Critical Encounters. Wolfgang Streeck
historical picture what many of us knew only in a much more fragmented way about neoliberalism as a social and political movement dating from the first half of the twentieth century. Indefatigably fighting the nation-state as a potential stronghold of democratic socialism, with the inevitable distortions it was prone to inflict on free markets, in the 1990s it finally prevailed, at least temporarily, over its last remaining opponents. Of particular interest to me was what I found there about the European Union and its ambivalent status in neoliberal politics as a regional experiment in anti-nationalism and anti-statism on the one hand and a potential breeding ground of supranationalism and multinational state-formation on the other – an ambivalence that was settled with the neoliberal turn of the EU in the 1990s. Having read the book, I was able to see the extensive specialist literature on ‘European integration’, to which I had earlier contributed, with different eyes – wondering how professional social scientists can be as forgetful as they sometimes are about the politics of what they so painstakingly analyse and ‘theorize’. Similarly eye-opening, if in a different way, I found reviewing Jürgen Habermas’s essay on ‘technovcracy’. In grappling with it I realized more clearly than ever before how thin democracy becomes, as a concept, if taken out of its historical context – here that of globalized capitalism – and in particular if the capitalist economy is conceived as an economic system governed by economic laws, rather than as a transgressive social structure of power and privilege from which society and social life need to be protected.
What I agree is controversial – and I have more than once been guilty of it – is using, or perhaps abusing, a book review as an opportunity to say something that one believes needs to be said although its connection to the book being reviewed is no more than tenuous. My article on Martin Sandbu’s fine book on ‘the future of the euro and the politics of debt’ in Europe can probably serve as a case in point. That the largest part of my review essay is about the immigration policy of the Merkel government may be justified, and is so justified in the text, as illustrating how, if push comes to shove, the domestic politics of Germany as the hegemonic member state of the European Union, driven by national political needs and interests, may hit the other member states unprepared and wreak havoc on the Union as a whole. As Sandbu’s main point is that the euro could be rescued by member states emancipating themselves from the EU centre – meaning Germany – and acting more independently on their own, I wanted to demonstrate by recounting the 2015 open borders episode how unlikely it was that this would ever be possible under the existing European Union regime.*
Another explanation, and perhaps apology, may be due for my discussion of the books on the German economy by Werner Plumpe, David Audretsch and Erik Lehmann, and Franz-Josef Meiers. Apart from the fact that I wholeheartedly disagree with some of the authors’ main points, I thought it necessary to suggest a very different approach to German economic exceptionalism: one that takes into account not just the longer-term history of Germany as a late industrializer and an over-industrialized national economy, but also as a thoroughly defeated would-be empire after 1945. The advantage I see in my approach is that it avoids blaming the sometimes admittedly strange – from an Anglo-American viewpoint – obsessions of German economic policy with avoiding debt and balancing budgets in the manner of the ‘Swabian housewife’ on a nationally specific lack of economic savvy and a deplorable inability to get one’s own interests right. (It also renders unnecessary accounting for the superior performance of German industry under the euro by ‘nationalist’ German industrial unions sacrificing the interests of their members to the national goal of a high export surplus.) To make this point, I felt I needed to venture into a longish exposition especially on the relationship between social structures and economic ‘competitiveness’, emphasizing the dramatic ‘modernization’ of the (West) German way of life as a result of the defeat, the occupation, and in particular the demographic revolution in the Western part of the country caused by the expulsion of millions of Germans from what then became parts of the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
I leave it to readers to decide whether and to what extent the fifteen reviews collected in this book are more than accidentally related to each other and what general themes, if any, keep the volume together. That different people might find different commonalities or, as the case may be, incompatibilities does not necessarily pose a problem for someone like me who habitually hesitates to sacrifice empirical variety for theoretical unity, preferring not to lose contact with the multiple facets of an ontologically incoherent social reality. The grouping of the book’s fifteen essays in three categories, ‘Capitalism’, ‘Democracy’ and ‘Ideas’, is not entirely systematic and nothing particular should be read into it. Other arrangements are equally conceivable but would be equally arbitrary. Whatever thematic clusters might be identified, they would always overlap. There is, for example, a sustained interest across the chapters in the political economy and the ideational foundations of neoliberalism; in the functioning of the European Union, in particular the European Monetary Union, and its effects on European societies, their states and the relations between them; in the impact of a capitalist economy on democratic politics and vice versa; and, not to forget, in the peculiar characteristics and idiosyncrasies of the German economy and the resulting politics of Germany in Europe and the European Union.
Appended to the book are six of the monthly Letters from Europe I have written for the online Spanish journal El Salto. The letters comment on current events around the European Union, small and large. Included are those from December 2019 to May 2020, the reason being that quite a few of the chapters in this book deal with the politics of ‘Europe’, which are changing at a tremendous rate. Until the book world has caught up with the EU’s extraordinary and deepening crisis, one is left with such commentary-on-the-move. Nothing about the EU response to the pandemic will come as a surprise to readers of my scholarly work and political comment on the ‘European project’. The way it came about, however, is extraordinary and deserves to be recalled so that we can measure the follies of the past against what happened later.
All things considered, then, Critical Encounters is a somewhat mixed bag and certainly not a ‘theory’ of anything. No need to read it in one piece, from cover to cover. But these sporadic explorations of not yet systematically related subjects may perhaps prepare the ground for something more ambitious in the future.
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* That there might be a parallel here would have been more difficult to observe working in German, where Spezialisierung exists for specialization but speciation is referred to as Artenbildung.
* A similar intention is behind my review, written in part tongue-in-cheek, of the book by Johannes Becker and Clemens Fuest which culminates in ‘a pragmatic proposal to solve the euro crisis’. To me the book represents a distinct category of work on the euro by mainstream German economists – a category in which it stands out for its theoretical precision and empirical perceptiveness. While its authors are fully aware of the deep institutional flaws of the euro under the Maastricht Treaty, they stop short of saying that its crisis cannot be solved as long as the euro remains a single currency for differently organized national economies politically governed by still sovereign nation-states. Rather than drawing the lessons of their analysis, however, they limit themselves to proposing ‘reforms’ which, as things stand, and as they must know, will never become reality. In part this may be due to a politically naïve optimism inherent in an economics-trained worldview, with its underlying assumption that what is ‘rational’ (as identified unambiguously by economic ‘science’) must also be possible. On a less heroic note, it may reflect a quite realistic fear of being identified and outcast by colleagues, politics, the press and relevant funding agencies as ‘anti-European’, in a country whose prosperity has increasingly come to depend on the common European currency. Being seen as ‘anti-European’ in Germany brings with it unpleasant consequences – so much so that when it comes to ‘solving the euro crisis’, advisors asked for advice may find it advisable to suggest the impossible and leave it to the politicians to discover that it cannot be done; which has the additional advantage that the refusal of the crisis to go away can be blamed