US power and the crisis of social democracy in Europe's second project of integration

Capital & Class, Autumn 2007 by Ryner, Magnus

This article draws on the work of Poulantzas to argue that European social democracy is in crisis because European integration since the 1980s has been articulated within a relationship of structural subordination to US-led globalised financial capital, to which European capital has itself increasingly gravitated. This has also been the determining parameter of the state-as-social-relation, and contradicts the post-war welfare settlement. Against this backdrop, Europe has struggled to rearticulate a new social compromise and politics of social mediation. The attendant crisis of legitimisation has primarily benefited right-wing populism, which does not augur well for the health of Europe's synthesis of capitalism with democracy.

Introduction

Economic and monetary union (EMU) is often seen as spearheading a 'European challenge' to us supremacy (e.g. Kupchan, 2003; Leonard, 2005), and reinvigorating a 'self-transformation' of Europe's 'social model' (Hutton, 2002; Rhodes, 2002; Hemerijck, 2002). However, such assessments are based on highly problematic 'basic force' conceptions of power that ignore the structural quality of fundamental power relations. These assessments also rest on functionalist conceptions that are overly concerned with questions of systems reproduction, without adequate regard to the social forces that these systems are supposed to integrate and represent. By contrast, this article returns to major insights of Poulantzas in order to analyse the implications of Europe's 'second project of integration' for European social democracy. The 'second project of integration' is understood here as having begun with the Fontainebleau summit of 1984, which followed in the wake of Mitterand's U-turn in 1983, and which facilitated a modus vivendi of social and Christian democrats withThatcherism, and the neoliberal paradigm of economic management. The cornerstones of this project are the single market, EMU (which followed the realignment of the European monetary system [EMS] and the exchange-rate mechanism [ERM] in 1983), and more recently, the Lisbon and Cardiff agendas (containing the financial-services action plan-FSAP) as well as the failed constitutional treaty.

The analysis contained in this article draws less sanguine conclusions than those referred to above. European social democracy entails, above all, two things: first, a 'historic compromise' with capital based on the production and distribution of relative surplus value, which has made mass consumption, welfare-state expansion, and even a fair degree of decommodification of labour possible. This essentially 'Fordist' 'politics of productivity' has been essential in ensuring what T. H. Marshall called 'social citizenship', which in turn stabilised 'political' and 'civic' citizenship (inter alia Lipietz, 1987] Esping-Andersen, 1990).This brings us to the second defining feature of European social democracy. As the 'historic compromise' was forged, European socialdemocratic parties became what in German is called Volksparteien; that is, 'mass', 'catch-all' or 'people's' parties. While still depending on an industrial-working-class core of support, social-democratic parties no longer sought to challenge the political construction of subjects on terms other than class. Instead, they sought to appeal to a broader range of social identities in order to thus address a broad range of social (economic, religious, linguistic) cleavages, and in this process they sought to mediate between them.The immediate cause of this was consistent defeats at the hands of, for the most part, Christian-democratic parties, and attempts to copy the winning strategies of the latter. In truth, social-democratic parties never consistently outperformed Christian democracy in this 'politics of mediation'. The 'established left' remained a junior partner in most European societies throughout the period of the second world war (van Kersbergen, 1995). Be this as it may, the conditions of these two defining features of social democracy are being undermined by the second project of European integration. Hence European social democracy, along with Christian democracy, is facing a crisis from which it seems unlikely to recover. At the same time, the conditions are not ripe in Europe for a neoliberal social hegemony. Consequently, there is a crisis of social representation, which has given increased room for manoeuvre to authoritarianism and populism, in which the far-right increasingly thrives, either directly through electoral success, or indirectly as established parties address their own crises of representation by adopting far-right policies in a more 'respectable' guise.

The 'interiorisation' of European capital

Caricatures and stereotyped understandings of Poulantzas's social theory have led to its dismissal, at great cost to critical analysis. Panitch (1994) has demonstrated that closer attention to a brief essay by Poulantzas (1974) could have avoided inhibiting 'either/or-isms' in the globalisation debate that follow from poorly posed questions such as: 'has the power of the nation state waned as a result of the globalisation of markets?' In capitalism, the state always exercises power through its structural relation to the capitalist economy, and the central function of such power is to reproduce the social conditions of the latter's existence. Hence the question is not so much about the 'retreat' of the state as it is about its structural transformation. What is more, in advanced capitalism, social reproduction is so fundamentally dependent on state intervention that any transnationalisation is dependent on state action for that purpose. 'Globalisation' is fundamentally 'authored' through the sovereignty that resides in nation states (Panitch, 1994; Panitch & Gindin, 2005).