Eurocrisis

Between 2009 and 2013, the research group known
as ‘State Project Europe’ based at the Institute for
Social Research in Frankfurt and at Marburg University
investigated the Europeanisation of migration
policies.1 The inquiry focused on the Federal Republic
of Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain as key
examples of EU member states. The following paper
summarises the central theoretical and methodological
results of this study. The first section develops and
unpacks the theoretical premises of a historical
materialist theory of the state. The section that follows
presents the historical materialist policy analysis
(HMPA) approach which has been developed within
this context and that allowed us to operationalise the
theoretical premises for our empirical studies. The last
section analyses the social forces at play in the field of
European migration policy in order to show that the
project of migration management became hegemonic
in Europe and how, since late summer 2015, it has
entered into a state of crisis.
The study identifies five ‘hegemony projects’ that
fought over the mode of European integration: a
neoliberal, a conservative, two social projects and
a left-liberal alternative one. In the field of migration
policy, the conflicts between these projects condensed
into the hegemonic political project of ‘migration
management’. This project, driven by demands of
corporations, certain capital fractions and neoliberal
‘experts’, aimed at making increased and flexible
immigration of workers into and within the EU
politically feasible by integrating certain migration
policy demands from other hegemony projects –
key among them were repressive border controls,
protection of genuine refugees and national-social
privileges.
The concluding section analyses current dynamics.
It focusses on Germany and Austria because these
countries are at the forefront of a major conflict
about the European migration regime, starting with
the ‘Summer of Migration’ of 2015. As a result, the
migration management project has entered a period
of crisis and readjustment, leading, first, to a partial
opening of European borders and then to a temporary
renationalisation and extensive expansion of the
repressive elements of the border regime.
When the refugees had made it over the borders
with self-confidence and found support from a large
‘welcome movement’, which can be attributed to a
discursive alliance of the left-liberal alternative and the
pro-European social hegemony project, it was possible
to shift discourses and practices to the left.
On the basis of decades of mobilisation and not
least of self-organised refugee protests, these
actors were able to strengthen their position in the
migration-political relations of force in Germany and
Austria, the main receiving countries in the Summer
of Migration. This was ultimately also mirrored in
the attitude of the German federal government.
The latter can only be grasped in its complexity and
inconsistency by concluding that the strategies of the
progressive hegemony projects coincided with those
of the neoliberal hegemony project: both strategies
were linked. The Merkel government was able to rely
on influential actors that can be seen as part of the
neoliberal hegemony project, including economists,
representatives of capital and the neoliberal press. The
conservative and national-social hegemony project, on
the other hand, fell behind.
The temporary revocation of the asymmetrical
compromise of ‘migration management’ by the
actors associated with the progressive and neoliberal
hegemony projects, triggered a major chauvinistic
counter-movement, especially on the part of the racist
(völkische) fraction of the conservative project. The
growing influence of these forces intensified until
March 2016, when the Aegean and Balkan routes were
effectively closed and significant restrictions to asylum
laws were introduced in Germany and Austria.
The coming years will show whether neoliberal
forces will succeed in overcoming their prevalent
crisis of hegemony and can re-stabilise the project
of migration management by pushing back racist
(völkische) actors and by reintegrating other actors of
the conservative project. Such integration efforts are
already apparent, for example in the support neoliberal
actors give to the externalisation of the European
border regime. The further direction of European
migration policy, however, very much depends on
whether there are forces that are able to develop a
counter-hegemonic project of transnational solidarity.

The collapse of the Soviet Bloc dramatically recast the European project and reopened the question of what Europe is. Radical nationalism returned in the Balkans to challenge western Europe’s belief that it had overcome such old demons, while Eastern enlargement and Turkey’s quest for membership in the European Union (EU) revived old debates about where Europe ends. Debates about Europe’s exterior boundaries have intersected with discussions about the nature of European identity, European constitutionalism, and the formation of a European single market and currency union. Embattled debates over European identity dovetailed with a return of age-old discussions of Christian Europe and its Islamic other. Today, echoes of the EU’s self-image as a bastion of humanitarian reason and a beacon of democracy find their test in the refugee crisis. Stuck between seemingly perennial austerity and managed inhospitability, the EU’s “thin cosmopolitanism” appears all too content with integrating markets and merely fulfilling minimalist human rights norms. In a painful twist of irony, the only ones who still appear to take seriously the preamble of the failed European Constitution that described Europe as “a special area of human hope” are the refugees landing on Europe’s shores or, more often, drowning in the Mediterranean. While Europe’s politicians are working hard to discourage potential asylum seekers and appear determined to prove that Europe is not a special area of human hope, refugees are voting with their feet for a life in Europe.

Mit Recht ist Hegemonie ein zentraler Begriff materialistischer Theoriebildung geworden, weil er sowohl ökonomische und politische als auch kulturelle Perspektiven zu integrieren vermag. Der Begriff der Hegemonie lenkt den Blick auf gesellschaftliche Kämpfe sowie auf bürgerliche Führungstechnologien und die Produktion von Konsens. Die Frage, ob sich die aktuelle Konstellation mit dem Begriff der Hegemonie angemessen erfassen lässt, ist damit aber noch nicht beantwortet und wird insbesondere in der deutschsprachigen Debatte kontrovers diskutiert. Es wird argumentiert, dass Konsens im Neoliberalismus keine entscheidende Rolle mehr spiele, seine Dominanz sei vielmehr vermittelt durch neue Machtechnologien, die auf Angst, Alternativlosigkeit und die Enteignung jeden Gedankens an Emanzipation beruhen. Wir gehen dementgegen davon aus, dass Hegemonie auch im Neoliberalismus zentraler Modus der Herrschaftsvermittlung bleibt und dass die angeführten nichthegemonialen Herrschaftstechniken selbst hegemonial vermittelt sind. Allerdings handelt es sich um eine fragmentierte Hegemonie, eine Herrschaftsformation in der Krise. Im Folgenden werden wir unser Verständnis von Hegemonie darlegen und versuchen eine begriffliche Bestimmung fragmentierter Hegemonie vorzunehmen. Im letzten Schritt werden wir versuchen die Fragmentierung von Hegemonie an der Herrschaft durch Schulden, die für den Neoliberalismus in der Krise von herausragender Bedeutung ist, zu demonstrieren.

Kritische Theorie stellt sich in den Auseinandersetzungen der letzten Jahrzehnte nicht als eindeutig abgrenzbarer theoretischer Zusammenhang mit festem Methodenkanon und einem privilegierten gesellschaftlichen Untersuchungsgegenstand dar. Der Beliebigkeit ausschließende Zusammenhang besteht in der geteilten Intention der Kritik von überflüssiger Herrschaft. Der Band präsentiert dementsprechend sowohl einige für aktuelle Debatten wichtige theoretische Perspektiven als auch zentrale Themen und Gegenstandsbereiche. Die Auswahl der Beiträge und ihrer Themenstellung verdankt sich auch den aktuellen gesellschaftlichen Krisenphänomenen im Anschluss an die Weltwirtschaftskrise. Deshalb nehmen Auseinandersetzungen mit der Krise der Demokratie und Fragen von Hegemonie- und Staatstheorie einen breiten Raum ein. Daneben finden sich grundlagentheoretische Analysen zu einzelnen Herrschaftsdimensionen und ihrem Verhältnis zueinander, Beiträge zur Intellektuellentheorie und zur Kritik der Wissensgesellschaft. Abgeschlossen wird der Band durch ein Gespräch der HerausgeberInnen mit Alex Demirović, dem der Band zu seinem 60. Geburtstag gewidmet ist. Wie kein anderer Autor im deutschsprachigen Raum hat Alex Demirović die vielfältigen Perspektiven kritischer Theorie produktiv weiter entwickelt und füreinander zugänglich zu machen versucht.

European labour movements are under severe pressure as a result of the global financial and Eurozone crises, which have been used by capital to attack unions and workers’ rights. In this essay, we will assess the response of European labour movements to this attack and discuss to what extent relations of transnational solidarity have been established in this process. Germany has been at the core of discussions about the Eurozone crisis. While peripheral EU member states have run into severe problems, the German economy appears as the clear winner, the example to follow due to its booming exports. As it is the largest national economy within the EU, what happens in Germany has also wider implications for the rest of the EU. Hence, we will specifically focus on the response by the German labour movement to the crisis. What has been more important for German unions, solidarity with workers elsewhere or solidarity with one’s own employer? The analysis of German unions will be complemented by brief discussions of struggles in Greece, Spain and Italy. Finally, in the conclusion we will reflect on the response by labour movements at the European level to establish whether unions have been able to go beyond their traditional national environment in the search for new strategies against the attack of capital.

The Greek announcement of its excessive debts led to one of the most severe crises the EU has faced since its inception. The crisis soon evolved into a full leadership crisis as European political leaders struggled to come up with a common solution to the challenges they faced. Theories of leadership and crisis management identify several factors that may contribute to these differences. This article examines to what extent leaders’
personal traits and external pressure influenced how six political leaders made sense of the situation. The study finds that a leader’s belief that they can control events, their self-confidence, as well as economic pressure provide a partial explanation of how European leaders make sense of the crisis. The traits of cognitive complexity and openness to information do not exert an influence in the cases discussed here. These findings indicate that any comprehensive understanding of how leaders make sense of crises should take note of specific  individual as well as contextual factors.

For most of her political career Angela Merkel has been perceived as a pragmatic political leader, avoiding tough and divisive decisions  wherever possible, and joining decision-making coalitions on contested issues when they emerged. To some extent, this remarkable ability appears to explain her extended hold on the German chancellorship. In the midst of her third term, however, her behaviour changed suddenly and unexpectedly, or so it seemed. When in July 2015 the euro crisis flared up again due to the standoff between Greece and its EU partners on the second bail-out, Merkel let her European convictions prevail and backed another support package against the wishes of many in her  party.
Moreover, when Germany was hit by a wave of refugees only a few months later, Merkel became the torch-bearer of a ‘culture of welcome’ and defended her ‘open-door’ policies with a measure of conviction that few observers would have considered possible. This paper looks at Merkel’s leadership performance during her third term through the lens of the concept of ‘conviction leadership’, and inquires if, or to what extent, Merkel can be meaningfully considered a ‘conviction leader’.

"Yanis (Varoufakis), the Minotaur, and the Field of Eurocracy", Historical Social Research 43 (2018) 3, 216-247 │ published by GESIS DOI: 10.12759/hsr.43.2018.3.216-247

This paper aims to show the binding force within the social field of Eurocracy and, more specifically, the subfield of the European economic governance, through the singular case of Yanis Varoufakis's experience as Greek minister of finance. Why is it that, while many elements might have suggested that Varoufakis was not lacking resources, his passage from economics into politics ended up in a fairly brutal shock and a mutual exclusion so extremely invested in on the symbolic level? The paper’s hypothesis is that a substantial part of the strategies of the epistemic agent Varoufakis – an experienced economist as well as a new ruler and new politician in the EU game – were completely out of tune with the structure of the field. To show this, the paper deliberately breaks with the causal analysis of the bargain inside the Eurogroup to build on the use of two multiple​ correspondence analyses (MCA). The first describes a view of (and from) the silent fraction of the field, composed of insiders in the European administrations. The second reconstructs Varoufakis's own relational position and vision of the game from the book he wrote on his experience. Thanks to these two approaches, we combine a descriptive-institutional and a narrative- individual construction of the same social space to explore its deep structure and effects in an innovative way.