postwar growth had come to an end. Both the long-term increase in public debt and the current global attempts to bring it under control were intertwined with the “financialization” of advanced capitalism and its complex functions and dysfunctions. The ongoing shift towards a consolidation state involves a deep rebuilding of the political institutions of postwar democratic capitalism and its international order. This is the case in particular in Europe where consolidation coincides with an unprecedented increase in the scale of political rule under European Monetary Union and with the transformation of the latter into an asymmetric fiscal stabilization regime. The paper focuses on the developing structure of the new consolidation regime and its consequences for the relationship between capitalism and democracy.
Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft, Vol. 9 (2015), No. 1-2, 49-60
There is good news and bad news — and as sometimes, good news inside the bad. The bad news is that the crisis of Western-liberal democracy has apparently grown to a point where it can no longer be ignored by mainstream political science — while the good news is that it is now actually being noticed there. What is more, it is beginning to make its leading representatives to leave behind institutionalism pure and simple and move forward (or in fact back?) to a political economy perspective on democracy that deserves its name. Democracy and capitalism is now the subject, if not of choice then of necessity. Gone are the good times, or so it seems, when Glasperlen issues as harmless and comfortable as first-past-the-post vs. proportional representation, Westminster vs. veto point, consociational vs. majoritarian democracy, parliamentary vs. presidential rule, unitary vs. federal government, monocameralism vs. bicameralism etc. could rule supreme in the discipline’s official journals. Back to the basics! — so I read the message of Merkel’s remarkable essay (Merkel 2014) in which he challenges nothing less than the foundational assumption of postwar political science that capitalism and democracy are birds of a feather: that just as capitalism needs as well as supports democracy, democracy needs as well as supports capitalism, the two flocking together in ever-lasting pre-established harmony. (…)
Erschienen in leicht gekürzter Fassung am 5. Feburar 2015 in der Wochenzeitung Die Zeit. Französische Übersetzung in Le Monde vom 3. März, englische Übersetzung im Verso Books Blog und niederländische Übersetzung im Blog des Leesmagazijn Verlags.
Wenn alles gutgeht, ist das, was sich dieser Tage vor unser aller Augen abspielt, der Anfang vom Ende der Europäischen Währungsunion. „Scheitert der Euro, so scheitert Europa“, so die Kanzlerin, als es darum ging, den Wählern einen dieser unsäglichen „Rettungsschirme“ für die europäischen Banken zu verkaufen. Umgekehrt wird nun ein Schuh daraus. Der Euro ist dabei, Europa zu zerstören. Scheitert der Euro – aber das muss rasch geschehen! – könnte es sein, dass Europa am Ende doch nicht scheitert. Sicher freilich ist das nicht; zu tief sind die Wunden, die die Währungsunion schon geschlagen hat. Weiterlesen
Klassekampen, Oslo, January 15, 2015 (in Norwegian)
As I understand it one of the main arguments in your book, „Gekaufte Zeit“, is that we now experience a rise of a new form of capitalism in the western world. A form of capitalism which evades democratic procedures. What is the main problem with western democracies? And is it possible to restore the balance between democracy and capitalism?
The so-called postwar settlement in Western capitalist democracies involved a state capable of correcting the distributional outcomes of markets. In exchange for its reinstatement after the disasters of the first half of the century, capitalism had to produce public benefits such as full employment, a growing welfare state, social security, steadily rising incomes, and a gradual reduction of inequality. For several decades now, Western capitalist economies have no longer been able to deliver on these promises. Growth is declining, inequality increasing, public and private debt is rising, so are economic risks, and crises are becoming more severe and disruptive. The new doctrine of economic policy is higher rewards for the winners and greater punishments for the losers – redistribution from bottom to top – rather than growth by stabilizing and expanding aggregate demand through steady increases in mass incomes: from Keynesianism to neoliberalism. For this purpose economic decision-making has to be taken away from democratically elected parliaments and accountable governments, to be relocated in international organizations and institutions as well as in “independent” central banks. As I said, these are trends that have been going on for decades. I cannot see how they could easily be reversed in the near future. Weiterlesen
Wolfgang Streeck 