Wolfgang Streeck, Craig Calhoun, Polly Toynbee, Amitai Etzioni
Discussion Forum at the at the 27th Annual Conference of the Society for Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), at the London School of Economics, July 3, 2015
Socio-Economic Review, 2016, Vol. 14, No. 1, 163–183
Review of Martin Sandbu, Europe’s Orphan: The Future of the Euro and the Politics of Debt, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2015
Appeared in London Review of Books, Vol. 38, No. 7, March 2016, pp. 7-10
Europe is falling apart, destroyed by its most devoted fans, the Germans. In the summer of 2015, having humiliated the Greeks by forcing another reform diktat down their throats, Angela Merkel started a new game, aimed at diverting attention from the economic and political disaster monetary union had become. Abrupt changes of policy are nothing new to Merkel, who is best described as a postmodern politician with a premodern, Machiavellian contempt for both causes and people. Having made her party adopt a radically neoliberal, deregulationist anti-labour platform in 2003, she barely escaped defeat two years later at the hands of Gerhard Schroeder. When she became chancellor, she used her office and the Grand Coalition with the post-Schroeder Social Democratic Party (SPD) to purge her own party of neoliberalism and neoliberals, and social-democratise it beyond recognition. In 2011, after the nuclear accident at Fukushima, which received extensive media coverage in Germany, it took Merkel, then known as the Atomkanzlerin, no more than a few days to order the immediate closure of eight nuclear power plants and to initiate legislation to end all nuclear power generation by 2022 at the latest. This was only a few months after she had, with much political arm-twisting, got the Bundestag to repeal the nuclear phase-out passed by the Red-Green coalition in 2001, and to extend the operating licences of German nuclear plants by an average of ten years. (…) Continue
Wirtschaftswoche Online, 11. März 2016
Herr Streeck, bei unserem letzten Interview sprachen wir über die Schuldenkrise und das bevorstehende Ende des Kapitalismus als soziale Ordnung. Das war vor der so genannten Flüchtlingskrise. Gibt es da einen ursächlichen Zusammenhang?
Nicht unmittelbar. Aber der allgemeine Zusammenhang ist die Erschöpfung des kapitalistischen Wachstumsmodells mitsamt den dadurch ausgelösten globalen Verwerfungen. In Deutschland zeigt sich diese Erschöpfung noch nicht, aber im gesamten Mittelmeerraum, den Vereinigten Staaten und dem Krisenbogen von Westafrika über die arabischen Länder bis nach Pakistan, Teile von Indien, in anderer Form auch Japan. Daran ändern auch die verzweifelten Bemühungen der Zentralbanken nichts, die Inflation und das Wachstum anzutreiben. Es bewegt sich nichts. Das Geld, das in Europa, Japan und den USA neu geschaffen wird, bleibt oben hängen, im Finanzsektor. Wie die Amerikaner sich fühlen, kann man daran sehen, wen sie in den Vorwahlen wählen. (Weiterlesen auf wiwo.de)
Erschienen auf LeMonde.fr. Gekürzte Fassung in Le Monde, 4. März 2016, Seite 13. Deutsche Originalfassung hier.
Le projet d’un Etat-providence européen a échoué depuis longtemps. L’Etat-providence existe encore en Europe, mais seulement au pluriel, à l’échelon national et en tant qu’acquis démocratique national. Son remplacement ou même son simple accompagnement par une « dimension sociale » conférée au marché unique, dont Jacques Delors s’était fait l’avocat dans les années 1990, est resté un vœu pieux. (…)
Jacobin online, February 25, 2016
Interview with Jonah Birch and George Souvlis
You’ve argued in recent years that the trajectory of “democratic capitalism” in Europe has increasingly been in the direction of a social and economic model that prioritizes the imperatives of the market and of business profitability over the requirements of democratic equality and social solidarity. Can you talk a little about how that process has unfolded, and how the eurozone crisis that broke out after 2008 fits into this picture?
Democracy under capitalism is democracy to the extent that it corrects the outcomes of markets in an egalitarian direction. Economic liberalization disconnects democracy from the economy — makes it run dry, as it were. The result is what is called post-democracy: democratic politics as a mass spectacle, as part of the entertainment industry. One way democracy is decoupled from the economy is by a transfer of economic policy out of the hands of national parliaments and governments to “independent” institutions such as central banks, summit meetings like the European Council, and international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The euro, as instituted by the Maastricht Treaty, has in this way de-democratized (although by no means depoliticized) monetary and economic policy-making in its member states. Substantively, it has imposed a hard-currency policy on the whole of Euroland, one under which some countries, like Germany, can prosper while many others cannot. Weiterlesen
Erschienen in Industrielle Beziehungen, 23 (1), 47-60
Der Aufsatz betrachtet das Lebenswerk von Walther Müller-Jentsch als wichtigsten deutschen Forscher der letzten Jahrzehnte über kollektive Arbeitsbeziehungen und das „deutsche Modell“ der Sozialpartnerschaft. Im Mittelpunkt steht das von Müller-Jentsch entwickelte Konzept der „Konfliktpartnerschaft“ als Beschreibung des derzeitigen Stands der industriellen Beziehungen in Deutschland vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Geschichte seit Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts.
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Mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Rainer Hampp Verlags.
Interview appeared at Near Futures Online, Issue No. 1, March 2016
Diskussion mit Sahra Wagenknecht, Universität zu Köln, 26. Januar 2016
Moderation: Karl-Heinz Heinemann
Interview for Liberal Culture, January 12, 2016. Polish version here.
Has Chancellor Merkel made a mistake when she opened the door for migrants without first consulting it with other European countries? Can this decision cost her the role of the European leader?
Like all other European leaders Merkel thinks first and foremost about her own domestic politics. Most of the migrants that had become stuck in the central station of Budapest wanted to go to Germany. The German public had been outraged about the French and the British leaving thousands of migrants stranded in Calais, at the entrance of the Channel tunnel. After Merkel had invited the Budapest migrants to Germany, perhaps also to clear the way for a coalition with the Greens in two years, it turned out there were millions more that wanted to come. At this point the German government began to look for a “European solution”. No European government consults with other European governments when it sees its own vital political interests at stake. Weiterlesen
Appeared in ROAR Magazine, December 23, 2015
Professor Streeck, to begin with, could you briefly explain why you believe that capitalism and democracy are in conflict with one another? Is this tension an inherent one, or do you consider it to be a more recent phenomenon?
Democracy: one person, one vote; capitalism: one dollar, one vote. The order of equality vs. the order of egoism (John Dunn). Capitalists as a permanent minority in a majoritarian democratic polity — and democracy ending “at the factory gates”. Social justice vs. the justice of markets. It’s an old story with unending permutations, discussed again and again since the nineteenth century, by legions of scholars and political leaders. Weiterlesen
Wolfgang Streeck 