http://mondediplo.com/2017/03/02brexit
(Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, March 2017)
Brexit, Trump’s win, Europe’s populist movements: the West is protesting, from the left and the right, against the neoliberal, globalist orthodoxies of the past 40 years.
by Perry Anderson
(Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, March 2017)
Brexit, Trump’s win, Europe’s populist movements: the West is protesting, from the left and the right, against the neoliberal, globalist orthodoxies of the past 40 years.
by Perry Anderson
The term ‘anti-systemic
movements’ was commonly used 25 years ago (1) to characterise forces on the left
in revolt against capitalism. Today, it has not lost relevance in the West,
but its meaning has changed. The movements of revolt that have multiplied over
the past decade no longer rebel against capitalism, but neoliberalism —
deregulated financial flows, privatised services and escalating social
inequality, that specific variant of the reign of capital set in place in Europe
and America since the 1980s. The resultant economic and political order has
been accepted all but indistinguishably by governments of the centre-right and
centre-left, in accordance with the central tenet of la
pensée unique, Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that ‘there is no
alternative’. Two kinds of movement are now arrayed against this system; the
established order stigmatises them, whether from the right or left, as the
menace of populism.
It is not by chance that
these movements first arose in Europe rather than the US. Sixty years after the
Treaty of Rome, the reason is clear. The common market of 1957,
an outgrowth of the coal and steel community of the Schuman Plan — designed
both to prevent any reversion to a century of Franco-German hostilities and to
consolidate post-war economic growth in western Europe — was the product of a
period of full employment and rising popular incomes, the entrenchment of
representative democracy and development of welfare systems. Its commercial
arrangements impinged very little on the sovereignty of the nation states
composing it, which were strengthened rather than weakened. Budgets and
exchange rates were determined domestically, by parliaments accountable to
national electorates, in which politically contrasting policies
were vigorously debated. Attempts by the Commission in Brussels to
aggrandise itself were famously rebuffed by Paris. Not only France under Charles
de Gaulle but, in its own more muted fashion, West Germany under Konrad
Adenauer, pursued foreign policies independent of the US and capable of defying
it.
The end of the trente
glorieuses brought a major change in this construction. From the mid-1970s,
the advanced capitalist world entered a long downturn as analysed by
the American historian Robert Brenner (2): lower growth rates and slower
increases in productivity, decade by decade, less employment and greater
inequality, punctuated by sharp recessions. From the 1980s, starting in the
UK and US, and gradually spreading to Europe, policy directions were reversed:
welfare systems were cut back, public industries and services were
privatised, and financial markets deregulated. Neoliberalism had arrived. In
Europe, this came over time to take a uniquely rigid institutional
form: the number of member states in what became the European Union
multiplied more than fourfold, incorporating a vast low-wage zone in the
east.
Draconian
austerity
From monetary union (1990) to
the Stability Pact (1997), then the Single Market Act (2011), the powers of
national parliaments were voided in a supranational structure
of bureaucratic authority shielded from popular will, just as the
ultraliberal economist Friedrich Hayek had prophesied. With this machinery in
place, draconian austerity could be imposed on helpless electorates, under
the joint direction of the Commission and a reunified Germany, now the most
powerful state in the union, where leading thinkers candidly announce its
vocation as continental hegemon. Externally, over the same period, the EU and
its members ceased to play any significant role in the world at
variance with US directives, becoming the advance guard of neo-cold war
policies towards Russia set by the US and paid for by Europe.
So it is no surprise that the
ever more oligarchic cast of the EU, defying popular will in successive
referendums and embedding budgetary diktats in constitutional law,
should have generated so many movements of protest against it. What is the
landscape of these forces? In the pre-enlargement core of the EU, the western
Europe of the cold war era (the topography of eastern Europe is so
different that it can be set aside for present purposes), movements of the right
dominate opposition to the system in France (Front National), the
Netherlands (Party for Freedom, PVV), Austria (Freedom Party of Austria), Sweden
(Sweden Democrats), Denmark (Danish People’s Party), Finland (True Finns),
Germany (Alternative for Germany, AfD) and Britain (UKIP).
In Spain, Greece and Ireland,
movements of the left have predominated: Podemos, Syriza and Sinn Fein.
Uniquely, Italy has both a strong anti-systemic movement of the right in
the Lega, and a still larger one across the left/right divide in the Five Star
Movement (M5S); its extra-parliamentary rhetoric on taxes and immigration puts
it to the right, but it is put on the left by its parliamentary record of
consistent opposition to the neoliberal measures of Matteo Renzi’s government
(particularly on education and deregulation of the labour market), and its
central role in defeating Renzi’s bid to weaken Italy’s democratic constitution
(3). To this can be added Momentum, which emerged in Britain behind Jeremy
Corbyn’s unexpected election as Labour Party leader. All the movements of the
right except the AfD predate the crash of 2008; some have histories going
back to the 1970s or earlier. Syriza took off, and M5S, Podemos and
Momentum were born, as direct results of the global financial
crisis.
The central fact is the
greater overall weight of movements of the right over those of the left, both in
the number of countries where they have the upper hand and in
voting strength. Both are reactions to the structure of the neoliberal
system, which finds its starkest, most concentrated expression in today’s EU,
with its order founded on the reduction and privatisation of public
services; the abrogation of democratic control and representation; and
deregulation of the factors of production. All three are present
at national level in Europe, as elsewhere, but they are of a higher degree
of intensity at EU level, as the torture of Greece, trampling of referendums and
scale of human trafficking attest. In the political arena, they are the
overriding issues of popular concern, driving protests against the system over
austerity, sovereignty and immigration. Anti-systemic movements are
differentiated by the weight they attach to each — to which colour in the
neoliberal palette they direct most hostility.
Movements of the right
predominate over those of the left because from early on they made the
immigration issue their own, playing on xenophobic and racist reactions to
gain widespread support among the most vulnerable sectors of the
population. With the exception of the movements in the Netherlands and Germany,
which believe in economic liberalism, this is typically linked (in France,
Denmark, Sweden and Finland) not to denunciation but to defence of the welfare
state; it is claimed the arrival of immigrants undermines this. But it
would be wrong to attribute all their advantage to this card; in important
examples — the Front National (FN) in France is the most significant —
they have an edge on other fronts too.
Monetary union is the most
obvious example. The single currency and central bank, designed at Maastricht,
have made the imposition of austerity and denial of popular sovereignty
into a single system. Movements of the left may attack these as vehemently as
any movement of the right, if not more so. But the solutions they propose are
less radical. On the right, the FN and the Lega have clear remedies to the
strains of the single currency and immigration: exit the euro and stop the
influx. On the left, with isolated exceptions, no such unambiguous demands
have ever been made. At best, the substitutes are technical adjustments to the
single currency, too complicated to have much popular purchase, and vague,
embarrassed allusions to quotas; neither is as readily intelligible to voters as
the straightforward propositions of the right.
Challenge of growing
migration
Immigration and monetary
union create special difficulties for the left for historical reasons. The
Treaty of Rome was founded on the promise of free movement of
capital, commodities and labour within a common European market. As long as
the European Community was confined to the countries of western Europe, the
factors of production where mobility mattered most were capital and
commodities: migration across borders within the community was generally quite
modest. But by the late 1960s, immigrant labour from former African, Asian
and Caribbean colonies, and semi-colonial regions of the former Ottoman empire,
was already significant in numbers. EU enlargement to eastern Europe then
sharply increased intra-union migration. Finally, neo-imperial adventures in
former Mediterranean colonies — the military blitz on Libya and
proxy fanning of civil war in Syria — have driven large waves of refugees
into Europe, along with retaliatory terror by militants from a region where the
West remains camped as overlord, with its bases, bombers and special
forces.
All of this has kindled
xenophobia: anti-systemic movements of the right have fed on it, and movements
of the left have fought it, loyal to the cause of a
humane internationalism. The same underlying attachments have led most of
the left to resist any thought of ending monetary union, as a regression to a
nationalism responsible for Europe’s past catastrophes. The ideal of
European unity remains for them a cardinal value. But the present Europe of
neoliberal integration is more coherent than any of the hesitant
alternatives they have so far proposed. Austerity, oligarchy and factor mobility
form an interconnected system. Factor mobility cannot be separated from
oligarchy: historically, no European electorate was ever consulted about
the arrival or scale of foreign labour; this always occurred behind its back.
The negation of democracy, which became the structure of the EU, excluded
from the start any say in the composition of its population. The rejection of
this Europe by movements of the right is politically more consistent than
rejection by the left, another reason for the right’s
advantage.
Record levels of voter
discontent
The arrival of M5S, Syriza,
Podemos and the AfD marked a jump in popular discontent in Europe. Polls now
post record levels of voter disaffection with the EU. But, right or left,
the electoral weight of anti-systemic movements remains limited. In the last
European elections, the three most successful results for the right — UKIP, the
FN and the Danish People’s Party — were around 25% of the vote. In national
elections, the average figure across western Europe for all such right and left
forces combined is about 15%. That percentage of the electorate poses
little threat to the system; 25% can represent a headache, but the ‘populist
danger’ of media alarm remains to date very modest. The only cases where an
anti-systemic movement has come to power, or looked as if it could do so, are
those where a deliberate mis-apportioning of seats, through an
electoral premium designed to favour the establishment, backfired, or
risked doing so, as in Greece or Italy.
In reality, there is a wide
gap between the degree of popular disillusion with today’s neoliberal EU — by
last summer, majorities in France and Spain expressed their aversion to it,
and even in Germany, barely half of those polled had a positive opinion of it —
and the extent of support for forces declaring against it. Indignation or
disgust at what the EU has become is common, but for some time the
fundamental determinant of European voting patterns has been, and remains, fear.
The socio-economic status quo is widely detested. But it is regularly
ratified at the polls with the re-election of parties responsible for it,
because of fears that to upset the status, alarming markets, would bring
worse misery. The single currency has not accelerated growth in Europe, and
has inflicted acute hardship in the countries of the south worst affected. But
the prospect of an exit terrifies even those who know by now how much they
have suffered from it. Fear trumps anger. Hence the acquiescence of the Greek
electorate in Syriza’s capitulation to Brussels, the setbacks of Podemos in
Spain, the shuffling of feet by the Parti de Gauche in France. The underlying
sense is everywhere the same. The system is bad. To affront it is to risk
retribution.
What, then, explains Brexit?
Mass immigration is another fear across the EU, and it was whipped up in the UK
by the Leave campaign, in which Nigel Farage was a conspicuous speaker and
organiser, alongside prominent Conservatives. But xenophobia on its own is by no
means enough to outweigh fear of economic meltdown. In England, as
elsewhere, it has been growing as one government after another has lied about
the scale of immigration. But if the referendum on the EU had just been a
contest between these fears, as the political establishment sought to make
it, Remain would have no doubt won by a handsome margin, as it did in the 2014
referendum on Scottish independence.
There were further factors.
After Maastricht, the British political class declined the straitjacket of the
euro, only to pursue a native neoliberalism more drastic than any on
the continent: first, the financialised hubris of New Labour, plunging
Britain into a banking crisis before any other European country, then a
Conservative-Lib Dem government of an austerity more drastic than any
generated without external constraint in Europe. Economically, the results of
this combination are unique. No other European country has been so
dramatically polarised by region, between a bubble-enclosed, high-income
metropolis in London and the southeast, and an impoverished, deindustrialised
north and northeast where voters felt they had little to lose in voting for
Leave (crucially, a more abstract prospect than ditching the euro), whatever
happened to the City and foreign investment. Fear counted for less than
despair.
Politically, too, no other
European country has so blatantly rigged an electoral system: UKIP was the
largest single British party at Strasbourg under proportional
representation in 2014, yet a year later, with 13% of the vote, it gained
just a single seat at Westminster, while the Scottish National Party, with under
5% of the vote, took 55 seats. Under the interchangeable Labour and
Conservative regimes produced by this system, voters at the bottom of the income
pyramid deserted the polls. But suddenly granted, for once, a real choice
in a national referendum, they returned in force to deliver their verdict on the
desolations of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron.
Finally, and decisively, came
the historical difference separating Britain from the continent. For centuries,
the country was not only an empire dwarfing any European rival culturally,
but unlike France, Germany, Italy or most the rest of the continent did not
suffer defeat, invasion or occupation in either world war. So expropriation of
local powers by a bureaucracy in Belgium was bound to grate more than
elsewhere: why should a state that twice saw off the might of Berlin submit to
petty meddling from Brussels or Luxembourg? Issues of identity could more
readily trump issues of interest than in the rest of the EU. So the normal
formula — fear of economic retribution outweighs fear of alien immigration
— failed to function, bent out of shape by a combination of economic despair and
national amour-propre.
US leap in the
dark
These were also the
conditions in which a US Republican presidential candidate of unprecedented
background and temperament — abhorrent to mainstream bipartisan opinion,
with no attempt to conform to accepted codes of civil or political conduct, and
disliked by many of his actual voters — could appeal to enough disregarded white
rust-belt workers to win the election. As in Britain, desperation outweighed
apprehension in deindustrialised proletarian regions. There too, much more rawly
and openly, in a country with a deeper history of native racism, immigrants
were denounced and barriers, physical as well as procedural, demanded. Above
all, empire was not a distant memory of the past but a vivid attribute of
the present and natural claim on the future, yet it had been cast aside by those
in power in the name of a globalisation that meant ruin for ordinary people
and humiliation for their country. Donald Trump’s slogan was ‘Make America Great
Again’ — prosperous in discarding the fetishes of free movement of goods
and labour, and victorious in ignoring the trammels and pieties of
multilateralism: he was not wrong to proclaim that his triumph was Brexit writ
large. It was a much more spectacular revolt, since it was not confined to
a single — for most people, symbolic — issue, and was devoid of any
establishment respectability or editorial blessing.
Trump’s victory has thrown
the European political class, centre-right and centre-left united, into outraged
dismay. Breaking established conventions on immigration is bad enough. The
EU may have had few scruples in penning refugees into Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s
Turkey, with its tens of thousands of political prisoners, police torture
and suspension of what passes for the rule of law; or in winking at
barbed-wire barricades across Greece’s northern frontier to keep them locked up
on Aegean islands. But the EU, respecting diplomatic decencies, has never
openly gloried in its exclusions. Trump’s lack of inhibition in these matters
does not directly affect the union. What does, and is cause for far more
serious concern, is his rejection of the ideology of free movement of the
factors of production, and, even more so, his apparently cavalier disregard
for NATO and his comments about a less belligerent attitude to Russia.
Whether either of these is more than a gesture soon to be forgotten, like many
of his domestic promises, remains to be seen. But his election has
crystallised a significant difference between a number of anti-systemic
movements of the right or ambiguous centre, and parties of the established
left, pink or green. In France and Italy, movements of the right have
consistently opposed neo-cold war policies and military adventures applauded by
the parties of the left, including the blitz on Libya and sanctions on
Russia.
The British referendum and
the US election were anti-systemic convulsions of the right, though flanked by
anti-systemic upsurges of the left (the Bernie Sanders movement in the US
and the Corbyn phenomenon in the UK), smaller in scale, if still less expected.
What the consequences of Trump or Brexit will be remain indeterminate, though
no doubt more limited than current predictions. The established order is
far from beaten in either country, and, as Greece has shown, is capable of
absorbing and neutralising revolts from whatever direction with impressive
speed. Among the antibodies it has already generated are yuppie simulacra of
populist breakthroughs (Albert Rivera in Spain, Emmanuel Macron in France),
inveighing against the deadlocks and corruptions of the present, and promising a
cleaner and more dynamic politics of the future, beyond the decaying
parties.
For anti-systemic movements
of the left in Europe, the lesson of recent years is clear. If they are not to
go on being outpaced by movements of the right, they cannot afford to be
less radical in attacking the system, and must be more coherent in their
opposition to it. That means facing the probability the EU is now so
path-dependent as a neoliberal construction that reform of it is no longer
seriously conceivable. It would have to be undone before anything better could
be built, either by breaking out of the current EU, or by reconstructing
Europe on another foundation, committing Maastricht to the flames. Unless there
is a further, deeper economic crisis, there is little likelihood of
either.
*********
Perry Anderson teaches history at UCLA and is the author, most recently, of The H-Word: the Peripeteia of Hegemony, Verso, London, 2017.
Notes
(1) By Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi and others.
(2) Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: the Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn 1945-2005, Verso, New York, 2006.
(3) Raffaele Laudani, ‘Renzi’s fall and Di Battista’s rise’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, January 2017.
