I have just read an interesting article on neoliberalism in Europe that
calls for restoring or regaining democratic debate at the national
level in European countries. I will cite paragraphs from the article,
written by William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi, which came out today in
Social Europe:
"Everything You Know About Neoliberalism Is Wrong." Although I do not like the title of the article, I like the text.
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| Thomas Fazi |
"Even though neoliberalism
as an ideology springs from a desire to curtail the state’s role, neoliberalism
as a political-economic reality has produced increasingly powerful, interventionist and ever-reaching – even authoritarian – state apparatuses.
The process of neoliberalisation has entailed extensive and permanent
state intervention, including: the liberalisation of goods and capital
markets; the privatisation of resources and social services; the
deregulation of business, and financial markets in particular; the
reduction of workers’ rights (first and foremost, the right to
collective bargaining) and more in general the repression of labour
activism; the lowering of taxes on wealth and capital, at the expense of
the middle and working classes; the slashing of social programmes, and
so on. These policies were systemically pursued throughout the West (and
imposed on developing countries) with unprecedented determination, and
with the support of all the major international institutions and
political parties.
(...) Conventional wisdom holds that globalisation and the
internationalisation of finance have ended the era of nation states and
their capacity to pursue policies not in accord with the diktats of
global capital. But does the evidence support the assertion that
national sovereignty has truly reached the end of its days? (...)
More in general, as we explain in our new book
Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post- Neoliberal World,
globalisation, even in its neoliberal form, was (is) not the result of
some intrinsic capitalist or technology-driven dynamic that inevitably
entails a reduction of state power, as is often claimed. On the
contrary, it was (is) a process that was (is) actively shaped and
promoted by states. All the elements that we associate with neoliberal
globalisation – delocalisation, deindustrialisation, the free movement
of goods and capital, etc. – were (are), in most cases, the result of
choices made by governments.
(...) [there was] a deliberate and conscious limitation of state
sovereign rights by national elites, through a process known as
depoliticisation.
The various policies adopted by Western governments to this end
include: (i) reducing the power of parliaments vis-à-vis that of the
executive and making the former increasingly less representative (for
instance by moving from proportional parliamentary systems to
majoritarian ones); (ii) making central banks formally independent of
governments; (iii) adopting ‘inflation targeting’ – an approach which
stresses low inflation as the primary objective of monetary policy, to
the exclusion of other policy objectives, such as full employment – as
the dominant approach to central bank policymaking; (iv) adopting
rules-bound policies – on public spending, debt as a proportion of GDP,
competition, etc. – thereby limiting what politicians can do at the
behest of their electorates; (v) subordinating spending departments to
treasury control; (vi) re-adopting fixed exchange rates systems, such as
the euro, which severely limit the ability of governments to exercise
control over economic policy; (vii) limiting the capacity of governments
to regulate in the public interest, by means of so-called ISDS
(investor-state dispute settlement) mechanisms, nowadays included in
most bilateral investment treaties (of which there are more than 4,000
in operation) and regional trade agreements (such as the FTAA and TPP);
and, most importantly perhaps, (viii) surrendering national prerogatives
to supranational institutions and super-state bureaucracies such as the
EU.
(...) the creation of self-imposed ‘external constraints’ allowed national
politicians to reduce the political costs of the neoliberal transition –
which clearly involved unpopular policies – by ‘scapegoating’
institutionalised rules and ‘independent’ or international institutions,
which in turn were presented as an inevitable outcome of the new, harsh
realities of globalisation, thus insulating macroeconomic policies from
popular contestation. The war on sovereignty has been in essence a war
on democracy. This process was brought to its most extreme conclusions
in Western Europe, where the Maastricht Treaty (1992) embedded
neoliberalism into the EU’s very fabric, effectively outlawing the
‘Keynesian’ polices that had been commonplace in the previous decades.
(...) for more democratic control over politics (and particularly over the
destructive global flows unleashed by neoliberalism), which necessarily
can only be exercised at the national level, in the absence of effective
supranational mechanisms of representation. The EU is obviously no
exception: in fact, it is (correctly) seen by many as the embodiment of
technocratic rule and elite estrangement from the masses, as
demonstrated by the Brexit vote and the widespread euroscepticism
engulfing the continent. In this sense, as we argue in the book,
leftists should not see Brexit – and more in general the current crisis
of the EU and monetary union – as a cause for despair, but rather as a
unique opportunity to embrace (once again) a progressive, emancipatory
vision of national sovereignty, to reject the EU’s neoliberal
straitjacket and to implement a true democratic-socialist platform
(which would be impossible within the EU, let alone within the
eurozone). To do this, however, they must come to terms with the fact
that the sovereign state, far from being helpless, still contains the
resources for democratic control of a nation’s economy and finances –
that the struggle for national sovereignty is ultimately a struggle for
democracy. This needn’t come at the expense of European cooperation. On
the contrary, by allowing governments to maximise the well-being of
their citizens, it could and should provide the basis for a renewed
European project, based on multilateral cooperation between sovereign
states.
