Sovereignty, Subsidiarity, Democratic Will, Political Control and the Globalization of Economic Rela

Sovereignty, Subsidiarity, Democratic Will, Political Control and the Globalization of Economic Relations

Comments on Brexit, the EU, the Corporate Form and Global Finance

Brexiteers argue that Britain will become pioneers of ‘free trade.’ The notion is fanciful. The global trading order is not ‘free’ but negotiated. The EU is not alone in taking a long time to conclude trade deals. There is no simple way of striking such deals as an ‘independent’. Nation. Given the globalisation of economic relations, no nation is free and independent. We live in a world of national and continental interests, all of which will be defended and prosecuted with at least as much vigour as Britain will defend and pursue its interests. The simple facts of economic life set the conditions of ‘free’ trade – the systemic constraints of the capital economy – growth/accumulation is a non-negotiable imperative – plus the fact that the EU (not to mention the US and China) is several times bigger than the UK. The British ‘will’ for ‘freedom’, national sovereignty and ‘control’ cannot prevail in those conditions. Whatever the British tell themselves and their followers, the billionaire-owned press feeding the people their own prejudices back to them, Brexit will mean what the EU decides it means, ‘free’ trade will mean what the trading blocs and partners of the world say it means. Above all the systemic constraints of the global economy set the parameters of any political and institutional ‘control’. Fail to address the metabolic order of the global economy, and notions of ‘control’ and sovereignty and freedom are merely chimerical.

The EU in its origins represents an attempt to reconstitute a regulatory framework that had broken down at national level at the supra-national level. It has proved incapable of regulating global economic forces with global priorities, hence its transformation into a neo-liberal institution presiding over austerity, monetary discipline and imposing competition policy on an EU wide level. Hence the populist revolt against the EU. But the failings of the EU are the failings of a globalised economic agenda. ‘In’ or ‘Out’ of the EU, those global constraints remain in place, with the nation state in an even weaker position than a supra-national body like the EU to resist. To the loss of political and legal ‘control’ that concern the critics of the EU should be added the loss of economic ‘control’ suffered by nations and the people viz the globalisation of the processes of production, finance, investment and employment.

Behind the rejection of the EU lies a discontent with globalisation and its consequences. People are saying no to ‘business as usual’ in Europe. The EU cannot continue on its current terms. Behind the disintegration, though, is a discontent with economic globalisation and the way that global shifts are removing power and control from people and nations, emptying the political realm of content and communities of stable ties and loyalties. It is not just the EU that stands in need of transformation: we need to transform the economic system and the way it relates to political institutions and communities from the ground upwards. The EU cannot carry on in the same way. It gives evidence of institutional overreach and impotence, lacks democratic and moral content, cannot motivate people as citizens, does not command respect or loyalty. It is empty. But those same points apply to other political communities and institutions, they have been emptied of power and content by the process of economic globalisation.

A withdrawal from the EU in the manner of Brexit is an expression of discontent with globalisation, aimed at against the institution of the EU, rather than a coherent response to it. I voted to Remain, but can see the forces which lay behind the Leave vote. I’d just say the Leave campaigners – with their concern for sovereignty, the right to make law, self-assumed obligation, democratic will – need to carry on further in their demands for control, because the EU is not the whole or even the main problem standing in the way of these things. A Brexit that fails to address these questions at a much deeper level in terms of a critique of the global political economy will simply unleash the liberal forces that the EU exercised some influence over – but which ultimately constrained even that supra-national body - bringing about further loss of control and further hardship and suffering. An anarchy of the powerful is not ‘freedom’, other than the freedom of the pike as death to the minnow. A rejection of ‘business as usual’ has to be accompanied by an agenda for positive change. But that agenda has to involve democratic will, consent and commitment, and not be an elitist project. The lesson is clear: to succeed, all large-scale projects must be based on smaller-scale actions, loyalties and reasons. That is to say that any supra-national institutional framework, the EU or other, requires the participation of the citizen body and not be a legal or technocratic endeavour that proceeds above the heads of people. The elites sold the people’s sovereignty out, and the people want it back. So as much as I argued for Remain as against Leave, I can see the motivations of most of those who voted to Leave. They just need to go deeper and further in their analyses, because the source of the problem is the globalisation of economic relations and the private priorities of the principal agents of this globalisation, not the EU. The EU may well have turned into a neo-liberal institution, but that was not by design, it was by the pressure of operating within a global economic order imposing system-wide imperatives to accumulation and free trade.

The British vote to leave the European Union may inspire the movements across Europe who want their own nations to follow suit and ‘take back control.’ The ‘Brussels bureaucrats’ may get the message and make an effort to overcome the democratic deficit at the heart of the EU. It may, however, be incapable of such reform. Leaving us with a disintegrating EU and the problem of working out precisely what is entailed, in terms of feasible institutions, by ‘taking back control.’ Control of what in a globalised economic environment?

The points go beyond economics to address political questions – who are ‘we’ and how do we want to live our lives? Politics is about more than economics, and economic imperatives – as well as institutional imperatives with respect to the EU, the perceived imposition of laws and edicts – is anathema to a people who reserve the right to answer questions of a way of life for themselves. The British vote to Leave the EU is an indication that projects that reduce human beings to economic categories concerned only with satisfying materialist interests fails to command loyalty and inspire commitment. If the EU is to survive then it needs to reassess its operating principles and found itself on more than an economic union bringing about a de facto political and legal union (ie, the latter as a consequence of the former, with people treated not as citizens but as tools following the coat-tails of economic determinism. The current debacle in the institutions of the EU has exposed a political, moral and even a spiritual vacuum at the heart not only of the EU but of the global economic order.

Which is to say that people don’t want a European Union driven by economics, but a European Community, a Community of communities which respects the principle of subsidiarity – the principle that power, resources and responsibility should reside at the lowest level of competence, lower scale when possible, higher scale when necessary – so that European nations would work together as partners in pursuit of peace and prosperity. This, I would argue, is the original European project as defined in terms of its founding principles. In terms, difficulties at the legal, political and institutional level in face of global economic forces has altered the character of the European project. Instead of respecting the principle of subsidiarity, expressing the view that policies are best decided at the lowest level, the EU became a technocratic and top-down legalistic project in the hands of a small clique of bureaucrats and elites administering the extension of globalised relations across Europe. People have revolted against the institutionalisation of the loss of control. They just need to see that behind the loss of institutional control with respect to the institutions and law of the EU is the more fundamental loss of economic control with respect to financial, banking and corporate interests. The EU is small beer in comparison to those forces and, arguably, has been doing their bidding.

With the Maastricht Treaty (effective since 1993) and the Lisbon Treaty (2009), the European Union ceased to be a genuine federal body but became a supranational super-state in which the priorities of a small elite of bureaucrats and technocrats trumped the democratic will of the people. The most obvious example here concerns the free movement of people and Brussels’ decrees on immigration, with popular concerns dismissed as racist and xenophobic. But there are many other examples. But again, the problem of institutional supranationalism here is the expression of an economic supranationalism, the EU having to manage the problems of a globalised economy. Take the Euro as a single currency. In one sense, this can be seen as a rejection of the principle of subsidiarity. But at a deeper level it is not a common currency that represents a denial of independent fiscal policies on the part of nation states but the independence of global finance from political and institutional control. Any notion of the single currency as strengthening Brussels’ control misses that greater point. If you want to ‘take back control’, you have to address systemic forces and imperatives in trade, finance and production.

It is the progressive loss of sovereignty and subsidiarity, with no obvious economic benefits in return, that has led substantial numbers in Britain to reject the EU. But nothing will change in that respect whether Britain is ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the EU. There will be the same loss of sovereignty and subsidiarity with respect to globalisation. Substitute ‘globalisation’ and the various trade bodies and agreements that go with it for the EU and you will see the same problem of loss of sovereignty, subsidiarity and control only a on a greater scale.

Whether the European Union survive relates to a bigger question of the relation of political institutions and units in a globalised economic environment. The call for the EU to return to its founding principles merely begs the question as to what forces impelled the EU to depart from those principles in the first place. The call presumes that a return to principles is possible and that such principles would be strong enough to withstand global economic imperatives. That is a big presumption, given the failure of the EU to resist transformation into a neoliberal economic agenda presided over by a top-down supra-national super state body. The EU in this form articulates a model of domination, not of cooperation. But behind that EU institutional and legal domination lies the domination of financial and economic imperatives, private in their concerns and priorities and global in their scope. In either form, such domination alienates the citizens of Europe (and the world) and will serve only to provoke further ‘Euroskepticism.’ The substantial number of national governments in the European Union that are not anti-EU will come under pressure of popular discontent with the effects of globalisation, revolting against Brussels in the first instance, but having to address wider global economic processes if the concern with recovering control is to have any meaning. Ironically, the rejection of the EU will lead to an appreciation of the need for effective international institutional cooperation and coordination if people are serious about exercising control in an economically interdependent world.

It is a point of significance that, despite warnings of deleterious economic consequences should Britain leave the EU, substantial numbers of the British people voted to Leave. One could dismiss them as stupid, committing an act of wilful economic vandalism out of prejudice and bigotry. Another way of looking at this is to say that the Leavers voted against their economic interests out of a commitment to a way of life, an assertion of political and ethical principles concerning democratic will and sovereignty. I think they are mistaken, that the nation state alone is ineffectual and incompetent in the expression of will and sovereignty with respect to globalised economic relations and forces. But the assertion of sovereignty, will, control and subsidiarity is right, and is integral to the principle of self-assumed obligation – the idea that people are bound only by those laws they have been party to making. The Remain camp made a big play of the claim that leaving the EU would tip Britain into recession. Leaving aside the accusation of fear-mongering amongst the experts and elites, and whether or not such predictions may yet turn out to be true, the interesting point is that political and moral issues of freedom, control and sovereignty weighed more heavily with people than considerations of their short-term economic wellbeing. This should give us cause for reflection, pointing to an ethical dimension over the economic one. As Europe’s elites drifted away from the moral and political principles upon which any public realm and nation is founded, the people remained close to those principles and rejected the development of a bureaucratic super state. Whether they can assert those same principles against the global economic machine remains to be seen.

Many are inclined to see Britain’s vote to leave the European Union as a tragedy. It could be. It depends on how it pans out. Assertions of sovereignty and control are not enough. There is a need for reflection on their institutional expression. The EU’s failure may be a result of abandoning its founding principles or of being drawn away from them as a result of global pressures. This begs the question of what sovereignty, control and subsidiarity actually mean and what their precise institutional expression could be in the context of globalised economic relations. It’s a problem the EU have never managed to sort out, but we have to remember that the turn to supra-national institutions came as a result of failure at the national level.

The United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union threatens to unravel the EU, opening a crack in the liberal international order that has been built since the Second World War. It does so at a time when globalisation is intensifying divisions within and between countries and regions. The result could be a greater anti-establishment, anti-immigration, nationalist reaction in the world’s democracies, as greater numbers of people seek to recover control from abstracting forces of the international order. All the world over, people and politicians are talking about ‘taking their country back.’ But that begs the questions of what they are taking back and taking back to what? What is power and where does it reside?

Have those voting Leave got the answers to those questions. As Winston Churchill said, ‘the trouble with committing political suicide is that you live to regret it.’ The British thought they had taken sovereignty and control back. Instead, they are looking at years of negotiations over trade, discovering the limitations of control in an economically interdependent world.

The question now is whether Britain’s apparent death wish will begin a stampede for taking back control, unravelling any number of international institutions only to leave autonomous nation states that are powerless before the forces of the global economy. (not to mention international terrorism and environmental crisis).

So the language of ‘taking back control’ needs to be set within a global perspective that throws off the insularity of Britain’s debate concerning relations with ‘Europe’ as this abstract ‘other.’ The fact that the EU has become this abstract, anonymous, bureaucratic force indicates the extent to which the institution has drifted from its founding principles to become a hollow institutional machine for administering the globalisation of economic relation.

We are living through a historic moment in which questions of power, authority, freedom and democracy will be reexamined. The British decision to leave the EU could turn out to be the high watermark of globalisation. I voted to Remain and I think the difficulties of dealing with Brexit will tie the hands of the British state and people for years to come. But the EU was a halfway house that could never reconstitute the control that had broken down at national level, only facilitate further abstraction of power through the forces of globalisation. The call for reform of the EU has been heard too many times before. A halt has been called in Britain. That begs the question of how control is now to be reconstituted apart from the EU. What national and international order will now follow?

When it comes to democratic will and legitimacy, there is a problem of how to take these questions further politically with those who voted to Leave. The question for them to answer is whether they have reclaimed control from ‘unelected Brussels bureaucrats’ only to see it not in their own hands after all, but in the hands of global finance, banking and corporate power. If the EU has proved incapable of restraining such forces, instead facilitating further liberalisation and globalisation, then what chance any nation state, however ‘independent’ it claims to be? Those who voted leave on account of a rejection of ‘Brussels Bureaucracy’ need to show how they can build a viable institutional order that is not prone to bureaucratisation. They are making claims of becoming pioneers in ‘free trade’. They will find, however, that trade agreements require negotiations, laws, bureaucracies. The idea of ‘free trade’ is a chimera. The case against the EU has to involve more than a rejection of bureaucracy.

One thing is for certain, a new internationalism cannot be born through yet more establishment technocrats and lawyers. There has to be democratic involvement on the part of the citizen body from the first, representing all sections of the country in unison. Remove that democratic involvement and any institution-building will be all form and no content.

In 2002, Stiglitz published Globalization and its Discontents, a book which expresses the author’s disillusionment with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international institutions supposedly regulating the global economic order. These institutions, Stiglitz argued, were acting against the interests of nations and peoples, being based upon neoliberal assumptions that are fundamentally flawed in many important respects.

‘Behind the free market ideology there is a model, often attributed to Adam Smith, which argues that market forces — the profit motive — drive the economy to efficient outcomes as if by an invisible hand. One of the great achievements of modern economics is to show the sense in which, and the conditions under which, Smith's conclusion is correct. It turns out that these conditions are highly restrictive. Indeed, more recent advances in economic theory — ironically occurring precisely during the period of the most relentless pursuit of the Washington Consensus policies — have shown that whenever information is imperfect and markets incomplete, which is to say always, and especially in developing countries, then the invisible hand works most imperfectly. Significantly, there are desirable government interventions which, in principle, can improve upon the efficiency of the market. These restrictions on the conditions under which markets result in efficiency are important — many of the key activities of government can be understood as responses to the resulting market failures.’

In this book, Stiglitz argued that IMF policies, based on these neoliberal assumptions, were instrumental in bringing about the East Asian financial crisis, as well as the Argentine economic crisis. He also noted the failure of Russia’s experiment with free market economics as well as the low levels of development in Sub-Saharan Africa. The specific policies which Stiglitz subjected to critical scrutiny point to the features of the global economy that are still very much with: fiscal austerity, high interest rates, trade liberalization, and the liberalization of capital markets and insistence on the privatization of state assets. These are the very things which I targeted in my own economics thesis Industry and Europe (1995), globalisation, liberalisation, the release of crisis and stagnationary tendencies in the global economy. I did, however, go further than pointing to this as the privatization of state assets in arguing that there is something deeper than the old public vs private debate.

[I provide precise references to the most relevant passages in Industry and Europe at the bottom of this article]

That debate, I argued in my thesis, is a false debate, a cover for the real development that is underway – the transition to the corporate form. It is this transition that is extinguishing the social and economic roots of liberal democracy, meaning that institutional attempts at a regulated, ‘responsible’ capitalism are doomed to failure – it lacks social roots and relevance. The EU, arguably, began as an attempt to achieve this responsible capitalism, reconstituting at the supranational level the regulatory framework that had broken down at national level. It failed in this attempt at regulation and hence developed into another international body practising neoliberal policies, ushering in globalisation as the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form. What the likes of Stiglitz describe as the privatization of state assets is better understood as the corporatisation of public business. (Which is precisely how I put it in Industry and Europe).

My point here is that the popular revolt underway against the EU is an expression of a revolt against globalisation as the extension of the corporate form, an attempt to recover control and sovereignty against global corporate entities with no ties and loyalties to place. The corporate form entrenches the loss of control that people are revolting against.

In his book, Stiglitz described the opposition in the developing world to the globalizing reforms imposed by international bodies like the IMF. The question was why, given the promise that globalization would increase overall well-being, so many people were expressing opposition to it? Either the promises of increased material well-being were false or people wanted more with respect to a way of life. I’d argue it is a bit of both. As with the decision of the British to leave the EU, despite warnings of economic chaos and a reduction in material well-being, there are political and moral principles at stake, particularly the concern of people to determine their own way of life, independently of economic imperatives and promises of material quantities. The discontent with globalization goes deeper than economics and its successes and failures.

Now, the discontent with globalization in the emerging markets and developing countries has extended to the advanced countries. Stiglitz thus asks how something that political and business leaders and economists claimed would make greater numbers of people better off come to be so reviled?

Stiglitz points to the answer from neoliberal advocates of globalization – people are better off – they either don’t know it or don’t appreciate the fact. Their discontent is a matter for psychiatrists, not economists. In response, Stiglitz presents income data to show that it is the neoliberal economists and politicians who are in need of therapy. The figures show that large segments of the population in advanced countries have not enjoying increased material well-being at all, quite the reverse: in the US, the bottom 90% has endured income stagnation for a third of a century. Median income for full-time male workers is actually lower in real (inflation-adjusted) terms than it was 42 years ago. At the bottom, real wages are comparable to their level 60 years ago.

To quote from Rethinking Robin Hood:

‘Huge strides have undoubtedly been made in reducing global poverty, more through growth and globalization than through aid from abroad. The number of poor people has fallen in the past 40 years from more than two billion to just under one billion – a remarkable feat, given the increase in world population and the long-term slowing of global economic growth, especially since 2008.

While impressive and wholly welcome, poverty reduction has not come without a cost. The globalization that has rescued so many in poor countries has harmed some people in rich countries, as factories and jobs migrated to where labor is cheaper. This seemed to be an ethically acceptable price to pay, because those who were losing were already so much wealthier (and healthier) than those who were gaining.

A long-standing cause of discomfort is that those of us who make these judgments are not exactly well placed to assess the costs. Like many in academia and in the development industry, I am among globalization’s greatest beneficiaries – those who are able to sell our services in markets that are larger and richer than our parents could have dreamed of.

Globalization is less splendid for those who not only don’t reap its benefits, but suffer from its impact. We have long known that less-educated and lower-income Americans, for example, have seen little economic gain for four decades, and that the bottom end of the US labor market can be a brutal environment. But just how badly are these Americans suffering from globalization? Are they much better off than the Asians now working in the factories that used to be in their hometowns?

Most undoubtedly are. But several million Americans – black, white, and Hispanic – now live in households with per capita income of less than $2 a day, essentially the same standard that the World Bank uses to define destitution-level poverty in India or Africa. Finding shelter in the United States on that income is so difficult that $2-a-day poverty is almost certainly much worse in the US than $2-a-day poverty in India or Africa.

Beyond that, America’s much-vaunted equality of opportunity is under threat. Towns and cities that have lost their factories to globalization have also lost their tax base and find it hard to maintain quality schools – the escape route for the next generation. Elite schools recruit the wealthy to pay their bills, and court minorities to redress centuries of discrimination; but this no doubt fosters resentment among the white working class, whose kids find no place in this brave new world.’

Rethinking Robin Hood by Angus Deaton, 2015 Nobel laureate in economics, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

The great mass-middle-class civilization that emerged after World War II enabled autoworkers and longshoremen to earn enough to have savings; today’s economy of part-time Wal-Mart workers and minimum-wage earners in automated factories produces the dislocation and frustration that has fueled this campaign—but not been addressed.

Lest 'globalization' itself be considered something of a catch-all scapegoat that misses the real economic problem, let me add that today’s economy of part-time workers, workers with zero-hours contracts, and minimum-wage earners deprives millions of the funds required for saving, for participating fully in society, for housing. The insecurity, social dislocation and displacement that this produces, with the breakdown of the building blocks of society, shows the real social costs accompanying the proceed of globalization.

I would relate these problems of globalization’s impact to Europe and the popular discontent with the European Union. The EU is a visible, political, institutional target for discontent, much more than the anonymous ‘market’ and system-tendencies associated with the global economy. It makes an easier target to hit than the global political economy, so the discontents take their aim against it. But the problems will not go away in leaving the EU, they will get worse with the further unravelling of international institutional regulation removing restraints upon corporate power and global finance (such as they are in the EU since, as noted, the EU establishment is now confining Europe within an austerian straightjacket bringing about stagnation and deflation).

The discontent with globalization is also evident in Europe, for reasons adumbrated above. Branko Milanovic’s book Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization examines the winners and losers in terms of income in the two decades from 1988 to 2008. The big winners were the global 1%, the world’s plutocrats, as well as the middle class in newly emerging economies. The big losers were not just those at the bottom but also the middle and working classes in the advanced countries.

Stiglitz attacks the neoliberal assumptions at the heart of this globalization:

‘Under the assumption of perfect markets (which underlies most neoliberal economic analyses), free trade equalizes the wages of unskilled workers around the world. Trade in goods is a substitute for the movement of people. Importing goods from China – goods that require a lot of unskilled workers to produce – reduces the demand for unskilled workers in Europe and the US.

This force is so strong that if there were no transportation costs, and if the US and Europe had no other source of competitive advantage, such as in technology, eventually it would be as if Chinese workers continued to migrate to the US and Europe until wage differences had been eliminated entirely. Not surprisingly, the neoliberals never advertised this consequence of trade liberalization, as they claimed – one could say lied – that all would benefit.’

For these reasons, globalization has failed to deliver on its promises, something that has produced not just discontent but a pervasive loss of confidence in and distrust of elites, experts and the ‘establishment.’ It should come as no surprise that the warnings of establishment figures on the deleterious consequences of a UK exit from the EU should have been so widely ignored. People have seen promises from the same establishment revealed as a false prospectus, so why should they pay attention to their threats? And just what lies behind economic expertise? I left economics for philosophy and ethics twenty one years ago for this reason – I had come to see ‘economic science’ as politics by other means, an ideological rationalisation of political perspectives, positions and interests. I saw it as politics based on particular assumptions and moral claims, and an underhand way of doing politics too. I have no objection to practical reason, it is my field. I have massive objections to dressing up politics and ethics as objective, neutral science leading to policy prescriptions imposed from above via the technocrats of de facto state bodies and institutions. In this sense, the claim to ‘take back control’ is well judged as an assertion on the part of people to recover responsibility for the determination of their common affairs. Of course, that now requires an elaboration of the institutional means and mechanisms of that control in order to be effective. Without those, we remain where we are – socially and democratically powerless in face of global forces and systemic imperatives, and with as little control as before.

I digress. Back to my previous disgression: economic science as politics and ethics in ideological form.

As economic theory and science, neoliberalism has no legs. It is patently a rationalisation of class struggle, redistributing income from labour to capital, poor to rich, all in the name of spurring enterprise and innovation. Not so. It has produced stagnation and crisis, tipping whole economies into debt and bankruptcy. The gaps between rich and poor, the scandals of financial and corporate corruption, the global crash caused by the liberation of finance all point to the effects of untrammelled markets and unrestrained greed, the crisis-tendencies endemic to the capital system which assuredly damage society when political, institutional, social and moral controls are relaxed. Conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter delivered a simple lesson when he wrote that it is because a car has brakes that it can go so fast. And yet, taking the name of Adam Smith in vain, the libertarian's response is to call for even less government intervention.

It is like arguing that car crashes are caused by the brakes rather than the drivers. Let the drivers free to go as fast as they can … Of course, it results in crashes, almighty pileups in fact. It is now an ideology based on the assumption that Smith's 'invisible hand' is a completely unregulated economy (it isn’t) that will generate a 'spontaneous order' in which markets will clear, prices will adjust to correct levels, resources will be allocated correctly accordingly. The result, again and again, is a public bail out to the tune of billions, at taxpayers expense. Remove government interference? Without government and the much derided public realm, there would be no capital system, only permanently stalled markets. An article of faith is not an economic science, and it is not practical reason at work either – it lacks prudence and wisdom. It is less to do with promoting individual liberty and enterprise, as claimed, and is much more about keeping irresponsible gamblers in sufficient funds to continue with their highly destructive and socially and environmentally costly behaviour.

Smith was a moral philosopher who was not so dumb or so greedy as to argue for an economics of untrammelled markets, see my posts:

The Economics of the Good

http://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/single-post/2016/11/08/The-Economics-of-the-Good

Markets and Morality: Where do public virtues come from? http://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/single-post/2016/02/09/Markets-and-Morality-Where-do-public-virtues-come-from

Economics, Ecology and Ethics

http://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/single-post/2015/05/13/Economics-Ecology-and-Ethics

Stiglitz makes this comment:

‘And governments’ offers of generous bailouts for the banks that had brought on the 2008 financial crisis, while leaving ordinary citizens largely to fend for themselves, reinforced the view that this failure was not merely a matter of economic misjudgments.’

‘In the US, Congressional Republicans even opposed assistance to those who were directly hurt by globalization. More generally, neoliberals, apparently worried about adverse incentive effects, have opposed welfare measures that would have protected the losers.

But they can’t have it both ways: if globalization is to benefit most members of society, strong social-protection measures must be in place. The Scandinavians figured this out long ago; it was part of the social contract that maintained an open society – open to globalization and changes in technology. Neoliberals elsewhere have not – and now, in elections in the US and Europe, they are having their comeuppance.’

In my thesis Industry and Europe I argued at length that the project of European integration could only work on the basis of this social contract as well as democratic consent and participation. Without those, the EU would be merely an economic mechanism, an institutional form lacking social democratic content. It came to be.

The dislocation of economies and disruption of communities could have been partly offset by the introduction of policies that ensured any gains that were forthcoming were widely shared. Instead, globalization has been accompanied by the systematic dismantling of public regulations and social protections. The social contract that could have acted as a social glue keeping all parties together has been winnowed away. The social and democratic commitment was lacking from the first. Instead, governments and international institutions promoted neoliberal policies that restructured markets in ways that deliberately redistributed wealth from labour to capital, rich to poor, increasing inequality. Some note the irony that such policies undermined economic performance, reducing productivity and efficiency. There is no irony. The end in view was not economic, it was political. Such policies were not concerned with a healthy economic performance but with class interests. Neoliberal economics is an ideological tool in the hands of political and business elites waging class struggle from above, via the ‘free’ markets, yes, as an anonymous and invisible external constraint, certainly, but also via the state and international institutions, the much-derided ‘government’ level. The result has been stagnation, deflation, debt and crisis as the rules of the economic game were rewritten through government in order to extend and entrench the interests of banking, finance and transnational corporate capital – economics as the class politics of the rich and powerful, ‘free’ markets as the anarchy of the rich and the powerful who aggrandize themselves at the expense of everyone else. Stiglitz notes what happened in the US: ‘Workers’ bargaining power was weakened; in the US, at least, competition laws didn’t keep up with the times; and existing laws were inadequately enforced. Financialization continued apace and corporate governance worsened.’

In Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy, Stiglitz argues that the rules of the game need to be changed again. Importantly, this must involve measures to tame globalization. But that begs the question of how this can be done. In Industry and Europe I explored the possibility that the European Union could develop as an international body capable of instituting a supranational regulatory framework reining in corporate power and global finance. I put the case for this in terms of a European wide socially responsible market economy. I proceeded, however, to identify the forces of liberalisation and corporatisation inherent in globalization that would work to undermine such an objective. The problem is not just one of writing the rules of the economic game – it is the game itself and its necessary assumptions and imperatives – accumulation is a non-negotiable, and the capital economy is running out of value. Stiglitz identifies the Trans-Pacific Partnership between the US and 11 Pacific Rim countries, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the EU and the US as moves in the wrong direction. He is right. Such trade agreements are a continuation of globalization as liberalisation and corporatisation as usual, guaranteed to swell the ranks of the discontents. In his book of 2001, Stiglitz argued that ‘the problem was not globalization, but how the process was being managed.’ I also argued for an appropriate institutional regulation of economic globalization – but also raised the likelihood that the economic forces ranged against such management – transnational corporate power and finance – would be powerful enough to resist attempts to restrain it, instead subjecting government and policy making to economic, financial and systemic constraints, thereby shaping the institutional level in its own image. This is what has happened. The EU has taken the hit on this, but it is not the only international institution practising neoliberal politics in the cause of economic globalization. As Stiglitz notes: ‘unfortunately, the management didn’t change. Fifteen years later, the new discontents have brought that message home to the advanced economies.’ The problem is that it is not enough to argue for rewriting the rules of the game. The EU, in origins, was an attempt to write the rules to ensure some kind of supranational regulation of global business and finance. In my own thesis I argued for an EU-wide socially responsible market as against the liberal market. As has now become clear – for reasons I gave in my thesis – these global forces of business and finance have proven to be strong enough to evade rules written in the name of public freedom, sovereign power, democratic will, social control and moral responsibility. These forces write the rules in their own interests. Hence the development of the EU as an austerian straightjacket ushering in economic globalization over the heads of European citizens. Not new rules, but a new game is required.

I’d like to return at this point to the claim that globalization has improved the living standards of people across the world. In a sense, this debate over material well-being is missing what is actually the key point at stake – sovereignty, democratic will, the right of people to live by laws of their own making and to determine their own way of life. That’s the point I raised with respect to the decision of British voters to ignore warnings from politicians, economists, and establishment experts of every variety that to leave the EU would provoke economic chaos, even ruination. In that sense, citizens voted against their economic interests to affirm the primacy of political and moral principles associated with public freedom, individual liberty and the right of people to self-government. Don’t get me wrong on this point – the assertion of such principles begs serious and difficult questions of cooperation and coordination, of developing appropriate and effective means and mechanisms of political and social action in a globally interdependent world. Issues of sovereignty and control cannot simply be re-nationalised, since it was the breakdown of the national framework in a globalised environment that caused the move to a supranational institutional framework in the first place. But the principles are right, and demand the creation of an appropriate institutional order for their expression.

The problem with globalization as the institutionalisation of a systemic constraint is that it really is a denial of popular sovereignty and of freedom as individual choice and the public right of self-government. This is why weighing up the argument in terms of material gains and losses within and between countries misses the point. When citizens start to believe that their political representatives and business leaders constitute an elite that cares more about external or global priorities than domestic concerns, then the social contract implodes from with; when globalization is accompanied by the removal of social and moral restraints on private gain, as well as the dismantling of social protections, then the gaps between rich and poor widen, dissolving the public realm as society divides into factions. In such a context, people feel they lack ‘control’ over their material life-processes, communities struggle with the insecurity of dependence on economic processes that are external to them, are alienated from their societies and become disillusioned and increasingly angry with a politics that is a non-politics, a technocratic politics that is more concerned with writing – or rewriting – the rules of the economic game. In a democracy, the individual citizens who compose the demos are involved in that writing and rewriting. We live in an era of technocratic politics that does not serve the people but instead does the bidding of business and financial elites with private and global priorities, and a global reach that enables them to evade political and democratic scrutiny and control.

My gut instinct, as well as reasoned judgement, is that the issues of most concern to those who voted Leave will not only remain but will intensify in the years to come. Because the problem is not one of the EU and ‘unelected Brussels bureaucrats’ at all. The EU is an international body attempting to address issues of global concern. Those global issues will not go away. Problems of international finance, of trade, capital and investment flows, of immigration, war and terrorism, environmental security will not go away because of assertions of ‘taking back control’. Effective institution building is required, and effective means of political action appropriate to the scale of the problems faced. Global issues require global solutions.

Brexit is a symptom of a wider systemic issue. It may or may not be the beginning of the breakup of the EU, but this is merely a symptom of protracted institutional crisis of political forms in relation to the globalisation of economic relations. The world of business is leaving the nationally bounded world of politics far behind, opening up issues with respect to popular representation, law making by sovereign bodies and the modes of democratic expression.

As business has gone global, the mentalities and modalities of politics have remained within national confines. International bodies have failed to garner sufficient popular support to be effective. The withdrawal of the UK could presage an era of fragmentation of large territorial state and supra-state structures like the US and Russia as well as the EU. In which case, economic globalisation will proceed hand in hand with a process of institutional unravelling, as against the international institution building that is required if we are to exercise control over global forces.

In effect, Britain has walked away from 30 years of engagement with the world’s biggest market. For what reason? Nationalistic self-delusion, some say. A concern to resume power of decision and control and law making others say. That is a legitimate concern, I’d say. But also delusional if there is a failure to identify its effective institutional expression in a world governed by system-wide global economic forces. The result is a historic moment, and a great opportunity to rethink the big issues of politics, and innovate new forms of political representation and expression. That opportunity requires that we reject old modes of thought, action and organisation and instead develop new modalities and mentalities. We have to remember that one powerful reason for the development of the EU in the first place was the failure of national controls of economic life.

Britain is £1.7trn in debt. Austerity did not work. The principal causes of the financial crisis remain in place. Since growth is low, wages are stagnant and the trade situation negative, there is no prospect of eradicating the budget deficit by 2020. These are the economic conditions of leaving the EU. With the deterioration in the value of sterling, Britain will start to feel the pressure of imported inflation on real wages. The economic pain of 2011-12 will be re-visited. No amount of short-term sloganizing about ‘taking back control’ can avoid the damaging uncertainty concerning investment caused by hard Brexit. And as investment gets delayed, the range of outcomes before Britain will get significantly worse. A leaked Treasury assessment points to 7.5 per cent being lopped off GDP. Civil servants believe that Britain’s negotiating position is so weak that to persuade the French and the Germans to cut any kind of decent bilateral deal Britain will have to leverage its intelligence-providing services to Europe and concede the ‘free movement of high-skilled workers.’ The problem is that, once Article 50 is triggered, the EU27 has no reason at all to concede favourable terms to Britain with respect to bilateral trade. By adopting hard Brexit, the British government has scheduled a slow-motion suicide.

A new internationalism is possible only through a combination of social liberalism, economic radicalism and environmentalism, one that develops the institutions and practices capable of addressing the global forces impacting upon national and regional communities and thus proves capable of reviving the communities that globalisation has left behind. That amounts to a pro-globalist form of Brexit, one that rejects one form of globalisation – one driven by economic imperatives and private priorities – in favour of another – one driven by democratic will and expression to form a global civil society. In recognition of the spirit of the referendum, this would involve a descaling of power downwards as well as a rescaling upwards to ensure the effective repatriation and expression of sovereign power. This means accepting restraints on the free movement of labour as well as immigration, managing global processes so as to encourage beneficial migration and check low-wage migration. Brexit is an opportunity to expose the forces behind poor housing, educational failure, low pay and social dislocation, not migration so much as globalisation and the penetration and destabilisation of local communities by global forces and global agents with global priorities. Outside of the EU, those to blame are without cover: the neoliberal elite and their extension of the corporate form through globalisation, characterised by privatisation, austerity and low wages. It was this elite’s indifference with respect to the negative impacts of EU migration on the lowest-skilled that led to the phenomenon of communities left behind. Those communities revolted to take Britain out of the EU. But they remain firmly within the globalised economic environment. For ‘taking back control’ to make sense requires that social justice and democracy is at the heart of Brexit negotiations. For Brexit negotiations to become a means of reshaping Britain into a rule-free space for corporate and financial power would be to deny citizens of the very control they had thought themselves to be taking back from the EU. In other words, taking back control means that we come to take control of the process in which the rights of the citizen are redefined with respect to the newly sovereign state.

In the short term, Britain can try to conclude a deal within the European Economic Area I would favour that. However, to address the concerns driving Brexit, there needs to be a new policy on migration led by the needs of employers, local communities and universities, designed for the moment when the rules on free movement on labour cease to apply. Free movement was a core principle of the EU, but in the context of globalisation has brought a migration that works for employers in the form of cheap labour, putting stresses on resources and alienating many citizens, including black and Asian people. It is not racist, still less fascist, to call for a migration policy that puts the concerns of communities uppermost, and to say so only reinforces the impression of a global agenda driven by elites over the heads of people.

The case for Remain was a case that said that the EU was and is capable of being reformed from within. But is this true? That there is a ‘democratic deficit’ at the heart of the EU has been noted many times over the years, but has had no effect in removing that deficit. That would seem to indicate that not only is the EU not a democracy, it is institutionally incapable of ever becoming a democracy. And with the case for reform shredded as a result of that understanding, the case for Remain goes too – unless one’s concerns are entirely the technocratic concerns of economic management. In my masters work on the economics of the European Community, I made the case for an Europe wide industrial strategy based upon the German Social Market model. It didn’t happen. Instead of a regulatory framework capable of constraining global economic forces, the EU came to develop the biggest institutional infrastructure in the world for facilitating the machinations of transnational monopoly capital, rentier corporations, tax-evading superrich, and financial elites. Like the markets, the EU possesses an executive with the power to crush the democratic will of national governments so that that citizens can no longer determine their laws or control their own affairs, and a judiciary that subordinates the rights of citizens to the rights of employers to do business freely. By treaty, the EU central bank is committed to a deflation that imposes stagnation at the expense of growth. The economics of austerity is written into the EU treaty as a non-negotiable obligation binding all member states. Where once European integration promised an alternative to neoliberal economics practised at national level as a matter of political choice, the EU has come to institutionalise those economic principles of the ‘free market.’ The EU has become the very thing its proponents claimed it would check, an order of unregulated business and unrestrained trade.

But Britain has also been practising the economics of austerity? True. But the British people can vote out the British government. No one can do this to the EU executive and judiciary.

My voting to Remain was motivated not by any illusions with respect to the regulatory framework of the EU, nor with the constant promises of reform. It was motivated by an awareness that the development of an alternative internationalism to the EU is not on the horizon. Instead, a leaving of the EU is more likely to become not a restitution of control to the citizen body but further loss of power via a full-blown neoliberalism in the service of corporate power: removal of employment and trade union rights, less regulation, less social and environmental protections, lower wages, fewer constraints on business. The irony is that the rejection of Brussels bureaucracy for a resumption of control merely marks a retreat to neoliberal fantasy island in a world of global economic forces, with even less control over these forces than before.

The EU’s institutional failure in face of globalisation is fuelling a populist reaction concerned with issues of democratic control, national identity, community stability and place-based meaning. Leavers will find that such things are not for the asking when power has moved away from political institutions and is instead invested in corporate and financial blocs and even more in systemic imperatives. Boris Johnson’s comparison of the EU with the Nazi Third Reich was ill-judged and inaccurate – the pertinent comparison is with the Weimar Republic, a weak and ineffective democracy that failed to deal with the social problems it faced and failed to command the loyalty and respect of its citizens. It was these failures that fuelled the rise of Nazism. It is the EU’s failures to address the impact of global pressures and forces that is fuelling the demands for control and sovereignty. Whether these demands come to be expressed in a positive manner or in reactionary terms depends upon the extent to which effective institutions can be developed with respect to global relations. To vote Remain out of fear of possibilities for a positive resolution to global crises amounts to a loss of nerve, an acquiescence in a gerrymandered state where political elites use the institutional machinery to facilitate globalisation and block the path to social justice. Leave won because Remain campaigners had little by way of a positive vision to check accusations of authoritarianism and contempt for the democratic will of the people. It is pointless extolling the virtues of economic integration and expansion in the EU in communities that have missed out on the benefits of globalisation and have seen only the damaging impacts in terms of the loss of jobs and investment, competition from migrant labour, social dislocation. Globalisation promised much but has failed to deliver for many. These discontents took aim at the EU and hit their target. The Remain claim that the EU was far from perfect was all too believable, the claim that it is able unbelievable. Leave promised democratic control. Delusional in an interdependent world, question begging, we may say. But it was a vision. Remain offered Europe as usual, with promises of reform that have been heard before. And threats of economic disasters to come should Britain exit. No vision, only threats. For many, the status quo isn’t working and hasn’t been working for a long time. It was pointless praising the success of the EU to these people. A vision of control, however question begging, was much more appealing. The hard work begins now. Without effective institution building ensuring control vis global economic forces, the disintegration of the EU will unleash deflationary forces that will tighten the screws of austerity everywhere, destroying the conditions of and possibilities of any kind of democratic control on the part of the people, favouring the neoliberal economics and forces of corporate power and global finance that lies at the heart of the loss of control in the first place.

So what stood against the vote for Remain and reform? In the first place, there is the claim that the EU is not democratic and reformable which, if the case, challenges us to create an alternative institutional framework to ensure genuine democratic control. Remain was led by David Cameron, whose claim that his Brussels’ deal was the best deal for Britain simply reminded Britons of the political fudges they loathe about the EU as well as reinforcing the view of EU as ‘other’, an enemy to be fought. Then there was the Treasury and its recourse to pseudo-economic econometric fear-mongering and threats. The City of London, whose financial machinations have done most to create a world over the heads of citizens. Brussels’ fiscal waterboarding of the weaker European nations, the lamentable Hollande issuing threats, which did nothing to enamour the British to the EU, playing right into the hands of xenophobic nationalism, the example of Greece, which made a laughing stock of claims that workers’ rights are protected by Brussels. Remain and reform was not believable, sparked no enthusiasm, had a record of failure and compromise to its name, and had nothing to offer on political rights and democratic control and liberty, only promises of economic benefits that have been heard before, and which many no longer believe.

We should be wary of apocalyptic predictions of collapse. In all likelihood, the markets will settle, and some kind of mutually agreed arrangement will be achieved. Britain will have gone from a position in which the country had one foot in the EU and one foot out to exactly the reverse. If Britain wants access to the single market, it will have to cut deals and conform to standards set by … those Brussels bureaucrats.

But the issues of control and sovereignty in a globalised environment will remain burning issues, both for national parliaments and the EU. These issues remain unresolved. Failure to resolve them risks provoking forces of reaction against the stagnation imposed by present arrangements. The architecture of the euro imposes austerity and produces a stagnation that is entrenching and extending the debt-deflationary spiral that is destabilising communities and bankrupting economies.

Is the British vote to leave a wake up call for the EU? The only plan in sight is that of Germany’s finance minister, who sees Brexit as opportunity to institute a permanent austerity union. In return for a veto over national budgets, eurozone states will be given a small eurozone budget to cover, in unemployment benefits and bank deposit insurance. That’s not an enticing vision. Given the choice between the certainties of austerity and the vagaries of democratic control, people will opt for the vagaries. If EU reform amounts to the imposition of a permanent iron cage of austerity for the remaining EU member states, then the case for Remain is bare, being merely an institutionalised austerity that will export deflation throughout the world. The problem is that that exportation will affect nations that vote to leave too. The question, then, is whether this austerian cage can be breached. By national autarchy? Unlikely. National economies are enmeshed in the global political economy. Who is Us? We can’t say for sure anymore. What if Germany exits a collapsing Eurozone? The Eurozone would simply be replaced by a Deutschmark zone, which in turn will become an engine of austerity exporting deflation (as the Deutschmark soars in value and German factories lose international markets). One way or another, austerity, stagnation and deflation. And ‘control’ as no more than a slogan and a delusion.

The EU establishment is committed to an economics that works hand in hand with globalisation and economic neoliberalism, losing support, alienating citizens and in the process driving the cause of European integration into the ground. Elites being what they are – convinced of their superior insight and intelligence - will not learn the lesson, even assuming they could act on it and initiate democrat reform aimed at control if they did. Instead, there will be the continued suppression of voices demanding democratisation, the same threats, the same assertions from economic philosopher-kings, the same rule through fear. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that many would fall for the delusions of national sovereignty and control, delusions because of the global context in which the domestic economy is set. But a vision which expresses the right principles nevertheless, principles which the EU and its imposition of Europe-wide austerity denies. And it should come as no surprise that progressive voices on the left should have struggled to have mustered much enthusiasm for remaining within such an institution as an EU committed to an iron cage of economic discipline.

We can argue that the Leavers committed an error of judgement. But in falling for the rhetoric of ‘taking back control’, they have nevertheless affirmed the right principles of political freedom and sovereignty that the EU, as an economic austerian cage, has lost sight of. That decision to Leave now forces the EU to tackle the democratic deficit at the heart of its project – if it can. We now need a movement of democratic citizens seeking to give its will political and institutional force in addressing the diminution of democratic control and sovereignty not only at the heart of the EU but more broadly at the heart of economic globalisation under the auspices of corporate power and global finance. That kind of reform is required in order to bring citizens together across national borders and political divides so as to provide the democratisation that Europe needs to avert a slide into deflationary economics and reactionary politics. Assertions of control as a national autarchy won’t work in a world in which the local and the global intersect and in which trade, capital and investment flows are international.

The EU’s combination of authoritarianism and economic failure is hardly a recipe for popular support. An institution that is no more than an economic mechanism has to at least deliver on economics to command any kind of loyalty. But, of course, economics is the most ephemeral and transitory of ties and loyalties, subject to the vicissitudes of a global economy. At this point, the democratic deficit reveals itself in the absence of popular enthusiasm. Remainers can make an intellectual case for the EU, but an intellectual case is not the same as commitment, loyalty and identity. If politics is about truth, then philosopher-kings will do fine. But the temper of politics is judicious and democratic, not technocratic. The technocrats command no loyalty, attract no sympathy. The EU technocrats practice of de-politicising political decision making, putting politics on ice, leaves citizens cold and unmotivated.

So what is on offer? More democracy in order to overcome the ‘democratic deficit.’ That Euro-reformism is a chimera. The EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ is not an institutional oversight that can be remedied by more democracy. The EU is an institution for technocrats, not democrats, a project that was engineered from above and designed to be a democracy-free zone rendering decision making safe from the intervention of the demos. Democracy was to be made safe for Europe’s big business and financial sector. Of course there is a democratic deficit at the heart of the EU, it was put there intentionally lest the people obstruct the best laid plans of the EU’s architects. It is for that reason that the EU’s institutions are incapable of being reformed. The case for Remain and reform was based on a lie, and people saw through it. The control that people lost at the national level has not been regained at the supra-national level, and the promise of further reforms delivering what has been lost are no longer believed. The deeper point is that the EU, firmly ensconced within a global accumulation regimen, could never deliver democratisation and democratic control, it’s job is to deliver the citizens of Europe over to the transnational institutional order. The result of ‘reform’ could only be the formalisation and legalisation of austerity and the imposition of deflation, a deepening of the economic crisis, a further destabilisation of communities, and a confirmation of a loss of control on the part of Europe’s citizens. Remain or Leave, ‘in’ or ‘out’, the forces of stagnation leading to the EU’s disintegration remain in place. Since this is so, then those committed to democracy – which is the only way to make sense of the demand to ‘take back control’ – are on a collision course with the EU’s establishment and its imposition of the iron cage of austerity and deflation.

Which begs the question of what control is and who is taking it back, through what institutions. There are those who argue for a national control, a national sovereignty through national parliaments. They argue for the re-nationalisation of issues and concerns that have been internationalised at EU level. It’s a cul-de-sac. That is simply to revert to a position that was mired in failure and crisis from the 1960s onwards. This approach is heading for monumental defeats leading to who knows what in reaction. As much as we criticise the EU for its failures, it represents an attempt to address a real issue of power, responsibility and control in a globalised world. The controls of economic management that once worked at national level broke down as a result of the globalisation of economic relations and had to be reconstituted at a supra-national level. The breakdown of that supra-national regulatory framework begs the question of what next. A national autarchy in the name of national control merely evades the problem of global power, it doesn’t address it. It doesn’t deliver control at all, merely confirms its loss to corporate and financial power. Political forces that cannot constrain such economic power at supra-national level cannot do so at national level. To seek to restore control to nation states is to return to where we were with the crisis-ridden politics of late sixties to the eighties, only with the forces of globalisation that overpowered nation states then being even more powerful and entrenched. Against those economic realities, demands for control will be revealed as delusional unless backed by real institutional force.

So we are faced with an attempt at a renewed internationalism in face of austerity and the debt-deflationary spiral that is alienating European citizens and driving them to reject the EU. The EU needs to reform itself. If it cannot do this, if, institutionally, it is committed to the economics of austerity to facilitate the forces of globalisation, then the EU will be ripped apart by its own Establishment – the Commission, the European Central Bank, Berlin and Paris, tearing Europe apart from within by imposing punitive sanctions on governments that refuse to comply with austerity policies.

The solution, then, is not the reform of the EU, the EU is what it is, and it has failed to achieve the control promised through the re-regulation of national controls at the supra-national level. Nor is the solution a renationalisation of control, a return to the national control that had failed and broken down in the first place. A genuine control which enables the democratic expression of the sovereign will of the people requires an interimbrication of the levels of local government, national governments and international bodies – subsidiarity in other words. No one level is prioritised over the other. Instead, power resides at the lowest level of competence, moving to a higher level when necessary. Local, municipal, national, regional and international levels are set in their appropriate places, avoiding abstract conceptions of citizenship.

In this context, the demand to ‘take back control’ comes to be converted into a struggle for the repoliticisation of decision making, reclaiming the political realm from the technocrats and elites and democratising it. Trump in the United States, UKIP in Britain, Le Pen in France etc. express a popular reaction against an economic crisis and an institutional failure brought on by an unrestrained economic globalisation and a financialisation that removed control from communities and citizens. The reaction has correctly identified that liberal democracies are no longer effective and are politically powerless in an era of economic globalisation. To argue for Remain and reform in this context is fail to appreciate that the social roots of liberal democracy have withered and died in the age of the corporate form, and entails a commitment to an impotent politics in defence of institutions that cannot deliver on the control and identity and responsibility that citizens want. The euro-loyalists exhibit a degree of faith in the reform of the EU that is misplaced. They fail to understand the extent to which the roots of liberal democracy have decayed. Those reacting against EU failure and authoritarianism to demand control understand the institutional delusions at work. But national autarchy is itself not the solution. A genuine alternative requires an alliance of citizens creating institutions across national borders so at to develop the means of effective action vis global forces, creating extensive public spaces enabling political engagement at all. That amounts to a cross-European democratic movement and global civil society, a genuine globalisation. Against this, the only alternatives are a) Remain and reform of the EU and b) national control as autarchy and c) national sovereignty and independence with individual trade agreements.

In assessing the viability of these alternatives, I would ask which is most likely to address the globalised nature of economic power. Option c) is a nineteenth century free trade solution that looks the most realistic, but which fails to grasp the sheer dominance of global economics over national parliaments. It amounts to the institutionalisation of the loss of political and democratic control in favour of markets.

Has the EU a future? If the democratic deficit is a necessary part of the EU, established to render EU regulation safe for corporate and financial power, then the EU will be subject to a process of internal disintegration as the forces of economic globalisation, with non-EU priorities proceed to pull the union apart. I wrote on this back in 1995 and believe we are now at this point. Which amounts to saying that the EU is incapable of being reformed and that citizens concerned with democratic control and sovereignty and subsidiarity need to look elsewhere.

National autarchy, national states and free trade, or a democratic globalisation based upon the interimbrication of all political levels.

Whichever – the same question remains: show me the money – the restoration of control and sovereignty only makes sense if it can be shown how the forces of economics and finance are to be subject to institutional restraint. Without economic and monetary independence, there is no political independence, national or otherwise.

As I predicted back in 1995, the EU’s attempts to reconstitute national control at the supranational level has proved inadequate in the face of global finance and transnational corporate power, with the result that the EU has developed into a neoliberal institution practising the economics of austerity. This has locked Europe into a deflationary-debt spiral in which austerity will generate – and export – more austerity, further alienating citizens. In this, it represents a microcosm of the global economy it purported to regulate. Which is to say that opponents of the EU, if they are to remain true to their commitment to ‘take back control’, must now face the forces of globalisation directly, for these are the forces which set the parameters of public policy on the part of national governments and sovereign parliaments. We found out decades ago that these governments do not have power and control with respect to economic forces. What next then? There is no simple way of opting out of globalisation the way we can vote to leave the EU. The EU as a political institution is easy to opt out of. A globalised economy in which the domestic economic is implicated is not so easy to extricate oneself from.

So there it is. If the EU cannot be reformed and cannot be democratised, then that is because it is implicated in a wider global economy that is the true source of the loss of democratic control and denial of sovereign power. There are those who argue we need to remain in the EU in order to reform it. Such a belief holds that the social roots of liberal democracy remain in place. In an age of the corporate form, I say those roots have withered and died. Which leaves us with options of defending an institution that lacks social roots, and which will continue to implode from within through its imposition of austerity under the auspices of globalisation, financialisation and the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form; renationalising political control and sovereignty, which takes us back to where we were all those decades ago – and if it was inadequate in the face of global power then, then it will be all the more inadequate now, the only thing to do is to renounce key principles of sovereignty and control and democratic will and throw oneself at the mercy of the vicissitudes of free trade and the free market. Which begs the question of whether leaving the EU achieved any great purpose, since there is austerity and loss of control and loss of sovereignty both ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the EU. National autarchy? A national neoliberalism? That sounds awfully like the old national socialism as an attempt to resolve thecrisis of international capitalism. Been there, not good, never ends well.

Any proposed solution has to answer this question – how do you relate political institutions to economic forces. What is the relation between national politics and global economics? What institutional purchase does the political realm of democratic will, control and sovereignty have over global and private economic forces? Without that purchase, all political and moral principles are just warm words at best, delusions and rationalisations at worst.

My own view is that the EU is taking a hit for the globalisation of economic relations, and that globalisation and its impact socially, economically and culturally on localities, nations and regions is the real issue. And that won’t go away ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the EU. It’s hitting the US too, and I think it part explains Trump’s popularity. Hence, as noted above, economist Joseph Stiglitz explains the ways in which globalisation has generated a generation of new discontents.

COMMENTARY

When I read demands that we should hold on tight to ‘liberal values’, I fear a deliberate refusal to learn the lessons of this populist revolt against ‘the establishment’. I detect the same determination to ignore the damage inflicted upon people, communities and nations in this past quarter of a century of globalisation – the same presumption that ‘we are right, and they are not just wrong, but racists, xenophobes and bigots to boot, and probably sexist and homophobic too. Can we use the phrase ‘the liberal establishment’? The establishment that has presided over the globalisation of economic relations consists of some very illiberal elements, and these are the real architects of this globalisation. But liberal elites have been in on it, in government, as well as within media and culture, delivering lessons on identity politics and multiculturalism to those who have been vocal in their complaints against globalisation. In On the Edge Living with Global Capitalism (2000), left of centre thinkers Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton noted the problems raised by globalisation, argued for global regulation to address the dangers of financial instability, but insisted that ‘the task, surely, in the absence of alternatives, is to keep the current system going and improve it... it is a source of global enrichment.’ The task, surely, is to develop alternatives. When we have Gordon Brown, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister, boasting of the ‘light touch’ of financial regulation, we can see the extent to which there is a liberal establishment implicated in the extension of globalisation as a liberalisation, not such economically, but politically – Democrats, Labour and the other Social Democratic parties in the conventional political sphere and in government – but also socially and culturally with reference to identity politics. That commitment to rights and liberties is all very laudable, but it is a liberal agenda, not socialist. And my point is that the roots of liberal society are being erased in an age of the corporate form. The extent to which private economic and global forces escape institutional control in this age points to the impossibility of the ‘global regulation’ demanded by the likes of Hutton and Giddens. If the EU cannot achieve this, then who can? The question moves beyond the provision of an appropriate regulatory framework to the development of alternatives based on a reorganisation of the entire social metabolism. Holding on to ‘liberal values’ in this context can be little more of a clinging to a failing status quo, inviting the very populist and reactionary politics that the assertion of liberalism is intended to avoid. The refusal to grasp this point, out of adherence to a liberal politics that lacks social roots, the refusal to move to the development of alternatives, leaves us with assertions of a ‘global regulation’ that lacks social roots and relevance. We should have learned by now that the forces of the capital economy we are dealing with cannot be regulated in such manner. The formation of supranational bodies like the EU were an attempt to deliver the institutional regulation on an international level that had broken down at the national level. We have learned that such regulation doesn’t work at international level either. All that we have are international bodies that constitute a de facto system of international authority presiding over the liberalisation of trade. The lack of an effective critique of political economy leaves our erstwhile liberals asserting values and principles that simply cannot be acted upon politically, they lack social relevance and institutional purchase. Get this straight once and for all, the priorities of a private economy organised around the dynamic of accumulation is not subject to the bidding of governments. We have spent decades avoiding that point, through assertions of the ‘mixed economy’ all the way up to these demands for global regulation. The capital system is by definition a competition of capitals and an anarchy of production – it resists notions of institutional regulation for the general good. If that’s the demand, you need an alternative economic system. The failure to develop that alternative leaves us politically impotent, defending liberal values whose social roots have withered and died. We live in a post-liberal society, a society of the corporate social form; if you want to defend liberal principles you have to move to the next level and engage in a genuine socialisation. Regulation won’t cut it. The pretensions of regulation have brought us to this.

The rise of a populist challenge to globalisation has common features that explicitly targets the most cherished nostrums of both conservative and liberal elites, exposing the establishment right-left divide as a phoney war. The complaints of those arguing against globalisation and its effects have been dismissed as stupid, ignorant, bigoted, racist, xenophobic. The pushing of a dominant narrative down the throats of people could have been designed to provoke a populist reaction along those lines. People on the left who have challenged globalisation and called for managed trade have likewise been dismissed as naïve, idealistic, misguided, and very probably socialists and communists and therefore likely to upset powerful people and scare the electorate. The search for positive alternatives has been delegitimised. Politicians and journalists proceed to close their ears to all but their own, endlessly re-affirming their own prejudices as necessary truths, carrying on their politics and business as usual within their exclusive social circles, cut off from the demos, confirming their own rectitude in an endless feedback loop. Pollsters and pundits are in on this too — remote from popular concerns, certain that challenges to the existing order are irrational, they miss the extent of the opposition emerging against the prevailing order. When the enormity of that opposition becomes clear, bringing about institutional crisis, the elites, still convinced of the rightness of their positions, cast around for others to blame, unshaken in the certainty of their entitlement to set the agenda and rule. Instead of looking in the mirror, and seeing themselves as others see them, they turn to blame everyone but themselves. And still, despite all that has happened, there is the expression of unconcealed contempt for the peasants and plebeians who have had the temerity to flout, ignore their threats, and ultimately reject them. There is no connection with the individuals composing the demos. People are not involved in the political project as active citizens, they are treated as passive subjects who are acted upon, ordered and who are expected to follow. Seeing through ‘jobs, growth and investment’ as a false prospectus, increasing numbers are no longer following. That doesn’t mean that they have an alternative, far from it. The demands being expressed amount to a reversion to all-our-yesterdays of a past that never was, a national sovereignty capable of governing private economic forces – assertions of a national autarchy will fail in a globalised environment, giving us a national neoliberalism of impotent governments in a global ‘free’ trading order. But if their answers are wrong, their questions are the right ones. And they are the questions that the elites have steadfastly refused to ask, dismissing them as wrongheaded. And it is that refusal that is driving rebellion.

I don’t have time to disentangle those implicated in this agenda of globalisation. I hear terms like ‘liberal establishment’ bandied about. In truth, it’s an establishment that contains ‘liberals’ in the shape of dominant parties, as well as media and cultural forces organised around identity and lifestyle politics – all part of the prevailing capital system. And there is the ubiquitous reference to ‘elites’. I have used the term myself in this context, because it is the term that is most familiar. But whatever happened to Marx and a class analysis? We are referring to a ruling class here, a class presiding over a social form based upon class exploitation. And globalisation is part of the development of a transnational monopoly capitalism based upon the corporate form. Putting the question in these terms is integral to going beyond global and institutional regulation to constituting a viable alternative. Which is what is required if people are really serious about ‘taking back control.’ Control of what by who or what? The control of the people by state and capital? Or the practical reappropriation of these things as alienated social powers to be organised as social powers and exercised by the people? The origin of these social forms is sovereign power and labour.

Whatever terms we use here, the indisputable fact is that the political, business and financial leaders have usurped the democratic will of the people of the world and used their power and authority through the prevailing institutions to impose a global agenda on the people, an agenda that is bound up with the extension and entrenchment of private power. This has undermined the material – and psychological – well-being, economic health and social security of communities around the world, affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. While the rich and powerful – the capitalist class to use the marxist idiom that has been struck from public discourse – have gorged themselves on globalisation, free trade and free markets, property, speculation and finance, social wars at home, military wars abroad, swelling the ranks of the poor and the powerless, filling the pockets of the perpetrators, the voices of the victims of this rapacious greed and excess has been ignored, pushed beyond the pale of legitimate opinion and, if ever it has managed to be heard, has been systematically abused as expressing the whining lament of those too stupid, slow and feckless to win in the wonderful meritocracy of global capitalism, with all of the opportunities available to each and all. Those who lose out are, by definition, losers. They fail on account of their personal characteristics, not because of any intrinsic properties of the global game. And here is where the liberal and cultural elites come in, because they are amongst the winners, the people who are ticking their identity politics boxes, cheering the winning of rights for this group or another, all of which may be commendable – but which proceeds apart from fundamental issues of class exploitation and class struggle. When the voices of the losers has been heard it has been all too easy to dismiss it as the voice of ‘the white working class male’ who, by definition, is sexist, stupid, racist and xenophobic. Probably fascist too. I have news for liberals – folk don’t take kindly to being abused thus. They may not be as verbally sophisticated or as well-read or as right-on as you are, but they have been on the receiving end of globalisation and have been trying to report back from the front – only to be dismissed.

The ruling class, the institutions of authority in politics and economics, the elite factions in politics, culture and media have spent years deriding, maligning, and dismissing large sections of the community, pilfering them at the same time, concealing their parasitism behind promises of ‘jobs, growth and investment’, racking up a strong record of economic failure, political corruption, social dislocation, ecological destruction and world war. And now they are mystified why their rational appeals to logic, facts and evidence go unheeded, their threats and warnings ignored, their dictates defied. I voted Remain with respect to the EU, but I’m not going to waste time berating people for people wrong, stupid and racist – that’s the mocking abuse and denigration from liberals that has led people to turn away from ‘liberal’ causes and values. This lesson needs to be learned quickly, people are no longer prepared to listen to and follow the very people they now identify as most responsible for their impoverishment and misery. Instead, they are going to deliberately reject the elites and presume the truth of the opposite of anything they say. To act in retaliation to a hurt suffered is not necessarily the right thing to do. I’m not justifying it, it is wrong, and the great danger is that of misdiagnosing the source of the problem, rejecting one set of elites only to run into the embrace of the very forces that are most responsible for this global disaster. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone that, after Bill Clinton and Blair and their global free trade deals, after the weakening of the social protocol of the EU, making it an explicitly pro-business entity, after illegal wars, that people no longer listen, no longer swallow the old promises, and no longer follow and obey, but rebel and reject.

This is a disaster at a time when we need respect for authority and for government in order to address the crisis in the climate system. The refusal to believe the findings of climate scientists and the refusal to believe the reality of climate change and global warming is bound up with decades of being sold a false prospectus in politics. And this is where the notion of the ‘liberal establishment’ comes in, because it is the failure of institutional and global institutional regulation, adumbrated above with reference to left of centre thinkers like Hutton and Giddens, that has been instrumental in the relentless imposition of globalisation, the silencing of contrary voices and the ruling out of alternatives. There are greater forces than liberalism at work, but assertions of liberal values at a time when liberal society is being erased is condemning the left to an impotent politics implicated in the process of globalisation rather than developing a coherent alternative to it. And involving those revolting folk in that alternative. The forms that this revolt are now taking are nothing short of disastrous, playing into the very hands of social and environmental destruction, the principal agents of expropriation and loss of control. The ‘liberal’ forces of institutional regulation are first in the line of fire because they offer the most visible targets; they are the forces that have made the most promises, promises on behalf of a global system they have been concerned to promote. For delusional promises and misplaced faith in institutional regulation, ‘the liberal establishment’ is being rejected by the people, identified with social dislocation, economic crisis, war abroad and terrorism at home. And the truth is that the liberals are implicated in this, are implicated in the denigration of working class victims of globalisation, are involved in the culture of globalisation, in the shape of multiculturalism. Keep lecturing away, people are no longer listening, and are making a virtue of rejecting elites and experts, social and intellectual betters who have presided over an age of failure and corruption. As I say, at a time when we need a politics based upon respect for truth and authority and reason with respect to climate action, the failures of this generation of politicians is a disaster. The same people who gave us globalisation and war are the same ones telling us global warming is real and should be acted on. So if I criticise the liberal establishment here, I do so not because they are the architects of the problems we face – they are not, it is global capitalism and the corporate form- it is because they are implicated in this disaster, have done the bidding of the forces to blame, have made the false promises, ignored the victims, ridden roughshod over the poor and the powerless, over the voices of people who want an alternative order to a placeless globalisation. People are rejecting a system, a politics and a culture they perceive to be corrupt, to be indifferent to their welfare and, more than this, to be contrary to how they see themselves and the way they want to live their lives. They are asserting political values over economic promises and economic imperatives. That’s precisely what we should have been doing all along.

We are now dealing with the consequences of the insularity of conventional political sphere, including journalism and the media, and the failure of institutions of authority. I repeat, the answers that people are giving – national isolationism and autarchy – are the wrong answers that will deliver those demanding control straight into the hands of the forces that have deprived them of control of the first place. The result, at best, will be a national neoliberalism of impotent governments trying to keep the civil peace in respect of the impacts of global free trade. And the people in revolt will still be ignored and silenced – we will be back to TINA, there is no alternative, on a national level. But the questions being asked are the right ones, ones of sovereign power, democratic will and ‘control’, raising questions of power, resources, authority and social relations – the very dangerous political questions that elites in business, finance, politics and the media have preferred not to ask for decades. Since neoliberalism? I’d go back further, to the time when social democrats were telling marxists and socialists to silence their criticism since capitalism doesn’t exist anymore in an age of the ‘mixed economy.’ Every time I hear the ‘third way’ being offered as a new way forward, I think back to every effort that has been made in the past to delegitimise the politics of socialism and class struggle. It is that approach that has caused us, time and again, to misdiagnose problems, indulge in institutional tinkering thinking it will be enough, only to see crisis, failure, war and corruption – and a populist backlash that delivers us right back into the hands of elites.

Since the collapse of the long boom and the dissolution of the social contract, the elites have had a free hand to prosecute their interests in the name of individual liberty, free markets and free trade. Liberty, they say, when they mean licence, argued Aristotle. Freedom for the pike is death to the minnow, wrote R.H. Tawney in Equality. Gains have been privatised, costs have been socialised. Hearts have been hardened, minds have been closed and ears covered when it comes to the voices of those who have protested the results. And still, even now, there is a denial that people could possibly have legitimate concerns with respect to the global economic order. Those who have succeeded in institutionalising their power, for whom the system works, will never believe the words of those who say otherwise, no matter how numerous. So stand by for political paralysis, and reassertion of impotent principles, as people carry on revolting. What form that revolt takes, and how far it continues to go down the wrong path, depends upon how soon we start to develop a positive alternative – and how quickly liberals cease parroting liberal nostrums as self-evident truths. The age of lecturing and hectoring is over. To the extent that the liberal left remain a smug, self-affirming elite in an echo chamber, they will be ignored. Worse, they will exist as the kind of smug, superior, mocking, intellectual windbags talking down to people who offer a perfect visible target for a populist revolt organised and directed by political and business elites (to repeat, the ruling class that is the real architect of this debacle, not the liberal establishment that has merely been doing its bidding these past decades, out of a combination of political cowardice and sectional self-interest – it is indeed profitable to be inside the gilded cage).

Political and business elites, decision makers, opinion formers, cultural voices are so knotted together, as left-right voices on the same thing, so detached from the people, so divorced from their concerns and so contemptuous of the ways in which they express these concerns, that they simply would not and could not see how, in the context of institutional failure, the illegitimate voice of populist protest could come to turn so destructively against the dominant institutions. The worst response is to continue with hectoring, lecturing assertions of correct principles because with little but a record of economic and institutional failure to back it, people no longer believe it. And such condescension is now insufferable, doing untold damage to principles and values of internationalism, solidarity, cooperation and environmental security that are central to any ‘control’ that is worth having. Instead of asserting the rightness of principles, we involve people in their practising. The success of all long-range projects depends upon participatory structures, active consent and small-scale actions and reasonings. Go over the heads of people, leave them behind, and they will reject you.

And while we are at it, can we now please turn off the pollsters and the pundits and the inane chatter of political commentators who, frankly, are clueless. Their views on what can and can’t be done, can and can’t be said, also deprive people of a voice and of a political future that is of their own making. And when election results come in, time and again they prove how little these chatterers actually know. You may as well consult Russell Grant or Mystic Maggie as consult these people, recycling their own political narratives. If the events of our times are proving anything, it is that we do not need to be trapped inside political narratives of our – or others’ – making.

Needs saying. Stopped arguing, stopped engaging, silenced and suppressed voices outside of the echo chamber, delegitimised alternate platforms, ban this, ban that - folk don't like being dismissed as racists, xenophobes, homophobes - and they don't like the way this establishment has racked up decades of economic and institutional failure, covering the encroachment of the global corporate form. Trump didn't play by the rules, pretty much did it all wrong by offending any number of people - and all the howls of protest from offended liberals cuts no ice - because they have form. And I'm stopping here because I am writing in anger. But I am sick of the whining. And to people protesting, put your banners down, go home, join together, organise, network, engage in some constructive social activism and build an alternative. There's enough of you out there to do this. I'm not interested in noise, not interested in fights against the police who, yet again, are caught in the middle, taking the blows for the political establishment that has done the bidding of a self-serving, globalist elite, disdainful of people, the few enriching themselves at the expense of the many. Some real politics please, not gestures and name-calling, and no cringing in corners or whinging from rooftops, still shoving principles down the throats of people. Let's back those principles with effective social practices, participatory structures that involve people, have them involved in a social and a self-transformation - step up, engage, stop the hectoring and lecturing and the shoving of principles down throats, imposition of laws and edicts. I voted to Remain in the EU, but my town, neglected for years by the globalising agenda, of which Labour were a part, voted to come out - and I am tired of well-off folk with their liberal principles abusing my folk as stupid, thick, sexist, racist, xenophobic idiots. They're not, whatever you think of their answers, they are raising the right questions, questions that the political classes and the self-proclaimed pollsters with their expert data have kept off the agenda for decades. The sense of entitlement on the part of those who cannot believe people would reject their principles and policies indicates the extent to which politicians are engaged in technocracy rather than democracy, seeing it as their job to inform and educate people from above, rather than engage them with a view to persuading them. It's been a rotten generation in politics, good riddance to it. And in developing the new politics, let's reconnect the struggle against social insecurity and economic suffering with the struggle against racism/sexism/xenophobia/racism, rather than letting them split apart, winning the cultural war whilst abandoning the socio-economic terrain where folk live their everyday lives. and ... the guy in the video is nearly as angry as I am, I'd better stop here ... I wrote a little piece on this a few days ago, just before the election. It was on the EU, but it's the same thing. I'll end by quoting that: "We can tell a new story. Such is the real meaning of politics. These political models of the media’s self-appointed data experts predicting election results project not real futures, only an enlarged version of a present rigged around particular interests and value positions. Talk to like-minded others if you merely want to reinforce your own political prejudices. The refusal to hear the voice of those outside of the echo-chamber, the failure to heed the voices of concern and protest from outside that chamber, to be so detached from people and their communities that the writing on the wall may as well be written in hieroglyphics for all the sense the elites make of it, guarantees that legitimate grievances will intensify, strengthen and one day explode in unpredictable ways. Or do the elites really think that globalisation would in time benefit each and all equally, blessing one and all with material largess? Do they not see that principles concerning more that material quantity are at stake here? Instead of looking at themselves and recognising how their concerns have become divorced from people in communities, the elites continue to presume the rightness of their positions and therefore turn to mock and slander their critics as stupid and bigoted. They fail to see their critics as the victims of their agenda of global enrichment for the few, with the burdens and costs shifted to the many. It's an elite pathology.

It’s all in a good cause - the expansion of the global economy through free trade benefits one and all in the long run. This ideological presumption delegitimizes the dissident voice, denies responsibility, and clears the way for further neglect of people’s concerns. Not only are problems unaddressed, they are left to fester and worsen, with popular reaction becoming even more vigorous and dangerous and, yes, taking even more illiberal forms in response. It’s only a short step from the conclusion that the key establishment institutions are beyond hope; it’s not that these institutions need to be reformed, it is that they are incapable of being reformed. The problem is not one of malfunctioning, it is one of design. But here is the problem, the dismantling of the institutional order entails also the destruction of instruments of economic management, social welfare, environmental protection, further creating the conditions the conditions of social hopelessness, misery and despair that fosters a demand for isolationism, protectionism, hatred and delusion. If we are to do better, we need to identify the root causes of divisions and create a project that draws people together to give some kind of conscious democratic control over our common future. And that means identifying the economic forces and social divisions that have created this elite pathology at the institutional level and devising forms of politics and social organisation capable of uprooting diremption, bringing people together, restoring democratic control to people in place.

Still, the elites, the experts, the liberals, the technocrats, the bureaucrats refuse to acknowledge the extent to which their principles and practices are culpable in this debacle, blaming anyone and everyone who comes within their sights as the ones to blame. I suggest they find a mirror and make good use of it. If they want to carry on fighting by mockery and abuse and denigration, that’s fine. But that holding tight to liberal principles, as some put it, amounts to a continued self-righteousness amongst what is certain to be an ever dwindling minority.

I have no doubt that I may turn up on that list for these words. I can live with it. I will also blame myself here, for being way too inclined to seek common cause and agreement, and not call out the liberal elite for being the phoney left it is. A deliberate, self-serving, self-protective deaf ear is precisely what brought the so-called left here in the first place.

When a political platform suffers ignominious defeat, it is for its proponents to identify why it lost and learn the lesson. And abandon the principles and practices that brought about the defeat, or ensure that good principles are buttressed by a viable and effective politics. Instead of blaming the people for the defeat, it is the responsibility of those in charge of a failed politics to ascertain why people rejected them. The sense of entitlement on the part of those who cannot believe people would reject their principles and policies indicates the extent to which politicians are engaged in technocracy rather than democracy, seeing it as their job to inform and educate people from above, rather than engage them in order to persuade them. It means returning to something Marx wrote back in the 1840s:

This does not mean that we shall confront the world with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means that we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world. We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with the true campaign-slogans. Instead we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes or not.

Marx EW Letters 1975

For decades now, the doctrinaires of globalisation have been shoving the principles and practices of globalisation down our throats – destabilising communities and economies in the process, and people are now vomiting it all back out.

And the liberals and the labourites? Not us, they say. To do an autopsy is to imply something is dead, and they remain committed to the EU, amongst other things. I’m more inclined to see why such projects have unravelled. And I want people to examine their own beliefs and behaviours before resorting to the self-righteous abuse of others.

To put it in a nutshell, there is a liberal establishment that, rather than practising a genuinely progressive politics, has engaged in a top-down bureaucratic management and manipulation of the people, becoming mired in corporate money and corruption along the way. No wonder they have come to be identified with the economic crises, financial scandals, wars and all the other things that identify an elite pathology. So away with the shifting of blame, denial of elitism (political, intellectual and cultural). If you are so smart, and those revolting folk are so dumb, how is it that they have beaten you and your truth and reason and principle so easily? You are morally, intellectually, politically and organisationally flabby, too busy asserting and imposing, hectoring and lecturing, to engage with people, too contemptuous of those people to deign to persuade them. Just tell them, impose edict and order on them! What can they do in return? Well, you have found out. And liberals and democrats who are mired in corporate money and connections isn’t much of a left at all. It pays lip service to liberal principles, then tells the rest of us to hold tight to them.

I don’t doubt that the leaders of Leave are themselves neoliberals, but neoliberals on the national level, with a global free trade agenda. And I don’t doubt that they too will be involved in personal enrichment, presiding over an economics and a politics that rides rough shod over the people. But institutions like the EU, this liberal establishment that has involved Bill Clinton and Blair, has been in on this too, riding globalisation as an agenda for the aggrandisement of the rich and the powerful. So when the likes of Trump, Le Pen, UKIP come along vowing to dismantle the establishment, it should come as no surprise that it should win a popular following. We can call it misguided. I call it misguided, in that it delivers politics into the hands of a national neoliberalism. But that’s not the point. Pick up the mirror and have a good look – our erstwhile liberals and democrats have been wedded to a system that the elites love and the masses despise, for the reason that it enriches the few at the expense of the many. Are we supposed to get politically excited by the fact that the liberal elites promise to manage this global machine more efficiently? Are we supposed to keep swallowing the promise that tinkering about with the processes of this global machine will deliver peace and prosperity for all? Just how dumb do they think people are? Enough! These left of centre parties abandoned all pretensions of economic management and sold out politics to economics, abandoning the demos and working people in the process, making their principles and promises conditional upon economic growth, that slippery euphemism for a capital accumulation now organised on a global level. And they defined themselves as a liberal left in contradistinction to the right by the claim to be able to do it all more efficiently than their political opponents. They ceased to be democrats and instead became bureaucrats and technocrats, Platonic philosopher-kings possessing exclusive insight and knowledge into the way the global economic machine operates. Not a democracy, but a benevolent despotism in the hands of global managers of corporate power. The jury is in on this corrupt, wasteful, destructive, divisive, crisis-ridden system – and the ‘liberal establishment’ is seen as its political and cultural protectors. So much so that millionaire businessmen can easily pose as men of the people, women too, with Le Pen, and can achieve popularity with their promises to knock down elite edifices in politics and economics. And the left? They chose and stuck with Clinton and Blair, globalisation as the only game in town, as Hutton and Giddens asserted, and now find themselves reviled as the architects of global division and destruction.

The task now is to bury that phoney liberal left and bury it for good, address the root causes of economic division (and ecological destruction) as part of tackling racism/sexism/xenophobia, not allowing these things to get split apart into economic and cultural wings, but as part of the same phenomenon. The left have fallen as a result of false dichotomies, allowing the abandonment of the people on economic issues and class struggle whilst at the same time engaging in an identity politics. The inability to keep these two wings together has created a gap that has allowed the left to win the cultural war, and lose the social and economic war on the terrain of material life on which everyday life depends. We need to reconnect these wings of domination and oppression. If we don’t, and if we get a national neoliberalism that causes further economic and social misery, the search for scapegoats will continue, eating away the gains made in the cultural struggle with respect to personal liberty. The liberal left have had this the wrong way round. The problem is not the sexism/racism/xenophobia/homophobia but the economic suffering and social insecurity, the things that fuel anger and hatred and bigotry. If we abandon the material terrain, any victories won at the cultural level will remain precarious. Millions have been ignored, their lives and communities ravaged as a result of the global anarchy of the rich and the powerful, the enrichment of the few At the expense of the many. These are the people whose voices, heard at last, have proven decisive in the populist reaction against elite institutions and pathologies. If this is a crisis for the left, it is a crisis born of the liberal left’s abandonment of these people – and their own democratic principles – in the first place.

Let's identify the real problem here - neoliberal economics as a class politics imposing the globalisation of economic relations. I'm afraid the Clintons, the Blairs, the Hollandes etc etc are all implicated in this. A phoney left, let's bid good riddance to it and start practising the real thing. I'm sick of having to defend socialism against critics who point to these statist technocrats who just tinker about in government, never remotely going near the transformation of social relations, upon which any socialism worthy of the name depends. Taking back control - raising issues of sovereignty, democratic will, the right of people to live by laws of their own making, right of self-government - raise the big issues that have been obscured for too long. I say keep calm and make sure that people asserting 'take back control' now come to address the forces that have removed control from the demos in the first place - corporate power, global finance. At the moment, the political establishment are taking the hit. This is merely to target the visible, institutional and public face of alienation. Power is best preserved by being invisible - it's these 'invisible' forces, private, global, systemic, that we can now target in the name of sovereign power, democracy and control. For decades now there has been a class war waged from above. Now the mask has slipped - if the demos want 'control', they are going to have to assert the primacy of politics over economic imperatives. There are some big lessons here. I think it’s an expression of something deeper than fear and loathing. Politics as usual, like business as usual, isn’t working, or is working only for a few. The many are in open revolt. There’s a populist revolt underway against ‘the establishment’ - the elites and experts who have extolled the virtues of globalization, destabilised communities, tipped nations and economies into bankruptcy, leaving people behind or putting them under increasing pressure merely to get by. I'd better add, in case I'm misunderstood, I'm not arguing that we reconnect with bigots, ignoramuses, racists and xenophobes whose rejection of 'globalisation' - or whatever it is they are rejecting - is motivated not by any political principle or understanding but by, well, bigotry, ignorance, racism and xenophobia. As with the narrative that says Brexit was a result of the revolt of alienated white working class, we need to be careful - the most revolting groups were in the higher income brackets, same with the US election. But refer to all the figures you like, I live in the middle of an industrial wasteland, have campaigned here - and that's the message I get time and time again - working class politics has been abandoned, and (enough) folk are in revolt against elites and experts (visible political targets). The point is not that it is the revolt of the alienated working class left behind in deindustrialised wastelands is the cause of Brexit and Trump – the figures show much greater support in other social groups and classes – but that significant numbers of the working class are jumping ship, splitting the left/liberal/progressive camp with, preventing a united front and swelling the numbers of the revolting. It refers to what Ralph Miliband called the crisis in the agencies of labour back in 1989: ‘The failures registered by parties of the Left in government do not produce great ideological shifts in the working class. They merely produce disillusionment and cynicism, and a greater availability to the frantic propaganda directed at the working class by conservative forces. All the more is this effective when these forces, unlike their opponents, appear assured, united, and confident. The remarkable thing is not that a substantial part of the working class responds—as it has always done—to these appeals, but that a large part of it does not, and remains, in electoral terms, faithful to the parties of the Left’ (Miliband 1989:222).

Miliband argues that: “The root of the problem, which is of historic proportions, lies not in the working class, nor in 'the electorate', but in these political agencies themselves, and notably in the main political formations of the Left in advanced capitalist countries—namely, social democratic parties.

The failings of these parties do not necessarily prevent them from winning elections, largely because of the discredit and unpopularity which comes to attach to conservative governments. But these electoral victories herald no significant challenge to the power structure and no advance in the direction of socialist change. Challenge and advance will not occur until what may be called the crisis of agencies has been overcome—until, that is, mass parties of the Left are able and willing to speak and act as parties committed to the advancement of 'reformist' policies and struggles within the perspective of a fundamental transformation of the social order (Miliband 1989:223).

Far from being resolved, that crisis has got worse.

I think it’s pointless talking about idiots, it makes no difference and misses the point. This phrase ‘take back control’ keeps cropping up. People are rejecting a politics identified with this loss of control – they need now to go further than the institutional expression of that loss, the EU in Europe and identify the means and mechanisms of this ‘control’. That all seems very vague at the moment, with the UK talking about being pioneers of something called ‘free trade’, more of the same but without institutional constraint, unleashing the very impacts people are revolting against. But it’s the right question in terms of sovereign power, subsidiarity, democratic will, the right of people to determine their way of life and live by laws they have had a hand in making – and not by economic imperatives and institutional edicts. I’m reading articles claiming the ‘end of rational enlightenment’. This is way off. I keep labouring this point, but knowledge and know-how only give us the ability to do things, it doesn’t make us want to do things. We need to address the motivational economy, not just deal with fact and reason and expect action, not just inform, but form characters. And most of all engage in a critique of political economy. The rational enlightenment model of reaching heads and ignoring hearts is great for technocracy but does nothing for democracy. It says something that we have to tell people to turn up and vote. Give people principles, ideals, values that inspire effort, and they would fly to the polling stations and public forums. The architects of globalization and their endless promises of ‘jobs, growth and investment’ – whilst paying lip service to climate action – have asked for this kick up the pants. It’s just that it’s the poor and the powerless and all manner of other groups liable to get this kick. And those doing the kicking are very much on the side of the forces behind the loss of control in the first place. The British ‘take back control’ from the EU only to promote the very ‘free trade’ that has removed control in the first place... some hard lessons to come here.

As I said about Brexit, it’s been coming. I live in an area left behind by the globalization of economic relations, ignored too by the politicians and the party who are supposed to represent them. So they voted to leave the EU. Unfortunately, this ‘globalisation’ turned the EU into an austerian iron cage, ushering in liberalisation of markets and trade as well as privatisation of state assets in Stiglitz’s terms, but what I call the corporatisation of public business, the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form. If people really are serious about ‘taking back control’, these issues of corporate power, global finance and system-wide accumulative imperatives – which remain outside of democratic will and sovereignty – will have to be addressed. I just find it somewhat disappointing that left of centre politics remains so limp and lame, so incapable of motivating people (Sanders had it, Corbyn has something of it.) I hope the era of focus groups, soundbites and bean-counting mediocrities out to manipulate people and seduce their votes is over, it’s rotten and rubbish, so much so the only positive thing to be said about them is that they represent a ‘lesser evil.’ An evil is an evil, leaves problems unresolved, to turn into the greater evil anyway. I heard this with Blair, he’s a lesser evil – he gave us dodgy dossiers, illegal wars, private finance and assorted other evils. I hope this calculating politics by these nth rate Machiavellis is over and we can get back to saying openly what we stand for. Good grief, Trump opened his mouth and offended any number of people. The fact he won nails the myth that we have to make the message so bland as to be meaningless, achieving broad appeal by having no principled depth, in order to win elections.

A couple of days ago I wrote something on Brexit that seems apposite. People are hacked off with this ‘globalization’ and its seemingly empty promises. The EU took the hit on that as a visible target. People now need to look deeper than the institutional level to identify the real forces underpinning the globalization of economic relations.

http://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/.../Sovereignty...

As for the environment and the climate agreement … rather than say ‘it’s over’, I’ll just quote Naomi Klein on HC "I don't trust her on climate at all," Klein tells Mehdi Hasan. "As secretary of state, when she had a huge megaphone to make this an issue, to show that she understands the connections between human security and climate, she didn't use the megaphone." I’ve read way too much climate change denialism in the US now to be past anger. A species doesn’t have to survive.

I’m glad I’m with these people, DIEM25

‘But, clearly, Europe is not enough. Progressives in the United States, those who supported Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, must band together with progressives in Canada and Latin America, to build a Democracy in the Americas Movement.’

I think we can back the 'neoliberal' accusation with respect to Bill Clinton, Blair in the 90s, all the way back to its origins (and before that with the failure of corporatism and the illusion that capitalism had been replaced with 'the mixed economy') with facts when it comes to policies, decisions, trade deals. When I studied international economics at Keele in 1995 I had hopes of an EU wide 'socially responsible market' economy modelled on Germany - only to see pretensions of industrial strategy develop into a competition policy. The memory of Blair, Mandelson, Roger Liddle et al working behind the scenes to weaken the social protocol in Europe is one I shan't forget or forgive (there can be no social partnership when there are no social partners, only a free handing for business and finance) - a rotten generation of politicians is passing, good riddance I say. I can't forgive them for taking the name of Adam Smith in vain, either. As for 'liberal', the problem is that the social roots of liberalism are withering away as we move to the corporate form, leaving a form in the establishment that lacks content in society. The liberals, if neither by choice nor design, but by systemic constraint, end up as neoliberals in practice. Sad to say, seeing how the EU ended up, given the high hopes I had back in the 1990s. Now we see a retreat from a supranational framework through a renationalisation that gives us neoliberalism on a national scale. Gotta get to the social roots of this.

Addition

Naomi Klein: 'They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?

Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.'

https://www.theguardian.com/.../rise-of-the-davos-class...

NOTES – some notes raising points to think about, linked to the above observations.

‘Brexit is the worst of all policy ideas.

The whole idea militates against longstanding notions of British pragmatism. That smart school of thought always asks one simple question: What is the fastest, least cumbersome way to obtain a payoff for a policy move?

Brexit is the exact opposite of that: It is a highly complex maneuver with a very uncertain outcome and an equally uncertain payoff. In that sense, the Brexit agenda is entirely un-British.

Many nations in the world have far more important goals to pursue than discussing the future possibility of a potential bilateral trade deal with the British government.

No matter how often British negotiators refer to the seemingly golden fact that the UK is the world’s fifth-largest economy, it won’t account for much.

Virtually every other nation is busy working on terrorism, finding strategies to promote employment for young people, securing pensions for old age and so forth.

In such a world, dealing with the UK is way down the agenda

Theresa May and the Brexit mastermind trio of Johnson, Davis and Fox must still believe that these are the days of Viceroy Mountbatten: London (or one of its representatives) calls – and the world jumps to attention. Not so.

Contrary to their continuing promises, they will have a very hard time to come up with any quick successes. This is due to the very complex, interlocking logic of international trade deals – which British negotiators helped co-invent over the centuries.

Most of the UK’s potential partners for such deals will want clarity about how any potential separate deal with the UK would affect their much larger, far more important relationship with the EU. That is a major, probably insurmountable handicap for the Brexiteers.’

‘The shock was regional rather than global, with the market impact concentrated in the United Kingdom and Europe; and the volatility lasted only about a week, compared to the previous two severe risk-off episodes, which lasted about two months and led to a sharp correction in US and global equity prices.

Why such a mild, temporary shock?

For starters, the UK accounts for just 3% of global GDP. By contrast, China (the world’s second-largest economy) accounts for 15% of world output and more than half of global growth.

The eurozone and the EU are unlikely to disintegrate suddenly. Many of the risks they face are on a slow fuse. And disintegration can of course be avoided by a political vision that balances the need for greater integration with the desire for some degree of national autonomy and sovereignty over a range of issues.

But finding ways to integrate that are democratic and politically acceptable is imperative. Muddling through has resulted in an unstable equilibrium that will make disintegration of the EU and the eurozone inevitable. Given the many risks Europe faces, a new vision is needed now.’

‘The hard Brexit option, of which many in Britain still dream, will require a Churchillian level of response from the British state for it to be successfully delivered.

It entails the prospect of a standoff with the EU institutions and some of the Member States over the procedure to negotiate the UK’s withdrawal from the Union.

The UK would also need far more than the two years often talked about – more likely, if all goes well, a five-year period to negotiate both its separation and trade agreement with the EU.

Perhaps most important and most difficult, while doing all this, the UK government would have to develop and execute a world class industrial strategy to re-balance the economy to cope with a world in which it can no longer rely on EU single market access.

As skilled as the British bureaucracy may be, it is not sufficiently resourced to achieve all that.

Where the UK has a powerful point

What may well turn out to be a practical way forward for Britain and the other 27 Member States is to see Brexit in its European context. The argument here is that the five drivers which led to the Brexit vote are found across Europe:

• Discontent from the downsides of globalization

• concern at intra-EU immigration

• external migrant flows

• security

• over-reach of the EU institutions.

One soft Brexit route which is worth Brussels, Berlin and London investigating is where Britain and the other 27 Member States agree to a new European settlement that seeks to address those discontents.

This would have all the advantages from the UK’s perspective of being less burdensome and less time consuming than a hard Brexit while addressing the concerns of leave voters.

From the rest of the EU’s perspective, such a deal would keep the UK close to the EU in some form of associate membership or EEA member.

Such a European settlement would also allow the EU Member States to tackle head on the discontents that now exist across Europe.

Their discontent threatens the mainstream democratic political parties and potentially liberal democracy itself.

Such an approach would have the tremendous advantage diplomatically and politically of turning a presumable life-threatening crisis of the EU into an unexpected recovery act.

The win-win strategy

It is not too difficult to sketch the outline of such a settlement. It would include the following elements:

1. Security in Globalization

This element of the settlement would include an agreement to bolster the EU’s trade procedures against unfair trade. It would include the creation of a foreign investment review procedure and a program to assist areas which had suffered as a result of globalization.

2. Pragmatic Breaks on Free Movement

This would include a number of measures to restrict the free movement of people across the Union, including a surge break.

The underlying aim would be to keep as far as possible to the principle of free movement, while protecting communities from large-scale movements.

3. Non-EU Migrants

This would involve a battery of measures, including:

• creating a more formidable security operation in the Mediterranean to suppress trafficking

• greater support for a border protection force

• funding migrants near their home countries and

• establishment of free trade enterprise zones in neighboring countries to stabilize those countries and support migrants.

4. Security

Given the security threats facing the European Union — from Narva Castle on the Russian/Estonian border to the gates of Gibraltar — the EU could create an enhanced security package.

This dimension, too, could include a major British role, reinforcing its military presence on the continent and in the Mediterranean Sea.

5. EU Reform

The reform package would seek to ensure that the EU focus its activities on where there was a compelling European reason to act.

It would also seek to return powers to the EU Member States and strengthen substantially the role of the national parliaments in scrutinizing proposed EU legislation.

A broad European settlement

But it is high time for all sides to get real. This applies to federalists in the European Parliament as well as to the Brexiteers in the UK who must urgently comprehend the (almost) unmanageable scale of what they have set in motion.

Both would be well advised – in the EU’s and Britain’s very own interests – to adjust their sights, and recognize the dangerous realities we all face.

Much as they wished otherwise, they cannot deny that the populists are at the gates, the discontents are real and the external threats that the whole of Europe and its liberal democratic order face are considerable.

Conclusion

A European settlement could keep Britain close to the EU and fully engaged, while at the same time providing the other Member States the means to challenge and then reverse the populist surge.’

‘A Radical Proposal After Brexit: End the European Union and Begin Destructive Creation

Why the European Union should start over

A year ago, as the “Greek Tragedy” was unfolding, I posted on my blog, Is this the Beginning of the End for the European Union? The outcome of the EU membership referendum in UK suggests that the break-up process is gathering steam.

Rather than trying to fight the disintegrative trend, we should allow it to run its course, destroying the EU as it is now.

But we need a European Union. Thus, what I hope will happen is another integrative project within Europe, one that will learn from the mistakes of the last one.

In other words, the EU is dead; long live a new and better EU.

Social Cooperation is Key

We live in huge societies of hundreds of millions of people, but we don’t really understand what makes them possible. It is not often appreciated that well-functioning—peaceful, wealthy, and just—societies are possible only on a basis of effective cooperation (for more on this, see Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth).

The overall trend over the last 10,000 years has been for humans evolving to cooperate in ever larger societies—from living in farming villages of a few hundred people to nation-states of today and even supra-national formations like the EU. But cooperation is fragile. We know from studying history that cooperation tends to go up and down in cycles. Currently, and according to all the indicators, both the United States and the European Union are in a downward, disintegrative, phase of the cooperation cycle.

There are several interlocking reasons why the EU, in particular, has entered the disintegrative phase. Let’s discuss them in turn.

Betrayal of the Elites

The political elites in UK were overwhelmingly in favor of staying, but the majority of the population voted to leave. We see similar gulfs develop between the elites and people in other European countries (notably, Germany). Why? Some answers are suggested by The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, published 20 years ago by Christopher Lasch. Lasch’s book is a powerful social critique of the American elites, but many of his charges now apply to the European leaders—self-serving, globalist, and disdainful of people they govern.

This development is, in large part, a result of the spread of the corrosive ideology of neoliberalism from the US to Europe. As the European elites adopted the neoliberal views en masse, it changed their attitudes and behaviors in several ways.

First, neoliberalism freed them to pursue self-serving policies, such as reducing corporate taxes:

Second, the reference group for European elites became other wealth- and power-holders in Berlin, London, and Washington, not their own populations.

The treatment of Greece last year is a vivid illustration of the new elite behavior. The Greeks were forced to swallow the neoliberal recipe for fixing the mess, in which they found themselves. Note also that it was not the elected (and completely ineffectual) European Parliament that imposed austerity on Greece.

Imperial Overstretch

Large-scale societies are not simply huge sloshing bags of people. Instead, they’re groups of groups of groups. Unlike ants, humans cooperate in societies that are organized hierarchically. Cooperation is important at all levels: we cooperate in families, we cooperate in towns, we cooperate on a regional level, in nation-states, and supranational organizations, like the European Union or the United Nations. At each level you need an identity. Who is that “us” who is cooperating? Most people have multiple nested identities, for example, one can be an Ingoldstadter, Bavarian, German, and European. We are interested in cooperation at the level above the nation-state. So where do supranational identities come from?

There were internal tensions within the precursor of the EU, the European Economic Community, but initially these problems were resolved in cooperative manner. But then, and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the EU started acting as a typical expansionary empire, gobbling up more and more states. This is a typical imperial disease, known in historical sociology as “imperial overstretch.” The problems mounted, willingness to cooperate waned, and the integrative trend reversed itself. In addition to the spread of neoliberalism, which, as I stated above, is an ideology corrosive of cooperation, different EU members found it difficult to cooperate with each other, because they did not share a well-defined common identity. Additionally, different groups evolve different institutions that promote cooperation. This is why, as the political scientist Robert Putnam found, ethnically diverse groups find it more difficult to cooperate. It’s a coordination problem.

Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Söder recently expressed this idea as follows: “In southern Europe, there are notions of solidarity that differ from ours.”

Identities are not fixed in stone; they evolve. The idea of Europeanness has evolved quite a lot since the day of Charlemagne. But evolution takes time. You cannot build an identity and a common set of institutions in one fell swoop. The rapid expansion of the European Union far beyond the area where Europeanness was born (the Carolingian Empire) was, in my opinion, a big mistake. Positive social change is gradual and slow; it’s breaking apart that can occur quite rapidly.

Destructive Creation

But breaking apart is also an important aspect of social evolution. When social formations become dysfunctional they must be somehow swept away and be replaced with more cooperative formations. After all, that’s how free market economics works. Unprofitable firms go belly up, and more efficient ones grab their market share. Joseph Schumpeter called this “creative destruction.” For reasons I explain in Ultrasociety I prefer to reverse the order, “destructive creation”.

I very much hope that the dissolution of the European Union will unfold in a non-violent manner. In fact, the faster the political elites decide that the EU must go, the better chances are that it will happen without people getting killed.

I actually don’t expect such an outcome. What will probably happen is that the EU will gradually fade away by becoming increasingly ineffectual and then irrelevant.

Where could a new and better EU come from? There is already some talk about “Core Europe” (Kerneuropa) perhaps consisting of the six founding nations, or some other subset of the EU. Such an incipient supranational political formation has a much better chance of promoting integration in Europe than an attempt to reform the EU as it is now. We have a rich history of human attempts to build large-scale societies over the last 10,000 years. The rise of the new discipline of Cultural Evolution, which uses evolutionary theories and historical data (see Seshat: Global History Databank), provides us with new tools and ideas for evolving peaceful, prosperous, and just societies.’

Industry and Europe: Problems and Uncertainties in a Global Economic Environment, 4 volumes

Volume 1

The Integration of the European Community

https://www.academia.edu/657275/INDUSTRY_AND_EUROPE_-_PROBLEMS_AND_UNCERTAINTIES_IN_A_GLOBAL_ECONOMIC_ENVIRONMENT_vol_1_The_Integration_of_the_European_Community

pages 4-7, 8, 11, 13-15, 16, 17-18, 23, 25-26, 42-43, 44-45, 46, 62-63, 67-69, 138, 143, 164, 165

Volume 2

The Social Market

https://www.academia.edu/657289/INDUSTRY_AND_EUROPE_vol_2_The_Social_Market

pages 3-4, 5-8, 9-12, 17-18, 165-167

Volume 3

Transnational Monopoly Capitalism

https://www.academia.edu/657291/INDUSTRY_AND_EUROPE_Pt_3_Transnational_Monopoly_Capitalism

pages 89, 102-103, 124-126, 128-130, 131-132, 133, 134, 135-137, 138-140, 146, 147-149, 150, 151, 152-155, 156-158, 162, 164, 165, 168, 169

Volume 4

The Economics of Peace, Freedom and Justice

https://www.academia.edu/657292/INDUSTRY_AND_EUROPE_Pt_4_The_Economics_of_Peace_Freedom_and_Justice

pages 2-3, 23-24, 79-80, 84-85, 85-87, 88-93, 95-96, 102-103, 104-105, 107, 108, 123-124, 125, 126, 135-137