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    Ever Closer Union?: Europe in the West
    Ever Closer Union?: Europe in the West
    Ever Closer Union?: Europe in the West
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    Ever Closer Union?: Europe in the West

    By Perry Anderson

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    The European Union is a political order of peculiar stamp and continental scope, its polity of 446 million the third largest on the planet, though with famously little purchase on the conduct of its representatives. Sixty years after the founding treaty, what sort of structure has crystallised, and does the promise of ever closer union still obtain?

    Against the self-image of the bloc, Perry Anderson poses the historical record of its assembly. He traces the wider arc of European history, from First World War to Eurozone crisis, the hegemony of Versailles to that of Maastricht, and casts the work of the EU's leading contemporary analysts - both independent critics and court philosophers - in older traditions of political thought. Are there likenesses to the age of Metternich, lessons in statecraft from that of Machiavelli?

    An excursus on the UK's jarring departure from the Union considers the responses it has met with inside the country's intelligentsia, from the contrite to the incandescent. How do Brussels and Westminster compare as constitutional forms? Differently put, which could be said to be worse?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVerso UK
    Release dateSep 28, 2021
    ISBN9781839764431
    Ever Closer Union?: Europe in the West
    Author

    Perry Anderson

    Perry Anderson is the author of, among other books, Spectrum, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Considerations on Western Marxism, English Questions, The Origins of Postmodernity, and The New Old World. He teaches history at UCLA and is on the editorial board of New Left Review.

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      Book preview

      Ever Closer Union? - Perry Anderson

      Ever Closer Union?

      By the same author

      Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism

      Lineages of the Absolutist State

      Considerations on Western Marxism

      Arguments within English Marxism

      In the Tracks of Historical Materialism

      The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci

      English Questions

      A Zone of Engagement

      The Origins of Postmodernity

      Spectrum

      The New Old World

      The Indian Ideology

      Brazil Apart

      American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers

      The H-Word

      EVER CLOSER UNION?

      Europe in the West

      Perry Anderson

      First published by Verso 2021

      © Perry Anderson 2021

      All rights reserved

      The moral rights of the author have been asserted

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Verso

      UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

      US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

      versobooks.com

      Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

      ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-441-7

      ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-444-8 (US EBK)

      ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-443-1 (UK EBK)

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

      Typeset in Minion Pro by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

      Printed by CPI Mackays, UK

      CONTENTS

      Acknowledgments

      Preface

      I.  ATLANTIC ORDER

      1. The Arc of Leadership?

      II.  EUROPEAN ORDER

      2. The Special Adviser

      3. The Rivets of Unity

      4. The Breakaway

      Notes

      Index of Names

      Index of Authorities

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      The first version of Chapter 1 appeared in New Left Review 119, September–October 2019; Chapters 2, 3 and 4 in the London Review of Books, 17 December 2020, 7 January 2021 and 21 January 2021 respectively.

      My thanks to William Allen, Daniel Cohen, Anton Jäger, Zep Kalb, Kawai Masahiro, Nicholas Mulder, R. Taggart Murphy, and Merijn Oudenampsen for advice on different aspects of this book.

      PREFACE

      This book can be regarded as a sequel. In 2009 I published a study of the European Union, The New Old World, that brought together an assessment of the nature of continental integration with considerations on the recent history of three leading states of the EU—France, Germany and Italy—and the principal candidate—Turkey—for its extension further east. Composed in the years following the Treaty of Maastricht, The New Old World appeared as the hammer blow of the global financial crisis of 2008 started to hit Europe. A decade later, Ever Closer Union? was written as the global pandemic of 2020 swept the West, shaking Europe and the United States with comparable severity.

      The inter-connexion between the two wings of the Atlantic zone was one of the leitmotifs of the New Old World, which traced the determinant role of Washington in the inception and consolidation of the European Community, and—a pattern attracting much less notice—the overwhelming predominance of American scholarship in the most original literature, be it economic, political, sociological, juridical or historical, on European integration. In the altered light of today’s conditions, Ever Closer Union? returns to these two subjects, the factual and the intellectual weight of the United States in the evolution of the EU. The book’s division corresponds to them. In Part I, attention falls on the pivotal role of America in the onset and outcome—not least in Europe—of the global economic crash of 2008. In Part II, the focus shifts to the EU itself, where an intellectual reversal has occurred, American scholarship on Europe dwindling as the United States, torn by intensifying conflicts, has become increasingly introverted, while once lagging European studies now command the field.

      In this division, the impact of two writers stands out as central. Adam Tooze and Luuk van Middelaar are the authors of the most important accounts of, respectively, the global financial crisis and the character of European integration which we possess today, Crashed and The Passage to Europe. Understandably, each has earned wide public celebration of their work. But to date neither has received sustained intellectual scrutiny of the kind attempted below. That they have much in common is clear. Belonging to the same generation, which grew up in the closing years of the Cold War, one is British by birth, holding a chair in New York, the other Dutch by birth, holding a chair in Leiden while active much of the time in Brussels. Both are historians by profession: the first an authority in economic history, the second in political history. Both are accomplished writers, enjoying a broad readership. Both are polymaths, with a range of theoretical and cultural interests far beyond the ruck of their peers. By conviction, both are liberals, and both outspoken champions of the European Union.

      Along with such similarities come several contrasts. Tooze, as he explains in the introduction to Crashed, is a liberal of the left, where by reason of philosophical formation and party affiliation van Middelaar is a liberal of the right. The former is proficient with financial and logistical statistics that are in some measure terra incognita for the latter, more at home with the history of ideas than of figures. Nor is the corpus of the two symmetrical. In the Anglosphere The Passage to Europe (2013) predates Crashed (2018) by five years, and by a further four years in Dutch (2009); likewise van Middelaar’s second book Alarums and Excursions was published in the Netherlands in 2017. Crashed, on the other hand, forms the conclusion of a trilogy whose preceding volumes Wages of Destruction (2006) and The Deluge (2014) cover the First World War, its aftermath and the Second World War, all three viewing Europe in the light of America. Van Middelaar’s pair of studies has no such longitude, though its tacit horizon of reference goes further back, to the time of the Congress of Vienna.

      In each case, I have sought to take into account the overall arc of their work, rather than simply its best-known expression, and to relate its arguments to alternative explanations of the same history. In the case of Tooze’s trilogy, this has meant: first, looking at the way in which its volumes are interconnected by the special position accorded the United States in global developments of the past and the present century, above all those affecting Europe; second, considering the hermeneutic preferences that underlie the set; third, registering accounts of the origins of the financial crisis of 2008, and of the measures taken to repair it, more critical than those offered in Crashed; and lastly, reflecting on the experience of the one great centre of advanced capitalism, Japan, which escapes Tooze’s attention, and what light it throws on the performance of the self-proclaimed ‘Firefighters’ of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury in Washington. In the case of van Middelaar’s diptych, the same approach has meant looking at the importance of a philosophical mentor in his formation, Frank Ankersmit; distinguishing the status of Passage, a work of history composed after seasons as an assistant in Brussels and The Hague, from Alarums, a political legitimation of the performance of the EU under a president whom he served as adviser and speechwriter; asking how far van Middelaar’s profile finds a precedent in the epoch of the Restoration; and, finally, surveying independent European minds who have studied the evolution of the EU from angles—economic, juridical, political, social or cultural—overlooked by van Middelaar, and reaching rather different verdicts on it. The work of these writers forms the focus of the third chapter of this book.

      The concluding fourth chapter considers the special case of Britain and the reasons behind its exit from the Union in 2020. It looks at the arguments advanced for and against preservation of its membership of the EU, the social configuration of the camps locked in struggle over the question, and what the outcome might suggest for the future of Europe in a Union otherwise left intact. In a foreword to The New Old World, I remarked that I did not regret the absence of Britain from it, as so little of moment had happened there since the departure of Thatcher. The validity of that judgment lapsed with the fall of New Labour, whose thirteen nondescript years in office, principally devoted to setting Thatcher’s legacy in amber, were broken only by its debacle in Iraq. Thereafter, from the austerity imposed by the Cameron regime to meet the global financial crisis, to the shock delivered to the country’s bipartisan establishment by the referendum on Europe in 2016 and its aftermath, the line of eventful descent is clear enough. Whether after Brexit the United Kingdom is any more secure in its own borders than was Europe before Brexit remains to be seen. Not raised here, that question is addressed in a separate essay, tracing the fortunes of the British political system since the sixties.¹

      Where do the US and the EU stand today? As in the past, during Trump’s Republican presidency the American economy performed better than the eurozone, posting an average growth rate of 2.5 per cent through 2017–19, as against 1.8 per cent across the Atlantic, with unemployment at 3.8 per cent compared with nearly 8 per cent. Once the pandemic struck, the US economy contracted by some 3.5 per cent, while the eurozone doubled that to some 7 per cent, though the distance between the two in unemployment narrowed significantly—figures concealing greater popular misery in America, given its higher rates of poverty and lack of social protection. Yet as after the crash of 2008, economic recovery once again came quicker in the US than in Europe; no doubt a factor, along with falling unemployment and rising worker incomes in the previous three years, accounting in part for the relative popular resilience of the Republican vote amid defeat in 2020.² Politically speaking, however, economic contrasts with the US were no more relevant in Europe during these years than they were under the two preceding administrations. What mattered to official and public opinion was less the domestic record than the foreign policy of the Trump regime.

      There, unease between Europe and America was not new. Bush’s invasion of Iraq split the governments of the EU and widely antagonized public opinion in the Old World, offended by the brusque style of his administration. Obama was greeted with little short of popular adulation, but chancelleries were soon aware how rarely his mind was engaged by Europe. Imperceptibly, the two sides of the Atlantic had already drifted somewhat apart by 2016. Trump’s belligerent proclamation of America First inevitably widened the distance between them. In trade, the protectionism of the new administration, though more noisy threat than action, inevitably ruffled feathers. Conflict brewed over taxation of Silicon giants, without coming as yet to the boil. Tensions were more acute over policies towards the rest of the world. There, the area of maximum friction lay in the Middle East, as Trump rescinded the deal Obama had reached, together with Europe, to force Iran to abandon its nuclear programme, tightening sanctions the deal had never entirely lifted. Though resentful of this unilateral action, the EU signatories to the deal—Germany, France and Britain—were in no position to circumvent it, given US control of the international banking system. Nor, however much they disapproved, could Atlantic etiquette allow them to protest Trump’s relocation of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, or say-so for prospective annexations in the West Bank. The traditional solidarity between Europe and America was strained but not ruptured by these initiatives.

      Elsewhere, as in the past, it still operated at full bore. In the Sahel, US arms and special forces supported French troops in a common battle against jihadis. In the same cause, French and British bombers supported US air and land power in Syria. In Latin America, the EU closed ranks with the US in recognizing the congressional claimant to the Venezuelan presidency. Along the most important front of all, relations with the two great powers of China and Russia, a more nuanced unity prevailed. Where China was the prime foe for America, against whom Trump declared an all-out economic and political offensive, Russia was treated as a lesser danger. For the EU both were menaces to Western democracy, but the order of battle tended to be the opposite. Viewed from Europe, Russia was not only closer geographically, but perceived as a deadlier threat; whereas China was a more distant power, and notwithstanding its own chargesheet of repression, might—if held at arm’s length—serve as potentially pragmatic partner in questions of commerce and climate. Member states resisting American pressure to cancel the Nordstream gas line from Russia to Germany, and to defer a trade pact with China, the EU has so far pursued its own economic interests, while joining with the US in resonant demands for an ideologically tough-minded defence of the Free World.

      If much transatlantic ill-feeling—muffled at summits, violent in assorted media on the European side—marked Trump’s tenure of the US presidency, without ever becoming an open rift, diplomatic politesse was not the only reason. For all its verbal belligerence, his administration was aware of the electoral risk of foreign adventures, and in practice was in some ways more prudent than its predecessor: overtures to North Korea, no surge in Afghanistan, no threats of war on Iran, no subventions to revolt in Syria, no second Libya, no second Yemen; even imports from the PRC continued to rise. Publicly, the advent of the Biden presidency heralds a grand reconciliation between the EU and the US, as that of Obama did in its time. How far this will extend from ceremony to substance is less clear, if only because of the internal distractions of each, and the limits of Trump’s departure from established US norms. But certainly the prospect of a New Cold War would solder the hierarchical unity of the Atlantic order fast once more. As in the past, the inequality of the pact between the two sides, inflected but not so far fundamentally altered this century, rests on the overwhelming military preponderance of the Pentagon and the financial grip of the Treasury on the world’s banking and trading system, neither of which Europe is in a position to challenge.

      For the moment, nothing perhaps captures the emergent relationship between Europe and America in the West better than the way in which the EU has responded to the crisis of the pandemic—with a ‘Next Europe’ package that for the first time authorizes the creation of mutual bonds, to the tune of 700 billion euros, to stave off bankruptcies and succour the stricken: just what so many faulted the Union for failing to produce in the global financial crisis. Among them was Adam Tooze, and in greeting the bonds as a historic breakthrough for the Union, he is joined by Luuk van Middelaar. For leading statesmen of the EU, Macron at their head, these offer a momentous step towards a Europe that can hold its own with America and China. Yet how was their promise popularly described, in the press and parliament of the continent alike? At long last, the ‘Hamiltonian moment’ of the Union. In the European imaginary, America remains the lodestar. The title of this book refers, of course, to the best-known phrase of the preamble to the Treaty of Rome, whose implications for Europe remain still unresolved. But it can be given an ambiguous twist. Tacitly, it lends itself to the West as well.

      I. ATLANTIC ORDER

      1

      THE ARC OF LEADERSHIP?

      In his thoughtful consideration of Adam Tooze’s Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Cédric Durand salutes the magnitude of Tooze’s achievement—a ‘landmark account’ of the mechanisms precipitating the economic disaster that started to engulf the West in 2008 and of the remedies and ruins that followed. Particularly impressive, he remarks, is the way the book illuminates ‘the technical workings of financial markets and asset-backed commercial paper without losing sight of the political dynamics at stake’:

      As Tooze writes: ‘Political choice, ideology and agency are everywhere across the narrative with highly consequential results, not merely as disturbing factors but as vital reactions to the huge volatility and contingency generated by the malfunctioning of the giant systems and machines and apparatuses of financial engineering.’ Crashed is, indeed, a highly political book.¹

      At the same time, Durand observes, its narrative is no simple—or rather in this case, of course, highly complex and intricate—empirical tracking of the crisis and its outcomes. It possesses definite ‘conceptual underpinnings’, suggested by Tooze himself in acknowledging his debt to Wynne Godley’s use of ‘stock-flow consistency’ to model the financial interactions between public, private and foreign sectors. This in Durand’s view supplies ‘the unstated backbone’ of Tooze’s general argument.²

      Both judgments appear sound. But in Durand’s exposition a paradox attaches to each of them, since by the end of his review, somewhat different notes are struck. For Godley, one of the key advantages of the stock-flow consistency approach was that it integrated the financial with the real economy, as alternative models did not. Durand, however, remarks that Crashed ‘does not discuss the concrete intertwining of the financial and productive sectors in the global economy at all’, and so ‘fails to set the financial crisis in the context of the structural crisis tendencies within contemporary capitalist economies’. This observation in turn generates another, which might seem to put in question Durand’s overall tribute to the book. For eventually he writes of ‘Tooze’s unwillingness to investigate the relations between the political and the economic’, a reluctance that ‘ultimately undermines his account of the crisis decade’.³ Logically, the question then arises: do these two apparent contradictions lie in Tooze’s work, or in Durand’s review of it? Or can both be coherent in their own terms?

      I

      Perhaps the best way of approaching this question is to turn to Durand’s own work on the metastases of contemporary capitalism. With a reticence that does him honour—all but unheard of in an Anglosphere where even bibliographies so often become mere catalogues of self-promotion—he makes no reference to Le Capital fictif, which appeared in France in 2014 (its English edition Fictitious Capital in 2017), though its bearing on the concerns of Crashed is plain. A succinct, luminous study, in it Durand displays a combination rare in the literature on the economic landscape of the new century: in a bare 150 pages, a driving conceptual energy joined to a controlling empirical grasp of statistical data across all the major capitalist states. Organized around the growth in the object of its title—a term coined by the first Earl of Liverpool, secretary for war in North’s administration under George III, received by Ricardo, theorized in differing ways by Marx and Hayek alike, whose history it traces—Fictitious Capital sets out to show the character and logic of the financial system that brought the world to crisis in 2008, and has only continued to burgeon since.

      What are the leading themes of the book? At the root of the instability that has triggered successive crises in the last forty years, first in the periphery and then in the core of the global capitalist economy, lies the peculiarity that distinguishes financial markets from markets in goods and services.

      Whereas in normal times rising prices weaken demand in the real economy, the opposite is generally true of financial securities: the more prices increase, the more these securities are in demand. The same applies the other way round: during a crisis, the fall in prices engenders fire sales, which translate into the acceleration of the price collapse. This peculiarity of financial products derives from the fact that their purchase—dissociated from any use-value—corresponds to a purely speculative rationale; the objective is to obtain surplus-value by reselling them at a higher price at some later point.

      On the way up, ‘the self-sustaining price rise fuelled by agents’ expectations is further exaggerated by credit. Indebtedness increases prices, and since the securities can serve as the counterpart to fresh loans, their increasing value allows agents to take on more debt.’ On the way down, as asset bubbles start to burst, ‘economic agents trying to meet the deadlines on their debt repayments are forced to sell at discounted prices’, unleashing ‘a self-sustaining movement towards depression, which only state intervention can interrupt’.⁴

      Since the deregulation of capital flows in the eighties, this general mechanism has been turbo-charged by the huge expansion of financial markets within the global economic system, with not only vastly larger forms and magnitudes of private credit, public bonds and equities—the three forms of fictitious capital designated by Marx—but the development of new kinds of transaction still further removed from processes of production, as shadow banking and financial innovations twist and lengthen the chains of indebtedness. ‘Contract swaps, structured products and option contracts are multiplying and combining among themselves. They are limited by nothing other than the imaginations of the financial actors.’ High-volume speculation ceases to be an outgrowth of booms: thanks to the flexibility of derivatives, ‘it becomes an activity independent of the business cycle’.⁵ The result is a radical transformation of the relations between financial and commercial transactions, and a vertiginous rise in the weight of finance in the world economy. By 2007, the total (notional) value of derivatives was some ten times that of global GDP. By 2013 the value of purely financial transactions outclassed those of trade and investment combined a hundred to one.⁶

      That such an inverted pyramid should in one way or another topple into crises is no surprise, each time requiring central banks to act as unlimited lender of last resort, and governments to sustain demand by letting deficits soar, to save the system—the crash of 2008 being the latest and most spectacular case to date. But as Durand observes, the very success of such rescue operations breeds the conditions for the next crisis. If ‘economic policies have undeniably succeeded in their effort to keep the collapse under control: all the post-war financial crises have been contained’, the subsequent return of confidence in due course undoes itself, as financial operators become increasingly willing to take new chances in the knowledge that central banks ‘will do everything to prevent systemic risk becoming a reality’. Such is the paradox of government intervention. ‘As capacities for crisis-management improve and financial actors as well as regulators become more optimistic’, financial innovation revives and regulation relaxes, leading to yet more complex and sophisticated products, expanding credit at the cost of the quality of the assets acquired. ‘This, in turn, leads to small crises which are rapidly overcome thanks to the improved capacity to handle them. This cumulative dynamic produces a financial super-cycle through which the accumulated risks become increasingly large—that is, the relative weight of speculative finance and Ponzi schemes constantly increases’, and with it the scale and cost of state intervention to contain the crisis. According to IMF calculations, between the autumn of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, the total support extended to the financial sector by states and central banks of the

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