CM: The first question I
wanted to ask you goes back to work you’ve been doing for a long time on the
European Union and the project of European integration in relation to the
dynamics of globalisation. Can you say a little bit about what role you think
the dynamics of global restructuring have played in the long process of
European integration, as well as in the context of the more recent crisis in
the European project?
AB: My main argument would
be that, if you look at the revival of European integration since the mid-1980s
with the Internal Market program and economic and monetary integration, we can
only understand that if we see this as part of a revival of integration at the
global level. People have observed at the global level that from the 1970s
onwards, but especially from the early 1980s onwards in response to the
declining rate of profit, capital restructured the way in which production is
organised, renouncing national class compromises and shifting production towards
countries in the global south where they could access cheap labour. So
production was reorganised and transnational production became ever more
important in the way in which production was organised across borders. And I
think those elements also underpin how European integration was reorganised: an
increasing transnationalisation of production in Europe too, with a lot of
northern European producers drawing on cheap labour from the European
periphery. And you have this rise of the neoliberal economic consensus in
Europe too, which with the four freedoms – free movement of goods, capital,
services and labour – of the Internal Market underpins European integration. So
in a way I would argue that European integration from the mid-80s onwards has
been part and parcel of what happened at the global level. A lot of people have
seen it as the creation of fortress Europe, but I don’t think it was ever a
protective project, it was a process of bloc building but via the external
trade policies of the EU also pushing trade partners towards restructuring
elsewhere in the world. At the end of the day it was always about tightening
internal integration combined with openness towards the global economy.
CM: It’s interesting that
you mention that two-faced logic. I’ve just been teaching a course on the
relationship between regionalism and identity within the EU, and one of the key
questions we’ve been looking at is how the project of a Europe of the regions,
which on the one hand many people saw in the 1990s as a means of undermining
the centrality of the nation-state, has in many cases given rise to peripheral
nationalisms that have paradoxically flourished by appealing to ideas of
national identity that are now asserting themselves against the European idea.
AB: Yes, and I would say that
these too are expressions of neoliberal restructuring. You have this idea of
regions of high growth in Bavaria, Northern Italy, certain areas of France for
example that could cooperate based on their economic status and create a transnational
identity that way, which as we saw did not work. But at the same time I would
argue that the state has always had a role to play as kind of a nodal point of
how capitalist accumulation is organised.
CM: So if that’s the bigger
picture of how European integration is connected historically to the dynamics
of globalisation, how would you construe the role of the global or
globalisation in terms of the more recent crisis in the European idea? One
narrative would be to say that the process we’ve just talked about has had
winners and losers, and one reason for a loss of faith in the project of
European integration is that many ordinary citizens and workers have lost out
in this process. Is that how you see it?
AB: Yes, I think that’s
exactly correct. As I said a moment ago the restructuring of global capital has
included the transnational integration of financial markets so I think it’s no
surprise that the moment we had the subprime mortgage crisis in the United
States, which brought down US banks in 2007-8, it completely impacted Europe
because European finance markets had been completely integrated with the global
financial market so Europe was completely dragged down by this crisis. As a
result, countries in the southern periphery of the EU who as Eurozone members
had had access to very cheap credit as part of the single currency suddenly
found it almost impossible to refinance their debts. So in a way the EU crisis
can be understood as a result of this global integration. And I would also
argue that one of the results of globalisation has been increasing inequality
within societies. So some have done extremely well out of it, and whole parts
of populations have done extremely badly. In economically good times,
particularly in the 1990s but also in the period leading up to 2007/2008, the
inequality wasn’t so visible because there was still enough to be shared
around, but the moment you have an economic crisis and austerity policies, this
inequality becomes very visible and leads to general unrest, and opposition to
European integration.
CM: What’s especially interesting
to me about that is that in addition to the inequality between different EU
member states, and particularly members of the Eurozone, which you mentioned
just now, there’s also inequality within individual states. And in the context
of the Eurozone crisis it seems that inequality between states functioned
discursively to displace antagonism arising from inequality within states. So
for example we saw that happening in Germany, which despite being a rich EU
country has also seen rising inequality and falling living standards for many,
and in the wake of the Greek debt crisis economic disparities between Germany
and Greece seemed to function as a lightning rod for resentments within Germany
about falling living standards, which also generated distrust in the EU project
that was exploited for example by the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a
right-wing political party.
AB: I think that’s a very
good observation because there has been a general sense that the German export
model functioned so fantastically well and Germany has been an overall winner
in the process of global neoliberal restructuring, which of course it has comparatively,
at the expense of others. Nevertheless, the result has been drastically
intensified inequality also within Germany. The casual labour sector of the
German economy has been one of the fastest growing in Europe and a significant
proportion of German workers have not benefitted at all from the gains of the
export boom, which is often overlooked. Historically, there’s no doubt that
support for European integration has been very strong in Germany, and it
remains very strong, but it’s also correct that the AfD has been able to
exploit Eurosceptic sentiments. Germany is not immune in this respect.
CM: Given what we’ve just been
talking about in terms of transnational cooperation and European integration, I
was wondering what you think the prospects are for reviving the project of a
social Europe, if there ever was such a project, and what role transnational
cooperation on the left might play in that.
AB: At the moment because
of this increasing inequality across Europe, we have witnessed the rise of the
extreme right, although it has different expressions in each country. So in the
UK it’s heavily constellated around Brexit with this strong anti-migration
rhetoric connected to the Eurosceptic idea. In Austria, there’s also a very
strong anti-migration sentiment exploited by the far right but it’s not linked
to criticism of the European Union. However, there’s this shift towards the
right as people are concerned about their security and the right come up with
the simple answers. In addition, the question as always is where’s the left,
can it offer an alternative to these answers. I remember in 2002 at the first
European Social Forum (ESF) in Florence, there were 60,000 people together for
a week discussing alternatives to neoliberal economics. It was an amazing
experience that was really the high time of the European left trying to think
about an alternative project for Europe. Unfortunately, since then the European
left has become very much fragmented. The ESF no longer takes place. There are
people saying we need to restructure the EU from the inside, though one can
also be very sceptical about that. Others are saying we need to abandon that
project altogether because it’s irrevocably tainted with the neoliberal logic.
There are all kinds of different groups such as DiEM 25 started by Varoufakis,
but it’s questionable how much following they actually have on the ground, or
whether it’s just actually a grouping of relatively elite figures. I was
recently at a meeting of the European left in Bilbao. There were about 400
people as opposed to 60,000 in Florence. It was good, I don’t want to be
negative about it, but it was mainly people from radical and left-wing
political parties represented in the European parliament. So its focus was
essentially on electoral politics in the EU parliament and potentially
domestically. While not unimportant or meaningless in itself, this on its own I
don’t think is enough to generate change. On the more positive side, there was
this Stop TTIP campaign in Europe, which did bring together an enormous number
of civil society organisations, trade unions and so on in opposition to the
TTIP, which is no longer being discussed in that form. This was a kind of
success. There was also the European Citizens Initiative on water is a human right,
which again brought trade unions, social movements, environmental and other
NGOs together in favour of declaring water to be a human right within the
European Union. Therefore, there are some mobilisations within Europe on the
left, which have been promising. However, whether that’s enough really to put
forward a green left alternative for the EU is questionable and the forces on
the right are very strong and organised at the national level with a xenophobic
nationalist rhetoric dominating.
CM: That leads us into
another question about your recent book Global
Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis. There you talk about the tension
between the dynamics of class and social movements as forces or agents of
change. That speaks to the issue we just discussed of electoral politics alone
being insufficient. What role do you think social movements have in Europe
today, then, and how do you see that related to class-based movements as more
traditionally conceived?
AB: Institutionally as an
expression of the left trade unions have of course become much weaker
throughout Europe, despite internal differences. Parties of the left, whether more
radical like the German Die Linke or social democratic parties, are also
generally weaker, with the exception of the Labour Party in the UK. Therefore,
from a class perspective resistance needs to be much broader than just being
based on trade unions, parliamentary politics or workplace struggles. As we
heard this morning [in Lisa Adkins’ opening keynote at HM Sydney], the site of
struggle has been expanding into spaces of social reproduction, ecology and so
on. Once we have accepted that, then we can see that any kind of movement
around social reproduction is also a part of a class struggle, and I think the
big challenge for trade unions—and some are better at this than others—is not
to continue to see themselves as a kind of privileged actor, but to open up to
cooperation with these other groups and movements in order to achieve change.
That’s one challenge. The other challenge, and I think we can see this
especially in the UK with the emergence of more radical, activist trade unions
with the organisation of cleaners for example, is how to create a much more
rank and file kind of trade union organisation that is open to more direct
action rather than focusing on simply discussing conditions with employers.
From a labour perspective I think the ‘social partnership ideology’ has run its
course, engaging with employers in corporatist, social dialogue institutions is no longer enough to achieve concessions for workers. The globalisation of
capitalism has shifted the balance of power so much in favour of capital that
organised trade unions need to be much more creative and activist, even
confrontational, in the ways they go about pursuing their demands. Water
struggles are a good example.
CM: Could you give me an
example of a case where that has happened?
AB: Certainly. In the Italian
referendum about water privatisation in 2011, the CGIL public sector union was
a key partner in a very broad alliance of movements including environmental
groups such as Legambiente, other trade unions, and development NGOs. This was
a structure that was replicated at the municipal level where the trade unions
organised the workers locally. In this case you saw trade unions coming to
understand that they have a responsibility not only for pay and working
conditions in the narrow sense, but much more broadly for the social conditions
of labour beyond the workplace, concerns affecting the whole of society.
CM: So in a way some trade
unions have accepted that they have to fight on the ground of social
reproduction, that’s really interesting. Could you say a bit more about how you
see production and reproduction connected in water struggles in Europe, and
maybe also where else you see the front line of struggles around social
reproduction in Europe?
AB: I think it’s important to
remember that capitalist domination and hegemony is never uncontested. There
are always ruptures. It’s easy to be too one-sided and emphasise the power of
capitalism and hopelessness of resistance, but all kinds of things are
overlooked if we do that. Water is a very important site of resistance globally
and nationally in different countries, but there are others. In Spain, for
example, you have a social movement supporting people who in the wake of 2008
were being evicted from their houses because they can’t pay the mortgage and
there has been a struggle against house evictions in response to that. There
are struggles against the privatisation of the health services in Spain and the
UK. In the UK there’ve been rent strikes by students against universities using
housing as a way of making more surplus with housing that’s often unaffordable
for students. So I think there are all kinds of areas in social reproduction
where you have resistance, but also in the sphere of production, represented
for example by the cleaners’ unions I mentioned a moment ago who have struggled
for holiday pay and pensions, which are not a given in this context. But in the
end, I’m not sure we can distinguish so clearly between production and
reproduction. Take the UK with the struggle against the privatisation of
healthcare: on one hand it’s a social reproduction issue because it’s about the
provision of healthcare becoming unaffordable and the intergenerational aspects
of that as well, but when you privatise you also change the way in which the
service is produced so it also has implications for workplace politics and the
social relations of production now and in the future. It’s the same with water.
Moments of class struggle around service provision are always struggles across
the spheres or production and reproduction. That’s why it should be possible
for trade unions to cooperate with social movements. It’s not automatic, but it
should be possible. I think it’s important on the one hand for trade unions to
develop a broader appreciation of why water and health are important for
workers, and on the other hand for members of social movements to understand
why workers as workers are concerned about their pay and working conditions. As
E.P. Thompson said, class consciousness emerges out of moments of joint
struggle.
CM: Thanks so much Andreas. I’d
like to finish by asking a more conceptual question if I can. Yourself and Adam
position the Global
Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis book as an intervention
into debates about ‘the international’, and I was thinking about how you
conceptualise the relationship between the global and globalisation, the
international, and the transnational. Given that we’ve been talking about the
resurgence of the nation as a salient political attachment, is part of your
mission with the book project to assert internationalism as an alternative to
globalism?
AB: One of the big issues we cover
in the book is how can you conceptualise the relations between global
capitalism on the one hand and the interstate system on the other. We criticise
approaches that oppose the state to the market, but also those who talk about
the transnational state emerging as a result of globalisation. We argue that
forms of state continue to play a crucial organising role of how global
capitalist accumulation is administered differentially. The question is how and
to what extent have the interests of transnational capital become internalised
within particular concrete national forms of state? So it’s not about the
global economy constraining what states can do, nor is it about states simply
constraining global capital, but it’s a doubly internalised relation
that differs from one context to the next.
Cat Moir is Senior Lecturer in Germanic Studies and European
Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research specialises in European
intellectual history, with a particular focus on the German-speaking world.
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