The Crisis in Europe Part I

What we are looking at is far more than an economic crisis and far more than a crisis of European integration, even if much of the analysis chooses to explore it from this perspective. While the perspective is valid in itself, it has the consequence of hiding other processes – political, cultural, sociological – that affect the crisis and, by ignoring them, we make the solution of the crisis less likely. In short, deep seated changes taking place in Europe and some of these are partly accelerated by the economic crisis, which has exposed the fragility of Western material well-being. It is in this sense that the word crisis is appropriate – social realities are increasingly out of alignment with institutions and elite thinking.

The crisis has also brought into question the reliability of both state and market as the central organising principle of Western democracy. After 1945, a great deal of trust was invested in the state as rational redistributor and allocator, as well as the ultimate source of rationality. By the late 1970s, this was being questioned and the dysfunctions of the state were to be eliminated by the market. The market, therefore, was seen as the supreme source of rationality. Note here that whereas as the state is and must be a political category, the market is understood as free of politics and is a primarily economic process, albeit culture, psychology and other factors are now recognised as forming a part of market behaviour. What this elevation of the market to paramountcy ignored, however, were and are the political implications of the shift, that this effectively amounted to abandoning politics and political inputs into the central processes of society. Democracy was thereby reduced to something narrower, almost to being a spectator with little legitimate points to make. At the same time, the functioning of the market was naturalised and to some extent sacralised. The supreme rationality of the market ruled and was above and beyond questioning; those who did raise objections were dismissed as “irrational” or as “dinosaurs” or “reactionaries”.

This supremacy of the market, together with the truth claim that market rationality would invariably produce the best answer, that these answers could be applied to any and all social problems, that markets would always return to equilibrium state became unquestionable and irrefutable propositions. One of the minor ironies of this is that it resembled Marxism-Leninism as the sole source of “truth” – all monistic systems do this – but unlike “real existing communism”, which relied on high levels of coercion, market liberalism “enforced” its legislative claims voluntarily, and it became a matter of something close to a faith or belief system. As with all monistic systems, akin to putting all one’s eggs into one basket, it became dangerously exposed to a single, overwhelming shock (cf. Taleb’s Black Swan).

Market supremacy did, however, generate a political counterpart, and this was what can be described as liberal individualism. The individual was invested with supreme, possibly sole, rationality, all interests were subordinated to economic, material or monetary factors, thereby ignoring the multiplicity of human motivations and the role of impulses like pride, the quest for power, status, aesthetics, religion (to name only a few) was simply screened out, regarded as tiresome irrelevancies.

Once the market is established as the paramount process, it then becomes important – possibly vital – to construct a discursive strategy that marginalises political activity, even while maintaining the appearance of politics and participation, as is proper in a democracy. This may be regarded as a shadow or penumbra of the market, a clear but fluid discursive strategy that offers the simulacrum of politics, operating in the preexisting institutional framework, but which is difficult if not impossible to interrogate. Unlike the language of Marxism-Leninism, which became dead, this liberal-market discourse remained and remains sufficiently open to be able to deal with challenges non-coercively. This may be seen as the outcome of the 1990s turn, the elaboration of a strategy that asserts that “politics is management”, or speaks of “good governance” or “benchmarking” and replaces political action with morality, a key aspect of which is to insist that the “spirit” of the process transcends all other possible readings, even while the definition of “spirit” remains in the hands of the dominant elite. It has proved to be an effective trick, because it is difficult to disprove, reverses the presumption of equal access to the truth, i.e. it is up to challenger to do this, and erodes the definition of the reality that might overturn the starting proposition. Thus alternative readings, other discourses are placed in a secondary, hierarchically inferior position and attempts to rely on, say, legal or administrative language can be set to one side. Arcadian shepherds and their semblables may be able to operate this system in a fair-minded way, but Arcadia is a very long way from contemporary Europe, hence the possibility (and reality) that arbitrariness, inconsistency and abuses of power can proliferate. The result is resentment on the part of those who do not agree with the quasi-belief system and are marginalised; and resentment is the breeding ground for polarisation, for the rise of counter-belief systems, for political hysteria and paranoia, all of which feed into extremism. Circumspice.

At the heart of the 1990s turn, the emergence of a vaguely centre-left consensus structured around liberal individualism, market freedom and the centrality of moral values (universalism, human rights, gender mainstreaming, citizenship replacing ethnicity, a democracy agenda). By this means, a morality-driven, value-centred discourse sought to create and sustain a particular concept of politics (the liberal consensus and moralisation are analysed in Chantal Mouffe’s work, notably in the book on populism edited by Francisco Panizza).

This concept can be regarded as an attempt at constructing a post-political politics, in that it sought to eliminate political conflict and preferred to resolve issues through “politics as management”, administratively or juridically. Crucially, this separated liberal democracy from the demos, because it necessarily excluded certain social strata, above all the semi-skilled working class. Those who would not or could not subscribe to the market-cum-morality concept of post-political politics – and there’s a contradiction in terms if ever there was one – were basically excluded from its remit. Although the proponents of this new order placed great emphasis on citizenship buttressed by the “empowering state”, in sociological reality, matters were different. Non-elite sectors of the demos were simply excluded from it, although they were certainly not seen as victims of social exclusion. Not surprisingly some of them turned elsewhere to find a political home – towards the extreme right and the extreme left.

Sch. Gy.