The Chronicle of a Death Foretold

The crucial question of the Habermas-Streeck debate on the crisis in Europe was, ‘Should the political forces resisting the de-democratization of capitalism strive for renewal of the European Union through its deeper integration, as per Habremas, or for peaceful dissolution of the European Union and a retreat to a national state, as per Streeck?’ In this article, the arguments of each author are examined against the background of the left-wing Syriza party’s challenge to European austerity in Greece. Three conclusions are drawn. First, Syriza’s nationally charged populism in opposition coincided with Streeck’s considerations. Second, Syriza’s governmental strategy reflected Habermas’s views. Third, Syriza’s sudden rise to power and its subsequent failure to reverse the austerity both substantiate Streeck’s thesis that at the present juncture renationalization of economic policy represents a condition of the possibility for egalitarian politics in Europe.

At the time of writing, Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister of the UK. While he is likely to face a general election sooner rather than later, he is also likely to retain the premiership at the next election. Beyond Brexit, what does he want to do with it? This paper situates Johnson’s domestic economic policy agenda in the context of the shift in British economic statecraft since the financial crisis towards the development of substantive industrial policies. It considers specifically what might change as a result of the switch from Theresa May to Boris Johnson, and what might – despite the rhetoric of radical departure – stay more or less the same.

Is there a political representation of investors and creditors? Making the collective entity of 'financial markets' or sovereign bondholders a subject of action, capable of political decisions and actions, poses de facto a number of challenges for sociological analysis. The analysis offered by the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck (2014) brings the division of the social body back to the centre of debt analysis. Streeck describes the opposition, whether implicit or explicit, between two types of political subjects with disjointed interests and modes of expression in our democratic systems: that of Staatsvolk (citizens in general) and that of Marktvolk (people of the market, or the 'aristocracy of finance'). He links these forms of political subjectivity with different registers of public and political expression. The Staatsvolk citizen-voters, 'the owners of passports commanding a right to vote', 1 express themselves during periodic elections and are attached to the public service and the social State. Meanwhile, members of the Marktvolk – 'the owners of bonds and movable capital commanding a right to sell' 2 – participate in political life as creditors who buy, trade and sell State bonds during auctions and renew (or not), their confidence in the government depending on its orientations. Auctions and interest rates for sovereign bonds are considered as competing modes of democratic expression objectifying opinion polls and election results. This understanding of the division of the social world through debt has proven controversial. 3 Critics aimed at Streeck focused on the very possibility of attributing 'market people' and sovereign bondholder, with a social unity, a political homogeneity and an inclination to form a group: in other words in considering it as a 'collective actor' with a class consciousness. 4 This controversy highlights one of the weaknesses in the sociology of public finances: How to refer to the social and political groups concerned, interested and affected by sovereign debt? And where does the coordination of their interests, if any, take place? Is it possible to differentiate between the social classes in their relationship with debt, and treat financial markets as active entities without leaving oneself open to accusations of conspiracy theory (Tooze, 2017)? The obstacles to such an inquiry are unquestionably numerous. The heterogeneity of the 'international financial class' thwarts any attempts to describe it. Likewise, the complexity of the relationship between States and markets – determined by skilfully-measured gifts and counter-gifts, and which, ultimately, cannot easily be said to be favourable

This book discusses the growing political contest between conservative and reform-orientated defenders of capitalist societies on the one side, and the policies and imagined futures advanced by green and socialist critics on the other. All are subjected to detailed scrutiny. Is ‘green growth’ innovation able to resolve deep-seated global inequality and other socio-political and environmental problems? Can new technology sustain capitalist production and high consumption by decoupling economic growth from the limits of nature? How feasible or utopian are ‘post-work’ or post-capitalist societies based on full automation and a universal basic income? What are the political economic strengths and weaknesses of green post-growth or degrowth proposals? These and other crucial issues are analysed by the author in a challenging and thought-provoking book covering an extensive range of policy reports, social theories, environmental proposals and political practices across the world. Boris Frankel is a social theorist, political economist and cultural critic. He is Honorary Principal Fellow in the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne.

This article examines the ways in which EU actors have engaged in incremental changes to the Eurozone rules 'by stealth,' that is, by reinterpreting the rules and recalibrating the numbers without admitting it in their public discourse. Using the methodological framework of discursive institutionalism to focus on agents' ideas and discursive interactions in institutional context, the article links EU actors' rules reinterpretation to their efforts to ensure greater legitimacy in terms of policy performance and governance processes as well as citizen politics. Using the normative theoretical framework of EU democratic systems theory, it analyses EU actors' considerations of legitimacy not only in terms of their policies' 'output' performance and citizens' political 'input' but also their governance processes' 'throughput' quality. The article illustrates by elaborating on the different pathways to legitimation of the European Central Bank and the European Commission.

States acting as lenders of last resort in the aftermath of the 2007/2008 financial crisis clearly illustrated the central role that states have in the operations of financial markets. Despite their active roles, however, states continue to be presented as passive actors that dance to the tunes of the financial markets. This paper, however, takes a close look at how states’ geopolitical concerns influence financial regulation. States are perceived as serving the interests of their citizens, yet future rescue operations (as lenders of last resort) at the costs of the taxpayers remain a strong possibility – in particular, Too Big To Fail (TBTF) banks persist and their leverage-ratios have not greatly improved. To better understand why this is the case, this paper argues that geopolitical concerns influence the triangular relationships between the (democratic) state, the financial sector, and the state’s citizens (and taxpayers) in favour of the financial sector. Accordingly, the paper argues that we should more explicitly ask ‘what drives states (and politics) in their approaches to finance?’

In her essay 'Neoliberalism and the end of liberal democracy' Wendy Brown suggests that critical political theory needs to 'mourn liberal democracy' in order to develop a transformative vision of 'the good'. The problem, as Brown outlines it, is not only that- to varying extents and in different scales across democratic states - market rationality has hollowed out representative structures and processes and organises social life, but also that 'basic principles and institutions of democracy are becoming nothing other than ideological shells' that nevertheless legitimate neoliberal governmentality. Brown's concept of mourning has implications for Media Studies' constitutive focus on publicness and political participation within the democratic nation-state. This paper considers Brown's critique in relation to the tendency in Media Studies to admit the unachievable idealism of certain ideas - particularly in relation to the public sphere and pluralism - while continuing to use them as guiding normative standards and values. The paper questions how such normative ideals can provide guidance where not only has the political and institutional imaginary that underpins them changed, perhaps irrevocably, but where the continued flagging of these ideas may be implicated in the kind of ideological camouflage Brown identifies.

This article analyses Germany " s Der Spiegel weekly journal, and its discursive constructions of the oppositional voices against the so-called structural reforms imposed on Greece in the context of the Eurozone crisis. The analysis is focused on relevant articles published by Der Spiegel between late 2009 and early 2015, during important, crisis-related socio-political events. Drawing on discourse theory and critical discourse analysis, the article concludes that Der Spiegel (along with other mainstream media in Germany and elsewhere) publicly legitimises the elites " hegemonic crisis-narratives and-policies, while discrediting oppositional voices. The study further foregrounds the ways Der Spiegel and other German mainstream-media reproduce a nationalistic " victimisation " of Germany, which advances Germany " s own national branding-strategy of positive Self-representation in the EU and in the world.

The paper considers what it means to contest austerity and what political contestation of austerity says about how austerity as a political process should be conceived. It does so through separating a narrow view of austerity as fiscal consolidation from actually existing austerity as a broader political economic process ongoing in different ways in different countries. Through a case study of crisis, austerity and contestation as it relates to housing in Spain, the paper argues that to contest actually existing austerity it is necessary to contest both the wealth and power of the actors that have gained from austerity, not least finance capital. Through bank bailouts and the creation of a bad bank, the reforms demanded by the troika have opened up Spanish housing to direct wealth extraction by global finance capital whilst half a million households have been evicted and hundreds of thousands live with insurmountable debt. The Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH, Platform for the Mortgage-Affected) has contested austerity in Spanish housing by contesting finance capital through civil disobedience whilst campaigning for anti-austerity reforms to housing and mortgage legislation, aiming to limit how housing can be a sphere of wealth extraction for finance capital.

This article considers how before and after the Tories came to power in 1979, The Times and the Daily and Sunday Telegraph consistently propagated ideas emanating from the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs. It argues that this was part of a wider process in which the post-war Keynesian consensus came under fire from sections of both the media and the political class, and heralded an era in which neo-liberal ideas would come to constitute a new form of economic ‘common sense’. Given the dominance of this perspective, most of the mainstream media failed to anticipate the 2008 financial crisis and have repeatedly endorsed austerity as the only means of reducing the ensuing deficit.

Europe is facing both a political crisis of democracy and legitimacy and an economic crisis of debt and competitiveness. These crises seem to point in two distinct directions, growing social unrest over the Europeanised mechanisms of economic adjustment, and increasing efforts at strengthening those same institutions that regulate the adjustment process. Recent analyses have suggested that this failure of democracy will prove decisive; legitimacy for crisis management efforts requires a re-democratisation of the European polity. Instead, drawing on an analysis of ordo- and neo-liberal traditions the paper explains how European integration was itself a response to the perceived threat of democratic demands at the domestic level. The body of the paper then traces the crisis through three phases, arguing that efforts by state managers reflect a deliberate attempt to depoliticize policymaking processes. Yet the selective intervention – to restore accumulation whilst withdrawing social spending – has only fuelled the politicisation of segments of European society. This threatens to test the limits of depoliticisation as a governing strategy.

Political economy literature has sought to explain the rapid shift from fiscal stimulus to austerity after the 2008 crisis. Influential contributions highlight the relative explanatory value of ideational or structural factors in contributing to post-crisis austerity. Drawing on Stephen Gill's (1998) analysis of new constitutionalism and Peter Burnham's (2001) understanding of depoliticisation, I contend that these frameworks offer a more useful lens to understand how post-2010 austerity in the US and UK was shaped by an enduring consensus on macroeconomic policy governance consolidating during the 1990s. Examining the role of fiscal mechanisms such as PAYGO in the US and the 'Fiscal Golden Rules' in the UK, and the operational independence conferred to central banks, I illustrate how Third Way governments institutionalised budgetary reforms and distanced macroeconomic policymaking from popular political contestation. Despite temporary lapses with this logic of fiscal restraint, as well as the rollout of historic monetary policies after 2008, I argue that these practices became deeply embedded within state institutions. Focusing on PAYGO in the US and the OBR in the UK, I show how policymakers redeployed policies and practices from the 1990s amidst the 2008 crisis to externalise responsibility for implementing austerity measures.

Political accounts for the contemporary rise of populism in Western democracies generally agree that elite unresponsiveness and a wider crisis of political representation are to blame for the current political predicament. Mainstream political elites are caught between increasingly irreconcilable responsibilities bound by external constraints and institutions and growing popular demands for responsiveness. These accounts, however, fail to explain what underlying processes and structures are constraining elite responsiveness. In this paper, I give a political economy explanation, which links elite unresponsiveness with the weakening problem-solving capacity of Western democracies to deliver to their citizens in the face of increasing global economic integration, the power of financial markets and neoliberal hegemony. Moreover, I argue that the success of populist actors lies precisely in attempting to overcome these structural constraints by employing state power to address the challenges posed by global economic processes and the imbalances they create to democracy and national sovereignty.

This special issue assembles eight articles on the relationship between democracy and the financial order from various legal perspectives. Each article engages with the concept of law from a particular theoretical angle, be it a full-grown legal theory or an approach in political economy that has a particular view of the law. We have arranged the special issue in order to reflect certain debates. Thus, the special issue begins with a debate between two contemporary German theories of law by Jürgen Habermas (Goldmann and Steininger) and Niklas Luhmann (Viellechner). Next is a transatlantic debate between rational choice conceptions of law (Towfigh) and ideas of constitutional pluralism (Avbelj). Different traditions of mostly Anglo-Saxon liberalism are reflected in the contribution by Suttle. Eventually, three contributions engage with conceptions of law in neoliberalism and ordoliberalism and the way they have shaped our perceptions of public finance, including budgetary rules, taxes, and money (Biebricher, Saffie, Feichtner). To connect theory with life, each contribution elaborates its salient theoretical points by using an example of a particular case study or issue area that faces challenges in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Thus, while all articles address the law’s capacity to accommodate both democracy and capitalism, each individually contributes to the development of law and policy in a particular issue area. Topics range from sovereign debt issues (Goldmann and Steininger, Viellechner, Suttle) to budgetary restrictions (Biebricher), banking regulation (Avbelj), money and the ECB (Towfigh and Feichtner), and taxes (Saffie).

This article seeks to contribute to the existing critical debates on money and debt by advancing three main arguments. First, largely due to such debates’ tendency for description, the article argues that in in the heterodox literature on money and debt there is no convincing critical theory of money creation. For this reason the authors introduce the theory of capital as power and how it can help us theorize the consequences of present money creation. Second, the authors demonstrate how the capitalization of money creation by a minority of investors not only leads to the political chase for unsustainable economic growth, but also how there is a differential distribution of interest upwards that helps generate greater economic inequality in the United States. Third, they argue that in an era of declining growth, dominant owners of capital seek to recapture their expected return on investments by extracting a greater share of the national income from the vast majority of citizens thr...

The recent publication of Kenneth Dyson’s book Conservative Liberalism, Liberalism, Ordo-Liberalism, and the State offers an occasion to reconsider the body of ideas known as ordoliberalism. The books reviewed here represent much of the most recent scholarship in English on the subject. In this essay, I undertake two tasks: first, to clarify what the term properly refers to and in particular how it is related to “neoliberalism,” and, second, to consider its influence on postwar German policies and institutions. I argue that much of the recent discussion of ordoliberalism and neoliberalism overlooks important differences between early ordoliberal thinking and the ideas associated with neoliberalism. Over time, as neoliberalism evolved and particularly as it became an ideological justification for policies and institutions justifying the accumulation of concentrated market power, these differences have become wider even as they have been obscured by misreadings of ordoliberalism. A be...

Introduction: During the euro’s sovereign debt crisis, European leaders have become obsessed with rules, numbers, and pacts. This has reinforced an approach that began with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which set out numerical targets for inflation, deficits, and debt for member-states adopting the Single Currency, was formalized by the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) of 1999, but accelerated during the Eurozone crisis beginning in 2010. In quick succession EU leaders signed up for the so-called ‘Six-Pack,’ the ‘Two-Pack,’ and the ‘Fiscal Compact,’ each more stringent on the nature of the rules, more restrictive with regard to the numbers, and more punitive for member-states that failed to meet the requirements. In the absence of any deeper political integration that could provide greater democratic representation and control over an everexpanding supranational governance, the EU has ended up with ‘governing by the rules’ and ‘ruling by the numbers’ in the Eurozone. What has become...

The EU’s sovereign debt crisis is not just economic; it is also political, resulting from the failure of EU leaders to offer solutions that calm the markets and convince the people. These failures stem from problems with EU leaders’ ideas about how to solve the crisis as well as their communication about them. That communication encompasses not just EU leaders talking to one another in negotiations of crisis solutions but also speaking to ‘the markets’ and to ‘the people’ about those solutions, all of which may interact in perverse ways. This article uses the analytic framework of ‘discursive institutionalism’ to consider the different forms, types, levels, rates and mechanisms of change in ideas followed by the EU leaders’ discursive interactions in the ‘coordinative’ discourse and their ‘communicative discourse’ to the global markets and European publics. It uses a range of country cases, but in particular Germany and France, in illustration.

This article focuses on New Democracy (ND), Greece's main conservative party, and its return to power in 2019. The study enquires into ND's hegemonic strategy and governing practice. ND's hegemonic strategy is grounded in both neoliberal and Far-Right premises. This enabled ND to create a hegemonic block that ranges from centrist liberals to far-rightists, while advancing an anti-leftist ideological project, connected to progressing upper-class interests. The ND administration unfolds an autocratic form of executive governance that is based on legislating class-related 182 Yiannis Mylonas reforms, propaganda and effective control of the mainstream media, and coercive force. These features reflect the development of neoliberal authoritarianism in Greece. They represent "the new form of bourgeois republic in the current phase of capitalism," bearing the traits of autocracy, illiberalism, and Far-Right mainstreaming. The study deploys examples from ND's political discourse and from policies that the ND administration has launched.

Published in Steffen Lehndorff (ed), Divise integration. The triumph of failed ideas in Europe revisisted. ETUI, 2015

This chapter traces the evolution of fiscal performance in Germany. Whereas the long-term trend sees a continuous increase of cumulative debt, the economic fundamentals and explicit and implicit efforts of consolidation allowed to government to keep deficits manageable. The reasons for successful consolidation vary, but one key factor is the role of electoral competition. When electoral pressure was high, and governments could not easily blame others, consolidation efforts remained limited or else led to severe political consequences.