Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (59 page)

Late-twentieth-century capitalism saw in images, services and events a far more lucrative source of instantly obsolescent desires than goods had ever been. Hence the marked commercialization of both leisure and culture in the last three decades: corporate sponsorship of sports in the UK, for instance, rose from £2.5 million sterling in 1970 to £128 million in 1986, and in the arts, from £0.5 million in 1976 to £25 million a decade later.
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Space and time were being ransacked, compressed and encompassed. “World music” and “ethnic fashions” revealed the global reach of an industry which was busy plundering the past, and—more and more often—the future. Was it by chance that the Henley Centre for Forecasting should have been founded in 1974 to offer businesses a guide to a future into which social and economic grand theory could no longer claim access? The expertise of the market analyst filled the vacuum left by the collapse of confidence in social science.

According to some commentators the whole pattern of Western consumer capitalism, forcing people to live daily life at a dizzying pace, was leading to a sort of existential crisis. With people harangued by “experts” and thus encouraged to mistrust their own intuitions, presented with “identities” to select and discard at random, was it not natural that there should be an increasing sense of anomie, which manifested itself in growing fear, on the one hand, and a sporadic search for “genuineness” on the other? “Post-modernity” had spawned an obsession with “roots” and “heritages” among a politically immobilized electorate, too sophisticated any longer to trust the media, and deprived of any dependable sources of knowledge. Television opened up a world of images, but robbed personal experience of its authenticity. The spread of astrology, New Age philosophies and other forms of irrationalism reflected this growing anxiety in the face of an uninterpretable world.
The Guardian
talked of the “fretful 1990s, when fear is the new badge of citizenship.”
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It was tempting to accept this line of argument—how else to reconcile increasing wealth with a decreasing sense of personal security—but there were good reasons not to exaggerate the post-modern
fin-de-siècle
malaise. After all, the complaint was not a new one, owing much to older theories of capitalist alienation and individual anomie. To be sure, modernity was now being defined differently, but the basic
analysis had been around for a while. “The times were on the move. People who were not born then will find it difficult to believe, but the fact is that time was moving as fast as a cavalry-camel; it is not only nowadays that it does so”: Robert Musil had ironically opened his novel
The Man without Qualities
by describing 1914 Vienna in terms which sounded very familiar to theorists of post-modernity. Heidegger greeted National Socialism as an escape into Being from the Becoming of the “dreary technological frenzy” of American/Russian mass culture. Contemporary theorists do not date the beginning of post-modernity back to the 1930s, still less to 1914. But it is not easy to see what is fundamentally different about the post-modern existential crisis from earlier versions.
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Where the late twentieth century did differ from earlier periods was that politics was no longer regarded as the prime arena for personal fulfilment or action. Voter apathy and abstention were on the increase, and party memberships dropped. The ranks of what the Spaniards called
pasotas
(“pass-men”) increased. In Belgium, Italy, France and Britain, corruption scandals rocked public confidence in political elites. They bred disillusionment but nothing like a “crisis of democracy” along inter-war lines, since that too had been the product of an era when people still believed in ideological and redemptive politics and looked forward to collectivist solutions. Polls consistently demonstrated that the vast majority of western Europeans—93 per cent in 1989, for instance—firmly believed in the idea of democracy as a principle of government.
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The sense of uncertainty was in fact chiefly social and economic rather than political. Class was bound up less with work than with lifestyles and fashion choices. Patterns of employment and personal relations were more varied and less settled than ever before, while the memory of two severe recessions had undermined the confidence of the 1950s and 1960s. Greater choice also meant greater uncertainty; increased individualism reduced the opportunity for collective mobilization. The great demonstrations and marches of the past became more and more sporadic: mass groupings of people were more likely to be generated by sports events and pop festivals. Individualism opened up a world of vulnerability to risks which had formerly been met with familial, local or national solidarity—crime and pensions
were two instances where the state tried to throw back responsibility on to the individual. One reaction was a “communitarianism” which tried to revive a civic morality based upon neighbourhoods and localities—a backward and rosy-tinted glance at earlier social harmonies. But another was surely the revival of a politics of resentment against “scroungers,” “benefit cheats” and immigrants—reminders of the processes of global change which mocked both individual and national destinies. Conservatives—and increasingly social democrats too—sought a return to the language of duties to counterbalance what they saw as an excessive emphasis on rights. Yet the language of rights had become entrenched in individualistic post-war Europe. Despite social crisis and economic readjustment, there was no return to the authoritarianism of the 1930s, and the new moralizing stress on duties made only very limited headway.

GLOBALIZATION AND THE CRISIS OF THE NATION-STATE

Despite the sense of economic vulnerability, western Europe remained one of the powerhouses of the global economy even after the crises of the 1970s. Although European economies were under pressure to remain globally competitive, they managed restructuring in the 1970s and 1980s fairly successfully while preserving high standards of living. What was changing was the power of government to pursue national economic policies, and thus capitalism’s impact upon the European nation-state. During the
Pax Americana
, national elites had been aided by the imperfect currency convertibility which existed for much of that era, by the need for domestic reconstruction in areas such as housing, and by the small size of non-governmental financial markets. Constraints increased sharply with the emergence of floating rates—which encouraged currency speculation—and in particular the rise of the Eurodollar market in the 1970s. With global capital markets awash in petrodollars, and then with the release of Eurodollar issues, an enormous new market emerged, outside the control of any single central bank. Flows of “hot money”—sensitive to interest rates or budget deficits—directed into or out of given currencies could entirely disrupt national economic policy.

UK governments came face to face with this phenomenon in the mid-1970s. In 1981 France’s Socialists tried Keynesian-style demand stimulus, weakening the franc and increasing the trade deficit. By early 1983 they had had to give up what was known as the “Albanian” option and opted instead for an anti-inflationary policy of
rigueur
. This narrowed substantially the policy distance between the Socialists and Chirac’s Gaullists when they returned to power with a neo-liberal programme in the mid-1980s. The whole scenario was repeated on a smaller scale in Greece with Papandreou’s Pasok U-turn in the same period. Thus the 1980s demonstrated that even governments aiming for a social democratic national economic recovery package could no longer go it alone.

It was at this point that the European option started to look increasingly attractive, and it was no coincidence that after a period in the doldrums, the “European project” should gather speed again in the 1980s. Of course, there were several variants of this “project” with very different backers. Some—perhaps one might call them the descendants of Albert Speer—saw the Community building up world-class industries on a European scale, rationalizing excessive national competitition, and providing protection from global competition; others, the free marketers (descendants of the British bankers of the 1920s?), saw trade liberalization as the key to Europe’s post-war growth and wanted this to continue through the Single European Market. Finally, European social democrats like Mitterrand’s Finance Minister Jacques Delors and others on the centre-left, saw the Community replacing or supporting the nation-state as the guarantor of welfare and social solidarity. These three options perhaps only seemed incompatible to the neo-liberal British; to most other west Europeans, free trade was perfectly compatible with support for industrial research and restructuring, and for “social capitalism.” There was an unsubtle British effort to undercut its European partners by opting out of the Social Chapter, and offering Japanese and American investors a cheap-labour alternative; few other EU members—despite periodic groans about labour costs—seriously considered following the British lead.

What did make the three visions of “Europe” more difficult to reconcile was the decision to push ahead for full monetary union on
terms that would compel budgetary retrenchment in the member states. EMU was one response to the currency speculators who made international exchange rate coordination so difficult, but it was not the only response—the earlier “snake” with its system of shadowing and banding currencies had been more flexible, and it was not necessary to have agreed on such stringent terms for achieving it.

Even leaving the substantial symbolic issues of national independence on one side, monetary union posed some serious difficulties. National government’s economic function would be sharply curtailed, posing an unprecedented challenge to national independence. Moreover, the harshness of the convergence criteria chosen for full monetary union caused increasing levels of unemployment and fiscal retrenchment, making social stability more rather than less difficult to achieve. Some argue that this harshness was a deliberate choice by national governments as a way they could push through unpopular fiscal policies while fixing the blame on Brussels. But a wave of strikes and protests across western Europe in 1994–6 indicated the depth of popular resentment. In France, the pursuit of the
franc fort
by successive governments—desperate to join the mark—prompted occasional bursts of speculation and record levels of unemployment. Chirac was forced to abandon neo-Keynesian policies of reflation almost as soon as he entered government. In Spain, Greece and the Netherlands, governments battled with austerity programmes against popular protest. Nation-states were becoming mere shells with no real hold over policy, while social problems and alienation from government increased. In effect, cautious and unelected German central bankers were being handed control over economic policy across most of western Europe.

There were two possible responses to this pessimistic outlook. One was to point out that EMU involved little that was not already happening, as, in practice, the German Bundesbank was already setting interest rates which other currencies were forced to respond to. Thus economic sovereignty had largely been eroded by the overwhelming strength of the mark. Was it not better in that case to share responsibility for policy throughout the Union more formally? The second consideration was that ultimately there was no particular reason why monetary policy made at the Union level should be more deflationary
than when made by national governments. The chief problem was convergence not union—the journey not the destination. EMU itself was not incompatible with expansionist fiscal and monetary policies. Everything depended on how far the authorities allowed control of inflation to override other economic and social concerns.

Interestingly, while the Germans—facing the enormous task of reconstructing the former East Germany—remained anxious about inflation, there were signs in the mid-1990s that the old obsession with inflation elsewhere was starting to wane. The lessons to be drawn from the experience of East Asia’s “tiger” economies turned out to be unexpected, and contrary to the principles followed by European capitalism in its neo-liberal phase in the 1980s. High growth depended upon high levels of government and private investment in research; this would have reassured countries like Germany which preserved high R&D ratios, but undermined the Conservative achievement in the UK where spending on civil research remained very low, overshadowed by the presence of an excessively large arms-export industry. East Asian growth also depended upon high levels of government spending on education, and more generally on egalitarian social policies that equalized income and wealth.

The World Bank drew some startling conclusions: inequality was not beneficial to growth, equality was. “Reducing inequality not only benefits the poor immediately but will benefit all through higher growth,” stated the chief economist of the World Bank in 1996. Skills and training, not “flexibilization” and cheap labour, were the way to reduce unemployment. “Future prosperity,” noted the OECD in 1996, “depends on reducing high unemployment … and in some instances, inequalities in earnings and income.” Though it would require redefinition and retargeting, welfare spending was not therefore the great obstacle to economic success. On the contrary, social cohesion was a greater virtue than individualism. By the late 1990s, it looked as though the conservative “revolution” had had its day. The sweeping Labour victory in the 1997 British elections suggested that neo-liberalism was dead even in its homeland: the capitalist social contract might have to be reworked, but it had proved its popularity and would survive.
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