Only in Athens homeless people exceed 20.000 while the Troika has ordered the confiscation of 200.000 primary residences from people who have no money to pay off their housing loan. More than one million people are unemployed with no access to health insurance and pension schemes. Life expectancy has dropped by 3 years, suicides have increased by 45%, young women give birth to dead babies as they have no access to prenatal controls. Children cannot get their vaccinations and old diseases such as tuberculosis come back. People die from diabetes or blood pressure because they cannot afford their medication and form long queues for some food at the common meals. Pensions and salaries are repeatedly cut and even more layoffs are on the way in critical social sectors such as health and education.

This social collapse is a direct or indirect result of laws voted in the Parliament in the name of democracy and collective will. While at the same time, thousands of citizens protesting outside the Parliament were suffering police brutality on an unprecedented scale.

So yes, democracy in Greece has been buried alive – under the Troika’s constant surveillance and pressure. Its grave was made by those who use democratic institutions to rescue the banks and serve the economic interests of the Greek and European elites. By those who ban collective bargaining, set the basic salary to 586 euros, demand mass layoffs. By those who do not hesitate to miscalculate when it comes to the advantages that their reforms supposedly have but avoid numbers when they refer to the humanitarian crisis that these reforms have created. By those who institutionalize corruption by selling out public companies to businessmen whose business affairs are totally obscure, while they do nothing to find the politicians and businessmen responsible for the Siemens bribery scandal. Democracy’s grave has been made by those who call “vested interests” the cleaners and teachers who fight against their layoffs and order police to beat and spray with tear gas the citizens who struggle for real democracy, health care, employment, education, social justice. By those who rule society through fear and treat citizens like objects.

Since July 2011 that the Task Force was formed, it became the locomotive for the implementation of the aforementioned policies that have brought Greek society to despair and have turned democracy into the despotism of the markets and the banks.

It is on this situation that we, Greeks living in the Netherlands, would like to hear Mr. Tom de Bruijn’s comments and views.

Do you consider the role of the Task Force successful in Greece Mr. de Bruijn?

ReINFORM

Source Link allegralaboratory

ALLEGRA: Dimitris, you are a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex. In the past you have studied highways and infrastructures and currently you are carrying out a research project entitled « The City at the Time of Crisis », funded by an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant. Can you briefly introduce yourself to those who are not familiar with your work and describe your projects?

DIMITRIS: For my PhD I studied anthropologically political transition via infrastructures and vice versa. More precisely I studied the main cross-border motorway between Albania and Greece and via that peculiar -at the time- ethnographic site I studied in a new way -via the road and its flows- the postsocialist conditions in the Balkans. By extension this study of infrastructure provided an insight into the materiality of the wider European neoliberalisation project.

We have to understand that the project of European neoliberalisation of the 1990s and 2000s passed precisely via a mass development of built environment in the continent. Moreover an additional element of that process was the re-determination of European boundaries and a related inter-European movement of populations which crossed these re-determined borders. Indeed, the replacement of State-run economies by market-based capitalism in half of the continent and the parallel expansion of Western European capitalist interests in Eastern Europe had a crucial role in this neoliberalisation project. So given this context the cross-border road between postsocialist and non-socialist peripheral European states looked like an ideal ethnographic locus for analysing such process anthropologically.

Today we are seeing one more stage of that neoliberalisation process with a capitalist crisis centered on the periphery of Western Europe.

In 2012, together with a team of colleagues, we started the ‘City at the time of Crisis’ project funded by ESRC. In this project we study the new forms of governance implemented in that periphery of Western (as political determination rather than geographic) Europe. A basic idea is that one of the most important parts of this new form of governance is the transformations of the notions of public. So ethnographically we study political transitions and social change in the form of socio-spatial changes in the public urban and infrastructural materialities of Athens.

ALLEGRA: You seem to suggest that Athens is the ideal ‘laboratory’ from which to observe the global financial crisis. In their recent book, Theories from the South, the Comaroffs argue that it is rather the global South that is best placed to help us understand contemporary world transformations. The obvious fact that you are Greek put aside, can you tell us why you chose Athens as your primary site of inquiry?

DIMITRIS: The Commaroffs are right, but they are also wrong. The reality is that we first saw extreme capitalism being applied in the global South. Gradually, more advanced and elaborated versions of capitalism were applied there. However, a very similar version of extreme neoliberalism -like the one that emerged in the 1970s in the South- was then applied in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Now it is the turn of the Western European periphery to experience a similar regime.

The anthropologists who happen to have ethnographic knowledge of both the postsocialist and non-socialist European periphery would be able to confirm the similarity between e.g. the loan and “aid” agreements between EU and postsocialist states and the current agreements between e.g. the Greek or Spanish governments and EU institutions.

So in the current historical stage it is not only organisations like the IMF:  there are other institutions involved in the shaping of the world political economy. For instance the EU leadership and especially the European Central Bank along with several other European banks play a crucial historical role in the expansion of an extreme neoliberalist form of governance that is applied in the crisis-ridden euro-zone countries. More and more populations are subjected to that regime and what we used to call Global South governance extends well beyond the South. So the category itself is a bit problematic.

As I mentioned in the previous question Greece is centrally located in a process of global proportions that is unravelling at this very moment. Greece’s centrality in this project starts from the re-definition of Greek borders which changed radically after 1990, given that it was surrounded by socialist European countries. Phenomena like migratory flows, big construction projects and capitalist expansion of Greek capitalist entreprises in Eastern Europe just complete this picture.

Under such circumstances the anthropology of Europe and European politics keep asking the same questions since the 1990s: How did the continent change after the collapse of socialism? What will come next? These questions are very similar to the ones we ask about e.g. China or India and especially North African countries.

The end of the cold war has led to radical transformations globally and we are still seeing them in front of our eyes. If European communism had really been the point of reference for the Left everywhere we would not have the squares movements occuring around the Mediterranean. So it is not a process that is detached from what is happening in the so-called Global South. Overall I think that unless anthropology starts including more substantially Europe and the West in its own perception of the world we will end up running behind change.

ALLEGRA: A few weeks ago, ALLEGRA launched a discussion on the future of universities, and tried to define the nature of the ‘space’ that current movements against cuts are seeking to preserve. Some of our conclusions were relatively optimistic, in the sense that we also tried to highlight the regenerative potential of the public to achieve positive change. In the past when ASA asked you to write a text on the crisis of higher education you jumped to similar conclusions. However, seeing your more recent work you seem to suggest that the current global crisis has deeply transformed notions of ‘public space’, ‘public good’, ‘public interest’ and so on…to the extent that the public as we used to know (or fantasize?) it seems to be slowly disappearing. To a certain extent, one is left with an impression of Athens as a city under a permanent state of exception, to use an Agambian expression. What has changed?

DIMITRIS: Since you used the term of a political philosopher I will respond with a political answer. In that ASA article I concluded that higher education in Britain does not deserve to be defended for what it is or what it was, but for what it may potentially become. I guess this applies in the case of Athens and Greece as well.

In the last two decades, as  European neoliberalisation reached a more intensified form,  we saw some of the resistance movements in the Western world romanticise or imagine a capitalism with better public social provisions. Much of the Occupy movement in the US had such demands, while many of the European movements suggest a return to a recent past of better social provisions. While I see the value of these benefits for the better quality of life of many, as a political proposition I think that implies a crucial mistake. If the middle classes of the Western World had a better life during the recent past, the majority of the world, the poor in the West or globally had very bad time.

The issue is that the current crisis is quite crucial for the evolution of capitalism in Europe and probably globally, and as we know in anthropology crises signify a transition while they also provide a window for anti-structural events to take place. This is our case at the moment and unless societies come up with a radical alternative (way forward from just better social policy) the future of European people will look very bad.

I think that the potentialities of the crisis are visible to economic elites and state authorities who are trying to make sure that no anti-structural events will occur. This is the reason why they employ some of the most violent apparatuses, like e.g. extreme police violence or armed neo-Nazi groups.

For example when the large anti-austerity and anti-governmental movement in Greece appeared in the summer of 2011 the police brutality was profound. Soon the neo-Nazis were funded with huge amounts of money and were activated on the streets of Athens but also electorally.

Neoliberal governance since its birth was ready to employ fascists such as Pinochet or go to fascistic extremes such as declaring national wars out of the blue like e.g. Margaret Thatcher did in the case of the UK or her social democratic offsprings did with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Researching the use of extreme violent apparatuses in Greece these days might make you pessimistic. In order for the austerity experiment to work, in order for the bankers’ interests to be protected, the current form of governance in Greece is ready to spill a lot of blood. A similar escalation in state’s violence has been seen in Britain in the last couple of years when the student movement emerged: police brutality against the protesters has been profound in recent British history. We even saw the police being invited on campus to arrest protesting students:  I personally saw it twice in my university, Sussex, and I have worked there only for only five years!

ALLEGRA: Your work brings an important contribution to the scholarship on statehood, by documenting changing everyday experiences in public spaces. With the mass privatization of public infrastructures, it seems like the only means left for the state to manifest itself is through violence, symbolic or real. What do you think is remaining of the state in Greece today?

DIMITRIS: Well, violence is a crucial part of statecraft anyway. Even the most democratic socialist or mild state mechanisms have used and/or use apparatuses of death and pain. For example, one of the most quoted of such examples: the Swedish state was force sterilising women until the 1970s. For another example, we have to remember that every state apparatus discriminates against people: citizens and non-citizens alike.

As the history of Europe shows in the best case scenario such division just implies less rights for the non-citizens and in the worst case scenario it implies exterminating non-citizens massively.

Even the most democratic states are still states and have the monopoly of legal violence, so potentially the state authorities or their agents can crash, kill, torture, and imprison any of us at any moment they will decide. They do not have necessarily to do it, but the fact that apparatuses are ready to do so is violent enough. And indeed these days they have a nice army of journalists, academics and so on who will provide good excuses about public order and social peace that need to be restored.

When the revolt of 2008 happened in Greece you had people like Greek Yale professors up to famous journalists supporting the government and indirectly excusing the police assassination of a teenager, and this is precisely what triggered the revolt.

Within this barbaric mechanism modern states provided various things to their citizens and selected citizens from other states to become part of the national body. That happened for many reasons, which I do not have the time to analyse at the moment. However, such provisions maintained some kind of social peace and consent between the State (or what we imagine to be the state) and a critical mass of state residents.

So in our case, EU citizens and migrants with visas probably had a better life at some point, but a substantial part of the population was faced with a state that did not even give them the right to exist, that arrested them, deported them and killed them. The same dynamics stands for the new poor, for example: many young people in Europe mainly experience the state as an apparatus that deregulates labour and that makes sure that the majority will work like slaves for small salaries, will have no job or social security etc. If they protest, the state will beat them up or in some cases may even kill them just for being around a protest, as Metropolitan Police did with Ian Tomlinson a few year ago. It is just that today we see this state of exception expanding towards social groups who have not had direct experience of state as violence before.

And certainly we are in a very difficult position, because the state and the capitalist market have ended up being the main controllers of social provisions, so now that state policies enforce poverty and austerity and fewer and fewer can afford private provisions, we see suffering of important proportions of the European population. This has been a usual phenomenon outside Europe though and among the non-citizens within Europe!

What one should stress is that the last few decades when the state has been as social provider have been nothing more than a happy break in the history of capitalism, based on the fear of social unrest.

Today that states have achieved so advanced repression and silencing mechanisms, is probably what allows them not to find it necessary anymore to provide social provisions. Anyhow, Western European middle classes as consumers of the products of global capitalism lose their significance given that we have new consuming classes emerging in other places of the planet. So their future is that of most Eastern Europeans: lots of work for peanuts, extreme inequalities etc. When it was happening there very few Western Europeans complained or protested against the barbaric form of postsocialist capitalism.

Indeed while European states decrease social provisions to the citizens in a drastic manner and provide only violence for non-citizens, simultaneously great proportions of state’s wealth is chanelled to global financial institutions and other corporations through various paths.

To end this answer with a final note though. I think that when the elites start busting their cards one after the other, namely when the police violence is not anymore enough to control social disappointment and rage and they have to use the para-state neo-Nazis apparatuses, we are in a situation where they are running out of legal responses, running out of cards, while running towards a potential dead end.

ALLEGRA: Michael Herzfeld, in his now famous books The Social Production of Indifference, argues that Greeks have always maintained some kind of indifference or at least, some kind of distance towards the state. In which ways does your work confirm or contradict this argument? How has the current crisis transformed citizens relationship towards the state? Is this pattern illustrative of broader transformations taking place in European/Western democracies?

DIMITRIS: Herzfeld’s question was phrased in the right way, one could summarise it like this perhaps: If Greeks are generally polite and welcoming people how comes when they become civil servants they are so unhelpful? My take on that phenomenon can be summarised like this: generally people are polite and nice until State and other power apparatuses intervene. For example when the civil servant’s role provides them with e.g. three options to the way s/he will treat a citizen and all three are nasty options, going for the least nasty one is actually a good option. At the same time remember that the official state does its best to create obedient people who will follow the rules.

It is like the banality of the evil argument of Hannah Arendt who suggested that some of the people who carried out the Holocaust were just civil servants who saw the mass extermination of people as just doing their job, like they would do any other job. They were good civil servants.

Back in 2011 when the people in Greece rose against the government, more than 500 people were hospitalised only in Athens due to police brutality.

Last summer when I was in Gezi park in Istanbul, I saw how Turkish policemen attacked the camp beating up people while, in the meantime, they were chatting and having cigarette breaks. Similarly in London, when Occupy London started in front of St Paul, the riot cops brutally attacked peaceful demonstrators without any reason, when 10 minutes before they were queuing next to each other in front of the same toilet in a nearby cafe. While I do not consider police or Nazi officials as simple civil servants, the reality is that the modern state apparatus filters and fractures its violence so much that the actual state’s employees/attackers often feel that they are merely serving the state and the government that feeds them. Indeed the state makes sure that they can do whatever they want, that they are fully potected and that they will never have to face the consequences. Most Nazi officials never paid for their crimes and quite a few of them were happily integrated in capitalist post-war state apparatuses. This does not imply that police officers who beat up demonstrators or shoot migrants are innocent. Only certain kinds of people can remain silent under such circumstances or blindly obey orders. So this is not an excuse: it is just an analysis of the production of indifference.

The reality is that civil servants (with the exception of riot police!) are on the forefront of salary and personnel cuts in Greece these days. The same mechanism that was programming them to misbehave, by e.g. giving them few resources, poor training, unjust promotion or employment system, poor and misleading explanation of tasks and roles etc. is the same mechanism that now blames them for doing what they were told to do. In other words everyone, even the cops are just consumable for the political and financial elites. So people do come to a realisation with great potentialities, as far as insecurity and state violence reaches one of the most secure social class such as permanent civil servants, there is a discontinuity in the continuums that have made the system sustainable so far.

Europeans know all about constitutional projects that have been pushed through despite being rejected by public referendum. They remember candidates who, having promised to renegotiate the terms of a treaty, then get it ratified without changing a comma. The people of Cyprus very nearly had a percentage of their bank deposits seized by the government (1). But this is a new milestone: the EC is washing its hands of the dismantling of the only Greek media not yet owned by shipping magnates, since this will make it possible to sack 2,800 workers immediately from the public sector, which the EC has always abhorred. It will also allow Greece to meet the targets for job cuts that the troika (2) has imposed on a country where 60% of young people are unemployed.

This misplaced zeal coincides with the publication in the US media of a confidential report in which the IMF concedes that the policies it has implemented in Greece over the last three years have resulted in “notable failures”. Were the errors due simply to over-optimistic growth forecasts? Probably not. According to the Wall Street Journal’s interpretation of this verbose document, the IMF admits that “an immediate restructuring [of Greece’s debt] would have been cheaper for European taxpayers, as private-sector creditors were repaid in full for two years before 2012 using the money borrowed by Athens. Greece’s debt level thus remained undented, but it was now owed to the IMF and Eurozone taxpayers instead of banks and hedge funds” (3).

The speculators have extricated themselves without losing one cent of the loans they made to Greece at astronomical interest rates. Obviously, such skill in robbing Europe’s taxpayers for the benefit of the hedge funds qualifies the troika to make the Greek people suffer. There are also hospitals, schools and universities that could be closed without any opposition. And not just in Greece: it’s only by making such sacrifices Europe that will be able keep its place in the triumphal progress towards a new Middle Ages.

Source: http://mondediplo.com/2013/07/01edito

Lettre ouverte

Monsieur le Premier Ministre du Gouvernement Grec, Antonis Samaras,

Les intellectuels et artistes d’Europe vous adressent cet appel solennel, au nom de la liberté démocratique, à la réouverture immédiate et inconditionnelle de la radio-télévision publique grecque, ERT.

La Grèce, berceau culturel de la civilisation occidentale, pays qui inventa l’admirable notion de “démocratie” et où naquit le mot même d’Europe, vit aujourd’hui – avec l’illégitime et brutale fermeture de sa radio-télévision publique (ERT) – une des périodes les plus sombres de son histoire moderne et contemporaine.

Le peuple grec, révolté par cette décision pour le moins arbitraire, aussi injuste qu’injustifiable, ne s’y est d’ailleurs pas trompé, lui qui se trouve désormais coupé, sans plus de connexion télévisuelle ni radiophonique, de sa diaspora : cet acte d’une rare violence politique, en tout point contraire aux principes mêmes de la démocratie, rappelle, de sinistre mémoire, la dictature, entre les années 1967 et 1974, des colonels.

Et encore : même celle-ci, cette junte militaire qui ne se souciait pourtant que fort peu du bien-être de ces concitoyens qu’elle commandait alors d’une impitoyable main de fer, n’osa pousser son autoritarisme jusque-là.

De cette très regrettable décision, aussi funeste dans son fond qu’intolérable dans sa forme, vous en êtes, Monsieur le Premier Ministre, le véritable responsable. Cet acte, qui ne vous honore guère, est la négation même – le paradoxe s’avère énorme, vous en conviendrez aisément – du beau nom que désigne votre parti : “Nouvelle Démocratie”, lequel, votre peuple n’ayant jamais été consulté sur cette question (pas plus d’ailleurs que vos alliés politiques), n’a jamais aussi mal porté son titre. Il relève même, en l’occurrence, d’une abusive et très malhonnête arnaque sémantique.

Pis : il équivaut à une trahison politique et linguistique tout à la fois, en totale opposition, y compris sur le plan moral, avec le sens profond du concept de “démocratie”, ce principe que les humanistes que nous sommes souhaiteraient universel.

Ainsi est-ce notre solidarité la plus sincère et totale que nous exprimons aujourd’hui au peuple grec, de plus en plus douloureusement malmené, à force d’absurdes et contre-productives politiques d’austérité ces temps-ci.

Vos très expéditives et sommaires méthodes, inacceptables à tous points de vue, ne font, en outre, qu’aggraver le problème plutôt que de le résoudre, au niveau social, dans la mesure où, en plus de ne point vous soucier de la volonté populaire, vous envoyez ainsi illégalement, sans préavis ni ménagement, près de trois mille personnes aussi désarmées qu’innocentes, lesquelles n’ont certes pas à payer pour les erreurs de leur hiérarchie professionnelle (que les gouvernements grecs du passé ont eux-mêmes contribué, suprême hypocrisie, à mettre à la tête de cette institution), au chômage.

Même votre Conseil d’Etat vous a désavoué, par décision de justice, en ordonnant la réouverture immédiate de cette radio-télévision que vous avez ainsi cru pouvoir impunément liquider.

Il est donc urgent, toutes affaires cessantes, que vous rouvriez définitivement, Monsieur le Premier Ministre, la radio-télévision publique grecque : celle-ci ne vous appartient pas, ni à vous ni à votre parti, pas plus, d’ailleurs, qu’au gouvernement que vous présidez, à l’évidence, si mal.

Elle est, comme son nom l’indique, un bien public, souverain, commun et inaliénable à la fois. Ne spoliez donc pas davantage encore, par cette inique et incompréhensible suppression d’une consistante partie de l’espace public, le peuple grec, que les divers représentants de votre caste nationale n’ont que trop volé déjà ! Et, surtout, ne bâillonnez pas ainsi l’intangible liberté d’expression, sans laquelle il n’est point de démocratie qui vaille ni de civilisation qui tienne !

Soyez donc digne, Monsieur le Premier Ministre, du glorieux passé de votre pays, la Grèce, et de ces grands hommes – de Homère à Aristote, en passant par Hérodote, Hésiode, Pythagore, Epicure, Socrate, Platon, Hippocrate, Sophocle ou Eschyle – qui ont fait son immortelle histoire, tant sur le plan philosophique que scientifique ou artistique : cette Histoire sans laquelle l’Europe elle-même, et donc l’Union européenne en tant que telle, n’existerait pas aujourd’hui. Vive ERT !
Les signataires de cette lettre ouverte: Soisic Belin, journaliste, attachée de presse aux Editions Albin Michel (Paris). Hélène Bravin, essayiste, journaliste (Paris). Marc Bressant, écrivain, Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française. Jacques De Decker, écrivain, secrétaire perpétuel de l’Académie royale de Langue et de Littérature françaises de Belgique. Nadine Dewit, artiste-peintre, Académie royale des Beaux-Arts de Liège (Belgique). Marek Halter, écrivain (Paris). Jean Jauniaux, écrivain, chroniqueur littéraire (Bruxelles). Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, linguiste, membre de l’Académie royale de Belgique. Giorgio Marconi, fondateur du “Studio Marconi”, galerie d’art à Milan (Italie). Daniel Mesguich, comédien, directeur du Conservatoire national supérieur d’Art dramatique (Paris). Gilles Perrault, écrivain, journaliste (Paris). Michelle Perrot, historienne, professeur émérite des universités (Paris). Patrick Roegiers, écrivain (Paris). Daniel Salvatore Schiffer, philosophe, écrivain, éditorialiste (Paris-Bruxelles-Luxembourg). Annie Sugier, présidente de la Ligue du Droit international des Femmes, association créée par Simone de Beauvoir (Paris). Jeanie Toschi Marazzani Visconti, essayiste, journaliste, éditorialiste (Milan, Italie). Elisabeth Weissman, essayiste, journaliste (Paris).

Source: http://www.lalibre.be/debats/opinions/vive-ertau-nom-de-la-liberte-democratique-51c7bf3335703374da318ea4

The facts

On the evening of June 11th the Greek Government spokesman, with no previous notice, announced that by midnight of that same day the national broadcaster (ERT) would be shut down and all its employees (2656 people) would be laid off. This was done without the approval of the parliament, by using an article of the Greek Constitution that allows governments to make law in “extraordinary” and “unpredictable” (e.g. earthquakes) events. By no means shutting down the national public broadcaster is an “unpredictable” event. It is just something that the largest party (ND) of the government coalition could not pass through the parliament. The ND party knows that it wont get approval, as the other two parties of the coalition openly and officially disagree with this action, and protest that in case of a vote in parliament they will definitely vote against.

A few hours later police units entered ERT’s broadcasting center. The digital television signal was violently interrupted around 23:15 of that evening. The employees of ERT together with employees from the public Hellenic Telecommunications Organization cooperated in solidarity to re-establish the connection and allow ERT to broadcast again. At the same time a spontaneous movement of protest, powered by the dismay of people throughout Greece about what had just happened, begun. Tens of thousands of people went to the central building of ERT in Athens to express their support to the employees and their outrage for this act of constitutional violation by the Government. Currently, the European Broadcaster’s Union (EBU) and numerous private broadcasters stream ERT’s signal to allow the employees to reach as much people as possible and let them know what is happening.

The language and the time zone changes but, from Turkey and Bulgaria to Brazil, the symbolism of protest is increasingly the same.

The Guy Fawkes masks, the erection of tent camps, the gas masks and helmets improvised in response to the use of tear gas as a means of collective punishment. The handwritten signs – scrawled in defiance of the state’s power and the uniformity of the old, collective protests of yesteryear.

And the youthfulness of the core protesters.

In Gezi Park, Istanbul, before it was cleared by police, I saw school-age teenagers turn up regularly, each afternoon in small groups, colonise what was left of the lawn and start their homework.

The pictures coming out of Sao Paulo tell a similar story.

Bypassing the state

In both cities, people born in a post-ideological era are using what symbols they can to tell a story of being modern, urban and discontented: the national flag and the shirt of the local football team are memes common to both Istanbul and Sao Paulo.

But what is driving the discontent?

When I covered the unrest in Britain and southern Europe in 2011, the answer was clear. A whole generation of young people has seen economic promises cancelled: they will work probably until their late sixties, come out of university with lifetime-crippling debts.

And, as American students famously complained in 2009, the jobs they get when they leave university are often the same jobs they did, part-time, when they were at university. I’ve met qualified civil engineers in Greece whose job was waiting table; the fact that I met them on a riot tells you all you need to know.

With the Arab Spring, it seemed different – from the outside: these were fast-growing economies – in Libya’s case spectacularly fast. But here you hit something that makes this wave of unrest unique: this is the first generation whose lives, and psychology, have been shaped by ready access to information technology and social media.

We know what this does: it makes state propaganda, censorship and a government-aligned mainstream media very easy to bypass. Egyptian state TV totally lost credibility during the first days of the uprisings against President Hosni Mubarak. This month, when Turkish TV stations tried to pull the same kind of non-reporting of unrest, they were bombarded with complaints.

“But,” one politics professor told me, “most of the complaints were from people aged over 35. The youth don’t watch TV, and in any case they have never believed what’s on the news.”

Social media makes it possible to organise protests fast, to react to repression fast, and to wage a quite successful propaganda war that makes the mainstream media and the spin machines of governments look foolish.

At the same time, it encourages a relatively “horizontal” structure to the protests themselves. Taksim Square in Istanbul was rare for having a 60-strong organising group; the protests in Sao Paulo have followed the more general pattern of several organising groups and an amorphous network of people who simply choose themselves where to turn up, what to write on their banners, and what to do.

As I arrived in Istanbul, some of my contacts in financial markets were mystified: why are they protesting when it is one of the fastest growing places on earth?

Get down to street level and the answer was clear. In the first place, many of the young educated people I spoke to complained that “the wealth is going to the corrupt elite”; many pointed out that despite being doctors, civil engineers, dotcom types etc, they could not afford a place to live.

‘Perfectly ordinary people’

But then there was the bigger grievance: they felt the religious conservative government of the AK Party was impinging on their freedom. One Turkish fashion writer – no natural revolutionary – complained of “a growing, insidious hostility to the modern”.

And they saw the heavy police action against the original tent camp in Gezi Park – an environmental protest – as a symbol of this unfreedom.

In Sao Paulo, the grievances are more clearly social: “Fewer stadiums, more hospitals”, reads one banner. The rising price of transport, combined with the government’s determination to prioritise infrastructure and sports stadia, are what this has come to be about.

But again, last week, it was an allegedly disproportionate police action – the arrest of a journalist for carrying vinegar (to dull the sting of tear gas), the shooting of four journalists with rubber bullets – which led to escalation.

In each case, the effects of police action are magnified by the ability of protesters to send images of brutality around the world immediately. And as a veteran of reporting more than 30 years’ worth of “non-lethal” law enforcement, my impression is that the use of CS, baton rounds, water cannon is pushing police procedures all over the world towards “near lethal” levels that are increasingly unacceptable to protesters who go on the streets with no violent intent.

Though smaller by comparison, the Bulgarian protests that on Wednesday removed a controversial head of state security speak to the issues that unite those taking to the streets in many countries: it is not about poverty, say protesters, it is about corruption, the sham nature of democracy, clique politics and an elite prepared to grab the lion’s share of the wealth generated by economic development.

In short, just as in 1989, when we found that people in East Europe preferred individual freedom to communism, today capitalism is becoming identified with the rule of unaccountable elites, lack of effective democratic accountability, and repressive policing.

And what the events of the last three years have shown is that perfectly ordinary people, with no ideological axe to grind, have found the means to resist it.

This is a rough cut sequence, part of the feature-length documentary that we are filming since the beginning of the crisis, for the last three years. It is called “AGORÁ – From Democracy to the Market” and it is an international co-production of major TV networks. AGORÁ will be released in April 2014.

Best Regards
Yorgos Avgeropoulos
Documentary Filmmaker
Author & Director of Exandas Documentary Series

Main Credits:

Written & Directed by Yorgos Avgeropoulos
Producers: Yorgos Avgeropoulos, Anastasia Skoubri
Picture: Yiannis Avgeropoulos, Anna Prokou
Music: Yiannis Paxevanis
Production Manager: Anastasia Skoubri
Editing: Anna prokou, Vasilis Magos
Researchers: Georgia Anagnou, Ahilleas Kouremenos, Andreas Vagias
A Small Planet production © 2013-2014 smallplanet.gr

Does the government plan to deal with other public organizations in the same way in order to “save” the country and show its discipline to the Troika? Do they plan to do the same with water or electricity?

Now, news in Greece are broadcasted only by private TV channels owned by Greek tycoons. In Greece’s closest neighbor, Turkey, while thousands of protesters were experiencing the violence of the police, the Turkish private TV channels, owned by bankers, were broadcasting cooking shows and soap operas.
Greece as any modern democracy needs a public broadcaster that will inform society in an independent and transparent way. Instead, the new national broadcaster that the Greek government wants to create is an organization fully controlled by the State, with employees working for 400 Euros per month. In addition, the possibility that ERT will be privatized and its property will be sold to private interests is not excluded.

It is already known that private TV and radio stations have been using ERT’s frequencies to broadcast their own programs. However, ERT has been financed by the Greek people and it is a public property. The privatization of ERT or any other public property should not be allowed.

Democracy in Greece has already been severely damaged in the name of austerity and bailout. But how far will this go?

Today, we are standing in solidarity with Greek people who are on strike to resist and organize themselves against authoritarianism, poverty, modern slavery.

Together with them, we shout:

- We want a public broadcaster controlled by the people and not by the government and the Troika.
– No public property given to private interests.
– Hands off the working people in Greece.
– Work-Decency-Justice.

We call on a protest in Beurspein,  Amsterdam at 18.00.

ReINFORM

Some read the recent IMF report on Greece as a mea culpa for its mistakes in the Greek bailout.

We see it differently. You can say sorry for an unintended mistake, a miscalculation. The case we have here is not an accident. IMF’s inhumane and otherwise ineffective policies are not, as IMF asserts, the result of a methodological error, simply the story of the wrong multiplier.

IMF failed because it is operating on the dogma of neo liberalism, and in mere defense of the capital. Blind by ideology, IMF got Greece wrong as they did with Argentina, or the Asian financial crisis. However, ideology on its own is not a sufficient explanation for the extend of the failure we experience in Greece. It’s the nondemocratic and unaccountable nature of IMF – a qualification that holds equally true for ECB and the Commission, the other two parties in the so-called Troika – and the arrogant and anti popular Greek ruling elite that allowed the IMF ideology to become a catastrophe for the Greek society.

With youth unemployment at 58.3% you don’t need the IMF to tell you there is a major blunder.

It’s high time IMF ceases to exist and the Greek government assumes its responsibility and resigns.

ReINFORM

Thus, to the present day there remains a gulf at the European level between the citizens’ opinion- and will-formation, on the one hand, and the policies actually adopted to solve the pressing problems, on the other. This also explains why conceptions of the European Union and ideas of its future development have remained diffuse among the general population. Informed opinions and articulated positions are for the most part the monopoly of professional politicians, economic elites, and scholars with relevant interests; not even public intellectuals who generally participate in debates on burning issues have made this issue their own.[1] What unite the European citizens today are the Eurosceptical mindsets that have become more pronounced in all of the member countries during the crisis, albeit in each country for different and rather polarizing reasons. This trend may be an important fact for the political elites to take into account; but the growing resistance is not really decisive for the actual course of European policy-making which is largely uncoupled from the national arenas. The actual course of the crisis management is pushed and implemented in the first place by the large camp of pragmatic politicians  who pursue an incrementalist agenda but lack a comprehensive perspective. They are  oriented towards “More Europe” because they want to avoid the far more dramatic and presumably costly alternative of abandoning the euro.

Starting with the roadmap that the European institutions have designed for developing a Genuine Economic and Monetary Union, I will first explain the probable technocratic dilemma in which this project becomes entangled (I). In the second part of my lecture I would like to expose alternative steps towards a supranational democracy in the core of Europe and the obstacles we would have to remove on that road (II). The major hindrance, the lack of solidarity, leads me in the last and philosophical part to a clarification of this difficult, yet genuinely political concept (III).

                           I

The Commission, the Presidency of the Council, and the European Central Bank — known in Brussels parlance as “the institutions” –  are least subject to legitimation pressures because of their relative distance from the national public spheres. So it was up them to present in December 2012 the first more detailed document in which the European Union develops a perspective for reforms in the medium and long term that go beyond the present, more or less dilatory reactions to critical symptoms.[2] Within this expanded timescale the attention is no longer focussed on the cluster of the recent causes that since 2010 have connected the global banking crisis with the vicious circle of over-indebted European states and undercapitalized banks refinancing each other. The important and since long overdue Blueprint, as it is called, directs attention to long-term structural causes inherent in the Monetary Union itself.

The Economic and Monetary Union took shape during the 1990s in accordance with the ordoliberal ideas of the Stability and Growth Pact. The Monetary Union was conceived as a supporting pillar of an economic constitution that stimulates free competition among market players across national borders, and it is organized in accordance with general rules binding on all member states.[3] Even without the instrument of devaluing national currencies that is not available in a monetary union, the differences in levels of competitiveness among the national economies were supposed to even out of their own accord. But the assumption that permitting unrestrained competition in accordance with fair rules would lead to similar unit labor costs and equal levels of prosperity, thereby obviating the need for joint decision-making on financial, economic and social policies, has proved to be false. Because the optimal conditions for a single currency in the euro zone are not satisfied, the structural imbalances between the national economies that existed from the start have become more acute; and they will become even more acute as long as the European policy pattern  does not break with the principle that each member state makes sovereign decisions within the relevant policy fields without taking other member states into consideration, in other words, exclusively from its own national perspective.[4] In spite of some concessions, however, until now the German Federal Government has clung steadfastly to this dogma.

It is to the credit of the Commission and the Presidency of the Council that they have addressed the actual cause of the crisis —namely, the faulty design of a monetary union that nevertheless holds fast to the political self-understanding of an alliance of sovereign states (as the “Herren der Verträge”). According to the aforementioned reform proposal, the so-called Blueprint, three essential, though vaguely defined, objectives are to be realized at the end of a path projected to last five years: First, joint political decision-making at the EU level on “integrated guidelines” for coordinating the fiscal, budget, and economic policies of the individual states.[5]This would call for an agreement that prevents the economic policy of one member state from having negative external effects on the economy of another member state. Furthermore, an EU budget based on the right to levy taxes with a European financial administration is envisaged for the purpose of country-specific stimulus programs. This would generate scope for selectively focused public investments through which the structural imbalances within the Monetary Union can be combated. Finally, euro bonds and a debt repayment fund are supposed to make possible a partial collectivization of state debts. This would relieve the European Central Bank of the task of preventing speculation against individual states in the euro zone that it has currently assumed on an informal basis.

These objectives could be realized only if cross-border transfer payments with the corresponding transnational redistribution effects were to be accepted. From the perspective of the constitutionally required legitimation, therefore, the Monetary Union would have to be expanded into a real Political Union. The report of the Commission naturally proposes the European Parliament for this purpose and correctly states that closer “inter-parliamentary cooperation as such does not … ensure democratic legitimacy for EU decisions.”[6] On the other hand, the Commission takes into consideration the reservations of the heads of state and adheres so radically to the principle of exhausting the present legal basis of the Lisbon Treaty that it conceives of the transfer of competences from the national to the European level occuring only in a rather gradual and inconspicuous way.[7]

The obvious aim is to postpone a revision of the treaties to the very end. The Commission accords the expansion of steering capacities priority in the short and the medium term over a  corresponding enlargement of the basis of legitimation. Thus the ultimate democratization is presented as a promise like a light at the end of the tunnel. Supranational democracy remains the declared long term goal on paper. But postponing democracy is a rather dangerous move. If the economic constraints by the markets happily meet the flexibility of a free-floating European technocracy, there arise the immediate risk that the gradual unification process which is planned for, but not by the people will grind to a halt before the proclaimed goal of rebalancing the executive and the parliamentary branches is reached. Uncoupled from democratically enacted law and without feedback from the pressing dynamics of a mobilized political public sphere and civil society, political management lacks the impulse and the strength  to contain and redirect the profit-oriented imperatives of investment capital into socially compatible channels. As we can observe already to-day, the authorities would more and more yield to the neoliberal pattern of politics. A technocracy without democratic roots would not have the motivation to accord sufficient weight to the demands of the electorate for a just distribution of income and property, for status security, public services, and collective goods when these conflicted with the systemic demands for competitiveness and economic growth.[8]

Summarizing the analysis, we are trapped in the dilemma between, on the one side, the economic policies required to preserve the euro and, on the other, the political steps to closer integration. The steps that are necessary to achieve this objective are unpopular and meet with spontaneous popular resistance. The Commission’s plans reflect the temptation to bridge, in a technocratic manner, this gulf between what is economically required and what seems to be politically achievable only apart from the people. This approach harbors the danger of a growing gap between consolidating regulatory competences, on the one hand, and the need to legitimize these increased powers in a democratic fashion, on the other. Under the pull of this technocratic dynamic, the European Union would approach the dubious ideal of a market-conforming democracy that would be even more helplessly exposed to the imperatives of the markets because it lacked an anchor in a politically irritable and excitable civil society. Instead, the steering capacities which are lacking at present, though they are functionally necessary for any monetary union, could and should be centralized only within the framework of an equally supranational and democratic political community.

                             II   

But what is the alternative to a further integration on the present model of executive federalism? Let us first consider those path breaking decisions that would have to be taken at the very beginning of the route leading to a supranational democracy in Europe. What is necessary in the first place is a consistent decision to expand the European Monetary Union into a Political Union (that would remain open, of course, to the accession of other EU member states, in particular Poland). This step would for the first time signify a serious differentiation of the Union into a core and a periphery. The feasibility of necessary changes in the European treaties would depend essentially on the consent of countries preferring to stay out. In the worst case a principled resistance had to be overcome only by a re-foundation of the Union (based on the existing institutions).

The decision for such a core Europe would amount to more than merely a further evolutionary step in the transfer of particular sovereign rights. With the establishment of a common economic government the red line of the classical understanding of sovereignty would be crossed. The idea that the nation states are “the sovereign subjects of the treaties” would have to be abandoned. On the other hand, the step to supranational democracy need not be conceived as a transition to a “United States of Europe.” “Confederation” versus “Federal state” is a false alternative (and a specific legacy of the constitutional discussion in 19^th century Germany).[9] The nation states can well preserve their integrity as states within a supranational democracy by retaining both their roles of the implementing administration and the final custodian of civil liberties.[10]

At the procedural level the dethronement of the European Council would mean switching over from intergovernmentalism to the community method. As long as the ordinary legislative procedure in which the Parliament and the Council participate on an equal footing has not become the general rule, the European Union shares a deficiency in legitimation with all international organizations that are founded on treaties between states. This deficiency is explained by the asymmetry between the scope of the democratic mandate of each single member state and the encompassing reach of competences of the organization exercised by all of member states in concert.[11] As national citizens see it, their political fate is determined by foreign governments who represent the interests of other nations, rather than by a government that is bound only by their own democratic vote. This deficit in accountability is intensified further by the fact that the negotiations of the European Council are conducted out of the public eye.

The community method is preferable not only for this normative reason, but for reason of enhancing efficiency, too. It helps to overcome national particularisms. In the Council, but also in inter-parliamentary committees, representatives who are obligated to defend national interests must just bargain compromises between obstinate positions. By contrast, the deputies in the European Parliament, which is divided up into parliamentary groups, are elected from the perspective of party affiliation. This is why, to the extent that a European party system is taking shape, political decision-making in the European Parliament can already be conducted on the basis of interests that were generalized across national borders.

These are the fundamental decisions necessary for transforming the Monetary Union into a Political Union that will not fall into the trap of technocracy. That would require, however, to overcome the high, almost insurmountable institutional hurdle of a change in primary law. The first step, namely calling for a convention which is authorized to revise the treaties, must be expected from the European Council, hence from the very institution that is least suited to making smooth cooperative resolutions. That would not be an easy decision for the members of the European Council who are at the same time heads of national governments. On the one hand, the thought of their reelection already leads them to recoil before this unpopular step; moreover, they do not have any interest in disempowering themselves either. On the other hand, they will not be able to ignore indefinitely the economic constraints that will sooner or later require further integration or at least a manifest choice between painful alternatives. For the present the German government is insisting that priority be accorded to stabilizing the budgets of the individual states by national administrations, mainly at the expense of their social security systems, of public services and collective goods. Along with a handful of smaller “donor countries,” it is vetoing the demand of the rest of the members for targeted investment programs and for a form of joint financial liability that would lower the interest rates of the government bonds of the crisis-hit countries.

In this situation, the German government holds the key to the fate of the European Union in its hand. If there is one government among the member states capable of taking the initiative to revise the treaties then it is the German government. Of course, the other governments could demand assistance on grounds of solidarity only if they themselves were ready to accept the complementary step of transferring required sovereignty rights to the European level. Otherwise, any assistance founded on solidarity would violate the democratic principle that the legislature that levies the taxes has also a say in the decision on how to allocate the funds and for whose benefit to use them. So the main question is, whether Germany not only is in a position to take the initiative, but also whether it could have an interest in doing so. In particular, I am looking for a specifically German interest that goes beyond the kind of interests shared by all the member states (such as the interest in the economic benefits of stabilizing the monetary union or the interest in preserving European influence on the international political agenda in the emerging multicultural world society, an influence which is in any case diminishing).[12]

In the wake of the shock of the defeat of 1945 and the moral catastrophe of the Holocaust, prudential reasons of regaining the international reputation destroyed by its own actions already made it imperative for the Federal Republic of Germany to promote an alliance with France and to pursue European unification. In addition, being embedded in a context of neighboring European countries under the hegemonic protection of the United States provided the context in which the German population at large could develop a liberal self-understanding for the first time. This arduous transformation of a political mentality, which in the old Federal Republic remained captive to fateful continuities for decades, can not be taken for granted. That shift in mindset occurred in tandem with a cautiously cooperative promotion of European unification. Moreover, the success of this policy was an important precondition for solving a more long-standing historical problem that I am concerned with in the first place.

After the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, Germany assumed a fatal “semi-hegemonic status” in Europe — in Ludwig Dehios’s words, it was “too weak to dominate the continent, but too strong to bring itself into line.”[13] It is in Germany’s interest to avoid a revival of this dilemma that was overcome only thanks to European unification. This is why the European question, which has been intensified by the crisis, also involves a domestic political challenge for Germans. The leadership role that falls to Germany today for demographic and economic reasons is not only awakening historical ghosts all around us but also tempts us to choose a unilateral national course, or even to succumb to power fantasies of a “German Europe” instead of a “Germanyin Europe”. We Germans should have learned from the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century that it is in our national interest to avoid permanently the dilemma of a semi-hegemonic status that can hardly held up without sliding into conflicts. Helmut Kohl’s achievement is not the reunification and the reestablishment of a certain national normality per se, but the fact that this happy event was coupled with the consistent promotion of a policy that binds Germany tightly into Europe.

Germany not only has an interest in a policy of solidarity; I would propose that it has even a corresponding normative obligation. Claus Offe tries to defend this thesis with three contested arguments. To date, Germany has derived the greatest benefit from the single currency through the increase in its exports. Because of these export surpluses Germany furthermore contributes to aggravating the economic imbalances within the monetary union and, in its role as a contributory cause, is part of the problem. Finally, Germany itself is even profiting from the crisis, because the increase in interest rates for the government bonds of the crisis-hit countries is matched by a decrease in the interest rates on German government bonds.[14] Even if we accept the arguments, the normative premise that these asymmetric effects of the politically unregulated interdependencies between the national economies entail an obligation to act in solidarity is not quite easy to explain.

                           III

This leads me to the final and philosophical question: What does it mean to show solidarity, and when are we entitled to appeal to solidarity? With a little exercise in conceptual analysis I intend to exonerate appeals to solidarity of accusations of moral stuffiness or misplaced good intentions that the “realists” are wont to level against them. Moreover, showing solidarity is a political act and by no means a form of moral selflessness that were misplaced in political contexts. Solidarity looses the false appearance of being unpolitical, once we learn how to distinguish obligations to show solidarity from both moral and legal obligations. “Solidarity” is not synonymous with “justice”, be it in the moral or the legal sense of the term.

We call moral and legal norms “just” when they regulate practices that are in the equal interest of all those affected. Just norms secure equal freedoms for all and equal respect for everyone. Of course, there are also special duties. Relatives, neighbors, or colleagues can in certain situations expect more, or a different kind of help from each other than from strangers. Such special duties also hold in general for certain social relations. For example, parents violate their duty of care when they neglect the health of their children. The extent of these positive duties is often indeterminate, of course; it varies according to the kind, frequency, and importance of the corresponding social relations. When a distant relative contacts his surprised cousin once again after decades and confronts her with a request for a large financial contribution because he is facing an emergency situation, he can hardly appeal to a moral obligation but at most to a tie of an “ethical” kind founded on family relations (in Hegel’s terminology one, rooted in “Sittlichkeit” or “ethical life”). Belonging to an extended family will justify prima facie a duty to help, but only in cases when the actual relation gives rise to the expectation that e.g. the cousin can count on the support of her relative in turn in a similar situation.

Thus it is the trust-founding Sittlichkeit of informal social relations that, under the condition of predictable reciprocity, requires that the one individual “vouches” for the others. Such “ethical” obligations rooted in ties ofan antecedently existing community, typically family ties, exhibit three features. They ground exacting or supererogatory claims that go beyond moral or legal obligations. On the other hand, when it comes to the required motivation the claim to solidarity is less exacting than the categorical force of a moral duty; nor does it coincide with the coercive character of law either. Moral commands should be obeyed out of respect for the underlying norm itself without regard to the compliance of other persons, whereas the citizen’s obedience to the law is conditional on the fact that the sanctioning power of the state ensures general compliance. Fulfilling anethical obligation, by contrast, can neither be enforced nor is it categorically required. It depends instead on the expectations of reciprocal favors — and on the confidence in this reciprocity over time.

In this respect, unenforceable ethical behavior also coincides with one’s own medium- or long-term interest. And it is precisely this aspect that Sittlichkeit shares with solidarity. However, the latter can not rely on pre-political communities such as the family but only on political associations or shared political interests. Conduct based on solidarity presupposes political contexts of life, hence contexts that are legally organized and in this sense artificial ones.[15] This explains why the credit of trust presupposed by solidarity is less robust than in the case of ethical conduct because this credit is not secured through the mere existence of a quasi-naturalcommunity. What is missing in the case of solidarity, is the moment of conventionality in antecedently existing ethical relations.

What lends solidarity moreover a special character is, second, the offensive character of pressing or even struggling for discharging the promise which is invested in the legitimacy claim of any political order. This forward-looking character becomes particularly clear when solidarity is required in the course of social and economic modernization, in order to adjust the overstretched capacities of an existing political framework, that is to adjust eroding political institutions to the indirect force of encompassing systemic, mainly economic interdependencies that are felt as constraints on what should be in the reach of the political control of democratic citizens. This offensive semantic feature of ‘solidarity’, over and above the reference to politics, can be elucidated by turning from an unhistorical conceptual clarification to the history of that concept.

The concept of solidarity first appeared in a situation in which revolutionaries were suing for solidarity in the sense of a redemptive reconstruction of relations of reciprocal support that were familiar but had become hollowed out by the surpassing processes of modernization.[16] Whereas “justice” and “injustice” where already the focus of controversies in the first literate civilizations, the concept of solidarity is an astonishingly recent one. Although the term can be traced back to the Roman law of debts, only since the French Revolution of 1789 did it slowly acquire a political meaning, albeit initially in connection with the slogan of “fraternity.”

The battle cry of “fraternité” is a product of the humanist generalization of a specific pattern of thought engendered by all of the major world religions – namely, of the intuition that one’s own local community is part of a universal community of all faithful believers. This is the background of ‘fraternity’ as the key concept of the secularized religion of humanity that was radicalized and fused with the concept of solidarity during the first half of the nineteenth century by early socialism and Catholic social teachings. Even Heinrich Heine had still used the concepts “fraternity” and “solidarity” more or less synonymously.[17] The two concepts became separated in the course of the social upheavals of approaching industrial capitalism and the nascent workers movement. The legacy of the Judeo-Christian ethics of fraternity was fused, in the concept of solidarity, with the republicanism of Roman origin. The orientation toward salvation or emancipation became amalgamated with that toward legal and political freedom.[18]

By the midst of the 19^th century, an accelerated functional differentiation of society gave rise to extensive interdependencies behind the back of a paternalistic, still largely corporative and occupationally stratified every-day-world. Under the pressure of these reciprocal functional dependencies the older forms of social integration broke down and led to the rise of class antagonisms which were finally contained only within the extended forms of political integration of the nation state. The appeals to “solidarity” had their historical origin in the dynamic of the new class struggles. The organizations of the workers movement with their well-founded appeals to solidarity reacted to the occasion provided by the fact that the systemic, mainly economic constraints had outstripped the old relations of solidarity. The socially uprooted journeymen, workers, employees, and day laborers were supposed to form an alliance beyond the systemically generated competitive relations on the labor market. The opposition between the social classes of industrial capitalism was finally institutionalized within the framework of the democratically constituted nation states.

These European states assumed their present-day form of welfare states only after the catastrophes of the two world wars. In the course of economic globalization, these states find themselves in turn exposed to the explosive pressure of economic interdependencies that now tacitly permeate national borders. Systemic constraints again shatter the established relations of solidarity and compel us to reconstruct the challenged forms of political integration of the nation state. This time, the uncontrolled systemic contingencies of a form of capitalism driven by unrestrained financial markets are transformed into tensions between the member states of the European Monetary Union. If one wants to preserve the Monetary Union, it is no longer enough, given the structural imbalances between the national economies, to provide loans to over-indebted states so that each should improve its competitiveness by its own efforts. What is required is solidarity instead, a cooperative effortfrom a shared political perspective to promote growth and competitiveness in the euro zone as a whole.

Such an effort would require Germany and several other countries to accept short- and medium-term negative redistribution effects in its own longer-term self-interest — a classic example of solidarity, at least on the conceptual analysis I have presented.