The Disintegration of Euro-Atlanticism and New Authoritarianism

Global Power-Shift

Vassilis K. Fouskas, Bülent Gökay

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319968179
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319968186
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book sets out a concrete analytical and empirical framework to understand the Euro-zone crisis and the deep disintegrative tendencies of Euro-Atlantic neo-imperialism. It explores how the authoritarianism and austerity led from above in the transatlantic world cultivate right-wing populism and racist hysteria from below, especially in relation to the global power-shift to China and other emerging economies. The authors argue that ordoliberal/neo-liberal austerity cannot reverse the decline of western economies; if anything, it precipitates their downfall and the re-launching of globalization under Asian primacy. The book will appeal to students, scholars and policymakers across the fields of International Political Economy, European Politics and Critical Social and Political Theory.

© The Author(s) 2019

Vassilis K. Fouskas and Bülent GökayThe Disintegration of Euro-Atlanticism and New Authoritarianism https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96818-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Study of Global Politics and Economics Today

Vassilis K. Fouskas¹ and Bülent Gökay²

(1)

University of East London, London, UK

(2)

Keele University, Keele, UK

Vassilis K. Fouskas (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Bülent Gökay

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

In this chapter, we lay out the theoretical concepts and postulates upon which the arguments developed in this book rest, and vice versa: historical and empirical evidence backing up this Introduction can be found in the chapters that follow. Thus, these postulates are neither arbitrary nor they constitute an imposition upon reality and history. They are theorisations and further elaboration of empirical and historical material already searched and reviewed. In addition, they draw from findings included in our previous work, namely The New American Imperialism (2005) and The Fall of the US Empire (2012). Having said this, this introductory essay aims to accomplish two tasks; first, to set out our approach to international relations, modern history and political economy, looking at structural/constant features while exemplifying the notion of global fault-lines (GF) and assessing critically some other approaches; second, to introduce the framework in which the notion of (global) power-shift should be studied and understood.

Inasmuch as this is mostly a theoretical chapter, we have opted to present our postulates and concepts in a structured and numbered manner so that reading can be facilitated. Further, readers would be in a position to contemplate more creatively on our text, perhaps even offering critiques from which we would most certainly benefit.

* * *

1

Our post-Cold War era is defined by intra-imperialist and inter-imperial contradictions. The former concerns core –core relations (North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia) developed during the Cold War under the hub-and-spoke system of American primacy (see below). The latter concerns geo-economic and geopolitical concentrations of capital , especially in South and South-east Asia (e.g. China ) and East-central Eurasia (e.g. Russia), whose market operations, accumulation strategies and security are not controlled by the American state but by geopolitically rival imperial states and capitalisms , such as China and Russia. The inter-imperialist contradictions of Lenin’s era have shifted to a different level. Yet, as the global financial crisis and the Eurozone crisis have clearly shown, regional intra-imperialist caucuses can unravel. This book argues that neoliberal/ordoliberal Europe is held together by what we call here as new (neoliberal) authoritarianism . The more the crisis of the neoliberal/ordoliberal model deepens, the more the authoritarian neoliberalism/ordoliberalism , as crisis management policy, becomes. We have a top-down approach to the phenomenon of authoritarianism. We see it as a direct consequence of the breakdown of the global economic order and the turn of ruling elites in many countries to either authoritarian crisis management techniques or unconstrained economic and political nationalism cum imperialism—even formal imperialism . We see it also as a means aiming at containing the unravelling of intra-imperialist contradictions caused by uneven development and the global fault-lines of capital accumulation on a world scale. In the final analysis, this is the result of what Martin Wolf called “the long and painful journey to world disorder” (Wolf 2017). In this context, we are not only examining the relative weakness of the USA and its Western allies, but also taking into consideration China ’s global expansion and its geo-economic imperatives, and increased confidence of Russia imposing its authority in Eurasia with strength as well as the great impact that these have been making on the global distribution of power. Our assessment is that they are driving a wedge among the intra-imperialist assemblages, further undermining the hub-and-spoke system of US neo-imperialism . China ’s interaction with US-led globalisation , whether deliberate or not, sets sight on snatching the leadership of globalisation away from the USA and not to succumb to the US-led globalisation , which is clearly in retreat. China , as an imperialist power, is building its global hegemony on the same geography, the very territory and terrain of intra-imperialist contradictions and by way of carefully penetrating them. We show, in this respect, that the Eurozone crisis and the stylised and separable—but not separate—public policies of Anglo-American neoliberalism and German-led ordoliberalism , themselves imperialist and deeply authoritarian public policies, are contributing as much to the coherence of transatlantic relations as to their decomposition.

2

A definition of GF is provided in our previous work (Fouskas and Gökay 2012) in which we also subscribe to some tenets of world systems theory. Suffice to say here in brief that GF conceive of and visualise the social whole as “tectonic plates”, each occupying relatively separate domains: geopolitical-geographical, political, economic, ideological and cultural-civilisational. We do not accept the primacy of economics, or of any domain in particular determining “in the last analysis” all other domains. In other words, we tangle up Marx’s “base/superstructure” metaphor, preferring in its stead another analytical guidance of his to help us untangle the domains of GF, one that goes as follows: “the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse” (Marx 1857/1973: 101). A truly global imperial power, an empire, must be in a position to master primacy in every single domain, that is to say, to make all “tectonic plates” converge somewhat harmonically under the single imperial-hegemonic design of a specific state. Some neoliberals reduce this to the economic level alone, arguing that “the world is flat” under the dominance of free market economics centred upon the USA, meaning that global capitalist integration of the entire world has been achieved. Theoretically, this is thinkable, hence (empirically) possible. Historically, and for good reasons, it has never been experienced. For instance, the USA tried first to establish itself in Central and Latin America—the so-called Western Hemisphere of the Monroe Doctrine—and then followed an Open Door imperialist policy in Eurasia and other parts of the globe towards the end of the nineteenth century. However, for nearly 200 years now, the USA has failed to build an informal empire even in its own backyard, Latin America, let alone the globe: many times during the course of the twentieth century, Latin American countries and peoples have not only dropped off the US bandwagon but have even risen to popular revolutions, the best example being socialist Cuba and, later, the Bolivarian strand of socialism which renewed its influence with the powerful anti-neoliberalisation movement of Caracazo in Venezuela in February 1989, followed by the rise of Hugo Chavez in power.

3

There are, of course, authors that disagree with our GF perspective in particular and world systems theory in general. For example, in their prize-winning, The Making of Global Capitalism , Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2012) argue that the USA today has achieved full capitalist integration of the global economic system, the making of global capitalism having American colours under the US-led policy of neoliberal globalisation . Even if this is correct, something which we doubt, the authors abstract from geopolitical and political factors in order to establish such a claim: they abstract, for example, from the problems the USA is facing in Northern Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East . In addition, as we shall see below when examining the Greek/Eurozone crisis , at a purely financial-operational level, US-led institutions, such as the IMF , are so weak that cannot influence even Germany ’s Finance Ministry, one of the masters—together with the Bundesbank—for setting out monetary policy and rules in the EU/Eurozone . Moreover, the trans-nationalisation of capital (see MNCs) serves many states, not just the American state, as many scholars close to Panitch’s and Gindin’s arguments have so far argued (among others: Kiely 2010; Starrs 2013). China has risen to global prominence because of the combined development boosted by the trans-nationalisation of capital accumulation on a global scale. Thus, from a GF perspective, the USA has never achieved empire, total hegemony, because it has never been in a position to exercise primacy in every domain of the social whole. Obviously, as Christopher Chase-Dunn has argued “all cores define themselves as the centre of the universe” (1998: xiv). But he immediately rushes to add a comment that derives from the Gramscian tradition and which is espoused by all world systems theorists: “But it is the ability to back up this claim with force and economic power that constitutes true hegemony” (ibid.). A GF perspective posits that a theoretical definition of imperial...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Study of Global Politics and Economics Today
• 2. Global Power-Shift, the Decline of the West and New Authoritarianism
• 3. Germany’s Ordoliberal Austerity and the European Disunion
• 4. The Road to Brexit
• 5. Imperial Symphysis: Greece and German Ordoliberalism
• 6. The Disintegrative and Authoritarian Logics of Euro-Atlanticism
• Back Matter