Collapse of a Continent

I have mentioned Perry Anderson several times on this blog. Although his reputation is based on his work as an historian and political philosopher (“specialist in intellectual history” is how Wikipedia puts it), he has in the past 5 years or so focused his energies on penning detailed and gripping portraits of contemporary countries. I know of no other writer who has his encyclopedic grasp of cultural, political and historical aspects of a country (based on reading of original sources) combined with elegance of writing.

His detailed dissections of France, Germany, Italy, Turkey (and the EU) collected in the book The New Old World are simply the first thing anyone who wants to understand contemporary Europe should read.   

No less a writer than Chris Hitchens claimed in an article that Anderson was “the most profound essayist wielding a pen” - if "on the wrong side of history."

He is 75 years old – and an exceptional example of a generation which was genuinely multicultural (not in the current PC sense of the word). His grasp of several European languages, his interdisciplinary and prolific reading (he apparently devours books) means that he moves in an intellectual world now known to few people. And then he returns from that world to give us amazing insights.

The book review which is mentioned gives a quite exceptional overview and pays appropriate tribute to the man -

Ambitious interdisciplinary essay writing and  the ability to sustain a complex multidimensional argument beyond about ten pages, is dying, if not dead. Atypical in his career, footloose across continents, Anderson has never had to worry about his citation index or his impact factor. He is "old school" in the good sense: as reliable and perennially cool as a pair of old adidas.

This week’s London Review of Books offers another of his long essays which paints juicy portraits of the way the EU and Italy have dealt with the financial and political crisis overwhelming the continent. I have still not finished the article – but need to share the incisiveness of following excerpts    

Commonplace in a Union that presents itself as a moral tutor to the world, the pollution of power by money and fraud follows from the leaching of substance or involvement in democracy. Elites freed from either real division above, or significant accountability below, can afford to enrich themselves without distraction or retribution. Exposure ceases to matter very much, as impunity becomes the rule. Like bankers, leading politicians do not go to prison. Of the fauna above, only an elderly Greek has ever suffered that indignity. But corruption is not just a function of the decline of the political order. It is also, of course, a symptom of the economic regime that has taken hold of Europe since the 1980s. In a neoliberal universe, where markets are the gauge of value, money becomes, more straightforwardly than ever before, the measure of all things. If hospitals, schools and prisons can be privatised as enterprises for profit, why not political office too?.......................... 

By the summer 2011, emboldened by increasing flattery of himself in the media as the rock of the Republic, and with the encouragement of Berlin, Brussels and Frankfurt, the Italian President, Napolitano, had decided to dispose of Berlusconi. The key to removing him smoothly was finding a replacement to satisfy these decisive partners, and the business establishment in Italy. Happily, the ideal figure was to hand: Mario Monti, the former EU commissioner, member of the Bilderberg Group and Trilateral Commission, senior adviser to Goldman Sachs and now president of Bocconi University. Monti had for some time been looking forward to just the situation which now presented itself. ‘Italian governments can take tough decisions,’ he confided to the Economist in 2005, ‘only if two conditions are met: there must be both a visible emergency and strong pressure from outside.’ At the time, he lamented, ‘such a moment of truth is lacking.’ Now it had come. As early as June or July, in complete secrecy,

Napolitano readied Monti to take over the government. In the same period, he commissioned the head of Italy’s largest banking group, Corrado Passera, to produce a confidential economic plan for the country. Passera was a former aide to Berlusconi’s arch political enemy and business rival Carlo De Benedetti, owner of La Repubblica and L’Espresso, who was privy to Napolitano’s moves. In urgent italics, Passera’s 196-page document proposed shock therapy: €100 billion worth of privatisations, housing tax, capital levies, a hike in VAT. Napolitano, on the phone to Merkel and no doubt Draghi, now had the man and the plan to eject Berlusconi ready. Monti had never run for election, and though a seat in Parliament was not required for investiture as prime minister, it would help to have one.On 9 November, plucking him from Bocconi, Napolitano appointed Monti a senator for life, to the applause of the world’s financial press. Under threat of destruction by the bond markets should he resist, Berlusconi capitulated, and within a week Monti was sworn in as the country’s new ruler, at the head of an unelected cabinet of bankers, businessmen and technocrats.

 The operation that had installed him is an expressive illustration of what democratic procedures and the rule of law can mean in today’s Europe. It was entirely unconstitutional. The Italian president is supposed to be the impartial guardian of a parliamentary order, who does not interfere with its decisions save where they breach the constitution – as this one had signally failed to do. He is not empowered to conspire, behind the back of an elected premier, with individuals of his choice, not even in Parliament, to form a government to his liking.

The corruption of business, bureaucracy and politics in Italy was now compounded by corruption of the constitution. In 2011 the crisis gripping Italy and the Eurozone had been triggered by a massive wave of financial speculation and derivative manipulation on both sides of the Atlantic. No operator was more notorious for its part in these than the very company on whose payroll both Monti and Draghi had figured. Goldman Sachs, amply earning its sobriquet in America of the ‘vampire squid’, had seconded the falsification of Greek public accounts, and been charged with fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, paying half a billion dollars to settle the case out of court. 

what is Europe for?

The USE – United States of Europe – is back. For the eurozone, at least. Such "political union", surrendering fundamental powers to Brussels has always been several steps too far for the French to consider. But Berlin is signalling that if it is to carry the can for what it sees as the failures of others in this global crisis, there will need to be incremental but major integrationist moves towards a banking, fiscal, and ultimately political union in the eurozone.
It is a divisive and contested notion which Merkel did not always favour. In the heat of the crisis, however, she now appears to see no alternative. The next three weeks will bring frantic activity to this end as a quartet of senior EU fixers race from capital to capital sounding out the scope of the possible.Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European council, Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg leader and longstanding head of the eurogroup of single currency countries, and José Manuel Barroso, chief of the European commission, are to deliver a eurozone integration plan to an EU summit on 28-29 June. All four are committed European federalists.

The Guardian 5 June 2012 

This is a rare blog (for me) about the European Union. It tries initially to “fix” the mainstream British attitude to what was once “The Common Market” but which, a couple of decades ago, underwent a name change and resurrected ambitions.

Unusually for a Brit, I try to be objective – since I have always been favourably disposed to things European. This was, actually, one of the reasons I felt unable to go forward in 1983 as a Labour candidate for my hometown to the British Parliament. Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown (in the same year) had any such dilemmas in fighting for election with a manifesto which threatened British withdrawal.

The blog is written in response not only to this news item - but also to a reread yesterday of the powerful overview of the European scene (and of its core academic writing) contained in Perry Anderson’s The New Old World. One of the many fascinating insights the book contains is that the intellectual framework for most of the tens of thousands of academics whose full-time professional occupation is European studies is…..American political science. Rather dryly, Anderson quotes (on page 80) Alfred Cobban’s definition of this branch of learning 50 years ago – a device “for avoiding that dangerous subject (politics) without achieving science”     

The fixation of the European political class on Federalism has been a constant source of puzzlement to even the most highly educated and pro-European Brits. Of course we understood the initial post-war drive to ensure there could be no more bloody conflicts between Europeans; we were reasonably convinced in the 1980s by the arguments about the potential a European system had to mitigate the power of the multinationals (although the sad reality has been that the multinationals have become a powerful but hidden part of the European constitution); and we recognised the powerful role which prospective EU membership had played in creating and grounding the legal, political and commercial institutions and processes of ex-communist countries.

But otherwise, we are not convinced by the relentless drive toward homogeneity; nor of the results from all the time and money spent on closed bureaucratic meetings and summits. Winston Churchill’s comment on the latter “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war” no longer packs the punch it once did. Brits are, of course, famous for being an awkward squad. In European circles we are always ready to puncture overblown rhetoric - although, sadly, New Labour brought its own brand of opaque Newspeak to negotiations.

De Gaulle’s dismissive image of the UK being “a nation of shop-keepers” and of bean counters is sustained by the overriding defence of the British political class of the privileges of the London financial elite; of the country’s 1990s rebate; and by its zealous compliance with European regulations. 

Other countries take a more relaxed attitude to their European obligations, appearing good Europeans at the negotiation stage but less so in their failure to implement. Membership of what became the European Union was always for us a matter of economic calculation rather than political commitment. 

And the calculations continue – alongside growing anxiety about the transfer of powers to a complex and opaque system of bargaining (amongst officials and lobbyists) and questionable judicial judgements in other countries. The previous generation of British politicians seemed to value democracy more than the present lot. After all they had fought a war for it! 

We have always been wary of the Eurocrats – and I was shocked during my (short) experience of working in Brussels in the mid 1990s by the privileges and their curious combination of indolence and arrogance. European structures are modelled on the French system which, in the post-war period, has been governed for the most part by civil servants – with citizens being reduced to the role of protestors.  

In the 1980s it was still possible to believe that the EU might build on the European social model (which owed nothing to the European Commission). Delors, after all, was still imbued with the values of most of the founders of the “European project” but, since then, the Commission officials and policies have become infected with neo-liberalism – a disease which most new member countries have also brought to the European political table since 2004. 

It has always been obvious that "the European project" had no place for the citizen - talk of the "democratic deficit" was so much eyewash (and the German push for greater powers for the European Parliament just a guilt reflex). 
But the scales have only now fallen from people's eyes as they saw the ease with which the European Union powers displaced the elected rulers of Italy and Greece..... 

Since writing this, I've come across an extensive overview of current British attitudes to the EU - which reveals the full scale of the British alienation from Europe.