Liburu berri baten aurkezpena

Liburu berria: Bill Mitchell-en liburu berria

Reclaiming the State, aro neoliberal honetarako medizinarik hoberena!

Aurkezpena: Against supranationalism: in defence of national sovereignty (and Brexit)1

by Bill Mitchell and Thomas Fazi

(i) Subiranotasun nazionala eta estatua

Let’s face it: national sovereignty has become irrelevant in today’s increasingly complex and interdependent international economy. The deepening of economic globalisation – and the massive leaps achieved in the fields of mass transport, communications, technology – have rendered individual states increasingly powerless vis-à-vis the forces of the market. The internationalisation of finance and the growing importance of multinational corporations have eroded the ability of individual states to autonomously pursue social and economic policies – especially of the progressive kind – and to deliver prosperity to their peoples. Financial markets and mega-corporations today wield more power than governments – and can easily bring these to their knees. This means that our only hope of tackling the cross-border challenges of modernity, of taming the power of global financial and corporate leviathans, and of achieving any meaningful change, is for countries to ‘pool’ their sovereignty together and transfer it to supranational institutions (such as the European Union) that are large and powerful enough to have their voices heard, thus regaining at the supranational level the sovereignty that has been lost at the national level. In other words, to preserve their ‘real’ sovereignty, states need to limit their formal sovereignty.

If these arguments sound familiar (and persuasive), it is because they are espoused and reinforced on a daily basis by politicians and commentators, particularly in Europe. This became acutely evident during the pre- and post-Brexit debate. A simple Google search for the words ‘Brexit’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘delusion’ yields hundreds of articles, including from allegedly progressive commentators, mocking voters for wanting to ‘take back control’ – for being too unsophisticated to realise that there is no sovereignty to take back, that ‘[i]n today’s integrated world it is a chimera to believe that one can establish some presumed long-lost economic sovereignty’,[1] and that ‘pooling decision-making and resources is the only way to stand up for self-interest’.[2] As Marlene Wind, director of the Center for European Politics at the Department of Political Science of the University of Copenhagen, summed it up: ‘[B]eing outside the EU with no influence on the rules that will limit and structure any states manoeuvring in a 21st century global society will most likely make [the UK] much less sovereign’.[3]

Before we take these claims to task, a point that needs to be stressed is that these ideas are far from new. In fact, they predate ‘today’s world’ – which allegedly poses an unprecedented challenge to national sovereignty – by a long shot, and have a much less politically correct pedigree than its proponents (which include many self-proclaimed progressives) are aware of. (…)

(ii) Liburua

In general, as we explain in our new book Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post- Neoliberal World, globalisation, even in its neoliberal form, was (is) not the result of some intrinsic capitalist or technology-driven dynamic that inevitably entails a reduction of state power, as is often claimed. On the contrary, it was (is) a process that was (is) actively shaped and promoted by states. All the elements that we associate with neoliberal globalisation – delocalisation, deindustrialisation, the free movement of goods and capital, etc. – were (are), in most cases, the result of choices made by governments. More generally, states continue to play a crucial role in promoting, enforcing and sustaining a neoliberal international framework (though that appears to be changing) as well as establishing the domestic conditions for allowing global accumulation to flourish. Furthermore, ‘[e]ven neoliberal forms of economic globalisation continue to depend on political institutions and policy initiatives to roll out neoliberalism and to maintain it in the face of market failures, crisis tendencies, and resistance’, as was made clear by the response of governments to the financial crisis of 2007-9.[19] This, Bob Jessop argues, ‘exclude[s] a zero-sum approach to world market integration and state power’.[20] (…)

(iii) Finantza merkatuak

Integrated financial markets also ‘require asymmetric power relations and institutional structures of enforcement to operate’, to guarantee creditors that their debts/credits will be paid back and to enforce debt repayment (by economic, political or military pressure).[22] (…)

(iv) Neoliberalismoa

There is a widespread belief – particularly among the left – that neoliberalism has involved (and involves) a ‘retreat’, ‘hollowing out’ or ‘withering away’ of the state, which in turn has fuelled the notion that today the state has been ‘overpowered’ by the market. However, a closer look reveals that neoliberalism has not entailed a retreat of the state but rather a reconfiguration of the state, aimed at placing the commanding heights of economic policy ‘in the hands of capital, and primarily financial interests’, as Stephen Gill writes.[23] It is self-evident, after all, that the process of neoliberalisation would not have been possible if governments – and in particular social-democratic governments – had not resorted to a wide array of tools to promote it: the liberalisation of goods and capital markets; the privatisation of resources and social services; the deregulation of business, and financial markets in particular; the reduction of workers’ rights (first and foremost, the right to collective bargaining) and more in general the repression of labour activism; the lowering of taxes on wealth and capital, at the expense of the middle and working classes; the slashing of social programmes, and so on. These policies were systemically pursued throughout the West (and imposed on developing countries) with unprecedented determination, and with the support of all the major international institutions and political parties. In this sense, neoliberal ideology, at least in its official anti-state guise, should be considered little more than a convenient alibi for what has been and is essentially a political and state-driven project. Capital remains as dependent on the state today as it did in under ‘Keynesianism’ – to police the working classes, bail out large firm that would otherwise go bankrupt, open up markets abroad (including throughout military intervention), etc. (…)

(v) Subiranotasun nazionalaren gainbehera

the loss of national sovereignty which has been invoked in the past – and continues to be invoked today – to justify neoliberal policies is largely the result of a willing and conscious limitation of state sovereign rights by national elites, through a process known as depoliticisation. The various policies adopted by Western governments to this end include: (i) reducing the power of parliaments vis-à-vis that of governments and making the former increasingly less representative (for instance by moving from proportional parliamentary systems to majoritarian ones); (ii) making central banks formally independent of governments, with the explicit aim of subjugating the latter to ‘market-based discipline’; (iii) adopting ‘inflation targeting’ – an approach which stresses low inflation as the primary objective of monetary policy, to the exclusion of other policy objectives, such as full employment – as the dominant approach to central bank policymaking; (iv) adopting rules-bound policies – on public spending, debt as a proportion of GDP, competition, etc. – thereby limiting what politicians can do at the behest of their electorates; (v) subordinating spending departments to treasury control; (vi) re-adopting fixed exchange rates systems, which severely limit the ability of governments to exercise control over economic policy; and, most importantly perhaps, (vii) surrendering national prerogatives to supranational institutions and super-state bureaucracies such as the European Union. (…)

(vi) Subiranotasunaren aurkako gerla

The war on sovereignty has been, in essence, a war on democracy. This process was brought to its most extreme conclusions in Western Europe, where the Maastricht Treaty (1992) embedded neoliberalism into the very fabric of the European Union, effectively outlawing the ‘Keynesian’ polices that had been commonplace in the previous decades: not just currency devaluation and direct central bank purchases of government debt (for those countries that adopted the euro) but also demand-management policies, strategic use of public procurement, generous welfare provisions and the creation of employment via public spending. (…)

(vii) Subiranotasuna: giltza politikoa

… ‘sovereignty has become the master-frame of contemporary politics’, as Paolo Gerbaudo notes.[25] By the same token, it is only natural that the revolt against neoliberalism should first and foremost take the form of demands for a re-politicisation of national decision-making processes – that is, for a greater degree of democratic control over politics (and particularly over the destructive global flows unleashed by neoliberalism), which necessarily can only be exercised at the national level, in the absence of effective supranational mechanisms of representation. The European Union is obviously no exception: in fact, it is (correctly) seen by many as the embodiment of technocratic rule and elite estrangement from the masses, as demonstrated by the Brexit vote and the widespread euroscepticism engulfing the continent. In this sense, as we argue in the book, leftists should not see Brexit – and more in general the current crisis of the EU and monetary union – as a cause for despair, but rather as a unique opportunity to embrace (once again) a progressive, emancipatory vision of national sovereignty, to reject the neoliberal straitjacket of the EU and to implement a true democratic-socialist platform (which would be impossible within the EU, let alone within the eurozone). To do this, however, they have to come to terms with the fact that the sovereign state, far from being helpless, still contains the resources for democratic control of a nation’s economy and finances – that the struggle for national sovereignty is ultimately a struggle for democracy. This needn’t come at the expense of European cooperation. On the contrary, by allowing governments to maximise the well-being of their citizens, it could and should provide the basis for a renewed European project, based on multilateral cooperation between sovereign states.

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Independentzia politikoa eta ekonomikoa batera daude, erabat lotuta daude.

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