Warum der Euro Europa spaltet statt es zu einigen

Veröffentlicht von

Leviathan, Jg. 43 (2015), Heft 3, 365-386 (Online-Zugriff hier)

Basierend auf einem Vortrag in der Reihe „Distinguished Lectures in the Social Sciences“  am Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, 21. April 2015

Zu den besonders ausführlich behandelten Themen im zweiten Kapitel von Max Webers monumentalem Werk Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, überschrieben “Soziologische Grundkategorien des Wirtschaftens“ (1956 [1920]), gehört das Geld. Für den Soziologen Weber wird Geld zu Geld kraft einer „Verbandsordnung“ (ibid., 54), auch „Geldordnung“ (ibid., 125) oder „Geldverfassung“ (ibid., 145), die unter modernen Bedingungen, so Weber im Anschluss an Knapps Staatliche Theorie des Geldes (1905), nur eine von einem Staat monopolisierte sein könne (ibid., 125). Geld ist eine in einem Herrschaftsverband – ein weiterer zentraler Weberscher Begriff – ein- und durchgesetzte politisch-ökonomische Institution, die wie alle Institutionen bestimmte Interessen privilegiert und andere benachteiligt. Dies macht es zum Gegenstand gesellschaftlichen „Kampfes“ bzw., als wirtschaftliche Institution, zu einer Ressource in dem, was Weber als „Marktkampf“ bezeichnet. (…)

Vortrag und Diskussion als Video hier.

English version

New Left Review, Vol. 95, September-October 2015, pp. 5-26 (access here)

Version française

Contretemps, N° 31, Novembre 2016 (Lire la suite)

Monetary Disunion: The Domestic Politics of Euroland

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With Lea Elsässer, Journal of European Public Policy, 2015

Abstract: Regional disparities within the European Union have always been perceived as an impediment to monetary integration. Discussions on a joint currency were linked to compensatory payments in the form of regional policy. Structural assistance increased sharply at the end of the 1980s. Later, however, it had to be shared with the new member states in the East. Moreover, the low-interest credit that Southern European Monetary Union members enjoyed as a result of interest rate convergence is no longer available. We predict that considerable amounts of financial aid will have to be provided in the future by rich to poor member countries, if only to prevent a further increase in economic disparities. We also expect ongoing distributional conflict between payer and recipient countries far beyond current rescue packages. We illustrate the dimension of the conflict by comparing income gaps and relative population size between the centre and periphery in Europe and in two nation-states with high regional disparities, Germany and Italy.

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(Previously published as Discussion Paper 14/17, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, October 2014 Download [PDF])

Brutish, nasty – and not even short: the ominous future of the eurozone

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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)

Griechenlandkrise: Gefangen in der Eurozone

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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

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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 →

„Barely disguised oligarchies“

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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 →

German Hegemony: Unintended and Unwanted

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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 →