Just before Christmas, Joschka Fischer - a man who incarnates the
institutionalization of 1968 - published an article on the Project
Syndicate website entitled "Europe's Make-or-Break Year." At stake, for
him, was the failed recovery, the divisive policy of austerity, the rise
of economic nationalism. The banks, in short. "When the turmoil comes,"
he wrote, "it is likely to be triggered -- as with the euro crisis -- by
Greece." How ironic. The former leftist who took Germany to war in
Kosovo in the 1990s did not say a word about the military situation.
There is a New Cold War in the Ukraine, an extremely hot civil war in
Syria, a branch of Al Qaeda alive and well in Yemen and a tremendous
global insurgency spilling out of Iraq. Not just recession and
unemployment, but fear and racism are stalking Europe. In my view, the
assassinations that just happened in France will mark the turning point
of the crisis that began in 2008. The last "liberal" plank - the EU -
just fell out of neoliberalism. We're in for a definitive change of era.
The European Union as we knew it grew out of the crisis of the 1970s,
when the Dollar Standard broke down, the new international division of
labor emerged, and the USA, having lost its war in Vietnam, could no
longer manage global hegemony on its own. The solution was to share
economic power with Europe and Japan, which were home to the two other
great currencies of the postwar era, the Deutschmark and the Yen.
"Liberalism," as understood in the old British imperial sense, signified
free trade cosmopolitanism, open borders for commodities and the
pretense of global citizenship. That was the rhetoric, I mean. After the
turmoil of global class struggle and Third World insurgency in the
Sixties, the strategic plan was to structure a tight communications
network across all sectors of the elites - corporates, financiers,
politicians, educators, scientists, religious leaders - and use it to
manage a new economic expansion. Shared economic power would be much
more difficult to criticize than raw political power coming out of
Washington. The publicly accessible archives of the Trilateral
Commission show how this was done. The Davos meetings in Switzerland
continue to express the results. The EU - which sublated the Deutschmark
into the European Single Currency - believed that it could become the
ideal type of this Brave New Economic Order.
The solution worked four about 25 years, from 1982 to 2008. After its
low point in the early 70s, the US went on to create neoliberalism's
global currency (derivatives), its global security system (the 34-nation
Coalition of the Gulf War) and its global infrastructure (the Internet).
Each of those things was necessary to manage the new just-in-time
production and distribution system that had been largely invented in
Japan. All three centers became fabulously wealthy hyperconsumption
societies, with bloated financial sectors, world-class educational
systems, robotized factories and lots of cultural veneer, especially in
Europe.
Each pole of the Triad had its exploitable periphery: Latin America for
the US; Southeast Asia and China for Japan; North Africa and much of the
former Soviet sphere for Europe. Throughout the period, the focus of
global war was sharply narrowed to the Middle East, where a system of US
client states (above all, Israel and Saudi Arabia) served to maintain
control over energy supplies while stoking the permanent war economy.
The whole thing seemed to function until the Asian Crisis of 1998, which
also swept through the former East and Latin America. But after that all
the big producer countries, including China, Brazil and Russia, set
about securing relative political and economic autonomy. This allowed
them to take full advantage of the unbelievable growth unleashed by the
new productive system. Meanwhile the came home to the neoliberal
heartland in the form of the dotcom crash of 2000 - and the US responded
in its usual way, by seizing the military pretext of 9/11 and
simultaneously inflating a new financial bubble. As for Japan and
Europe, they apparently believed they could just do nothing.
They were wrong. Since the 2008 crash and the total failure of the US
wars - a double failure worse than Vietnam - we are living through a
major crisis of capitalism, comparable to the 1970s and the 1930s. It is
a global social and ecological crisis, whose burdens are distributed
unequally, according to a regionalized and racialized class structure.
So far this crisis has had no political expression whatsoever. It has
everywhere been conceived in strictly economic terms, as a banking
crisis, and it has been treated in the most facile way imaginable, by
printing money for the banks. But the resolution of a major economic
crisis requires a change of social order. And that can't be achieved
without a political turn. Unfortunately it's now set to happen in the EU
just the same way as it happened in the US a decade ago - under the
pressure of war and racism.
We live in a planetary society with a totally integrated world market.
After decades of globalization rhetoric that sounds like a simple
statement. In reality it means we have reached the limits of capitalism
itself. There are no more "peripheries" to exploit: every periphery is
integrally part of the center. There are no more "externalities" to
production: every ton of waste comes back in its producers' faces. Above
all there are no more "foreign wars," for oil or anything else. Each new
terrorist bombing proves it.
I guess that despite himself, Joschka Fischer was right. This will be
Europe's make or break year. A neocon political turn is now imaginable
for Europe. The French socialist prime minister Manuel Valls - who's
what they call a "social-liberal" - is probably the perfect man to
launch it. It can be done in the name of Charlie Hebdo, a '68-era
satirical weekly that has often shown how the secularist left can be
just as racist as anyone.
In the early 1990s, as Western capitalism was being hailed triumphant,
Michel Serres opened his book "The Natural Contract" with the analysis
of a Goya painting showing two combatants sinking into quicksand. "Let's
make a wager," he wrote. "You put your stakes on the right; we've bet on
the left. The fight's outcome is in doubt simply because there are two
combatants, and once one of them wins there will be no more uncertainty.
But we can identify a third position, outside their squabble: the marsh
into which the struggle is sinking."
A real political turn - and not just a blind man's walk into
authoritarianism - would have to begin with a full recognition of the
quagmire of the present.
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