Perry Anderson's The New Old Europe
Morgan, Glyn
Enlightenment, Enlargement, and the European Union GLYN MORGAN The New Old Europe by Perry Anderson Verso, 2009, 549 pp. $39.95 When the history of the present era is written, it will be...
...Anderson's book contains a long essay chronicling the alarming state of democracy in Berlusconi's Italy...
...Anyone sympathetic to this more expansive project of European integration must consider Anderson's criticism of the EU...
...Rather than offering "the highest moral and international order in the world," as preening Europeans like to think, the reality is that Europe plays Muttley to America's Dick Dastardly...
...The terminus of the European project could lie in a return to something like the boundaries of the Roman Empire...
...Anderson was quick to recognize both the triumph and the contradictions of what he terms "the neo-liberal ascendancy...
...Anderson's critique of Europe's social democratic deficiencies is on even weaker grounds...
...More than anything, this state of dependence diminishes the achievements of the original architects of integration...
...These pathologies have prompted social democrats to build institutions capable of socializing the market...
...His aims lie elsewhere...
...Anderson is not someone whose reservations about the United States are confined to the recent Bush administration...
...Europe is joined at the hip with the US, wherever the legacies of imperial control or settler zeal are at stake...
...The United States could be one more 9/11 attack away from a Sarah Palin presidency...
...Lectures on human rights ring hollow from governments collaborating with torture...
...international law set aside...
...Nonetheless, the relevant point of comparison is between these shabby arrangements and the no less shabby arrangements in Europe's member states...
...and an assault unleashed...
...Anderson is full of admiration for the early architects of the EU (or the EEC, as it then was...
...Anderson is well aware of these social democratic debates...
...In both, a casus belli—imminent genocide, imminent nuclear weapons—was trumped up...
...It's not simply that Europeans currently lack the ability to throw the buggers out, but they don't even know who or where the buggers are...
...He characterizes the emergence of the EU as "the last great historical achievement of the bourgeoisie," which has transformed "the internal nature of Europe more profoundly than any development since Carolingian times...
...Reeling under the impact of the Southern European debt crises, the EU might well prove to be the Great Recession's biggest casualty of all...
...Here one cannot but be puzzled at Anderson's political realism...
...In refusing to force Turkey to disgorge the part of Cyprus it controls and trying to shepherd into existence an illegitimate bi-national state, the EU (egged on by the United States) colludes, as Anderson puts it, with ethnic cleansing...
...In contrast to Marxists, social democrats are animated less by any sense of inevitable contradiction than by a hope, perhaps naïve, that a just society can be constructed within the interstices of a broadly capitalist order...
...When a new institutional form emerges—and the EU is nothing if not new—a social democrat wants to know, Does this new institutional form serve social democratic values...
...For Habermas, a European constitutional polity would allow Europeans to expand their unique form of social democratic welfarism...
...Anderson is, I think, completely wrong about this...
...Their enterprise had no historical precedent and its grandeur continues to haunt what it has become...
...To pursue the question of Europe's alleged social democratic deficiency further, one has to make judgments concerning values, institutions, and boundaries that Anderson is reluctant to pursue...
...Anderson's fascinating new book of essays on Europe is framed by the Thatcherite-inspired deregulation of financial markets and the collapse of communism that initiated its ascendancy...
...The Europeans must now, he argues, accept that their monetary unification necessitates political unification...
...Many of the rulings of the European Court of Justice have benefited workers—female workers in particular...
...These new territories thereby play a similar role in the EU to the Southern states in the United States...
...Anderson is disappointed that the EU has been unable to define a motivating goal...
...Rather, the motivating goal of European integration ought to involve the maintenance of Enlightenment values—individuality, diversity, tolerance, equality, scientific discovery, and so forth...
...Still others are doing quite nicely...
...Anderson respects power and disdains those who refuse to recognize the constraints imposed by current power relations...
...For Anderson, Europe as a Union is less independent of "the American imperium" than when it was a collection of independent nation-states...
...Anderson has no answer to this question...
...Nor is it true to speak of a widespread depoliticization in the United States...
...The EU has had a similarly malign influence, so Anderson contends, on the relations between labor and capital within Europe...
...What the core structures of the EU effectively do," he argues, "is to convert the open agendas of parliaments into the closed world of chancelleries...
...And Anderson is having none of it...
...Yet whenever he spots the European Union using power in its own interests—as it does with its Enlargement offers—it gives him the willies...
...Let's assume, for instance, that social democracy requires giving some special priority to "the least well-off...
...One does not have to be a Marxist to recognize the social pathologies that result from a poorly regulated form of market capitalism...
...This is not a goal that a weak, divided Europe of independent nation-states can hope to pursue...
...Habermas thinks that even the Greek debt crisis has a silver lining...
...Much of the force of Anderson's withering criticisms of the EU trade on Europe's pretensions to moral superiority...
...A very different point of view is found in the writings of Jürgen Habermas, for whom the EU represents Europe's best chance of escaping a history of nationalist-inspired violence...
...Anderson is no less willing to recognize some of the accomplishments of the recent integration project, including the Enlargements of 2004 and 2007 that expanded the EU into Central and Eastern Europe...
...In opening the borders of the nation-state, the EU, so it is feared, will erode this sense of shared nationality, which in turn will jeopardize the achievements of the welfare state...
...If the Union benefits the least well-off as a whole but not the least well-off in one or more rich nations, is this a gain or a loss for social justice...
...The drawbacks of U.S...
...Anderson's disappointment with the eu turns into outright contempt when he contemplates Europe's relationship with the United States...
...He ridicules efforts of Europeans to present themselves as a distinctive ethical power separate from and superior to the United States...
...39.95 When the history of the present era is written, it will be interesting to see which institutions, ideologies, and reputations survive the Great Recession of 2008...
...If Europeans still need a motivating goal, Enlargement in pursuit of global justice provides one...
...Anderson seems to think that the EU is institutionally incapable of protecting social justice...
...What goes on in Brussels is in many ways a marked improvement over what goes on in the political circles of London, Rome, Budapest, and elsewhere...
...Social democrats recognize that capitalism comes in a variety of different institutional forms, some less benign than others...
...Which of its institutional features require reform...
...If the book—which comprises several long essays—has one central theme, it is the confusions that have befallen the European Union (EU) as its architects wrestle with the contradictions in neoliberal capitalism...
...Yet he has little to contribute in the way of answers...
...Europe exists in a wider world of relative poverty, a fact that is brought home gruesomely by the numbers of Africans washing up drowned on Southern European beaches...
...Through its policy of ever-expanding Enlargement, Europe is in a position to export liberal democratic institutions to all countries willing to accept its rules...
...Anderson makes do with three general ideas...
...The real danger for a Europe dependent for its security on the United States is that an unstable populist takes hold of the White House...
...These values cannot be trusted solely to a United States that has never managed to free itself entirely from religious mania...
...For him, Bush's predecessor and successor are only superficially different...
...For some social democrats (political theorist David Miller comes to mind), social justice requires the strong sense of shared nationality found in Europe's traditional nation-states...
...Anderson's third idea concerns the United States, which he characterizes as an empire whose interventions in world affairs are invariably pernicious...
...the Security Council ignored...
...It could not be more timely...
...Anderson is right to focus attention on Europe's relationship to power...
...Doubtless Anderson would consider any more expansive form of Enlargement a form of imperialism...
...Enlightenment values are more secure when located in two equally powerful continental political systems...
...The Treaty of Rome (in effect Europe's founding charter) contains a number of provisions that protect labor and the idea of a social market...
...Yet these expressions of admiration quickly give way to disappointment and contempt...
...Americans remain highly politicized, dangerously so in some respects, because erratic populist sentiments exist outside the channels of institutionalized parties...
...For Anderson, there is little "substantive divergence between political parties and a widespread depoliticization of the population...
...Some casualties are already evident: Lehman Brothers, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, Alan Greenspan, and Gordon Brown (to list a few obvious examples...
...Notwithstanding the limitations of a political worldview concocted from these three ideas, Anderson has much that is interesting to say about the EU...
...Measured against some abstract ideal of democracy, the EU's current political system is woefully lacking...
...The autonomy of Europe, conceived as a mission of "norma-tivity" peculiar to it, is little more than an apologetic for post-moderns...
...Many Italians have concluded, not without good reason, that they are better off governed by Europe than governed by the Italian political classes...
...The obvious response to this line of criticism, however, is to claim that Europe actually benefits from its current dependent relationship, whether because it gets its defense on the cheap or because its geopolitical interests are largely co-aligned with those of the United States...
...The hope of the book," he tells us, "is to contribute towards a republic of letters in the European Union...
...The EU's repression of genocide in Turkey is, in Anderson's telling of it, straightforward...
...But this process is slowly turning Turkey into a political and economic entity that Europe can one day (albeit not anytime soon) comfortably incorporate...
...For thinkers in this tradition, theories of justice are important, but so too is the comparative study of social and political institutions...
...The goal ought not to involve any childish hostility toward the United States, if only because the United States and Europe share common interests...
...The EU represses genocide insofar as it is refuses to force Turkey to admit its own dark history...
...He believes that the EU constitutes an oligarchic structure that is neither democratic itself nor conducive to democracy in its member states...
...If this were to be the finality of the Union, it would be a miniature...
...The upshot is that the EU, so Anderson reports, "now has a wider span of income inequality than the US and harsher inter-ethnic relations...
...In the wider Middle East, the scene is the same...
...A portion of Cyprus, it must be remembered, is currently controlled by Turkey, a consequence of Turkish military intervention in 1974...
...To this familiar charge sheet of Europe's acquiescence to American perfidy, Anderson adds a couple of new crimes: "the collusion of the Union with military occupation and ethnic cleansing in Cyprus, and the repression of genocide in Turkey...
...Anderson is no less critical of the impact of the EU on Europe's domestic politics...
...The problem for social democrats is to identify the right balance of values—equality, opportunity, liberty, democracy, and so forth—and the institutions capable of securing those values...
...Nor does Anderson consider the possibility that European Enlargement offers a solution to problems of global justice...
...As Anderson puts it: An EU unable ever to cross the will of the hegemon, on any issue the US holds important to it, is an agent diminished in advance...
...While this response is not fully adequate, it would be wrong to accept Anderson's characterization of current U.S.-European relations...
...If Turkey is to gain admittance to the EU, Anderson wants to see the frank acknowledgment of all past injustices and the thorough implementation of all European norms...
...The new member states in Central and Eastern Europe provide a ready supply of cheap labor and encourage capital flight...
...Anderson, as I've noted, respects power and likes political thinkers capable of grasping hard realities...
...Get over it...
...Sure, the EU downplays past injustices while it strings the Turks along through chapter after chapter of conditionality agreements...
...Anderson paints a bleak picture of the recent foreign policy record of the American hegemon and its enfeebled European auxiliary: [A] straight line led from the war in the Balkans to the war in Mesopotamia...
...Glyn Morgan teaches in the Political Science Department in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, where he also serves as Director of the EU Center...
...Is this institutional form an improvement on its predecessors...
...There are similarities here between Anderson's argument and that of the neoconservative Robert Kagan, whom Anderson praises for offering a "lucid and hard-headed comparison between America and Europe...
...The principal difficulty with Anderson's argument lies in his account of the United States...
...The Turks killed between 1.2 and 1.4 million Armenians, a genocide that the Turkish state and many Western scholars are reluctant to acknowledge...
...The collusion of the Union with military occupation and ethnic cleansing in Cyprus, and the repression of genocide in Turkey, exposes its rescue missions in the Balkans and commemorations of the Shoah as something more than double-standards...
...Anyone who can't see a difference between the Obama and Bush administrations either already has good health insurance or doesn't give a toss about those who don't...
...Faced with the EU, social democrats remain divided in their answers...
...Anderson makes a great deal of Europe's alleged democratic deficiencies...
...Anderson devotes two lengthy essays to Cyprus and Turkey...
...As the West's leading Marxist intellectual, Perry Anderson appears to be having a rather good recession...
...The first (which I've already mentioned) concerns the triumph and contradictions of the neoliberal ascendancy...
...John Rawls took a similarly hostile view of the EU, even going so far as to suggest that a more politically integrated Europe would benefit the large banks and the business classes at the expense of the least well off...
...If the EU is currently enacting policies that are less than worker friendly—and it is—this has much to do with the fact that right-wing governments occupy most European capitals, and the right-wing bloc forms a majority in the European Parliament...
...It then becomes necessary to consider how to weigh the interests of "the least well-off" in one relatively rich member state (Netherlands or Sweden, for example) against "the least well-off" in the Union as a whole...
...Indeed very few debates about the EU—whether in English, French, Spanish, Italian, or German—escape Anderson's attention...
...Majorities in a number of East European countries think the same way of their political classes...
...Yet even when measured against this modest aspiration, Anderson's contribution lacks something very important: a set of values to inform a sound political judgment...
...Anderson's United States is the United States of George W. Bush, no matter who occupies the White House...
...dependency can provide the European project with the motivating goal that Anderson sees as lacking...
...The second might be described as a form of political realism...
...Some are wounded, but will likely survive in a diminished form...
Vol. 57 • July 2010 • No. 3
