The Politics of Debt and Europe’s Relations with the ‘South’ 9781474461429

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The Politics of Debt and Europe’s Relations with the ‘South’



Annual of European and Global Studies An annual collection of the best research on European and global themes, the Annual of European and Global Studies publishes issues with a specific focus, each addressing critical developments and controversies in the field. Published volumes: Religion and Politics: European and Global Perspectives Edited by Johann P. Arnason and Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity: Past Oppression, Future Justice? Edited by Peter Wagner Social Transformations and Revolutions: Reflections and Analyses Edited by Johann P. Arnason and Marek Hrubec The Moral Mappings of the South and North Edited by Peter Wagner European Integration: Historical Trajectories, Geopolitical Contexts Edited by Johann P. Arnason Migration and Border-Making: Reshaping Policies and Identities Edited by Robert Sata, Jochen Roose and Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski The Politics of Debt and Europe’s Relations with the ‘South’ Edited by Stefan Nygård https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-annual-of-europeanand-global-studies.html



Annual of European and Global Studies

The Politics of Debt and Europe’s Relations with the ‘South’ Edited by Stefan Nygård

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Stefan Nygård, 2020 © the chapters their several authors, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun­– H ­ olyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11.5/13.5 Minion Pro by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 6140 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 6142 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 6143 6 (epub) The right of Stefan Nygård to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

List of Schemas vii Notes on Contributors viii Acknowledgements xii   1 The Two Faces of Debt Stefan Nygård

1

PART I: DEBT AND SOCIAL THEORY   2 The Indebted Subject and Social Transformations: The Possibility of Resistance and Empowerment Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner   3 Debt, Democracy and the Pharmacology of Money Jean François Bissonnette

21 35

PART II: GREECE AND GERMANY AS EUROPE’S SOUTH AND NORTH   4 Europe’s Debt to Refugees Eugenia Siapera and Maria Rieder

59

  5 Causes, Critique and Blame: A Political Discourse Analysis of the Crisis and Blame Discourse of German and Greek Intellectuals 80 Aristotelis Agridopoulos   6 The Tragedy of Recognition: Debt, Guilt and Political Action 118 Carlotta Cossutta

Contents

  7 The Soul of Europe: Two Different Ways of Thinking Germany’s Debt to Greek Culture Simona Forti

140

PART III: THE LOCAL, THE REGIONAL AND THE GLOBAL ‘SOUTH’   8 The ‘South’ as a Moving Target: Europe’s Debt to the Former Colonies Peter Wagner   9 Debating the South in Unified Italy Stefan Nygård 10 Economic Theory as Morality: Europe’s and the World’s North and South Bo Stråth

163 186

215

PART IV: DEBT AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY 11 Europe’s Debt Denied: Reflections on 1989 and the Loss of Yugoslav Experience of Direct Democracy Svjetlana Nedimović

247

12 The Use of the Past under Conditions of Disorientation and Instability: The Spanish–Catalan Political Conflict Gerard Rosich

278

Index 307

vi

Schemas

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

The crisis and blame discourse of Stelios Ramfos The crisis and blame discourse of Nikos Dimou The crisis and blame discourse of Wolfgang Streeck The crisis and blame discourse of Yanis Varoufakis

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90 95 102 108

Contributors

Aristotelis Agridopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He is also a Research Fellow and PhD candidate in the Institute of Political Science at the University of Heidelberg. His research interests are political theory, theories of radical democracy, political education, critical pedagogy, European and Greek debt crisis and political discourse analysis. His recent publications are the (co-)edited volumes Crisis and Discourses of Crisis: Greece in the European Context (in German) (Springer, 2016); ‘Democracy­– ­ Aesthetics­– ­ Emancipation: The Transdisciplinary Thought of Jacques Rancière’ (special issue in German of kultuRRevolution: Journal for Applied Discourse Theory, 75, 2018); and ‘Guilt and Debt’ (special issue in German of WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 16, 2019). Jean François Bissonnette is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Université de Montréal. Trained in political philosophy, he focuses his research on the issue of increasing private and public debt and the impact of the financialisation of capitalism on the formation of contemporary subjectivity, as well as on the possibilities and limitations of the emerging paradigm of the ‘common’ in critical political economy. He co-edited La dette comme rapport social: liberté ou servitude? (Le Bord de l’eau, 2017), and has published articles in journals such as Theory & Event, Journal of Cultural Economy, Politique et Sociétés and Terrains/Théories. Carlotta Cossutta is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Philosophy at the University of Eastern Piedmont. She obtained her doctorate from the University of Verona with a thesis entitled ‘Public Bodies: Citizenship, Motherhood and Power Starting from Mary Wollstonecraft’ in which viii

Contributors

she analysed the relationship between motherhood and biopolitics. Her research interests, in addition to political philosophy, include critical theory, the history of political thought and studies on gender and sexuality. In her research, she aims to combine philosophy with other disciplines such as history, literature and cultural studies. Simona Forti is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Eastern Piedmont; Part-Time Faculty at the Department of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research, New York; and Professor in the PhD Programme Western Philosophy Consortium (Italy). She has been Visiting Professor in Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Columbia University (2017) and The New School for Social Research (2012–16), and Fulbright Distinguished Chair Professor at Northwestern University (2014). She is widely recognised in Italy and abroad for her far-reaching studies on Hannah Arendt’s thought and the philosophical idea of totalitarianism. In recent years she has made important contributions to the debate on biopolitics launched by Michel Foucault, by focusing on Nazi biopolitics and democratic biopolitics of the bodies. In her last volume, New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today, translated into English and published by Stanford University Press in 2015, she deals with contemporary and post-foundational reshaping of the notion of evil. Nathalie Karagiannis is a Researcher at the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, writing in English on social- and political-theoretical issues such as debt, solidarity and democracy. She is also a poet, writing in Greek. . Svjetlana Nedimović obtained her PhD at the European University Institute in Florence on the philosophical implications of Hannah Arendt’s thought, with a specific focus on the dynamics between action and imagination. She taught political theory in Sarajevo and contributed to the project on ‘Trajectories of Modernity’ at the University of Barcelona. She regularly edits a web archive in Bosnian, Riječ i djelo, on political struggles across the world. Her main area of activity outside academia remains political work in the Sarajevo-based activist organisation One City, One Struggle. Stefan Nygård is a Senior Researcher at the University of Helsinki with special interests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century ix

Contributors

Scandinavian and European intellectual, cultural and social history. He is currently based at the Department of Philosophy, History and Art at the University of Helsinki and is associated with its Centre for Nordic Studies. He has recently published Decentering European Intellectual Space (Brill, 2018) with Marja Jalava and Johan Strang and in Swedish, with Henrika Tandefelt, Skrivandets villkor och gemenskap (Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2019), on the professionalisation of writers. Maria Rieder is a Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Limerick. Her research is concerned with the critical study of language in situations of economic and social inequality. Her research interests include media and social protest, issues of immigration and asylum, critical intercultural communication and minority languages and economics. Her published work focuses on social and economic inequality, human rights and minority communities, with a specific focus on the role of language, language perceptions and language ideologies in the production of power and social conflict. Gerard Rosich obtained his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of World Cultures, University of Helsinki. Located in the areas of conceptual and intellectual history, political theory and historical sociology, his research focuses on the comparative-historical analysis of the challenges and constraints that globalisation imposes on democracy, and on the history and theory of modernity. He has co-edited, with Peter Wagner, The Trouble with Democracy: Political Modernity in the 21st Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and has authored three books: Democracy and Self-Determination: The Revolt of the Catalans from a Global Perspective (Routledge, forthcoming); Autonomy: The Contested History of a European Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2018); and Independència i autonomia: una teoria històrica de la modernitat (Editorial Afers, 2017). Eugenia Siapera recently took up the position of Professor of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin, after having been Associate Professor in Digital Media at the School of Communications in Dublin City University. Her research focuses on digital technologies and media, politics and journalism, cultural diversity, immigration and asylum. Her most recent books are x

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Understanding New Media (2nd edn, Sage, 2018) and Gendered Hate Online (co-edited with Debbie Ging, Palgrave, 2019). Bo Stråth was Finnish Academy Professor of Nordic, European and World History at the Helsinki University (2007–14), Professor of Contemporary History at the European University Institute in Florence (1997–2007) and Professor of History at the University of Gothenburg (1990–6). He has published extensively on various aspects of European and global modernity and construction of community. His most recent publications are Europe’s Utopias of Peace: 1815, 1919, 1951 (Bloomsbury, 2016) and European Modernity: A Global Approach (Bloomsbury, 2017, co-authored with Peter Wagner). . Peter Wagner is Research Professor of Social Sciences at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and at the University of Barcelona. Currently, he is also Project Director at Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg. His main research interests are in historical-comparative sociology and in social and political theory. He has tried to develop a comparative perspective on trajectories of modernity, most recently comparing ‘Southern’ societies with Europe. His most recent publications in this area are European Modernity: A Global Approach, with Bo Stråth (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Collective Action and Political Transformations: The Entangled Experiences of Brazil, South Africa and Europe, with Aurea Mota (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

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Acknowledgements

The research behind this volume has benefited from funding by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) joint research programme ‘Uses of the Past’ (2016–19). All contributors have in various ways been associated with the programme and the collaborative research project ‘The Debt: Historicising Europe’s Relations with the “South” ’ (project number 15.057), led by Peter Wagner. We would like to thank HERA for making this work possible, and for institutional support from the University of Barcelona, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, the University of Eastern Piedmont and the University of Helsinki. We are also greatly indebted to Samuel Sadian for his rigorous language editing, which has been all the more important in view of the fact that English is not the first language of any of the contributors.

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1 The Two Faces of Debt Stefan Nygård

G

rowing levels of public and private borrowing have placed debt at the centre of scholarly and public debates in the twenty-first century. The concept, however, is notoriously ambivalent. Debt enables individuals and collectives to function and to expand their space of manoeuvre, but it also creates hierarchy and possibilities for domination. The negative aspects of our contemporary debt economy are well known: debt underpins wealth inequality, restricts the freedom of individuals, households, public institutions and struggling firms, stifles democracy and constrains the exercise of individual and collective self-responsibility.1 Under such conditions, and as ever-growing segments of the global population are drawn into the debt system through policies of ‘financial inclusion’,2 the creditor–debtor relation has become a key locus of social conflict. One of the characteristic features of this relation is that its inherent power asymmetries are reinforced by the way in which debt combines economic duty and moral blame. Past and present resistance to oppressive debt relations includes the debtors’ movements that emerged in the context of the debt crisis of the 1970s and 1980s in the ‘Third World’, as it was called in Cold War parlance, and contemporary denunciations of unmanageable levels of personal debt, especially medical and student debt, in privatised welfare societies such as the United States.3 In both cases, scholars, activists and politicians have challenged the moral framing of debt by declaring that debts should not be paid if doing so leads to widespread human suffering. To support their argument they sometimes mobilise historical evidence of the relative sanctity of debt, invoking, for instance, the history of periodic debt cancellations in the ancient world and the biblical notion of debt forgiveness in the Jubilee year.4 With regard to international debts, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights established independent experts to assess the effects of foreign debt on 1

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human rights at the turn of the twenty-first century.5 In this period, Third World debt also took on another meaning with respect to climate change and the ecological overshoot by which humans in the present incur debts that will be transmitted to future humans as debts to the past, the causes and consequences of which are unevenly distributed between the Global South and the Global North, as the Third and First worlds are increasingly called today. These are only some trends that echo, in one way or another, the predominance of debt in our time and the need to reconsider its many meanings, which tend to gravitate towards oppressive or more socially beneficial understandings.

‘The demonic ambiguity of the word “Schuld” ’ As the chapters in this book demonstrate, debt is a fundamentally dualistic concept that denotes both reciprocity and domination in social relations. Rabelais’ proudly reckless debtor Panurge in the ­sixteenth-century satire Gargantua and Pantagruel considered debt a condition for all social relations. According to Panurge, society simply cannot function without debt, because without it there ‘will be no mutual sharing of qualities [. . .] one will not think itself obliged to the other: it has lent nothing’.6 Anthropologists have elaborated this idea into an understanding of debt as a form of delayed exchange that, especially in face-to-face interaction, creates relationships and obligations in the time that passes between giving and reciprocating. This is less the case in market relations understood in terms of barter, a form of immediate exchange that does not create lasting relations of interdependence, although scholars have struggled to find evidence for the commonly encountered claim that barter characterised ‘archaic’ economies. Instead, these societies appear to have been based on debt and credit, to which we, according to the anthropologist David Graeber, drawing on Geoffrey Ingham, should also trace the origins of money, which would have evolved as a means of calculating and accounting for debts.7 To be sure, debt relations do not stand in direct opposition to barter, insofar as they are not detached from the logic of ‘self-interest’, but they are ambivalent and can evolve in different directions. As Jean François Bissonnette notes in his chapter in this volume, we can compare debts to gifts, and consider the dual references of ‘gift’ in Germanic languages to both gift and poison. In his 1968 book Gifts and Nations: The Obligation to Give, Receive and Repay, the anthropologist Wilton 2

The Two Faces of Debt

S. Dillon explored this double meaning in the context of international relations. Applying Marcel Mauss’s concept of gift exchange to French responses to Marshall Plan aid, Dillon interpreted Marshall aid as a gift that ‘turned bad’ when the obligation felt by the receiver to make counter-gifts led to frustration over a generalised feeling of obligation without means of repayment. The ambivalent nature of debt invites us to revisit perennial questions over the more or less oppressive ways in which modern societies are held together. How do increasingly autonomous individuals attach themselves to others and to society? In the liberal understanding of a society composed of free individuals, debt is ideal-typically seen as a voluntary contractual relation between two self-governing parties. A relational approach in turn asks to what extent debt relations are also determined by uneven geometries of power and interdependence in society. These relations may be benign, so to speak, rather than oppressive, but they are always asymmetrical. As Pericles notes in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War: In generosity we [the Athenians] are equally singular, acquiring our friends by conferring, not by receiving, favours. Yet, of course, the doer of the favour is the firmer friend of the two, in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in his debt; while the debtor feels less keenly from the very consciousness that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift.8 Debt, then, suspends equality and implies the possibility of restoring balance through some form of repayment. But while debt has the capacity to sustain social relations, it also contains the risk of deteriorating into domination and bargaining. A tension between debt as hierarchy and as the glue of social bonds consequently runs through the history of debt relations. Debt entails a temporary disruption of a relationship of equality, which at least in principle can be restored by settling the debt. But sometimes paying off the debt may seem less appropriate and perhaps even undesirable, inasmuch as our obligations to society, parents, ancestors, life or God are often described in terms of debt. As many religious texts testify, this kind of ambiguity places debt at the intersection of the sacred and the profane. ‘Primordial debt theorists’ suggest that social obligations, administered either by priests or by governments, can indeed be seen as a form of tribute or ‘interest payment’ for existential debts that cannot be settled on earth. This interpretation 3

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sheds light on the connection between debt, sin and guilt in Hindu and Judaeo-Christian thought, and the way in which debt is varyingly used in a literal and a metaphorical sense in these traditions.9 In Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), David Graeber relates the two faces of debt to the transformation from what he calls old-style credit­­– ­­debt relations and moral obligations as a cornerstone of social life in small-scale societies­– ­to an economy of interest, which is based on lending out at interest in return for property or labour pledged as collateral in large-scale societies with impersonal relations and banking industries. In explaining this shift, Graeber highlights the role of violence and the transformation to a commercial economy where humans no longer form unique relations with a society in which they are incorporated in ‘webs of mutual commitment’, but can instead be measured and traded, which in his analysis has much to do with the history of war and slavery. Earlier anthropological studies had examined the formation of social bonds in tribal communities through the exchange of gifts that link families together. In these communities, gifts were not loans but building blocks in a broader system of reciprocity. Credit was not quantified and there were no formal rules for repayment. This changed with the introduction of modern money. Assessing the social consequences of impersonal money and debt in modern society, Karl Marx noted how money in nineteenth-century Europe had taken on a life of its own, beyond any neutral medium of exchange, and served to perpetuate domination between humans. Other philosophers of money, such as Georg Simmel, saw the impersonal nature of modern money more optimistically as a condition for equality and liberty. In this view, impersonal money freed from pre-capitalist moral and social restraints enabled the formation of more equal social relations, precisely by disconnecting transactions between people from social status and older moral-religious institutions (for economic and non-economic understandings of human relations, see the chapters in this volume by Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner and by Jean François Bissonnette). Like debt, then, money can serve as a means of both oppression and liberation. It can both improve the conditions for individuals to fulfil themselves and expose them to domination by others. Sociologists of money have also highlighted the social, symbolic and sacred significance of money, which contradicts the common understanding of monetary transactions as detached from the ‘non-market’ sphere.10 Indeed, market and non-market are more entangled than is often implied by analyses proceeding from the 4

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assumption of an opposition between different lifeworlds and logics; an impersonal sphere of rational calculation and another sphere characterised by personal relations and interdependence. While it is clearly important to assess the dominance of one or the other pattern under different institutional and social arrangements, it is also true that not only the intimate social sphere but also economic transactions are heavily invested with cultural meaning. ‘The economy’, as a growing body of scholarship drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi stresses, is never really ‘disembedded’ from social relations.11 As a recent example, we could mention the European budget deficit rules that in the post2008 conditions of financial austerity have taken on a meaning of their own, exceeding any form of disinterested technical rationality (see the chapter by Bo Stråth). Assuming that debt relations often deteriorate into domination and oppression, the question is one of establishing the conditions under which these relations can function positively as a productive social force based on reciprocity. Anthropologists have looked at debt as a form of obligation that points towards an understanding of human sociality in terms of exchange and reciprocity, beyond the economic logic of calculation and utility maximisation. Many of these studies have centred on the practice of gift giving in ‘archaic’ societies. In the terminology of Marshall Sahlins (‘On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange’, 1965) such exchange can be divided into generalised reciprocity (gift giving without the expectation of immediate return), balanced reciprocity (when there is an expectation of immediate return) and negative reciprocity (when there is an attempt to maximise gain, for example through theft or barter). Debts typically emerge from a situation of generalised reciprocity, where gift giving can be seen as a way of reinforcing social ties through an open expectation to return generosity at some future date.12 Scholarly attention has also been devoted to exploring whether the kind of giving and reciprocity encountered in kinship-based debt relations can be scaled up to include relations between countries. In early twentieth-century France, Marcel Mauss seemed to think so when he described the international system as a web of duties and obligations relying not on the maximisation of individual gain, but on a larger sense of community, duty and interdependence, sustained by a common history and shared expectations for the future, with states honouring their debts by circulating gifts that are paid back at an unspecified point in time.13 Studying interdependence and fragmentation within and between societies, the issues that Mauss and his 5

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circle of Durkheimian ‘solidarists’ committed themselves to are no less relevant for contemporary efforts to figure out the conditions under which an international system can be brought into being in which debts serve the purpose of creating and maintaining social bonds, bearing in mind the ambivalent human drives to associate with and dominate each other. It may be the case, however, that Mauss and others after him, because of methodological nationalism, have seen the state as too much of a unitary actor, overlooking the different interests of different actors within each state in, for instance, avoiding a debt default.14 In the post-First World War period when Mauss was exploring these questions, his German contemporary Walter Benjamin approached debt from a different, metaphysical and temporal perspective. At a time of acute awareness of moral guilt and economic debts, Benjamin outlined a theory of historical time that amounted to a form of ‘guilt history’. What if, Benjamin asked, moments in time were joined not mechanistically through cause and effect, but through the perpetual incursion of debt (the Greek word aition refers to cause and provenance, but also guilt and fault, and the adjective aitios to being responsible or culpable)? The past would then be connected to the present through debt and guilt, as forces that sustain community across time. Similarly, in her contribution to this volume Carlotta Cossutta sets contemporary interpretations of Greece’s debt crisis against the background of the archaic fault chain that forms the structure of classic Greek tragedy. The collapse of the Greek economy is often narrated as a tragic drama that derives from an original fault, and where the individual and collective actors find themselves pushed into blindness and hubris by the forces of history. For Benjamin, debt and guilt were moral and economic categories at the same time, even more so than for Max Weber, who in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) famously saw capitalism as conditioned by religion. By attaching itself to religion like a parasite­– ­long before Calvinism­– ­capitalism in Benjamin’s analysis turned into an all-encompassing cult that made use of a religious sense of guilt to sustain a ‘theology’ that capitalised on the ‘demonic ambiguity of the word “Schuld” ’, the entanglement of moral guilt and economic debt.15 While Benjamin’s ‘guilt history’ represents a far-reaching interpretation of how non-economic meanings of debt spill over into the language of financial debt and reinforce the idea that paying back is a moral imperative, philosophers since at least Plato have critically examined the question ‘Should one always pay one’s debts?’ In Book 6

The Two Faces of Debt

I of the Republic, Socrates resists offering any unreflexively affirmative answer to this seemingly uncomplicated question by interrogating a straightforward formula for justice defended by the merchant and arms manufacturer Cephalus: ‘Speak the truth and pay your debts!’ Unconvinced, Socrates asks whether paying one’s debt could, under some circumstances, be detrimental to the creditor and his or her environment. What if someone had borrowed a weapon from a friend, and the friend became violently insane before the loan was returned? Would it not be unjust to repay the debt, given the risk of violence that returning the loan would entail?16 The meaning of ‘repayment’ is no less ambiguous, as the word history of debt and related terms demonstrates. Take, for instance, the above-mentioned question, ‘Should one always pay one’s debts?’ Here, we could underline three words that illustrate the multiple meanings of debt in different languages. First, the connection between debt, guilt and sin is well known, and the words are for example used interchangeably in different translations of the Lord’s Prayer.17 As mentioned, the German word Schuld denotes both debt and guilt, as do corresponding terms in other Indo-European languages. Second, the English word ‘should’ is related to Schuld, or skuld in Swedish, scyld in Anglo-Saxon and skulan in ancient Gothic, underlining connections between debt, duty and obligation. The English word ‘debt’ derives from the Latin debere, meaning ‘to be obliged’, and ‘due’ and ‘duty’ have the same origins. Third, the word ‘pay’ derives from the Latin pacare, to pacify or appease, which in turn draws attention to different historical conceptualisations of ‘payment’.18 Another example of debt as sin relates to the ancient German institution of Wergeld. This was a form of debt that literally refers to ‘man-price’ and denotes a money-token paid to the family or the ruler as compensation for homicide or injury, according to a price that was sometimes determined by the injured person’s social standing. Debt and sin were two sides of the same coin and, crucially, debt was not something incurred, but acknowledgement of an offence. Moreover, payment was not equivalent to the injury but rather a way of avoiding vengeance by means of symbolic recognition.19 Such debts do not denote reimbursing a loan or giving back something borrowed or stolen. These debts could not be ‘settled’; instead, they served the purpose of pacification and reparation for past misconduct or error.20 In Benjamin’s theory of historical time each present is indebted to a past that is ‘guilty’ of the deficiencies it passes on to the following generation, resulting in a never-ending struggle to fix inherited d ­ eficiencies 7

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through reparation; the present is indebted to a past that it carries forward, adding something to it but also leaving something behind. Benjamin’s generation of European intellectuals was obsessed with the questions of time, memory and uses of the past in the present. Henri Bergson, the French celebrity philosopher of the period, suggested that what human memory retrieves from the past and what it leaves behind is largely determined by what can be activated at a specific moment in time, which depends on what the pragmatically oriented intellect can make use of for acting in the present.21 The chapters by Gerard Rosich and Svjetlana Nedimović highlight the complexities involved when historians and public intellectuals retrieve or reject elements from such pasts as remembered in the present, and with specific expectations for the future, in relation to the Catalan question in Spain and the post-1989 memory of Eastern Europe respectively. In the first case, it is argued that historians today often work with an understanding of the present that no longer structures the world as in the past. The way in which history is actively mobilised and reinterpreted in a political conflict such as that surrounding the Catalan question is complicated by new regimes of justification emerging from changing modes of collective subjectivation­– ­between sub- and supra-state levels­– ­at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the latter case, ‘debts’ to the past are rejected and historical reflection is dismissed as unhelpful for orientation in the present. The transition to the market economy in Eastern Europe, Nedimović argues, was accompanied by a political erasure of the democratic practices of socialism, which she discusses in relation to the Yugoslav experience. Acknowledging our debts to the past, then, also entails a critical engagement with roads not taken in the past.

Debts between North and South The current pervasiveness of debt links the economies of the Global North with the series of debt crises that swept across the so-called Third World in the 1970s and 1980s. In that period, the debt crises ended what remains the most ambitious programme for restructuring North–South relations, the New International Economic Order (NIEO), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1974. Continuing on the path that had been set by the G77 group of developing nations, organised at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in 1964, the NIEO was the culmination of anti-colonial efforts to ‘settle 8

The Two Faces of Debt

the debt’ between North and South by a Southern expansion of the Northern welfare state. The 1974 declaration thus envisioned a new international economic order that ‘shall correct i­ nequalities and redress existing injustices’ and work towards the ‘removal of the disequilibrium’ between units in an interdependent system of states.22 However, these moral and structural claims were soon buried under the growing burden of economic debt. The optimism of the NIEO gave way to despair and debtor–creditor conflicts, in which the moral idea that one must always pay one’s debt stood against the Southern assertions that the debts could not be paid, or that doing so would require human sacrifices beyond any reasonable extent. As before and after, demands for debt repayment were not confined to economic reasoning alone. The etymological links between debt, guilt and sin were as evident as ever, just as the relationship between the debtor countries of the Global South and the financial institutions of the Global North reflected the idea of pacification and sacrifice denoted by ‘paying’.23 Southern leaders struggled to reverse the moral economy in expressive speeches addressed to the international community. One of these was delivered at the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa in 1987 by the prime minister of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, who challenged the moral imperative of repayment and placed debt at the centre of the post-colonial world order. The problem, according to Sankara, was the following: Debt cannot be repaid, first because if we don’t repay, lenders will not die. That is for sure. But if we repay, we are going to die. That is also for sure. Those who led us to indebtedness gambled as if in a casino. As long as they had gains, there was no debate. But now that they suffer losses, they demand repayment. And we talk about crisis. No, Mister President, they played, they lost, that’s the rule of the game, and life goes on.24 While such statements certainly found an echo among audiences in the Global North as well, the series of debt crises effectively ended the more comprehensive plans of the 1970s for addressing historical injustices by redesigning the rules for international economic relations.25 The debt crisis of the 1980s was also a major turning point for international creditor–debtor relations. Jerome Roos identifies the increasingly ­ concentrated international credit markets, the effective integration of official sector intervention into the global financial architecture­– a­ nd 9

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the new role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a lender of last resort, engaging in conditional crisis lending­– ­as well as the overall growing dependence on private credit as factors contributing to the strengthening of the creditors’ position in recent decades. In a revealing example, Roos compares the current situation to the period before the Second World War when sovereign defaults were less uncommon and when, in 1943, the president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, considered it appropriate to personally apologise to his Bolivian colleague for the reckless lending and ‘supersalesmanship’ of Wall Street in the lead-up to the crisis.26 The Global North experienced the capacity of debt to transform economies and social relations after the financial crisis of 2007–8. In its European manifestation, the so-called eurozone crisis, a North– South division was transposed onto the still unsettled East–West divide and placed at the centre of European debates. The North–South divide combined horizontal debt relations with a temporal dimension by drawing on a longstanding narrative of European modernity. Past debts were invoked to support claims made in the present by anchoring them in an understanding of progress as a spatio-temporal movement from Mediterranean antiquity to North-Western modernity. In addition to the standard representations of the different moral qualities of what were depicted as economically disciplined Northerners and slack Southerners, such a framework of spatialised time provides the background for contrasting the Northern financial creditors of the present with the Southern civilisational creditors of the past. The reactivated ‘Southern question’ in Europe served to consolidate allegedly opposite macro-regions and to introduce yet another definition of the ‘South’ (on the fluid character of this concept, see the chapter by Peter Wagner). Yet the eurozone crisis not only introduced a new division and confirmed Northern economic power, but also unified debtors across Europe in a common struggle, although creditor organisation no doubt proved more effective. Moreover, just as with the global financial crisis that it was part of, the North–South division prompted critical reflections on the contradictions between the moral imperative of repayment and the possibilities, in a financialised economy, of forming creditor–debtor relationships without the trust and faith that the word ‘credit’ (from the Latin credere, ‘to believe or have faith’) implies. In the intricate world of financial instruments, it is increasingly difficult to pin down the parties in a debt relationship or to make the case that debtors have a moral obligation to repay if such 10

The Two Faces of Debt

relationships, when they are formed, are not underwritten by a mutual faith in the debtor’s ability to reimburse.27 This is one of many factors underpinning a general crisis of confidence and legitimacy between citizens and the financial sector. On the level of regional and global macro-areas, the creditor–debtor relationship raises further questions about the relationship between individual and collective debts and what we mean when we speak about settling debts between North and South (for contemporary examples see the chapters by Peter Wagner and Gerard Rosich, and the contribution by Stefan Nygård for a historical study). In international politics, the connotations of debt as compensation and condemnation translate into demands for retribution (the Latin retribuere refers to that which is given in return for past good or evil) and judgement. This was the starting point for Patrice Lumumba, the leader of the Congolese National Movement, when he stated in 1958 that the country’s independence should not be considered by Belgium as a gift but a right that had been lost,28 or for Frantz Fanon, the French West Indian psychiatrist, philosopher and anti-colonial revolutionary who, in his 1961 manifesto The Wretched of the Earth, makes the claim, in opposition to the paradigm of development and aid, that the South had developed the North rather than vice versa. Europe was ‘literally the creation of the Third World’ and therefore its wealth also belonged to the underdeveloped nations. ‘Indebted’ to Northern discourses on rights, duties and self-determination, Fanon went on to state that the imperial powers had ‘not settled their debt to us once they have withdrawn their police force from our territories’. Moreover, just as European countries receiving compensation from Germany after Nazism (which had made ‘the whole of Europe into a colony’) should not feel gratitude, Third World aid was not charity: ‘Such aid must be considered the final stage of a dual consciousness­– ­the consciousness of the colonised that it is their due and the consciousness of the capitalist powers that effectively they must pay up.’29 But it was not only about ‘paying up’, and Fanon cautioned against going forward without comprehensively dealing with the debt in terms of repairing what Europe, and the United States as its continuation, had broken. The great challenge of his project for the formerly colonised world was to designate a new direction for history that did not sacrifice humans for profit and productivity, and that acknowledged both the progress and the misconduct of Europe.30 Looking back from today, as the chapter by Bo Stråth demonstrates, we have to go all the way back to the German ex-chancellor Willy 11

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Brandt’s North–South commission in the late 1970s to find a truly future-oriented way of dealing with colonial debt, by seeking reconciliation through combining acknowledgement of past injustices with a global programme for social progress in the present. Asserting the need to rethink the rules of the global economy as part of the North’s attempts to rectify past wrongs was a common stance in the postwar decades, when development economics was strongly influenced by dependency theory and core–periphery models. In the 1970s and 1980s, these claims were increasingly challenged by a (neo)liberal understanding of North–South relations. Peter Bauer, a development economist and member of the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ associated with the Mont Pelerin Society, was a prominent critic of development aid and of the idea of ‘Western guilt’ that legitimised aid. Not only did aid fail to promote growth in poor countries, but accusations of Western sin were equally unfounded since ‘contact with the West has been the prime agent of material progress in the Third World’, Bauer wrote in 1984. Since the 1950s, discussions on development within the Mont Pelerin Society had focused on rejecting the notion of Western guilt and shifting the burden of blame for Southern poverty from the shoulders of the Global North to the Third World countries themselves and their leaders.31 Understandings of colonial debt have thus been anything but stable across political and economic regimes. Today, as power has shifted from states to corporations, historical debt claims are increasingly made vis-à-vis Northern-based multinational corporations, notably the fossil fuel industry, pressed to face up to their climate debts to the hardest-hit countries in the Global South.32 The North–South debates that culminated in the 1970s and the NIEO provide an essential but often absent background for understanding the more recent intra-European North–South conflicts over debt, economic and moral. The idea that ‘real reparation’ is not only economic but also narrative reappeared in the European ‘debt crisis’, and different forms of debt were invoked in the debate between Europe’s North and South. On a more abstract level, solidarity with debt-ridden Greece was linked to Europe’s historic debt to Hellenic civilisation. Previously such symbolic debts had been invoked for different purposes, sometimes by creating the illusion that this form of debt, which is essentially a debt of gratitude, could be ‘paid back’. In her chapter, Simona Forti examines how this idea of repayment has been conceptualised and mobilised in twentieth-century European philosophy. Conversely, Greek intellectuals in the context of the euro crisis evoked relations of indebtedness 12

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vis-à-vis the European project of modernisation and progress, which Greece had to prove itself worthy of (see the chapter by Aristotelis Agridopoulos). In the other direction, Greek politicians defended their demands to ease the burden of interest payments and conditional loans by reactivating claims on Germany for unsettled reparations from the Second World War, with Poland following suit,33 or by stressing the role of debt relief in the German economic miracle after the Second World War. These debates continue the long and complex history of post-war retributive justice.34 Furthermore, as Eugenia Siapera and Maria Rieder show in their contribution to this volume, debts have been reactivated in present Greek and German media debates on refugees in rather different ways, and through different understandings of who the creditors and debtors are. Obligations towards refugees today are sometimes defended by invoking a general debt to humanity or to ancestors who as refugees were treated well by ancestors of contemporary refugees. Others justify helping refugees mainly on the basis of legal obligations and without references to past debt. Mirroring current discussions about historical debts and reparations in Europe, debates on the legacy of racial injustice in the United States demonstrate how one party tends to be more inclined to highlight the problems involved in defining debt and responsibility for offences committed over centuries, while the other argues that some assessment of damage ought to be made, albeit recognising that the costs of discrimination can hardly be exhaustively quantified.35 Comprehensive reparation would require turning a logic of hierarchy based on superiority and inferiority into one of reciprocity, which in turn would require a change in the social and mental structures that continue to perpetuate racial injustice. Debates on reparation thus echo the understandings of debt as recompensing something borrowed or taken, and acknowledgement or appeasement for offence or injury. In the former instance, the debt can be settled and the relationship dissolved. In the latter, the relation is less restricted and more open, but appeasement is seen as a condition for going forward.

The structure of the book Debates on reparations for racial or other historical injustices combine elements from different ways of understanding the debt relationship. In addition to compensation and recognition, they are about broadening our horizons towards the past and the future, aiming at finding 13

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new ways of going forward by revisiting lost futures in the past that can be reactivated in the present. The history of debt provides us with a variety of paradigms of acknowledging or settling debts, what it means to owe something, and the complex relationship between sacred and profane understandings of debt and closely related terms such as duty, obligation, guilt and sin. Some of these past and present meanings are examined, conceptually and empirically, in what follows. The main purpose of the book is to explore social and cultural understandings of debt beyond and in connection with economic debt. In view of the centrality of the North–South divide today, in relation to both the surfacing of the term ‘Global South’ as a replacement for ‘Third World’ around the turn of the millennium, and the prominence of the regional North–South divide in Europe in the context of the eurozone crisis, most of the chapters aim at combining a discussion on debt along two axes: a socio-spatial one between North and South, and a temporal one between past, present and future. The book thus draws attention to the way in which historically incurred debts are mobilised for present purposes, with a particular emphasis on North–South divides. The individual contributions to this volume have been prepared within the framework of a collaborative European research project, funded by the network Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) and entitled ‘The Debt: Historicising Europe’s Relations with the “South” ’. The centre of gravity in the four parts of the book shifts between the three main themes of the project: debt, North and South, and uses of the past. Debt is the main focus in Parts I and II, first in relation to social theory and the sociology of money, then with respect to Greek–German relations in the context of refugees, the euro crisis and philosophy. The third part centres on the North–South divide, its local, regional and global manifestations, and the way in which the distinction combines spatial, social and temporal elements. The two chapters in the final part take a closer look at the politics of history, with regard to Yugoslav history and the Catalan question.

Notes   1. See, for example, Adair Turner, Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt, Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014); Michael Kumhof, Romain Rancière and Pablo Winant, ‘Inequality, Leverage, and Crises’, American

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The Two Faces of Debt Economic Review, 105(3), 2015, pp. 1217–45; Susanne Soederberg, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population (London: Routledge, 2014); Maurizio Lazzarato, La fabrique de l’homme endetté: essai sur la condition néolibérale (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2011).  2. Milford Bateman and Ha-Joon Chang, ‘Microfinance and the Illusion of Development: From Hubris to Nemesis in Thirty Years’, World Economic Review, 1, 2012, pp. 13–36.   3. On contemporary debt resistance in the United States, see (last accessed 26 February 2020).  4. Notably the Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt cancellation, the transnational Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM), and in the US, the Strike Debt network, the Rolling Jubilee and The Debt Collective. For ancient practices of debt cancellation, see Michael Hudson, . . . And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (Dresden: Islet, 2018).  5. (last accessed 26 February 2020).   6. Cited in David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), p. 125.  7. Graeber, Debt; Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2004). On the historical origins of money, see also Jean François Bissonnette in this volume.   8. Cited in Douglas E. Oakman, Jesus, Debt, and the Lord’s Prayer: First-Century Debt and Jesus’ Intentions (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2015), p. 19.   9. Bruno Théret, ‘Monnaie et dettes de vie’, L’Homme, 190, 2009, pp. 153–79. 10. Viviana Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Carlo Tognato, ‘The Culture and the Economy’, in Jeffrey Alexander, Ronald Jacobs and Philip Smith (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 140–2; Gustav Peebles, The Euro and Its Rivals: Currency and the Construction of a Transnational City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 11. Tognato, ‘Culture and the Economy’. 12. On the anthropology of debt and exchange, see Graeber, Debt, ch. 5, and Chris Hann, ‘The Gift and Reciprocity: Perspectives from Economic Anthropology’, in Serge-Christophe Kolm and Jean Mercier Ythie (eds), Handbook of the Economics of Giving, Altruism and Reciprocity, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2006). 13. Gregoire Mallard, ‘The Gift Revisited: Marcel Mauss on War, Debt and the Politics of Nations’, Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies Working Paper Series No. 10-004, December 2010. Available at SSRN: or (both last accessed 26 February 2020), pp. 2, 11. 14. On this point, see Jerome Roos, Why Not Default? The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 41–3. 15. By the term ‘cult’, Benjamin was referring to a doctrine that did not promise

15

Stefan Nygård atonement, only guilt, and work to compensate for it. Max Weber had also noted the connection between economic debt, moral duty and religious guilt. What is spent for personal aims is stolen from ‘the service of God’s glory’ and one becomes at the same time guilty and ‘in debt’ to God. See Michael Löwy, ‘Capitalism as Religion: Walter Benjamin and Max Weber’, Historical Materialism, 17, 2009, pp. 60–73; Werner Hamacher, ‘Guilt History: Benjamin’s Sketch “Capitalism as Religion” ’, Diacritics, 32, 2002, 3–4, pp. 81–106. 16. Alexander X. Douglas, The Philosophy of Debt (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 5–6. 17. English translations of the Lord’s Prayer in the gospels of Matthew and Luke (‘forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors’), varyingly use the terms ‘debt’, ‘sin’ and ‘trespasses’. 18. See Émile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropéennes, vol. 1 (Paris: Minuit, 1969), pp. 181–97; Elettra Stimilli, Debito e colpa (Rome: Ediesse, 2015). 19. Philippe Rospabé, La dette de vie: aux origines de la monnaie (Paris: La Découverte, 2010). 20. Schuld is preceded by the Sanskrit term skhal, ‘to stumble or sin’, indicating deviation from the right path. 21. Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire (Paris: Alcan, 1896). 22. On globalising welfare, see Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), ch. 4; the NIEO declaration: (last accessed 14 November 2019). 23. For a discussion on how this applies to recent debates on Greek debt, see Alexander Douglas, ‘Greece, Honour and the Ancient Ties of Wergeld’, 3 July 2015 (last accessed 26 February 2020). 24. Translation from French original; see (last accessed 14 November 2019). 25. On the NIEO, see Nils Gilman, ‘The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 6(1), 19 March 2015. 26. Roos, Why Not Default?, pp. 12–15, 112–13. 27. Douglas, Philosophy of Debt, pp. 21–4. The lack of faith in the current crisis of global capitalism has been underlined by Wolfgang Streeck, who describes the generally increasing appetite for public and private borrowing, without faith in the ability to repay, as a form of ‘buying time’. Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, transl. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 2015). 28. Jan Eckel, ‘Human Rights and Decolonization: New Perspectives and Open Questions’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 1(1), 2010, p. 116. 29. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, transl. Richard Philcox (New York:

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The Two Faces of Debt Grove Press, [1963] 2004), pp. 57­–9. Jason Hickel demonstrates how the South still today remains a net creditor to the North, if measured by the net outflows that the South loses in the form of interest payments on debt, tax evasion and illicit financial flows to the North, and so on. These losses exceed the amount of aid that goes in the other direction. If that is the case and the system of siphoning wealth from South to North is still in place, the word ‘reparation’, Hickel notes, is misleading as it suggests that the problem is in the past. Jason Hickel, The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions (London: Heinemann, 2017). 30. In ‘facing Europe as a colossal mass whose project must be to try and solve the problems this Europe was incapable of finding the answers to’. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, pp. 237–9. 31. P. T. Bauer, Reality and Rhetoric (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), p. 57. Quoted in Jennifer Bair, ‘Taking Aim at the New International Economic Order’, in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 363; Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (London: Verso, 2019), ch. 5. 32. Ben Ehrenreich, ‘It’s Time to Pay Our Climate Debt to Countries Like Mozambique’, The Nation, 22 April 2019 (last accessed 26 October 2019). 33. Joanna Plucinska, ‘Germany Owes Poland over $850 billion in WW2 Reparations’, Reuters, 26 April 2019 (last accessed 26 February 2020); Renee Maltezou and George Georgiopoulos, ‘Greek Parliament Calls on Germany to pay WW2 Reparations’, Reuters, 17 April 2019 (last accessed 26 February 2020). 34. István Deák, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 35. Katherine Franke, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019).

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PART I

DEBT AND SOCIAL THEORY

2 The Indebted Subject and Social Transformations: The Possibility of Resistance and Empowerment Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner

T

oday, individuals, households and states have accumulated enormous amounts of debt. Their indebtedness has significant social and political consequences. The accessibility of credit can be seen as a new indicator of social stratification and class division.1 In turn, highly indebted states face severe constraints on their capacity for action owing to the need to retain ‘credibility’ on financial markets. Indebtedness is a central topic of our time. The main tendency in critical debate is to see the indebted subject as a dominated and disempowered subject. There is certainly much truth in this view. At the same time, however, this view accepts a rather narrow, economic-financial understanding of debt and, furthermore, explores only the consequences of this form of indebtedness, not the ways in which it has come about. It looks neither at the broader preconditions of a debt relation between subjects nor at the variety of ways in which a debt relation can be understood. In this brief note we want to suggest, in contrast to the dominant critical view, that the debt relation contains emancipatory and empowering possibilities for the indebted subject.2 To identify them, one needs to explore the broader meanings of debt and the ways in which indebtedness constitutes and sustains social relations. In particular, we suggest that it is at the point of breakage­– ­when debt becomes unbearable, often called ‘crisis’­– ­that we observe the rise of the subject. We will start out from observations about the differences and asymmetries between economic and non-economic understandings of debt. In a second step, we will reflect on the reasons for the historical rise of the economic understanding of debt. Third, we extrapolate from the preceding reflections and suggest that debt can be seen as constitutive of social relations and that disputes over debt have the potential for social transformations. This will allow us, fourth, to see how an indebted 21

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subject’s reaction to unbearable debt breaks up the imposed economic understanding of debt and creates the conditions for empowerment. This chapter is largely conceptual and programmatic. It concludes with some reflections on directions for further research, which point towards the constitution of different individual or collective subjects according to the world-making capacity they discover through settling­ – ­or ‘unsettling’­– t­ heir debt.

Debt and historical time That exchange relations between human beings can be conceptualised in a variety of ways, of which the economic understanding is only one, is no novelty for anyone interested in the foundations of the social sciences, in particular in the opposition between economics and the other social sciences that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Nor is the fact that the timeliness of the exchange is important in defining social relations, a question we will come back to below.3 But little attention has hitherto been given to historical time in this respect. The invocation of a past debt between two (collective) subjects is often made to solicit action in the present. We can start with a recent example: the financial crisis in the eurozone led to a confrontation between ‘debtors’ and ‘creditors’, particularly pronounced at the high point of the dispute in the summer of 2015 between the then SYRIZAled government of Greece and the German Minister of Finance, Wolfgang Schäuble (discussed in more detail by Agridopoulos and by Stråth, both in this volume). At that point, this confrontation took the form of invocations of different forms of debt. The German government focused on the monetary terms of the crisis arrangements and emphasised the amount of the debt, the need to fully repay and the need to do so within agreed time limits. From the Greek side, the debt was placed in larger contexts. Reference was made to reparations due for the German occupation of Greece during the Second World War. Specifically, it was underlined that the Nazi government of Germany had extracted a loan from the Greek state that was never repaid. In the broader debate, Europe was also seen as indebted to Greece for the invention of democracy. These invocations of debt can be distinguished by their historical temporality. The recent agreements within the European Union and the eurozone are financial arrangements set up in legal terms, with obligations situated between the present and a delimited future, and 22

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signed by explicit representatives of current collective subjects. The debts incurred at the time of the Second World War are more diffuse, but do not entirely escape the possibility of calculation. First of all, even though the personal signatories of the debt have long since died, the collective subjects still exist, given that there is declared continuity of statehood for Greece and, with some complications, for Germany. Furthermore, the Nazi loan was an explicit loan, and the only difficulties consist in assessing its legal status today and recalculating the debt across three-quarters of a century with changing currencies and significant inflation. The question of reparations for war and occupation is already more complicated. There are international understandings of reparation payments, but they are always open to contestation. Furthermore, they are linked to the question of war guilt. For the Nazi war inflicted on Europe, the question of moral and political responsibility beyond economic damages is beyond doubt. Thus, invoking a debt of Germany to Greece in this way enlarges the relation between both subjects beyond calculation and extends it across historical time.4 To invoke Europe’s indebtedness to ancient Greece for the invention of democracy does the same, a fortiori, and it does so in a positive sense: debt is here related to gratitude. There is no way in which this debt could be ‘paid back’. Taking our cue from this example of invocations of past debt, we observe that the further the past, the easier it is to talk about debt in a non-economic discourse. At first sight, this asymmetry can be related to difficulties with events long past: the subjects are possibly no longer the same, not only individually but also collectively. The ‘currency’­– ­in a broad sense of the term: specifying the relation between what was given and what was received­– ­in which to account for the debt may have changed. And in contrast to the interest that accumulates with an unpaid financial debt, the passing of time may be seen to diminish the amount of moral and political responsibility, but in an unspecified way. Calculation of debt turns into an assessment of historical injustice, with the associated difficulty of attributing responsibility and defining remedial or compensatory action.5 However, the difficulty of calculating debt across longer stretches of time also creates an opportunity, namely that of considering the relation between two collective subjects within a wider horizon. The limitations of access to a remote past make it more acceptable, at times even unavoidable, to focus on elements that do not have strictly quantifiable consequences in the present. In turn, it seems that the closer in time the event of exchange is, the 23

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more adequate the explanatory potential of the economic approach appears to be. In part this is so because of the reverse of the reasons mentioned before: the exchanging subjects may be present and clearly identifiable; the terms of their exchange are suited for quantification; they may even have used quantitative assessment at the moment of exchange. But there are further reasons that are related to the view of time itself, οr to the view of its nature: over the short run, it may seem permissible to use an abstract notion of time, a time that can be divided into segments of equal duration and without qualities, and that is not loaded with facts and their perceptions and interpretations. Time itself is measured, and not merely that which has been exchanged. Across such time, nothing changes; time just runs its course, ceteris paribus. Finally, more recent situations of indebtedness may also lend themselves to a more economic interpretation because this interpretation itself emerged in explicit form only in recent history and is often seen as steadily increasing its significance. It is to this question that we now turn.

The rise of the economic understanding of debt The explicit formulation of what we call here an economic understanding of social relations and its marked conceptual separation from other understandings dates from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For our reflections here, it is important to underline that this conceptual innovation was pursued for a purpose. The central idea then, as is well known, was to expand the place of commerce among human social relations. But this proposal arose in response to persistent problems in human history, namely strife, warfare and misery. Against this background, the argument ran as follows: when human beings increasingly trade goods with each other because of specialisation and a division of labour, they come to depend on each other and will no longer fight wars against each other. In such an arrangement, furthermore, the pursuit of one’s own interest in producing more and selling more of one’s product will tend to maximise the general level of satisfaction of needs. The former line of reasoning is known as the ‘sweet commerce’ (doux commerce) argument, originating in Montesquieu, the latter as the ‘wealth of nations’ argument, made famous by Adam Smith. In other words, the notion of economic relation­– ­more precisely: commercial relation­– ­was developed as a tool to further peace and material affluence in human societies.6 24

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From the late eighteenth century onwards, however, the reasoning changed. From being a conceptual tool that improves human society in specific respects, the economic relation became a model for human relations in general. It came to be seen as a form of social bond that was superior to other, time-honoured forms. This superiority was defined in two respects, very often connected to each other: first, it was seen as liberating human beings from bonds that meant bondage. The commercial relation made human beings free and equal. Second, it was seen as functionally superior. It would generate beneficial individual and collective effects. This assumption of normative and functional superiority, combined with the evolutionist thinking that was widespread during the nineteenth century, led to the theorem of the historical rise of individual instrumental rationality. This is a classic theorem of critical social theory, maybe first most poignantly pronounced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto with the claim that all social bonds will be dissolved in the icy waters of egotistical calculation in the wake of the rise of the bourgeoisie. It is taken up in modified form by scholars such as Max Weber, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Weber expressed an ambivalence that made his conceptualisation open to widely divergent interpretations. His distinction between types of action­– ­purpose-rational (instrumental), value-rational, affectual and traditional­– ­has been read both as a grading from higher to lower rationality and as underlining a plurality of forms of rationality. Adorno and Horkheimer developed a radically critical perspective, which became the core of the critical theory of the ‘classical’ Frankfurt School. In contrast, current rational choice theorising both takes note of the historical rise of individualism and rationalism and praises it. The world, so it is assumed, has been transformed so that human beings increasingly relate to each other in economic terms, and this makes human societies more rational. If this were so, and unavoidably so, not much more would need to be said here. Without entering too deeply into historical analysis, however, we just want to mention three approaches that cast doubt on the theorem of the inescapable rise to dominance of the economic bond between human beings. In his analysis of ‘the rise and fall of market societies’ from the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries, Karl Polanyi suggests that there is an inherent limitation to applying the idea of market self-regulation as the consequence of individuals interacting rationally in pursuit of their preferences.7 If goods are exchanged 25

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as commodities even though they are not suitable for such treatment because they have not been produced as commodities (namely land, labour and money, for Polanyi), then negative consequences of such a kind will arise that ‘society’ will move to defend itself against the consequences of commodification. As Polanyi put it, the idea of market self-regulation ‘disembeds’ the economic relation from other bonds between human beings; society’s response urges and aims for a ‘re-embedding’. While Polanyi was writing during the Second World War and was duly sceptical of the outcome, the experiences of the post-war period then led scholars such as Talcott Parsons and Jürgen Habermas to theorise the appropriate, ‘embedded’ place of commodified (economic, market) relations in society, a place within which they should be and can be contained. This thinking, in a way, returns to the idea of the economic bond as a tool whose use offers functional benefits that can be reaped without jeopardising other important aspects of human social life. However, it remains doubtful whether the place of economic bonds in social life can indeed be defined a priori and in institutional terms. Parsons and Habermas were optimistic, but Polanyi was troubled by such doubts. More recently, indeed, the view of the adequate embedding of economic relations into social life was criticised from two different angles. Reviewing colonial-imperial domination, Dipesh Chakrabarty makes a distinction between History 1, determined by the logic of capital expanding across the globe, and History 2, the plural history of resistance to History 1.8 There is no balancing in this perspective, but historical openness. Like Polanyi, Chakrabarty emphasises the unacceptability and unsustainability of the expansion of the economic relation. More directly Polanyi-inspired scholars, in turn, have analysed recent politico-economic transformations as a new disembedding, without any identifiable prospect of re-embedding (yet). Among them, Wolfgang Streeck focuses explicitly on the debt relation. He sees increasing indebtedness as the latest historical stage in the unfolding of the logic of capital.9 Keynesian debt-financing had worked on the assumption that debt-financed economic stimulus would create a dynamics of growth that allows future debt reduction, a kind of self-rescuing device. From the 1980s onwards, however, private and public debt ‘buys time’ without any sustained argument about a future in which the possibility of repaying the incurred debt will arise. This situation points to a limit, to a radicalisation of debt practices, and that 26

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is why it is addressed as a debt crisis.10 There is, however, a profound ambiguity in this situation. What is often overlooked is the imminent possibility of a transformation of the meaning of debt. Clearly, the authors who address the debt crisis do so in economic terms, to start with. They point to increasing amounts of debt and relate debt to the capacity of subjects to repay the debt within specified temporal limits. The amplification and generalisation of indebtedness, however, potentially undermine the economic meaning of debt insofar as repayment within specified periods, or even repayment at all, becomes less likely or even impossible. Generalised indebtedness is a new social situation that escapes the disembedded economic understanding of debt, which aimed at making money lending one more tool of functional economic organisation. In this situation, indebtedness can become ‘too large’ to allow the debtors to ‘fail’, to paraphrase a term hitherto only used for banks. We mention these works as examples for the plausibility of not one, but two key observations about historical transformations, namely that we have reason to assume that over the past two centuries the significance of the economic bond between human beings has increased, but that this increase has also met resistance that aimed at re-emphasising other bonds between human beings. Historically, furthermore, this resistance has led to empowerment of those who resist and to social transformations, such as the building of organised social solidarity and decolonisation. In the current situation, such empowerment does not seem to be on the horizon, and increasing indebtedness is mostly analysed as a new form of domination. To go beyond such analysis, one needs to retrieve a broader non-economic understanding of debt and mobilise it in the light of our starting observations about how past debt can be invoked to call for action in the present.

The subject-in-debt In its economic sense, debt is fixed and calculable, as that which one autonomous economic actor owes to another. There is a clear quantitative meaning to satisfying the demand of a debt, and in most cases also a definition of the time over which a debt has to be repaid. Time is assigned no meaning beyond the intervals during which the debt is to diminish in agreed terms. Past debt will only be invoked to demand or to demonstrate repayment. The full repayment of the debt is an act that cancels the relation between creditor and debtor. This is the prevailing 27

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meaning in a market society in which the commercial bond is the key relation between human beings. This understanding is based on the premise that a debt is a contract bringing together the free will of two individuals. This premise is formed by three components: (1) it sees debt as a contract that inaugurates and constitutes the relation and defines the conditions for its end;11 (2) it supposes the free will of the people involved; and (3) it supposes that these people are individuals. In contrast, we suggest that a more fruitful way of looking at a debt relation is based on the premises that (1) debt is an irreversible, always-already-there relation;12 (2) the reasons for incurring a (new) debt arise in situations where the term ‘free will’ is hardly applicable;13 and (3) a debt is not an occurrence between decontextualised individuals who merely sign a promise to pay; it is their being tied into a net of relations which makes the debt possible, the guarantee against which a loan is normally given being the simplest sign of such embedding.14 The confrontation of these two sets of premises shows that the economic view of the indebted subject is much narrower than the broader understanding that we propose.15 One could say that at best the economic view captures very specific debt situations but fails to grasp the social phenomenon of indebtedness in general. Indeed, in our view, the economic actor is the narrow but supposedly all-encompassing container of the subject-in-debt, a much richer and varying social person whose relations are guided by interest and many more passions. Despite these obvious failings, the economic concept dominates the prevailing understanding of debt. A main reason for this dominance resides in its usefulness as a tool. Debt in the economic sense creates capacities, but in a double, socially contradictory sense. On the one hand, it capacitates the debtor. Entering into an economic debt relation by contracting a loan can be liberating by permitting the use of resources one could not otherwise avail oneself of, and making it possible to do so without obliging oneself to others in terms of personal bonds. For a state, running public deficits for work programmes and social policy measures can sustain ‘mass loyalty’16 and­– ­under democratic conditions­– ­help governments get re-elected. On the other hand, debt in the economic sense capacitates the creditor by subjecting the debtor. To be highly indebted forces human beings to continue gaining revenues with a view to repayment and thus constrains their freedom in the future. Similarly, indebted states lose much of their capacity for ‘sovereign’ policy action because they have to secure their ‘credibility’ 28

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in the face of financial institutions rather than their citizens. In both cases, the constraints on people and governments due to indebtedness may be desired and even intended by the ‘creditors’, securing compliance and submission over long periods. In other words, the debt relation, economically understood, remains a tool for both liberation and subjection. To understand, however, how a subject can emerge from subjection under a debt relation, a different concept of debt is required. Moving further along the lines of the three alternative premises that we sketched above, and drawing on and extending Marcel Mauss’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s views on exchange and reciprocity, we first suggest that a widened concept of debt becomes almost synonymous with social relations in general: social relations are sustained through exchanges (of various kinds), and every exchange has a temporal dimension. Between the giving and the taking, time elapses; this lapse of time is marked by indebtedness. Going a step further, second, we further suggest that such indebtedness generates social dynamics. It motivates people to act. Rather than looking at the social world from the angle of a performed operation of exchange after which ‘the accounts are in balance’, one should look at the social world as constantly driven by indebtedness, and in particular contestation of the latter or even ‘crisis’. There is some parallelism between such an approach and the one developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in their ‘pragmatic sociology’:17 Boltanski and Thévenot suggest that moments of agreement are less suitable for understanding social interactions than moments of dispute. During the latter, underlying repertoires of justification have to be made explicit, and thus become visible for analysis, whereas during the former they are concealed. Even beyond pragmatic sociology, third, there is a specificity to the debt relation. Disputes or misunderstandings leave something unresolved. Thus, they are drivers of action and interaction. But situations described in such terms do not a priori locate subjects within specific positions, whereas a debt relation does: some are debtors and others are creditors. Thus, a sociology and philosophy of debt starts out from an asymmetric social relation. It links with analyses of domination, but avoids a systemic perspective. In such a light, debt can be seen as a core constituent of the dynamics of social action and social transformations. Continuing for a moment the analogy between pragmatic sociology and a future sociology and philosophy of debt, we can regard the 29

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moment when a debt becomes unbearable­– ­or when the debtor perceives it to have become unbearable­– ­as the equivalent to the moment of dispute. In this moment, the debtor becomes a subject in a fuller way than the ‘actor’ who treats the debt in a run-of-the mill, economic way. The unbearable debt creates a subject who is no longer willing to assume the weight of debt, or at least no longer willing to assume it without contestation. It creates a subject in the process of emancipation.

Debt and empowerment Tentatively, we propose to distinguish three stages in the sentiments and passions of the subject who is indebted. They mark highly different attitudes to one’s indebtedness and, even though they do not necessarily occur in sequence, their distinction is crucial for mapping out a different understanding of debt. In a first instance, debtors whose debt has become unbearable often feel guilt. They overestimated their capacity to repay the debt. They should not have entered into a debt of such high amount, long-lasting duration and/or difficulty to monitor and control. The relation between debt and guilt has been a topic of moral philosophy and genealogy at least since Nietzsche. It has resurfaced during the current eurozone crisis both as a subject of conceptual history and as a topic of public debate, namely when alleged creditor countries, often with Protestant religious majorities, blamed debtor countries for immorally living beyond their means.18 The feeling of guilt may go along with a feeling of humiliation as well as either resentment of, or gratitude towards, the creditor. Parenthetically, we note the case of the annihilation of the overburdened subject-in-debt, the one who never fully becomes a subject. The most famous literary figure is Madame Bovary, who commits suicide under the unbearable weight of her accumulated debts. Increasing numbers of suicides for reasons of indebtedness are regularly reported for societies in which the debt burden increases, be this in Korea and Japan, India, or the recent European austerity context of Italy and Greece. Both the specific character and the case of the annihilation of the person or the collective actor (state failure and all that this entails in terms of ruptures in the social net) need to be developed in full in the future.19 In a second step, facing a situation without exit, debtors’ passions may move to indignation and anger. To just use an example that starts 30

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out from a narrowly defined financial debt situation, the reasoning would develop as follows: the terms of the debt that were imposed on the debtors were unjust and exploitative. The creditors abused a situation of need when contracting the loan. It was improper of them to grant a loan that the debtor was never likely to be able to repay.20 The state should have protected potential debtors by legally limiting the terms and conditions on which loans can be contracted. Such indignation and anger are directed in the first place against the creditors, but also against the political authorities that set the framework for the creditors to operate. Thus, the debt relation turns into an antagonism, defining opponents in a struggle. In this process, third, the debtors may recognise that they have the power to resist. They note the capacitating effect of their redefining the situation at the second step. If their situation is not their fault (alone), then something can be done about it. Responsibilities are redesigned and solidarities developed. What emerges is feelings of trust in oneself, in other debtors, and possibly in the collectivity; and with trust comes a sense of resilience, of becoming able to securely exit the seemingly unbearable debt situation. Our intuition is that as soon as a person, or a group of persons, passes from the first to the second cluster of sentiments, we witness the creation of the subject, a subjectivation; that is, in the sense in which we use the term here, a rising into political and social consciousness of the person. This is a process of empowerment and emancipation. The move from the second to the third cluster consolidates this process by pointing to a solution of the issue from which it started out as the identification of a problem. There is (always) a variety of possible solutions, more agonistic or more consensual ones. And there is no necessary or generally preferable passage from the second to the third moment. But the way in which this passage occurs leads to the forming of different social relations. They vary according to the intensity of the relation, the substantive definition of responsibility and solidarity, and the criteria of inclusion or exclusion, among other features. A comparative history of welfare states, of the processes of their creation and the varieties of their institutionalisation, would give testimony of one major case of such a passage, given that the welfare state’s theoretical justification is a debt that society has to its workers. There is no place here for more historical and empirical detail. But we want to suggest in general that it is fruitful to look at the history of societies in the light of the ways in which their members are indebted 31

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to each other, how their debt relations are shaped, and how from debt oppression, processes of emancipation and empowerment can arise and transform societal institutions. We have pointed above to the history of colonialism and decolonisation and to the history of the workers’ movement and organised social solidarity. Despite unprecedented levels of commodification and financialisation, there is no a priori reason to assume that the multiple debt crises of the present time might not entail embarking on new but similar trajectories, leading from guilt and humiliation to indignation and anger and on to trust and resilience.

Notes   1. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, ‘Classification Situations: Life Chances in Neoliberal Society’, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 38, 2013, pp. 559–72.  2. For reflections and investigations of a parallel kind see the contributions to Aristotelis Agridopoulos, Axel Honneth, Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner (eds), ‘Stichwort: Schuld und Schulden’, special section of WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 2, 2019; and to Nathalie Karagiannis (ed.), ‘Time, Debt, Creation’, special issue of Social Science Information, 58(3), 2019; as well as Bissonnette in this volume.   3. Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don (Paris: PUF, [1924] 1973); Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (Geneva: Droz, 1972).   4. For an analysis of the historical way in which the West German state and the state of Israel dealt with responsibility and reparations, see Joëlle Hecker, ‘Les temps et les modes de la reconnaissance politique: la RFA, Israël et la Claims Conference (1950–1990)’, doctoral thesis (Paris: Institut d’études politiques, 2014).   5. See Peter Wagner, ‘Historisches Unrecht im Zeitalter von Menschenwürde und Demokratie’, WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 2, 2019.   6. As Albert Hirschman (The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977)) aptly put it in his subtitle, these were strong ‘arguments for capitalism before its triumph’ (even though they might better be called ‘arguments for commercial society’).   7. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944).   8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).   9. Wolfgang Streeck, Gekaufte Zeit (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013). The general notion of ‘imagining futures’ as a way of socially stabilising something that is naturally unknown and uncertain has been developed by Jens Beckert, Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 10. The currently globalising industrial capitalism and its associated way of life inten-

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The Indebted Subject and Social Transformations sify both resource extraction and the emission of pollutants. The excesses of the present are made possible by ‘buying time’ and ‘mortgaging the future’, but also by largely ignoring the available assessments of the future conditions under which ‘repayment’ would have to be made. In the following we only briefly develop the reasoning with regard to social relations, but a related argument would need to be elaborated for the relation between society and nature as well. Within social relations, there is always the possibility of cancelling a debt. Forgiving is a way of forming future social relations, as Hannah Arendt underlined. But it may not be available to the planet with regard to the indebted human beings that inhabit it. 11. On ways of ending debt, see Nathalie Karagiannis, ‘Das Ende der Schulden: die Frage nach der tabula rasa’, WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 2, 2019. 12. We are indebted to Charles Malamoud’s work on the Brahmanic understanding of debt (‘Théologie de la dette dans les Brāhmana’, in La dette (Paris: Éditions de ˙ l’EHESS, 1980)). Malamoud underlines that in both Brahmanic practice and language, debt is ‘first, autonomous, and non-decomposable’ (p. 45); that is, it does not refer to anything before it and is not explicated by any primordial myth. It just is. The ramifications of such an understanding are extremely fruitful, because they are very far from implying a passive or abstract view of the subject, who, on the contrary, is called upon to ‘make world’ (pp. 51–3) by settling the debts of different natures that she has. Unfortunately, there is no space here to further develop points that we shall explore in the future. 13. We can consider two extreme but typical situations: that of the ideal entrepreneur who incurs a debt in order to expand his flourishing affairs in competition with other entrepreneurs, and that of the poor person who is threatened with losing everything unless he enters into debt. In both situations, the social context demands incurring debt in ways that cannot be captured by the notion of the preferences of autonomous actors. 14. Many languages reflect the broader foundations of the economic meaning of debt by insisting on the need for the creditor to believe (‘credere’; ‘glauben’) in the future actions of the debtor. 15. We use the term ‘indebted subject’ to capture the empirical situation of indebtedness. The term ‘subject-in-debt’, in turn, is proposed as a concept for understanding debt as constitutive of social relations. This section draws generally on what for present purposes we can, for purposes of brevity, call a non-utilitarian understanding of social relations. 16. Wolfdieter Narr and Claus Offe (eds), Wohlfahrtsstaat und Massenloyalität (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1975). 17. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, ‘The Sociology of Critical Capacity’, European Journal of Social Theory, 2(3), 1999, pp. 359–77; Luc Boltanski, De la critique (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). 18. See recently Elettra Stimilli, Debito e colpa (Rome: Ediesse, 2015). 19. For a reflection on ways of ending debt, see Karagiannis, ‘Das Ende der Schulden’. 20. This argument arose with regard to the indebtedness of Southern societies when

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Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner ‘structural adjustment programmes’ were imposed on them. It re-emerged in recent social movements addressing the mortgage crisis, namely the incapability of real-estate owners to repay their mortgages, in many Northern societies, maybe most pronouncedly in Spain.

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3 Debt, Democracy and the Pharmacology of Money Jean François Bissonnette

T

he sovereign debt crisis that befell Southern European countries in the wake of the private debt crisis that triggered the collapse of the American financial system in 2008 threw a harsh light on the functioning of contemporary monetary institutions. After more than two centuries of denial, since Jeremy Bentham hammered the final nails into the coffin of early modern usury laws and dispelled the last remnants of religious taboo on money lending, debt started being seen again as a moral and political phenomenon.1 For the modern credit industry to rise, debt had to be depoliticised. Now, the suffering of indebted nations, forced as they have been to make every sacrifice in the name of debt repayment, made plain the political nature of credit. Disguised as a mere economic arrangement between self-interested actors, the relationship between lenders and borrowers turned out to be an asymmetrical, unforgiving and exploitative power relation. The sheer brutality of such a political entanglement could be observed in the particular case of Greece, and in the relentless silencing by creditors and their lackeys of any demand for relief. Debt, it seems, functioned as some kind of categorical imperative, foreclosing all possible alternatives. Expressing her doubts regarding the restructuring of the Greek debt, for instance, the former International Monetary Fund (IMF) chairwoman, Christine Lagarde, thus declared: ‘A debt is a debt, and it is a contract.’2 The tautological nature of her assertion only served as a reminder of the powerlessness of debtor countries. Democracy, in these lands, was effectively shut down, as the tragic fate of the SYRIZA government and of the thunderous result of the Oxi referendum showed. Echoing Lagarde’s comments, the then European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, indeed proclaimed the utter inanity of popular will, assuring that there could be ‘no democratic choice against the European treaties’.3 Not only were debtors tied to 35

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an absolutely binding ‘contract’, they also bore politically unshakeable fetters. In this context, it has been argued that the plight of Greece, in particular, was the direct result of its being a member of the eurozone.4 By design, the euro would put its user countries in shackles, depriving them of the monetary policy instruments that could have offered the leeway necessary to alleviate their debt burden, notably by means of currency deflation. The sovereign debt crisis in Europe thus provided an opportunity for critically questioning the institutional design of the common currency. Yet, more often than not, critical voices fell short of questioning, not the merits and shortcomings of this or that particular currency, but of money itself. And yet, because it is nothing but debt, it could be argued that money is in and of itself a paradigmatically democratic issue. The purpose of this chapter is precisely to examine what ‘democratic money’ could mean. For money to be ‘democratised’, that is, to be instituted in a way that ensures the equality and promotes the liberty of its users, conventional wisdom concerning its very nature first needs to be put into question. The first section of this chapter aims to critically examine the foundational myth of economics regarding money, which considers it mainly as a politically neutral medium of exchange. Building on Karl Marx’s and Georg Simmel’s critiques of money and of the origin of economic value, the section sketches out a properly sociological understanding of money as a political institution, while emphasising its profound ambivalence in regard to the problem of equality and collective autonomy. Money, it seems, can foster both domination and freedom. The question thus consists in examining what determines the outcome of money’s contemporary mode of institutionalisation. Turning to social anthropology, the second section of this chapter highlights the fact that money, in capitalist societies, comes into existence by means of lending. As such, monetary creation through credit, today, merely echoes the real historical origins of money, which came about as an accounting technology to quantify and settle debts. It appears that debt and, behind it, giving and counter-giving relationships form both the primitive architecture of economic relations and the basis of moral obligations, so much so that using the language of debt seems inescapable when it comes to expressing the very nature of collective interdependence. Yet, just like money itself, the debt implied in the gift is also unremittably ambivalent, so to speak. The ancient theme of the poisoned gift 36

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draws our attention to the fact that the gift is not simply the opposite of market exchange, contrasting self-interested and calculative relations with disinterested and unquantifiable ones, as some contemporary theorists would have it. As such, this fundamental ambivalence of the gift points to the problem of ‘pharmacology’, that is, the critical search for the criteria that would make it possible to separate the beneficial and adverse effects of human practices and technologies, including money. Reflecting on the conditions that allow for the gift to nurture ‘mutually beneficial debts’, rather than asymmetrical, toxic ones, the chapter concludes by attempting to isolate this criterion and apply it to the search for monetary alternatives.

The myth of barter and the ambivalence of money When it comes to explaining the very existence of money, the science of economics has repeated the same fairy tale for more than two centuries. As the story goes, money would have come into existence as a mere technical fix to the shortcomings of the primitive form of exchange: barter. The story originates, of course, in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Against the backdrop of a spontaneous and quite unexplainable division of labour, which isolated individuals in their own particular spheres of occupation, while making them mutually dependent for satisfying their needs, an allegedly natural ‘propensity to truck, exchange and barter one thing for another’ would have given rise to the first lineaments of market exchange.5 In this view, engaging with others could only be motivated by self-interest, while one’s work could only be predicated on the likely exchangeability of one’s production. Neither ‘wisdom’ nor ‘benevolence’ nor ‘friendship’ were needed to make people useful to one another. A peculiar, agonistic form of social cooperation could thus thrive. Forced into the market by his own self-insufficiency, ‘every man [. . .] bec[ame] in some measure a merchant’, competing against others to hammer out the most favourable deal for himself.6 Swapping the product of their own labour for that of others, people would have had to learn by trial and error to ascribe comparative values to the objects of their trade. Hence the cumbersome, limitative nature of primitive exchange. In the absence of a universally recognised standard, the market value of one’s products would have depended on constant haggling. How many arrowheads would equate to that many bushels of wheat? The sheer impracticality of one-on-one negotiation would 37

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have been made worse by the fact that the products on offer would not necessarily correspond to the traders’ respective needs. This problem of the non-coincidence of wants would have made the search for a universally accepted exchangeable good more and more urgent. This is how, in Smith’s canonic view, money came about. Prudence, Smith says, would have led everyone ‘to have at all times by him, besides the peculiar produce of his own industry, a certain quantity of some one commodity or other, such as he imagined few people would be likely to refuse in exchange for the produce of their industry’.7 Although a great variety of objects may have historically filled that purpose, Smith concedes, certain ‘irresistible reasons’ would have led, ‘in all countries’, to the adoption of metal to serve as a unit of account and means of exchange. Its unique durability, which allowed value to be stored without loss; its divisibility, which facilitated price-making by fine-tuning payment in specie; and its portability, which favoured long-distance trade, all made metal, for practical reasons, the universally accepted equivalent of every other commodity. Of importance here is the fact that money is merely a specific kind of commodity, that is, an object that is produced solely for the purpose of exchange. It has no other meaning than that of expressing the value of every other tradable commodity. As such, it is perfectly neutral, and accounts for nothing in the existence of markets. Indeed, a ‘commercial society’ was already in the making before the appearance of money. It is, therefore, socially and politically innocuous, even insignificant. Were it not for the impracticality of barter, it would not even matter. However awkwardly, prices could be set by simply comparing the intrinsic value of commodities on offer, and thus exchange could carry on independently from it. In that sense, to use Schumpeter’s word, money is but a ‘garb’ that masks the real factors behind commercial exchange, a ‘veil’ that could just as easily be ‘discarded’ if we were to examine ‘the fundamental features of the economic process’, the real elements that alone truly matter to the dynamic of exchange.8 Money’s theoretical neutrality largely explains our collective inability to politically problematise its existence and functioning. Indeed, the myth of barter matters less to the explanation of its historical origins than to the reasons why it came to be institutionalised the way it was in modern times. This ‘teleological functionalism’,9 which recurs throughout the history of modern economic ideas, leads to treating the ‘effects’ of money’s existence as the ‘causes’ of its appearance. Money is only defined by its functions, and as such, the story of its historical evo38

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lution posits that it was always meant to function, from its inception, the way it came to do in a fully fledged market society. Consequently, the fact that, in this story, the ‘invention’ of money presupposes the idea of private property, market-oriented production and the self-­ interested nature of exchange reveals the ideological purpose of such a foundational myth. Indeed, the trope of the primitive ‘African king’, in Smith’s account,10 who reigns over a people that both ignores the utility of money and vegetates in an inferior state of material and rational progress, shows how this tale of money’s origins reflects the historical circumstances in which it was imagined, as Great Britain was starting its rise to global prominence. Behind this scientific myth thus lies an ideological sleight of hand, which both naturalised the historically specific institutional form of money that was established in Europe at the time and justified the increasingly unequal balance of power that centred the world economy on it. Indeed, such a conception of money, allegedly evolved from barter, corresponds quite closely to the kind of money that circulated in Europe at the time in the form of coins made of precious metals. Money could be conceived as a substitute for commodities because it was itself instituted as one, albeit a spurious one. In his account of the development of capitalist markets, Karl Polanyi asserted that three things had to be made into what he called ‘fictitious commodities’ for the economy to be ‘disembedded’ from society: land, labour and money.11 Through the destruction of the commons with the enclosure movement and the rural exodus that ensued, land and labour, which constitute humankind’s organic and transformative relationship with its natural environment, became commodities to be bought and sold on the market, although they were never produced for the market to begin with. The same goes with money, Polanyi explains, this ‘token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but merely comes into existence through the mechanism of banking or state finance’.12 In other words, even in its commodity form, money is and has always been a political institution. Yet, if the social and human cost of maintaining alive the fiction of commodity money proved too great, by sacrificing all to the preservation of the gold standard that proved essential, up until the 1930s, to the automatic regulation of the market, the efforts that followed to avoid the absolute ‘demolition of society’,13 by reinstituting a semblance of political control over the money supply, fell short of recognising monetary policy as a paramount democratic issue. 39

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Failure to consider money as a social institution, imbued with contentious norms and traversed by relationships of power, rather than as a neutral, technical appendage of market exchange, largely explains why money has been left out of the modern democratic project. The democratic values of equality and liberty are nevertheless intrinsically linked to the institutional dynamics of monetary creation and circulation. In this, however, money proves highly ambivalent. This ambivalence shows in the contrasting positions respectively taken by Karl Marx and Georg Simmel in their critical analyses of money. Although they both perpetuated some aspects of Smith’s foundational misconception­– M ­ arx by adhering to the notion of commodity money implied in his reformulation of Smith’s theory of labour as the source of economic value, and Simmel by deriving money from the barter-like intersubjective evaluation of commodities’ worth­– ­their respective views on money help shed some light on this ambivalence, that is, the fact that money serves both as an instrument for domination and as a vehicle for liberty. These contrasting views are made apparent by their common use of the metaphor of money as the god of modern times. In his ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’, quoting from Shakespeare, Marx defines money as a ‘visible divinity’. Like God almighty, money is an ‘omnipotent being’ whose eminent quality lies in its ‘property of appropriating all objects’.14 Money’s liquidity, its capacity to substitute for all commodities and thus to make all opposites ‘fraternise’, constitutes the hallmark of its ‘divine power’, of which anyone who possesses it partakes.15 It should be no wonder, then, that money is imbued with supernatural powers. The ‘magic of money’, as Marx writes in Capital, is manifest in its capacity to express the market value of all goods, and thus to be traded in exchange for the socially necessary labour that they condense. Inhabited by the ghost of value, ‘gold or silver in its crude state, becomes, immediately on its emergence from the bowels of the earth, the direct incarnation of all human labour’.16 All this magical and religious vocabulary is no mere metaphor in Marx’s analysis of money. His idea is not simply to compare religious and economic phenomena, and say that the latter somehow resemble the former. In fact, in both religion and economy, a single mechanism is at play. Both gods and monies are at the same time the effect and the cause of human alienation. If money is a ‘jealous god’, as he writes in ‘On the Jewish Question’, like the God in Heaven, it acts as the self-negating expression of human capacities. Humans are alienated 40

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because they let themselves be dominated by their own creations. God’s almightiness, being nothing but a figment of human imagination, is at the same time the negation of humankind’s own creativity. Rather than recognising themselves as the makers of their own world, humans ascribe this power to an otherworldly being, and subject themselves to its authority. Consequently, ‘the more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself’, wrote Marx in the ‘Manuscripts’.17 Likewise, ‘money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it’.18 Such servile behaviour shows through the phenomenon of ‘commodity fetishism’, described by Marx in Capital. Fetishism, in its literal sense, designates the cult of inanimate objects, which are believed to be inhabited by powerful spirits. Under capitalism, Marx explains, commodities, including money, likewise appear to take on a life of their own and influence human destiny. The spirit that inhabits commodities is their exchange value. Following Smith, this value of commodities has no other foundation, for Marx, than the quantity of human labour that enters into their fabrication. And yet, once they enter the market, where commodities are traded for one another through the medium of money, the social relations of labour that they comprise disappear from view, so that only their exchange ratio appears to possess tangible reality. Human relations of production and exchange are thus perceived as relations between commodities, and are hence subjected to the law of value. This is made possible because labour­– ­and human life itself­– ­has itself been turned into a commodity, as Polanyi would later note. The commodification of labour indeed represents the precondition for economic activity to become profitable, that is, for trade to cease being a mere exchange of equivalents and usher in inequivalence, that is, profit. On the one hand, this means that the satisfaction of vital needs now depends exclusively on the market, that is, on the capacity for sellers of commodities­– ­including workers selling their labour­– ­to realise their exchange value by converting them into liquid money, thus restoring and increasing their purchasing power. On the other hand, this also means that the formal equality of the work contract­– ­a mere act of buying and selling between equal partners, it would seem­ – ­inaugurates in reality the practical subordination of workers to their employers. Through the mediation of money, labour thus becomes doubly alienated. It is alienated because, by selling their labour power to an employer, workers surrender control of their activity and lose all autonomy. It is also alienated because, by working for the benefit of 41

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someone else, workers are henceforth dispossessed of the product of their labour. Humans’ work no longer bears the fruit that nourishes their ‘species being’, but generates other commodities whose law of value ultimately decides their fate. Money, in Marx’s view, is thus no longer the neutral instrument of trade that it was in Smith’s description of its origin and function. It rather appears as the operator of human domination over other humans. Although he still conceives of it as a commodity, Marx is not impervious to its social nature. Indeed, money both lubricates and hides the unequal social relations that effectively produce the material and intellectual world that humans inhabit. One could possibly say that, in Marx’s theory of commodity money, money is socially instituted as such. Yet, just as commodity fetishism can be dispelled by scientific analysis, the institutional form adopted by money under capitalism is susceptible to deliberate change. The effects of political domination that its functioning creates can be reversed. Money, perhaps, can bring about freedom. This contention is arguably closer to Georg Simmel’s analysis of money than it is faithful to Marx’s view. According to the former, it might be the case that workers are disgruntled by their situation in a society dominated by market exchange, hence the appeal of socialist theories such as Marx’s.19 Since happiness is not a necessary correlate of liberty, for Simmel, workers’ misery does not imply that they are unfree. Humans’ universal dependence on money might make some more advantaged than others because of their unequal possession of riches, but by itself, money is indifferent to that fact. This is not because money is but a neutral appendage of markets, but precisely because the extension of monetary relations provides the conditions for equality and liberty to develop. For Simmel, too, money is like God. ‘Just as God in the form of faith, so money in the form of the concrete object is the highest abstraction to which practical reason has risen.’20 Yet, contrary to Marx, for Simmel this godlike nature of money signals not the alienation of humankind, but the crest of rational progress. Money is primarily a technical artefact, whose purpose is to make different values comparable. But ­whereas valuation is fundamentally a psychological ­phenomenon­– ­here, Simmel parts ways with both Smith and Marx, rejecting the notion of an ‘objectively’ existing value ‘in the absolute sense’,21 be it based on labour time or otherwise­– ­money’s value, or valuableness, transcends the simple intersubjective comparison of p ­ references to enter the realm of 42

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institutional objectivity. Like the objective world that humans produce and inhabit, whose order becomes ever more complex and abstract, so does money itself. In this historical process of increasing abstraction, to which it largely contributes by making ‘teleological series’­– ­the social and logical mediations between means and ends­– e­ ver longer, money’s material ‘substance’ progressively disappears behind its pure ‘function’ as equivalent of all values.22 Money is perhaps ‘vulgar’ or ‘common’, in the sense that it downgrades even the noblest ideals by making them quantitatively comparable with the lowest trinkets,23 yet, like God, it nevertheless reigns supreme, a beacon of stability in a world of increasing impermanence and fluidity. Some, nostalgic for the rootedness of days past, might bemoan this state of affairs. Yet Simmel insists on the fact that this condition, made possible by the increasing pervasiveness of monetary relations, actually opens a space for human liberty to flourish. This is because the world of money is an impersonal one. Money ‘makes possible relationships between people but leaves them personally undisturbed’.24 The mutual indifference of trade partners, according to Simmel, confirms the egalitarian, if not ‘democratic’, character of monetary traffic. The anonymity of money, its absence of intrinsic qualities, makes it so that the distinctive qualities of individual persons also become irrelevant to monetary transactions. The individual’s ‘character’, their ‘dignity’, their ‘honour’ or lack thereof, which could in different contexts justify their exclusion from certain social circles, no longer apply once money is involved. The market simply does not produce, in Simmel’s view, these kinds of qualitative distinctions. As long as they possess money, all are on an equal footing. Therefore, money profoundly changes the meaning of social obligations. The hierarchical, immovable and highly personalised relations typical of feudalism, for instance, give way to extremely plastic, adaptable and reversible ones. Whereas social prestations used to be acquitted in nature, attaching debtors to the single activity corresponding to the type of good specified as means of payment, now that money has become ‘the constant by-product of all different kinds of production’,25 debtors become formally free to choose their occupation. If freedom means the capacity for individuals to follow their own personal inclinations, then the world of money offers, in Simmel’s view, the most propitious conditions for it to develop, since one is free both to heed one’s calling and find in it a source of income, and to use the latter to buy whatever suits one’s fancy. The point of this short comparison between Marx’s and Simmel’s 43

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views was not to settle the debate on the nature of money and decide whether its effects on liberty are positive or negative, but to underline its inescapable ambivalence. Money is both alienating and liberating. It is both a factor of equality and an instrument of exploitation. It favours both autonomy and dependence. Beyond this ambivalence, what transpires from Marx’s and Simmel’s contrasting accounts is, however, the institutional and political nature of money. As a simple means of exchange, money’s worth might be ‘purely conventional’, writes Marx in Capital, yet the necessity for it to ‘possess universal validity’ implies a need for political validation. This is why ‘it is in the end regulated by law’.26 Simmel insists, likewise, on the importance of money’s ‘legitimation by public power’.27 Only this kind of political guarantee allows it to shed its material, intrinsic worth and become a pure symbol of purchasing power. The abstract nature of paper money, to say nothing of today’s digital currencies, reveals that money is, in the end, nothing but a ‘claim upon society’.28 If the ‘community as a whole’ acts as its guarantor, thus infusing worthless tokens with universally recognised value, this signals that money is both merely a matter of social trust and a highly plastic, malleable institution. Society, in other words, ultimately decides what money is, which also means it can change at will its form and institutional design, which arguably determine whether its social effects incline towards equality and freedom or their opposite. It is in that sense that money is a democratic issue. Money seems to induce contradictory effects when it comes to the democratic values of equality and liberty. Yet these effects ultimately depend on the kind of social validation provided by public authorities, which gives money its power. As long as popular will can influence the political process and command those in charge of this institutional sanctioning, it would thus appear that it ultimately falls to the people to decide whether money should, by design, foster equality and liberty or prolong its own dispossession. The ambivalence of money is not so much a fatum as an open question. This is, in essence, what I call the ‘pharmacological’ dilemma of money.

Gifts, debts and the problem of pharmacology In his discussion of the mythological origins of writing, as recounted in Plato’s Phaedrus, Jacques Derrida points to the ambivalent nature of this recording technique, which transforms the living voice of the logos into the artificial, lifeless and imperishable ‘grapheme’. The written 44

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word is thus designated as a ‘drug’, a pharmakon, a ‘“medicine” [. . .] which acts as both remedy and poison’, and which thus ‘can be­– ­alternately or simultaneously­– ­beneficent or maleficent’.29 The technique of writing has indeed paradoxical effects. While it saves human thoughts by affixing them to a durable medium, it also weakens the mind by relieving it of the need to remember. Taking up from Derrida, Bernard Stiegler argues that not only writing but ‘every technique is a pharmakon, that is, every technique can serve to build, to elaborate, to elevate the world, or to destroy it’.30 Because of their inescapable ambivalence, society therefore needs to remedy the toxic effects of techniques while potentialising their beneficial uses. ‘Politics, and political responsibility, thus consists essentially in developing therapeutics for pharmaka.’31 Considering the ambivalence of money noted above, that is, of the accounting technique developed to make economic values comparable, a therapeutics of money is thus indispensable. Rekindling a politics of money, which means not only a politics of value, but also a politics of what holds society together beyond the mere exchange of commodities, is of the essence. The political nature of money was lost from view once it was said to derive from barter. Now, anthropologists have long established that it is the gift that is the true primitive form of exchange, but the myth of barter sticks nevertheless because it elegantly explains the three functions that money plays in modern economies: unit of account, means of exchange and store of value. Yet, if we consider the gift as the starting point of all ‘economic’ relations­– ­although the gift being, in Marcel Mauss’s terms, a ‘“total” social phenomen[on]’32 implies that its economic aspect cannot be separated from the other institutional spheres that constitute society­– ­we are immediately confronted, again, with the problem of pharmacology. Indeed, to forget the dual nature of the gift would be ‘madness’, says Derrida. The ‘madness of economic reason’, he explains, would consist precisely in wishing for ‘a gift without ambivalence, a gift that would not be a pharmakon or a poisoned present’.33 The ambivalence of money outlined above thus finds its echo in the ambiguous nature of the gift itself, which hinges on the doubleedged obligation it can create. It follows that the idea of democratising money implies a reflection on the equivocity of social obligations more generally, since those obligations are most often formulated in terms of debt. Money is no different in this regard. As Geoffrey Ingham writes, ‘all evidence points to the historical origins of money as a means of calculating obligations and debts’.34 And yet, although they both share 45

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this pharmacological relationship to debt, lumping together gifts and monetary exchange can seem, at first sight, rather antithetical. Both gift giving and monetary trade nevertheless imply a form of reciprocity, although, following Marshall Sahlins, they appear to belong on separate planes. ‘Altruistic’ forms of exchange, embedded within networks of social solidarity, appeal to a ‘generalised’ form of reciprocity. Here, reciprocation need not be immediate or exactly equivalent. In fact, although giving creates an obligation to return, the ‘reckoning of debts outstanding cannot be overt’,35 for it would contradict the explicit disinterestedness of the giver’s gesture. The obligation imparted to the receiver is rather ‘diffuse’. It is fulfilled by perpetuating the relations of solidarity, which maintain, amongst the members of a community, a never-ending cycle of mutual yet unquantifiable debts. Transactions implying the exchange of strict equivalents, by contrast, belong, in Sahlins’s vocabulary, to the sphere of ‘balanced reciprocity’. This is the realm of ‘tit-for-tat’, where the concern to be quits is actively present to the minds of trading partners. Whereas relations of the first type prioritise the social bonds over the materiality of the things that circulate, the latter rather emphasise the actual value of the objects that are being traded, the vitality of the relationship being dependent on the material satisfaction of the parties involved. The question remains, however, whether monetary exchange should belong to the second type, premised on equivalence, or if it more closely resembles the third, ‘negative’ type of reciprocity identified by Sahlins. Indeed, if negative reciprocity designates phenomena such as ‘theft’, which denotes a desire to appropriate without reciprocating, and calls for a no less unilateral retaliation in the form of punishment, Sahlins also includes ‘barter’ in this category, for it too implies a will to maximise one’s ‘utility’ at the expense of others. Whereas a Smithian account of money would claim that it merely facilitates the evening out of the things received and the things given in exchange, as we have seen in the previous section, a more critical analysis, influenced by Marx, would rather point to the underlying inequity of the social relations that make monetary transactions possible. This kind of critique resonates in the intellectual project of the so-called ‘Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences’ (M.A.U.S.S.) animated by the French sociologist Alain Caillé.36 For anti-utilitarians, who claim to follow up on Mauss’s seminal work, the gift constitutes the basic form of sociality. Taking the gift into account thus challenges, in their view, the ideological hegemony of utilitaria46

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nism, which is premised on the idea that we, like Smith’s prehistoric merchants, always calculate costs and benefits, and follow our best interests. The anthropological model of utilitarianism would indeed be incapable of explaining the human propensity to make gifts. Granted, gift giving is never entirely devoid of self-interest, be it denied or unconscious, since the motivation to give does not preclude an implicit expectation of receiving in return. Pure generosity might well be radically ‘impossible’, as Derrida contends.37 After all, for the gift to cement social solidarity, it has to be reciprocated. There is a ‘power’, supposedly contained in the objects received, that forces the receiver to give back.38 But such is the ‘paradoxical’ nature of the gift39 that it combines, to the point of indiscernibility, liberty­– t­ he undetermined, inaugural offering­ – a­ nd constraint­– ­the socially sanctioned obligation to return. It thus cannot be reduced to a desire to maximise one’s benefit. This view therefore implies that the gift is radically different from market exchange. Whereas the latter emphasises the quantitative equivalence of reciprocal prestations, expressed in monetary terms, the value of the gift is seen as essentially qualitative, as ‘the value of the things’ that circulate is always ‘subordinated to the value of the persons’ involved in this circulation.40 As such, anti-utilitarians claim that the circulation of objects as gifts serves not so much the satisfaction of people’s needs as the perpetuation of social relationships themselves. Indeed, whereas giving cultivates highly personalised relationships, since the objects given are somehow impregnated with the personality of the giver­– ­‘in giving [. . .] a man gives himself’, as Mauss said41­ – ­market transactions are conversely depersonalised, as are the objects of trade themselves. Impersonality might well be a condition for individual freedom, as Simmel thought, but this liberty would entail the severance of an essential part of ourselves. Thus, when they contrast the gift and market economies, anti-utilitarians make a rather explicit normative distinction between the two. Gifts are good, as they nurture social relationships and foster our humanity. Market exchange is bad, because it reduces social life to calculation and dehumanises us. Such a Manichaean distinction does oversimplify things, however, especially when it comes to accounting for monetary debts such as Greece’s, that is, debts that originate in the market. Gifts might create their own ‘mutually beneficial’ kind of debt, but, for anti-utilitarians, conflating the latter with the type of obligation associated with financial credit would be deeply mistaken. ‘The same word designates wholly different realities.’42 Sure enough, there is a difference between a general 47

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sense of obligation for the favours we receive and a precisely calculated debt, as David Graeber suggests.43 The latter contains the possibility of paying it back in its entirety, which means the possibility of dissolving the relationship, whereas the first emphasises our permanent interdependence. Besides, contrarily to the formal aspect of the credit contract, and the possibility for the creditor to enforce the obligation to return by appealing to the courts, gifts contain no such constraining mechanism in case of failure to give back, apart from a vague sanctioning in the form of social shame and the risk of losing one’s status. Nevertheless, it is difficult to distinguish between the two, because financial debts are not mere market exchanges. Market exchange is supposedly impersonal, discontinuous and premised on the idea of quantitative equivalence. But financial credit always remains personal in some way, since debt always raises suspicion concerning the ethical personality of the debtor, as the duplicitous moral castigating of the ‘lazy’ and ‘unreliable’ Greeks at the height of the sovereign debt crisis amply proved. What is more, credit is not discontinuous; quite the opposite. As the ‘rescue’ offered to Greece by European and international monetary authorities would suggest, contemporary credit arrangements rather seem to function so as to entrap people in permanent debt. Debts are only profitable to creditors as long as they remain outstanding, and the longer they are left unpaid, the heavier they become thanks to ‘the magic of compound interest’. Interest taking, furthermore, or ‘usury’ as the Ancients called it, also differentiates financial credit from the purported equivalence of market exchange. Indeed, since debtors are obligated to give back more than they have received, credit introduces the same kind of inequivalence noted by Marx. If the gift does not help to clarify the semantic and political ambiguity of debt, it is because it is itself extremely ambivalent. This ambivalence is apparent in the very etymology of the word itself. In Germanic languages, the word gift designates both a present and a poison.44 In ancient Greek, likewise, the word dosis also carries this dual meaning, evoking both a gift and a ‘dose’ of pharmakon.45 Considering this places us on the terrain delineated by Derrida, since establishing the right dosage is precisely the goal of a pharmacological critique. What is at stake, in this notion of a poisoned gift, is that presents can be dangerous for both the health and the liberty of the person who receives them. The obligation to accept always instils in the mind of the giftee an ‘uncertainty about the good or bad nature of the presents’ received.46 This toxicity of the gift has to do not at all with the substance 48

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of the thing given, but with the potentially fraught social relationship it creates. The ‘poison in the gift’, Laidlaw notes, is but a metaphor for the ‘danger of social interdependence’ more generally.47 Indeed, to accept a gift is to put oneself at the ‘mercy’ of the giver, as the French word for ‘thank you’ (merci) would suggest, with its dual meaning of gratitude on the part of the recipient, and arbitrariness on the part of the giver, whose power to withhold his or her ‘grace’ is thereby acknowledged. The gift is by nature non-egalitarian, as it places the receiver in a position of dependence and inferiority. Marcel Mauss wrote about the kind of agonistic gift practised in the potlatch that ‘to give is to show one’s superiority’.48 Giving is a challenge that one is obliged to take up. You have to show that you are capable of ‘supporting the debt’.49 If not, failure or incapacity to give back could lead to social destitution and the loss of liberty. Hence this Inuit saying reported by a Danish explorer: ‘Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.’50 Be it because too much interdependence can be harmful, or because there is a risk of being crushed by the generosity of one’s superior, the gift always contains an element of toxicity. It is not the object given itself but the social relationship of debt that is poisonous, or more precisely, the poisoned gift is the irremissible debt that subjects the debtor to his or her creditor. A poisoned gift, following Jacques Godbout, is thus a gift that has the effect of ‘preventing the acquisition of autonomy’.51 And yet, a situation in which ‘the gift received would induce a state of guilt or domination’ would be nothing but a ‘perversion’ of the gift.52 This is because the possibility always exists of a ‘positive debt’,53 of a ‘debt without guilt’54 that could even prove ‘mutually nourishing’.55 But how, as was the question in the previous chapter, can debt emancipate? For the ambivalence of the gift to be dispelled and for the beneficial potential of debt to be realised, its toxicity, or the risk of domination that it contains, must be neutralised. What defuses this risk, what prevents the gift from giving way to a unilateral and hierarchical relationship, is the reversibility of the positions between givers and giftees. More than mere reciprocity, which would ensure the partners’ evenness through the logic of ‘tit-for-tat’, the reversibility of givers’ and receivers’ positions induces the possibility of cumulative equality. In fact, this ‘parity’ slowly builds up over time, against the backdrop of an ‘intrinsic initial difference’.56 Reciprocation upends the primary inequality that accompanies the gift. The sequential character of the giving/counter-giving relationship thus averts the typically unilateral­ 49

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– ­and potentially exploitative­– ­nature of debt, by cyclically alternating the partners’ positions, so much so that, in the end, no one knows any longer what one precisely owes the other, but everyone knows they are in debt to one another. In that sense, one could say, as Michael Hardt and Toni Negri write, that this ‘reciprocal recognition of the social debts we owe to one another’ institutes a form of debt ‘for which there is no creditor’.57 Such a debt echoes the promise of democracy. ‘We are in debt, yet we are free.’58 In other words, the possibility of mutually beneficial debts indicates that there are indeed forms of exchange that promote both equality and liberty. The pharmacological dilemma of the gift is thus solved, albeit tentatively, by this criterion of reversibility.

Conclusion: commoning money ‘The nature of society changes with the meaning and direction (sens) of debt’, wrote Pierre Clastres.59 The primordial equality of archaic societies, carefully maintained through the logic of mutual, horizontal indebtedness, gave way, somehow, to the vertical, unilateral debt that tied the people to the political and religious elites, ushering in the era of social domination. In today’s world, domination through debt is woven into the fabric of society, and determines the way in which the market’s purportedly neutral instrument, money, is socially instituted. As the example of Greece shows, monetary debt also constitutes, by the same token, the mechanism by which the people are subjugated to the state, as well as states indentured to other, richer ones. As was noted in the first section of this chapter, money is ambivalent. It harbours the possibility for both domination and freedom, and, as I have argued, the ways in which it is instituted determines whether its effects will fall out one way or the other. Besides, money is and has always been an instrument to settle debts, and the fact that it is a ‘claim upon society’, as Simmel thought, only emphasises its intimate relationship to credit and debt. Yet, in today’s world, the world of financialised capitalism, this relationship has soured. This is because money has been institutionalised in such a way that its functioning confers an exorbitant privilege on unaccountable organisations: banks. Indeed, in financialised capitalism, money is loaned into existence; that is, commercial banks, in their capacity to issue loans, actually create the money supply at the stroke of a pen. Of course, as with all usurers, they seldom perform this service for free. This means that almost all the money that circulates in the economy is predicated on the profit 50

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motive of banks.60 And as Marx would have argued, the very possibility of monetary profit presupposes social relations of domination and exploitation. Money thus exists primarily as debt. But such debt allows no space for the flourishing of the kind of mutually beneficial relationship that the pharmacology of the gift hints at. There can be no reversibility between debtors and creditors, as only the latter possess the privilege of issuing money and deciding to what ends it can be created. Yet it could be argued that there are positive aspects to credit, and thus to the peculiar form of monetary creation that prevails today. The concept of money as commodity necessarily implies an idea of scarcity, but money creation by means of credit entails no such limitation, save the risk of inflation. This means that pro-austerity arguments to the effect that ‘we can no longer afford’ this or that because ‘money does not grow on trees’ simply fall apart. If money can be willed into existence by mutual agreement, solely on the basis of trust, then the capacity to provide for social needs is multiplied. Credit is creative. Indeed, by its very nature, it is a form of ‘advance’ that allows for possibilities to take shape. Any economic initiative requires a financial kick-start. One can patiently save every penny to accumulate initial capital, or one can borrow it, which accelerates the realisation of one’s project. As Gustav Peebles writes, credit thus has an inherent, albeit ambivalent, ‘productivity’.61 What is at stake, beneath the idea of ‘democratising money’, is thus the possibility of making use of credit’s unique capacity to facilitate social development without conducing to domination. Yet, if money is nothing but debt, the latter, as I have argued, can be mutually beneficial only if the relationship it creates is horizontal and reversible. What turns this benefit into a toxic thing, however, is that the technical capacity to create money has been confiscated by banks. When Polanyi wrote of money that it had become a ‘fictitious commodity’, we can surmise that his point was not only that this fiction hid the fact that money is in reality a ‘token’ of debt, but that debt itself has become a commodity, now that money creation operates only inasmuch as lenders can turn a profit on the credit market. It is in that sense that money, being a social institution based on mutual trust, has been confiscated, and this confiscation is integral to the dynamic of capitalism. Now, if the enclosure of the commons and industrial exploitation, which also turned land and labour into fictitious commodities, immediately evoke the image of collective dispossession, what of money? Shall we conclude that communities were also dispossessed of their monies, that 51

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is, of the symbolic mediums through which exchanges are made, and the ‘provisioning [of] society’ ensured?62 Was money also a form of ‘common’ prior to its commodification? If so, how could the social institution of money be restored as a common, that is, as a resource that is collectively and democratically managed so as to foster the autonomy of communities?63 Two options appear that further research will need to examine: alternative currencies, on the one hand, and the democratic management of credit, on the other. What follows is simply a sketch of the possibilities and limitations that these two options are likely to entail. Hundreds of local, alternative currencies projects have been developed in recent years throughout the world. The idea behind them is simple: to strengthen social bonds and reinforce local economic networks by means of a currency unit that can only be used within the perimeter of its user community.64 Money thus loses the apparent neutrality that is attached to its status as general equivalent. Its lack of inherent qualities, as noted by Simmel, which was the condition for it to represent, express and make comparable the value of all the things that can be bought with it, is tentatively filled with social values of solidarity and reciprocity. Of course, one practical difficulty on which most alternative currencies projects seem to stumble is that, in order to be adopted by their would-be users, such currencies have to be useful to them; that is, they have to give access to a large pool of goods and services. And to achieve this, alternative currencies already have to be used by a large number of people, buyers and sellers. A typical ‘chicken or egg’ problem, which is in fact reminiscent, by the way, of Smith’s ‘prudence’ in the primitive search for a universally accepted means of exchange. Nevertheless, the idea remains potent: to put into the hands of the community the monetary instrument that is the very medium through which a great many of our daily interactions go about. The power to decide what money is and how it should work should indeed be seen as an essential aspect of democracy. In that capacity, it could even be decided that money should not and could not be accumulated, which would be quite simple to work out, technically speaking, and yet have enormous social and political implications.65 There is one crucial limitation that most existing alternative currencies face, however: the money supply is necessarily scarce, because such currencies cannot be created ex nihilo, but only by being converted from official currencies at par. In other words, they cannot serve as credit instruments, which 52

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means that they can hardly be used as seed capital to finance economic initiatives. And yet, therein lies the emancipatory potential of credit, that is, its capacity to transcend scarcity and make all things possible. Since money is a mere convention, and not a rare commodity, there is indeed a magic money tree, or at least there could be one if the power to create money was given back to the people, so as to fund what they actually want and need. Because credit is, for now, dependent on its profitability for private lenders, a good deal of the money thus created goes to fund entirely speculative and wasteful projects, rather than socially useful and productive endeavours. If money were to be made a common, people would have a say on its finality. It is difficult, however, to envision how credit allocation could be made truly democratic. Even at the level of credit unions and cooperatives, where members nominally have a voice, lending decisions are made on a day-to-day basis and it is hard to imagine every credit application being debated in a general assembly. Nevertheless, be it at this level or at that of a yet-tobe-created ‘bank of the people’, as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon imagined it, communities should be able to decide at least on the general framework for lending, to define priorities and draw red lines as to what should and should not be funded.66 We often imagine democracy, following Rousseau, as the general will defining the law, that is, what is permitted and what is forbidden. A democratisation of credit, or a money of the common, would rather mean defining collectively what is possible, what is worth funding, and what is not. In other words, commoning money constitutes the democratic answer to the pharmacological dilemma presented in this chapter. Money can enslave us just as much as it can make us free. To be sure, the plight of indebted nations and individuals today shows just how toxic our monetary system has become, and yet, money remains irreplaceably useful. The problem is not new. Aristotle wrote about it 2,400 years ago. To defuse the risk of what he called ‘chrematistics’, and restore a healthy balance to our economic practices, money has to be made common again.

Notes  1. Jeremy Bentham, A Defence of Usury, Shewing the Impolicy of the Present Legal Restraints on the Terms of Pecuniary Bargains, in a Series of Letters to a Friend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1787] 2014).

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Jean François Bissonnette   2. Quoted in Ashoka Mody, EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 416.  3. Satyajit Das, ‘Europe’s Greek Fallout’, Wilmott, 81, 2016, pp. 16–21: 17.  4. See Costas Lapavitsas, A. Kaltenbrunner, G. Labrinidis, D. Undo, J. Meadway, J. Michell, J. P. Painceira, E. Pires, J. Powell, A. Stenfors, N. Teles and L. Vatikiotis, Crisis in the Eurozone (New York: Verso, 2012).  5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1776] 1976), p. 25.   6. Ibid., p. 37.   7. Ibid., p. 38.  8. Quoted in Geoffrey Ingham, ‘Money is a Social Relation’, Review of Social Economy, 54(4), 1996, pp. 507–29: 511.  9. Ibid., p. 513. 10. Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 24. 11. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origin of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, [1944] 2001), pp. 71–80. 12. Ibid., pp. 75–6. 13. Ibid., p. 76. 14. Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (Chadwell Heath: Lawrence & Wishart, [1844] 1975), pp. 229–58: 323. 15. Ibid., p. 325. 16. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, [1867] 1990), p. 187. 17. Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’, p. 272. 18. Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 146–74: 172. 19. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, [1900] 2004), pp. 337–8. 20. Georg Simmel, ‘On the Psychology of Money’, in G. Simmel, Simmel On Culture: Selected Writings: Theory, Culture & Society, D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (eds) (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 233–43: 243. 21. Ibid., p. 237. 22. Simmel, Philosophy of Money, pp. 167–9. 23. Georg Simmel, ‘Money in the Modern Culture’, in Simmel, Simmel On Culture, pp. 243–55: 249. 24. Simmel, Philosophy of Money, p. 304. 25. Ibid., p. 308. 26. Marx, Capital, p. 194. 27. Simmel, ‘Psychology of Money’, p. 237 28. Simmel, Philosophy of Money, p. 176. 29. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (London: Athlone Press, 1981), p. 70. 30. Bernard Stiegler, ‘Questions de pharmacologie générale : il n’y a pas de simple pharmakon’, Psychotropes, 13(3), 2007, pp. 27–54: 34.

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Debt, Democracy and the Pharmacology of Money 31. Ibid., p. 33 32. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen & West, 1966), p. 76. 33. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 35–6. 34. Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), p. 105. 35. Marshall Sahlins, ‘On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange’, in M. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 185–275: 194. 36. Alain Caillé, Anti-utilitarisme et paradigme du don : pour quoi? (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2014). 37. Derrida, Given Time, 34. 38. Mauss, Gift, p. 1. 39. Jacques Godbout, L’esprit du don (Chicoutimi: Les classiques des sciences sociales, [1992] 2007), p. 157 (last accessed 11 June 2019). 40. Godbout, L’esprit du don, p. 125. 41. Mauss, Gift, p. 45. 42. Godbout, L’esprit du don, p. 110. 43. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), p. 386. 44. Marcel Mauss, ‘Gift, Gift’, in A. D. Schrift (ed.), The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 28–32. As Mauss observed, although it stems from a single root, this dual meaning is almost never present within any single language. In English, it means ‘present’, but not ‘poison’, whereas it is the converse in German, as well as in Swedish (where it also refers to marriage and dowry). Only in Dutch are both meanings c­o-present, although their spelling differs. I would like to thank Peter Wagner, Stefan Nygård and Sjoerd van Tuinen for their remarks on German, Swedish and Dutch, respectively. 45. Émile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes 1 : économie, parenté, société (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), p. 68. 46. Mauss, ‘Gift, Gift’, p. 30. 47. James Laidlaw, ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6(4), 2000, pp. 617–34: 630. 48. Mauss, Gift, p. 72. 49. Godbout, L’esprit du don, p. 116. 50. Quoted in Graeber, Debt, p. 79. 51. Godbout, L’esprit du don, p. 58. 52. Jacques Godbout, Le don, la dette et l’identité: Homo donator vs homo œconomicus (Chicoutimi: Les classiques des sciences sociales, [2000] 2007), p. 49 (last accessed 11 June 2019). 53. Caillé, Anti-utilitarisme, p. 50. 54. Godbout, L’esprit du don, p. 46

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Jean François Bissonnette 55. Andrew Ross, Creditocracy: And the Case for Debt Refusal (New York: OR Books, 2013), p. 29. 56. Godbout, L’esprit du don, p. 145. 57. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration (New York: Argo Navis Authors Service, 2012), p. 34. 58. Godbout, L’esprit du don, p. 47. 59. Pierre Clastres, ‘Préface’, in Marshall Sahlins, Âge de pierre, âge d’abondance (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 11–30: 26. 60. See Ann Pettifor, The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers (London: Verso, 2017). 61. Gustav Peebles, ‘The Anthropology of Credit and Debt’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 2010, pp. 225–40: 234. 62. Sahlins, ‘Primitive Exchange’, p. 185. 63. See Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Commun: essai sur la révolution au XXIe siècle (Paris: La Découverte, 2014). 64. See Peter North, Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 65. See Silvio Gesell, The Natural Economic Order (London: Peter Owen, 1958), p. 269ff. 66. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Organisation du crédit et de la circulation et solution du problème social (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1848).

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PART II

GREECE AND GERMANY AS EUROPE’S SOUTH AND NORTH

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4 Europe’s Debt to Refugees Eugenia Siapera and Maria Rieder

T

Introduction

he spectre of dead refugees trying to reach European shores is haunting Europe. The tragic death of the three-year-old Aylan Kurdi in September 2015 signalled the beginning of what has come to be called the ‘refugee crisis’ in the media and public discourse. In March 2019, the European Commission declared this ‘crisis’ over,1 although there is evidence that suggests that Europe has merely externalised migration controls to non-EU countries, such as Turkey and Libya.2 Despite the rhetoric, Europe seems unwilling to address the rights of refugees and migrants. This may be in part because the European countries that signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and article 14 on the right to asylum, are no longer the same: the demands made by the millions of dead and displaced people were too loud to ignore in 1948, but seventy years later these voices appear too distant. But some ghosts might be more resistant than others: the past is still haunting the present, or at least invoked in order to do so. Interpretations and invocations of the past circulate, often resignified and given different meanings, looking to confront the present. Focusing on two European countries, Germany and Greece, this chapter seeks to examine the ways in which the historical past is mobilised in connection with the refugee issue. We understand the invocations of the historical past as a kind of debt that binds the past to the present. The refugees and migrants coming to Europe ask for a new safe home; but in doing so, they also confront Europe with questions about borders crossed and to be crossed. These borders, political, cultural and geographical, bring to the fore questions of identity: what is Europe? Who belongs and who doesn’t? What is Europe’s relationship to and responsibility towards the refugees and migrants? Crucially, what is 59

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to become of Europe depends on the answers given to these questions. In the much-quoted words of Angela Merkel, ‘If Europe fails on the question of refugees, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for.’3 The future of Europe is at stake, as Merkel indicates, in a move that places the refugee and migrant demands on the temporal plane: talking about the future involves both the present and the past. At the same time, the refugee question­– ­as also indicated by Merkel­– p ­ oints to the ongoing question of how Europe relates to others. It is because of these two elements, temporality and relationality, that the refugee question can be posed as a question concerning debt, which similarly evokes both questions of time and questions of the bonds between people. We therefore ask: what is Europe’s debt to refugees? While the term ‘Europe’ is used here to denote both a geographical and cultural configuration, the various histories of different nations within Europe make formulating a single answer to this question very difficult. As an entry point, we focus in this chapter on two nations: Germany and Greece. This focus is justified, first, because of the important role they both played in the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–16 and beyond, with Greece being a portal to Europe and Germany being a preferred destination for many of the refugees. Second, the long and troubled history of both Germany and Greece make them an ideal starting point for this discussion. In studying the relationship between these countries and refugees through the lens of debt, we hope not only to discover ‘our’ relationship to others in need, but also to think about the various conceptualisations of ‘debt’ as a type of bond that connects people in specific ways. The chapter therefore poses the question of debt to refugees both conceptually and empirically, proceeding as follows: it begins with a discussion of debt as a residual relationship with the past and the conceptual avenues this theorisation opens up for understanding the refugee question. It then empirically examines the invocations of the past and the debt it creates in the public discourse on refugees in Greece and Germany, two countries directly involved in the refugee question. The final section brings all the threads together.

Debt and refugees In the first instance it may be counter-intuitive to ask what Europe owes to refugees. This is more so if we consider that often it is the refugees themselves who are thought of as indebted to those who grant 60

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them asylum. But even in these terms, it is clear that debt and indebtedness evoke a relationship between two parties that is at the same time an economic one and beyond economic calculations. In its most basic terms, a debt involves a relationship between two parties, in which one is offering something, typically money, in the present but deferring repayment. The second party then agrees to repay this at some point in the future. In these terms, this is an economic transaction, in which the debt and its value can be calculated and therefore exact repayment can be made at the agreed time in the future. But, for the debt to be issued, the creditor has to make a moral judgement on the debtor4 and their worthiness and ability to repay the debt. Additionally, and at least in the absence of any external forces or guarantees, this repayment hinges upon the second party’s moral obligation to stick to the agreement and its terms. But morality is also involved when the actual debt is not of the monetary kind, as found in terms of ‘gifts’ which were forms of morally binding obligations to reciprocate.5 Debts therefore involve both economic and moral obligations that unfold temporally. This section will begin with a discussion of these elements that constitute debts in different ways, looking to connect these to the issue of refugees. If we consider debt as a temporal relationship or bond between two parties, the creditor and the debtor, we obtain four possible ­ideal-typical positions: (1) the creditor does not find the debtor worthy and refuses to extend any credit; no relationship is established; (2) the debt is issued and repaid on its due date; the bonds between debtor and creditor are dissolved; (3) the debt is not repaid, leaving unfinished business, and possibly also accruing interest; (4) the debt is forgiven and the bonds between creditor and debtor are dissolved, though there may be a residual obligation by the debtor to the creditor for forgiving the debt. These may be thought of as forming a matrix, with variations falling at any point between them. We can then use these positions to think of Europe and refugees as the two parties and asylum as the debt. While in the first position we have, formally speaking, no debt, the refusal of the creditor’s request is in itself significant. In refusing to extend a line of credit, the creditor in practice refuses to have any relationship with the potential debtor and to assume any responsibility for them. In refusing the credit, the creditor is passing a moral judgement of unworthiness upon the debtor, at least in the present time. The creditor may issue conditions upon which to extend credit to the debtor, thereby putting off the decision until these are met. The debtor is therefore called upon to work towards obtaining the debt even if this 61

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is not extended to them yet. The primary issue in this position is the degree of moral worthiness of the debtor but also, by extension, the moral generosity of the creditor. The question of the moral worthiness of refugees has emerged time and again in public discussions about them,6 but also Europe and its citizens are often described as morally generous for offering asylum to refugees. For those defending anti-­ immigration politics, Europe is constructed as far too generous. In the second position, the debtor has repaid the debt in accordance with the requirements of the creditor and nothing more needs to be done. This is the ideal position when everything proceeds as expected, and both parties end the relationship as equals, having received what they asked for. The debtor and creditor both gain from this relationship, albeit in different ways. When the debt is paid off and the bonds dissolved, the two parties become­– ­or return to being­ – ­autonomous from one another. For the refugee issue, this position may be taken to represent a situation where Europe extends credit to refugees in the form of asylum, which they eventually make good or repay. And it is at this level that things become more complex, for two main reasons: first, because the terms of this debt are not clear, as neither do the refugees know what or how to repay this nor do their European hosts know what to demand or expect from these refugees. Second, then, this means that the debt is never seen as repaid and conditions are constantly imposed. The presence of refugees is always conditional, but the conditions are not known in advance. Some countries may, for example, set conditions of ‘good character’ for citizenship to be offered but, as we have seen in the case of Shamima Begum, citizenship can also be revoked at will from those deemed not native enough.7 In this sense, the idealised normative position on debt repayment in a situation where Europe is the creditor and refugees the debtor cannot work. As we shall see in the empirical part of this chapter, it may be possible for the reverse of this relationship to work, where Europe is the debtor and refugees the creditors. In a broader sense, however, equality and autonomy are involved in this position as the two parties dissolve the bond and no longer depend on one another. In the third position, the debtor and creditor are caught in a prolongation of the debt and the bonds between them, but in a manner where the debtor is disadvantaged because they end up having to repay more than they initially estimated, and where the creditor is disadvantaged because they have not yet received full payment. In this position, 62

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the two parties are antagonistically positioned and the actual debt is growing, making it more and more difficult to resolve the bonds in a satisfactory manner. In this sense, the two parties are bound together until the debt is resolved, but in ways that are less than satisfactory for both of them. This can be taken to correspond with the current situation concerning refugees: neither Europe nor the refugees are satisfied with their relationship but they are nevertheless bound to one another. Moreover, asylum, the debt, is neither given nor denied, leaving both parties in a situation that is unclear. Refugees find themselves caught up in limbo for years, often in appalling conditions in camps or hotspots. This is a moment of dispute. The underlying dynamic of this position is therefore undecidability, which in turn can be linked to the suspension of time, as this process is ongoing. However, as we shall see in the empirical part of this chapter, it is this position that offers an opening for the debt between Europe and refugees to be negotiated in a way that carries the relationship into the future without unduly burdening those who are currently in the weakest position, that is, the refugees. The fourth and final position is one where the debt is forgiven. In this position the bonds between the two parties are formally dissolved. At the same time, a new bond is formed, based on (expected) gratitude for this forgiveness. This is a transformation of the debt, which carries on existing, albeit in a different form, often as an obligation. The relationship is still unequal, but the terms may be more bearable for the debtor. Transformation is then the key element of this position. The four elements that we obtain from each of the positions are moral worthiness, equality, undecidability and transformation. These can be seen as corresponding to the ideal-typical positions but are also found mixed­– ­or differentially accented­– ­in the intermediate positions on the matrix. While Karagiannis and Wagner locate disputes primarily at the level of the unpaid debt,8 these ideal-typical positions can all involve potential disputes that can be resolved in a variety of ways, thereby generating different outcomes. So far, this discussion has abstracted the debt from the concrete circumstances in which it arises and examined it as a potentiality. It is now time to turn to a historical grounding of the debt, in the sense of locating it in in a specific temporality. When does it (tend to) occur; what is the time of debt? It turns out that it is very difficult to find a time of being free of debt­– o ­ r the need for some form of credit­– a­ s it is so entangled with social life. Dienst refers to this permanent condition of indebtedness as comprising two parts: on the one hand, the kind of 63

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ontological debt discussed by Agamben as arising because of the potential found in human life that makes people have and feel a debt which can never be fulfilled and that is always pushed further into the future;9 on the other hand, the concrete-historical debt that arises in people’s interactions in and with the world, ranging from ‘the duties of identity to the very persistent obligations imposed by the dominant forms of economic and political power’.10 If indeed all human life is lived in a state of indebtedness, if all of us are debtors and creditors, then we can see all the positions discussed above enacted at different points and occasionally coinciding with respect to different debts. Additionally, the constant state of indebtedness implies that all debts, the refused ones, the ‘good’, the ‘bad’ and the forgiven debts, are recorded in individual, social and collective memory and mobilised when the time comes. This can explain how and why, as Karagiannis and Wagner point out, past debts are invoked in order to justify and demand action in the present but also with a view to the future.11 This invocation is at the centre of the empirical part of this chapter. This is because, as Dienst argues, the adoption of a practical orientation towards history (in which debts are generated) and the present (when we are called to repay them) is the most appropriate response to the state of indebtedness.12 This entails that we learn how ‘to bind and break our debts’ in a manner that makes life more liveable.13 It is here that an empirical examination is important, to flesh out the ways in which debt in relation to refugees is understood in its concrete dimensions. Using the findings of this empirical examination, we can then return to these positions and examine the outcomes they involve vis-à-vis the refugee issue and the extent to which they make life more liveable.

Refugees in the media In empirical terms, the focus is on two European countries, Germany and Greece, themselves caught up in a complex relationship as both creditors and debtors to each other.14 Given its geographical position, Greece is the European country that refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have most prioritised as a point of entry into Europe­– a­ t the end of 2017 Greece was hosting over 83,000 refugees and asylum seekers. While Greece is the first port of call for refugees, Germany is the main destination for a large number of refugees­– ­according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), at the end of 2017 Germany was hosting 1.41 million ‘persons of con64

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cern’, including refugees, asylum seekers and stateless persons. In both countries the arrival of refugees has generated intense discussions and occasionally tensions and disputes. As such, the actions to be taken vis-à-vis the refugees require justification, which in turn is grounded on specific publicly shared descriptions and constructions of the issue. Public discussion on refugees in the media reveals certain themes and threads common to both countries. Moral deserving is one such theme,15 alongside an emphasis on numbers and statistics, the management of the ‘crisis’ and the issue of children and other vulnerable refugees.16 For the most part, the media coverage has described refugees as outsiders to Europe and different from Europeans, and in terms of a polarity between vulnerability and danger.17 Specifically, in Germany, as Holmes and Castañeda note, the public debate on refugees, and more broadly on immigration, reflects the tensions between an increasingly restrictive immigration policy, xenophobic tendencies and liberal aspirations.18 Holmes and Castañeda further locate the refugee issue within the specific historical context of austerity. It is in this manner that a distinction is made between those who deserve asylum and those who do not. Typically, it is families from war-torn regions, and specifically Syria, that are seen as ‘deserving’ as they have no choice other than to flee. Conversely, those from African countries or elsewhere in the Middle East are seen as economic migrants and for this reason deemed ‘not deserving’. The deserving of refugees is often mobilised as a justification for offering or withholding asylum and as such it constitutes a source of tension. The numbers and ‘logistical’ approach to refugees was highlighted in analyses of media coverage of the ‘crisis’, pointing to important issues but within an overall discourse of ‘flows’ and ‘flooding’ or ‘stemming flows’, difficulties in ‘processing’ such numbers and facing ‘insurmountable’ problems­– ­for example, Fotopoulos and Kaimaklioti found that the German newspaper Die Welt referred to the insurmountable costs of dealing with unaccompanied children.19 It is important to stress this ‘economic’ discourse on refugees because it can be linked to economic understandings of bonds of debt with refugees. For instance, Chouliaraki and Georgiou stress that refugee reception in Greece takes place within the context of the protracted economic crisis and austerity measures that preclude state support and investment in reception infrastructure.20 More broadly speaking, discussions of cost and the economics of managing refugees point to an economic transaction between refugees and their hosts, which in turn alludes to the ­formation 65

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of a debt, as refugees cannot be expected to return anything to their hosts in the present. The extent to which host societies in Germany and Greece wish to enter into this bond of debt, and their current and future demands in order to resolve it, are an ongoing source of tension. The polarity between danger and vulnerability observed by Georgiou and Zaborowski alludes to the ongoing securitisation of the borders in Europe (and elsewhere).21 The policing of borders through Frontex, the discussion of refugees as ‘illegal’, the references to ‘smugglers’ and ‘traffickers’, all found in the media discourses in the countries examined by these researchers, create a sense of possible danger and feelings of insecurity. At the same time, the references to children, their pressing needs for food and shelter, their traumatic experiences, cases of disabled or ill refugees and similar stories construct refugees as vulnerable and in need of care. Chouliaraki and Georgiou argue that the oscillation between securitisation and care leads to a hybrid ‘moral order’, which they refer to as ‘hospitability’, ‘a flexible regime of reception that contains and regulates mobile populations at the same time as it cares for and protects them’.22 This ‘flexibility’ in turn can be linked to the ambiguity of the relationship between hosts and refugees: the nature of this relationship is not yet determined. A final element of the media debates on refugees is their perennial construction as ‘Others’ to Europe. We refer to this as perennial because it has been the main finding of studies of the mediated representations of refugees since at least the 1980s.23 It is the persistence of this ‘othering’ representation that is of interest to us, because it shows the difficulty with which the relationship between hosts and refugees, self and other, can be transformed into a form of bond that is more equitable or liveable for both. This discussion shows the ways in which the media discourses in Germany and Greece already involve some of the issues we engaged in our discussion on the debt in the previous section: deserving, extending credit and future ‘repayments’ and, more generally, the ambiguity of the relationship between hosts and refugees, potential creditors and debtors. While none of these explicitly engages the notion of debt as such, they can be read as posing the question of whether Europe (Germany and Greece) should enter into a bond of debt with refugees­ – ­and, since these themes appear to dominate, the answer is that it shouldn’t. Yet in parallel with these dominant discourses and themes there are other forms of understanding this relationship that invoke an already-existing bond or debt stemming from these countries’ pasts, 66

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and such interpretations may lead to more productive justifications, in the sense of reframing the ‘problem’ in different terms. The following sections offer empirical insights from the two countries in which a debt is mobilised in order­– ­at least in part­– ­to resolve these tensions, even if in some cases it ends up producing new ones. Since, as we saw earlier, debt always occurs within a temporal horizon, such that it involves the past, the present and the future, the analysis will pose two questions: where is the origin of debt to be found? In which past? And: how is such debt mobilised in the present? We therefore consider how debt is mobilised, in and around the issue of refugees in the public discourses of Germany and Greece, as a means by which to understand the bonds binding hosts to refugees within a temporal horizon but oriented towards action in the present. The following sections discuss the two country case studies.

Greece: the dominance of the past The material for the analysis in Greece was drawn from three sources: print media, broadcasts and social media. Given that there exists no digital database with media contents in Greece, the methodology employed was digital ethnography, where the researchers followed media and refugee-related pages and saved any relevant contents that emerged in the 2016–17 period. The materials used for this analysis include news articles, photographs, videos and social media posts which articulate the refugee issue with debt. Within these, we focused on the articles that engaged with the historical past rather than with Greece’s sovereign debt crisis. The analysis identified three historical time periods: ancient Greece, the events of 1922 and the Second World War. These mobilise different kinds of debt but, taken together, end up transforming the relationship between debtors and creditors. The outcome of this transformation is not necessarily more autonomy or equality between the two parties but rather the formation of deeper, more enduring bonds. When it comes to the mobilisation of the ancient Greek past, two of the most striking examples are, first, an article by the columnist Pantelis Boukalas in the morning newspaper Kathimerini and, second, a photo­ graph by the Pulitzer prize photographer Yannis Behrakis (Reuters). Boukalas’s article (from 6 September 2015) is titled ‘If I am a Syrian, what wonder?’, a verse from an epigram by Meleager of Gadara,24 a Syrian poet of the first century BC who spent most of his life on the 67

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island of Kos, today one of the reception islands for refugees. Boukalas weaves the ancient verses and the life of Meleager together with the life of a modern-day Syrian taxi driver in Athens. The author makes two claims of indebtedness revolving around Meleager: the first is based on Meleager’s contribution to Greek letters and culture; and the second is because his lines gave us a ‘fascinating internationalist (or better, humanist) manifesto’. The implication is that our debt to Meleager is now called upon by the current refugees whose voices we ought to hear. This debt that emanates from the ancient past creates a direct line of continuity that is at once cultural and geographical and transcends the specificity of these parameters by calling on a shared humanity. The debt to Meleager therefore needs to be repaid to his descendants. The second example is a visual one: a photograph that depicts a refugee walking on a road carrying his father on his shoulders. The photograph was taken by Yannis Behrakis and published by Reuters in an English-language article on 26 February 2016.25 However, the photograph was subsequently widely disseminated within the Greek public sphere, with online news sites and social media users pointing to the similarity of this photograph to the myth of Aeneas. Another photograph used was one of a refugee carrying his blind wife on his shoulders and their baby in his arms.26 The mythical Trojan hero Aeneas left burning Troy carrying only his father on his shoulders, eliciting the admiration of the Greeks, who then offered help and allowed him to collect all his belongings. The myth of Aeneas the refugee, the mythical ancestor of Rome, was mobilised in articles pointing to the duty/debt of the modern Greeks to the modern Aeneas to offer help so that the refugee is able to reach a place of safety. The debt-duty or obligation signified by this photograph as found in these articles and posts points to an intergenerational debt, from father to son, from one generation to the next, from the past to the present. This intergenerational debt concerns the duties and subsequent bonds that unite generations: the duty of parents is to look after their children, and then when the children grow up it is their duty to look after their elderly parents­– t­ his can be, and is, extrapolated to the duty to care for those in need. This duty that sustains society ties us to our past but also holds the promise of reciprocity in the future. In these photographs that mobilise the myth of Aeneas, we see refugees performing this duty and are by this means directly called upon to perform our duties towards those in need now. Situating contemporary debt within a temporal dimension that encompasses the ancient past mobilises a notion of general humanity­ 68

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– ­notwithstanding the references to culture and geography­– ­whereas the second past debt invoked has a more specific character, binding creditors and debtors in a more concrete manner. This is because this debt is to a past that still exists in living memory and which is conveyed through experience. The particular past referred to is that of the war between Greece and Turkey, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the First World War. The war ended in disaster for Greece, with over a million refugees moving to mainland Greece from Asia Minor in 1922. Some of these first arrived and eventually settled on the islands of the Eastern Aegean, which are currently reception centres for present-day refugees. In our analysis, this was the most common reference that we encountered to a past debt in connection with refugees. Most Greeks have a direct link to a refugee parent, grandparent or great-grandparent to whom they feel they owe a debt, repaid in the form of helping refugees now. There are many examples of this formulation. Perhaps the most widely cited is that involving three grandmothers in Lesbos, who were later symbolically nominated for the Nobel Peace prize. All mentioned their past as refugees, discussing the memories and stories passed on to them by their parents. In another example of this trope, one of the better-known Greek football teams, PAOK, referred to its origin as a team established by refugees from 1922 in order to justify its support for refugees: ‘We were, we are, and we will remain refugees, as long as the uprooting of our grandparents is written in the books of our history, and we will never stand against the creatures of God who are expecting their own resurrection, seeking their own Ithaca.’27 The form of this debt is captured eloquently in the words of a fisherman in Lesbos: ‘We owe it [helping refugees] to the memory of our people who arrived in Panagiouda a century ago.’28 A Facebook post tells the story of Ed St. George, an American of Greek descent who went to Lesbos to help refugees as repayment of a 100-year-old debt. His parents crossed the Aegean on a refugee boat in 1922 and were helped by the locals: ‘I owe my own life, my children, everything I own today, to the generosity and support of the people of Lesvos.’29 There are numerous other similar references to Greece’s refugee past in 1922, especially in the islands, and all understand their relationship to refugees as mediated through this past, and the debt they owe to their own refugee history. This debt to their own grandparents constructs the relationship between present-day Greeks and refugees as not necessarily unequal, but rather an imaginary one. In this relationship, present-day refugees 69

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are almost incidental, as their presence and the help they receive is primarily a means by which Greeks can honour the memory of their forebears. Since the debt is to the forebears and cannot really be repaid, as the forebears are not present any more, refugees are not burdened with any direct demands for repayment. The help they are offered is therefore understood as repayment of an older debt. In this sense, this construction is one in which no demands are made of refugees, no conditions imposed on receiving any help and their autonomy is preserved. In this formulation, the implicit understanding is that ­present-day refugees will have a debt or obligation, not towards their hosts, but towards others in need in the future. In the final involvement of past debt, the particular past mobilised is that of the Second World War and this time the relationship is a direct one to present-day refugees. In these references to the Second World War, it is Greeks who were refugees during the war, and Middle Eastern countries, especially Syria, were the hosts. Photographs and articles here show pictures of Greek refugees fleeing to camps in the Middle East, notably in Aleppo in Syria, but also in Egypt and Palestine. These posts and articles invoke a specific bond of debt between Greeks and Syrians: Greeks found refuge during the Second World War in Syria, and they need to ‘repay’ this to present-day Syrians looking for a safe place in Greece. In an article posted on ERT, the public service broadcaster website, the author, whose family were refugees in Damascus during the Second World War, writes that ‘our approach to present-day refugees should be informed by Greeks’ particular history as refugees in Syria’, and that they should pay back or return what their ancestors received from Syrians then.30 Another ERT article quotes a statement of support by a local solidarity group in the island of Kalymnos, calling for solidarity with refugees ‘in the name and memory of the 3,500 Kalymnians who found refuge in Gaza in Palestine and in Damascus in Syria’.31 This reference to the specific past not only makes use of living memory and experience but also binds the specific cultures and nationalities of those involved. Here the roles of creditors and debtors are reversed: Syrian and other refugees are the creditors who have come to collect the debt and Greeks/Europeans are the debtors. Greeks are called upon to honour this past debt and accept their bond to ­present-day refugees. In the Greek case study, we have seen a very long temporal horizon for a variety of debts: a debt to shared humanity and the perennial bonds that bind generations and societies; a debt to a specific gener70

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ation of Greek refugees and the historical trauma of 1922; and a debt to a specific nation and region, Syria and the Middle East. In all these evocations of the past, the call is to bind modern Greeks to these debts and to meet the obligations that arise from these. The action that is called for is therefore the same across all three evocations: offer help and support to refugees. But there are some variations in these debts in terms of the relationships they posit. In the first two, present-day refugees do not enter into the picture and modern Greeks are not expected or required to enter into any relationship of indebtedness with respect to them. The question of moral deserving that we saw not only prevailing in media accounts of the refugee issue, but also in thinking about extending credit, is not present because present-day refugees are almost incidental to this debt; rather the debt is towards humanity in the generic sense and/or towards Greek ancestors. In the third case, the relationship is a direct one between the Greeks and the Syrian refugees, and the bonds of debt claimed are specific, with evidence provided in photographs and personal narratives. But in this position, it is the refugees who are the creditors and the Greeks the debtors, in a reversal of the media discourses that focus on numbers and the ability of hosts to offer help or extend credit: it is not a matter of extending credit that may or may not be repaid in the future but rather a matter of repaying what was received in the past. This focus on help to refugees as repayment of past debt­– r­ ather than creating a new debt that refugees will have to pay back­– ­is common across all these evocations of the past and it has the outcome of transforming the relationship between hosts and refugees. This transformation is from a relationship of dependence to a more equal one, in which refugees are merely receiving what is owed to them. This leaves present-day refugees free of specific conditions attached to offers of help. With respect to the four positions discussed earlier, the evocations of past debt occupy an interim space between positions three and four on the ‘bad debt’ that did not get repaid and the forgiven debt. This is because the two parties involved in the present were not the ones among whom the debt arose in the first place: the debt will never be fully repaid and will never be repayable and neither party can fulfil its obligations in the present. But it will not be forgiven either; rather it will be passed on to future generations, contributing in this manner to the continuation of bonds to distant and proximal others. This is how the relationship is transformed into a social bond of mutual dependence and ongoing reciprocity and carries the present into the future. 71

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Germany: past debt or present (European) responsibility? This section traces the evocation of different kinds of debt towards refugees and others in the German media. In order to explore which past events were raised and how potential debt stemming from the past was discussed, we collected both print media texts and images such as historical photographs and art mobilised in the present context. These texts, images and any accompanying captions were collected by, first, the use of the LexisNexis tool for German news publications, using the keywords ‘Flüchtlinge’ (‘refugees’), ‘Pflicht’ (‘obligation’), ‘Schuld’ (‘guilt, debt’), ‘Geschichte’ (‘history’) and ‘Vergangenheit’ (‘past’). For  the time period of 2015 to 2017 this gave us articles from local and national print media to analyse for themes of past evocations in the context of Syrian refugees arriving in 2015. Further, we collected images in newspapers and online media in a snowballing fashion using the above keywords in the Google images tool. Our endeavour was not to present an exhaustive list of textual and visual material and of all past ghosts, but to identify any discourses on a past–present debt relationship in German media. The images were then categorised according to the past event they evoked, as well as how the past was mobilised: as a stimulator for action, or to make some other argument. Before we go into the discussion of these various categories, we would like to point out two things that struck us as noteworthy. First, our extensive search did not render as many images or textual evocations of the past as we had expected. We consider this absence an important finding in itself and something that will be addressed in the following analysis, as it is often the silences that are significant and meaningful in public discourse. Second, even though the history of the previous century, and especially the Nazi era, can be said to be still omnipresent in all generations’ minds and collective memories, a number of articles present Germany’s duty to help as unrelated to the past. Rather, many articles argue that while Germany does need to remember, for instance, the crimes committed against the Jews or the help German refugees received in the past, the debts incurred then are irrelevant in the present. Instead, Germany’s responsibility to help is presented as lying more in its present role on the world stage, and its indirect engagement in conflicts through weapons deals, (post-) colonial relations and other capitalistic practices, issues that we would argue are more distant from the immediate knowledge, memory and experiences of the majority of German people and where the guilt/debt 72

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is displaced onto Europe as a whole. Taking these two observations together, there seems to be a discrepancy between what we find in the media, on the one hand, and, on the other, the sentiments held by ordinary people or their motivations for helping. Moving on to the different discourses we found, the main theme concerns the period after the Second World War. In particular, the experiences of displaced Germans are evoked in relation to German Jews who were granted asylum in Ireland and England, but mainly in relation to the Sudeten Germans (ethnic Germans living in the Bohemian region of former Czechoslovakia and expelled after the Second World War). For instance, one article, accompanied by images of Sudeten German and Syrian refugees walking towards borders, titled ‘Flüchtlinge 1945 und heute: Gemeinsamkeiten überwiegen’ (‘Refugees 1945 and today: commonalities predominate’), works out the similarities between the situations of the refugees of both periods and points out how the extent to which people deal with the past (Geschichtsaufarbeitung) strongly determines their attitude and degree of openness towards newcomers. In a similar vein, a reflection piece on the displaced Sudeten Germans, for instance, asked the question of whether the rejection of refugees in the east of Germany may be grounded in their insufficient engagement with history, with war, and with the displacement and destruction experienced by residents in the east, which may now be the reason for animosity towards and fear of refugees as well as for the popularity of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party in parts of eastern Germany. However, as a side note and in reaction to this article, we must remember that protest happens in different ways; xenophobic sentiments are quite evenly spread throughout Germany and find different forms of expression in different parts of Germany. Other articles invoking 1947 and the Sudeten Germans talk of the success of their integration thirty to forty years later on local levels, and end on a positive note, saying that the same will happen in time with today’s refugees. Overall, it is noteworthy that none of the images and texts which discuss the Sudeten Germans speaks of debt; rather, they look for explanations for the German resentment and animosity towards refugees and for why the forced detachment from their own past leads Germans to lack a sense of obligation. As a second major theme, a number of images and texts evoked the experience of refugees after the German–German reunification in 1989. For instance, an image gallery made available by infranken.de, a local south German news platform, produces short captions that describe 73

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each image. However, these captions refrain from further linking the images to a certain agenda or from joining a particular discourse around debt and responsibility. Lastly, a number of articles evoke the Second World War and the massive human catastrophe it brought. One article specifically raises Germany’s ‘special history’, from which a debt towards current refugees arises. A number of other articles criticise certain eastern German politicians’ rhetoric around the ‘flood’ of refugees and their fearmongering use of Nazi-ideological vocabulary such as ‘repopulation/ethnic cleansing’ (Umvolkung) and ‘Islamisation of the occident’. Others warn of inciting fear of and hatred towards refugees, as scapegoating against minorities has, as the past has taught us, had terrible consequences. On the other hand, some articles criticise the constant calling up of a collective guilt and duty to justify Merkel’s open-arms policy. For instance, one article discusses the way in which the 2015 refugee crisis has woken old ghosts: the conflicts between the Antifa (anti-fascists) and the NSU/neo-Nazis. Stemming from this history of conflicts, the article claims, Germans cannot be heard saying anything negative about refugees or the open-arms policy as they will be put into a Nazi corner. It goes on talking about the German trauma and the ingrained and inherited fear of rising nationalism, which is why policies such as the open borders in 2015 cannot be seen to be criticised. In this instance, Lord George Weidenfeld (who fled from the Nazis in Vienna) is quoted as saying that with their open-arms attitude Germans desperately want to wash their hands of cruelties committed during the Nazi era and that many people with guilty consciences are hoping to be absolved. He describes this as lazy thinking, as nothing will ever make amends for what happened in the past. Weidenfeld explains that this way of thinking makes introducing restrictive policies very difficult in Germany, in contrast to other countries (Denmark, Sweden), where according to him nobody would be called a Nazi for favouring restrictive policies or expressing critical views, and nobody would point out the dangers of nationalism. This position rebuts the implied but never articulated notion of a debt binding Germans to the refugees as debtors and creditors respectively. If there was any notion in the minds of Germans that help to refugees was a form of repayment then this article repudiates it. Other articles, less analytically and more assertively, criticise Germany’s sense that it is destined to solve the refugee crisis because of the perversions of the past as hubristic. These articles argue that Germans not only seem to feel cleansed and have acquired a new 74

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self-confidence in their endeavour to cure Europe of its problems; this felix culpa, which can be traced back to early Christian teachings of guilt as necessary to do good now, also has something of self-righteousness in it. One text then argues that it is part of the German responsibility, especially of those that consider themselves progressive, to stop this moral hubris; it goes on to point out that any attempt to take this terrible chapter of German history as reason for a special moral stand or duty is going to come to nothing, as Germans also have only limited capacities and cannot promise more than they can actually give. This constitutes another repudiation of any claims about Germany’s past debt. In this formulation, Germany cannot be bound to its past through any kind of debt, and its current actions must be decided entirely on the basis of the present and possible future. In sum, the texts falling into this third thematic area describe a mental/spiritual civil war in Germany, the lack of any space for open debate, and argue that where other countries have a ‘healthy’, loose patriotism, in Germany we find only right or wrong, good or bad. However, we only find one side of this mental civil war in the media and no material that actually thematises, imposes or evokes this debt stemming from the past as a kind of a discourse. Hence, the texts we sourced are in response to an atmosphere in the German public, to a kind of underlying, unconscious and unspoken conviction among Germans that it is their debt to help due to past crimes committed. These texts may then be reacting to something that is silenced, that people can (still) not talk about or express loudly, in a context where there is no open dialogue being carried on in the media, but rather a dialogue between media and floating, unprinted public opinion. This observation finds anecdotal verification in the literature that now exists around Kriegskinder (‘war children’) and Kriegsenkel (‘war grandchildren’), where a number of people from the second and third generations after the war report about their relationship with their parents and grandparents, about emotional detachment and silence around the hardships and experiences during the Second World War.32 In summary, German media texts display moves to dissociate the present from the past. First, and in relation to the first theme, Germans’ experiences of displacement were rarely evoked as a means of pointing out present duty, but rather as a motivation to work together in the integration of refugees, as ‘we have done it before’. Further, especially in theme three in relation to guilt stemming from Nazi crimes, the discourse seems to try and move ‘German debt’ to a ‘European debt’ 75

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s­temming from the colonial past and from present-day neoliberal practices, and from an individual/national to a cosmopolitan position. Hence, there is no more debt for Germany alone and Germany is responsible as part of a larger European or Western world system. We can then put forward the proposition that in Germany, even if similarities are evoked, the debt is forgiven or cancelled, as it is either not being thematised in relation to Sudeten Germans and German reunification, or seen as already paid in relation to the Second World War. For the German public discourse, it seems that it is time to lay ghosts to rest and that Germans can stop feeling haunted by the past. But in doing so, while Germany emerges as equal and autonomous in relation to other European polities, there is no possibility of entering into a relationship with refugees on this basis. Rather, the issue of refugees becomes less a matter of a social relationship and more a logistical question of management emerging out of Germany’s legal obligations. This is what might ultimately explain the focus on the deserving of refugees and the emphasis on numbers. The disavowal of the debt liberates Germany from past debts, but in so doing introduces a rupture in the continuity between past, present and future. For the refugee issue, this rupture means that a new kind of relationship needs to be established, the terms of which are still under negotiation, but as previous research indicates,33 they are likely to revolve around moral deserving and clear displays of gratitude.

Conclusions This chapter has sought to identify and make clear the ways in which past debt enters into and possibly affects the present relationship between Europe and people seeking refuge. We have focused on debt because it allows us to think of relationships within a temporal horizon that includes the past, present and future. At the same time, it allows us to think of the debt in terms of its moral and social dimensions rather than merely the economic ones. In our empirical investigation we have found that, in Greece, the issue of refugees is understood through the prism of debt to unnamed past generations, and through these to humanity in general, to specific past generations of Greek refugees, and specifically to Syrian people who offered asylum to Greek refugees during the Second World War. In the Greek case study, the past debt cannot ever be repaid as such but must be rolled over to future generations. The temporal horizon 76

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within which it unfolds enables social reproduction in the form of the maintenance of social bonds, both among generations of Greeks and between Greeks and present-day refugees coming from Syria and beyond. In Germany, the movement is one in which the debt to the past is implied but not clearly articulated and the public/media discourse is oriented towards repudiating or denying that this debt remains unpaid. Germany’s concern is to liberate itself from the shackles of past debt and establish a relationship with refugees on a different basis. However, this introduces a rupture in the continuity between past, present and future, whose immediate effect on the refugee issue is to take it out of the realm of social relationships and social bonds and into the realm of management and logistics. In cutting off present-day refugees from those in the past, either Sudeten Germans or those that Germany’s Nazi past produced, any relationship needs to be created anew, without the benefit of historical continuity. While for Germany this may involve a liberating effect, for refugees the only role available is that of a debtor with no clear end to their debt. In this manner, our analysis points to the ways in which debts can be productive of social relations, and argues that there are instances where accepting debts binds society closely together.

Notes   1. European Commission, ‘The European Agenda on Migration: EU Needs to Sustain Progress Made over the Past 4 Years’, press release, 6 March 2019. Available at (last accessed 3 March 2020).   2. See also B. Frelick, I. M. Kysel and J. Podkul, ‘The Impact of Externalization of Migration Controls on the Rights of Asylum Seekers and Other Migrants’, Journal on Migration and Human Security, 4(4), 2016, pp. 190–220.   3. L. Ridley, ‘Angela Merkel’s Immigration Quotes Show Germany’s Response to Refugees Is Wildly Different to Britain’s’, Huffington Post, 1 September 2015. Available at (last accessed 3 March 2020).   4. ‘Credit is the economic judgment of the morality of a man’, according to Marx. K. Marx, Marx: Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 264.  5. M. Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, [1950] 2002).   6. S. M. Holmes and H. Castañeda, ‘Representing the “European Refugee Crisis” in Germany and Beyond: Deservingness and Difference, Life and Death’, American Ethnologist, 43(1), 2016, pp. 12–24.

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Eugenia Siapera and Maria Rieder   7. Shamima Begum, who left school to join ISIS when she was 15, had her citizenship revoked by the British state, which argued that she would not be stateless on the basis that her mother had Bangladeshi citizenship which Shamima could claim. Another example here is Nicolas Sarkozy’s comment on the 2005 riots in France that those responsible ‘would be sent back’, even though they had lived in France for generations.   8. N. Karagiannis and P. Wagner, ‘The Subject-in-Debt: Notes Towards a Sociology and Philosophy of Indebtedness’, unpublished manuscript, 2018. Available at (last accessed 3 March 2020). See also Karagiannis and Wagner in this volume.  9. G. Agamben, The Coming Community, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 43; R. Dienst, The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good (London: Verso Books, 2017). It is worth noting here that Agamben finds in this potentiality the basis of ethics. This is because human life exists as potentiality rather than as the fulfilment of a biological or metaphysical destiny. The movement towards this potential is what makes ethics possible­– ­in contrast to morality, which is seen as compensation for a blameworthy act committed in the past. 10. Dienst, Bonds of Debt, p. 157. 11. Karagiannis and Wagner, ‘Subject-in-Debt’. 12. Dienst, Bonds of Debt. 13. Ibid., p. 157. 14. Karagiannis and Wagner, ‘Subject-in-Debt’. 15. Holmes and Castañeda, ‘Representing the “European Refugee Crisis” ’. 16. S. Fotopoulos and M. Kaimaklioti, ‘Media Discourse on the Refugee Crisis: On What Have the Greek, German and British Press Focused?’, European View, 15(2), 2016, pp. 265–79; L. Chouliaraki and M. Georgiou, ‘Hospitability: The Communicative Architecture of Humanitarian Securitization at Europe’s Borders’, Journal of Communication, 67(2), 2017, pp. 159–80. 17. M. Georgiou and R. Zaborowski, Media Coverage of the ‘Refugee Crisis’: A CrossEuropean Perspective (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2017). 18. Holmes and Castañeda, ‘Representing the “European Refugee Crisis” ’; cf. S. Lehr, ‘Germany as Host: Examining Ongoing Anti‐Immigration Discourse and Policy in a Country with a High Level of Non‐National Residents’, Refugee Review: Reconceptualizing Refugees and Forced Migration in the 21st Century, 2(1), 2015, pp. 113–31. 19. Fotopoulos and Kaimaklioti, ‘Media Discourse’, p. 272. 20. Chouliaraki and Georgiou, ‘Hospitability’. 21. Georgiou and Zaborowski, Media Coverage. 22. Chouliaraki and Georgiou, ‘Hospitability’, p. 175. 23. For example, T. A. Van Dijk, ‘Semantics of a Press Panic: The Tamil Invasion’, European Journal of Communication, 3(2), 1988, pp. 167–87. 24. Meleager’s poem reads: ‘Island Tyre was my nurse, and Gadara, which is Attic

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Europe’s Debt to Refugees [in culture], but lies in Syria, gave birth to me. From Eucrates I sprung, Meleager, who first by the help of the Muses ran abreast of the Graces of Menippus. If I am a Syrian, what wonder? Stranger, we dwell in one country, the world; one Chaos gave birth to all mortals’ [7.417]; quoted in W. R. Paton, Greek Anthology (London: William Heinemann, 1917), p. 225. 25. Y. Behrakis and G. Georgiopoulos, ‘Greece Seeks to Stem Migrant Flow as Thousands Trapped by Border Limits’, Reuters, February 2016. Available at (last accessed 3 March 2020). 26. Pontos News, ‘Sygklonistikos o prosfygas pou eftase sti Lesvo’, 27 June 2016. Available at (last accessed 3 March 2020). 27. PAOK Mytilene official announcement, 2018. Available at (English original) (last accessed 3 March 2020). 28. To Nisi, 2019. Available at (Greek original) (last accessed 3 March 2020). 29. The original Facebook post was published on 20 December 2015 and is found here:

(last accessed 3 March 2020). It was subsequently reported in the Greek-American blog Pappas Post in January 2016. Available at (last accessed 3 March 2020). 30. N. Bratsos, ‘Prosfyges kai metanastes: na thymithoume kai tin anapodi diadromi’ [Refugees and Immigrants: Let’s Remember the Reverse Route], ERT Online, 22 July 2015. Available at (last accessed 3 March 2020). 31. ERT, ‘I prosfygia tou B’ Pagkosmiou Polemou odigos allilengiis sto simera’ [The Refugee Experience of the Second World War Guide to Solidarity of Today], 11 January 2017. Available at (last accessed 3 March 2020). 32. S. Bode, Die vergessene Generation: Die Kriegskinder brechen ihr Schweigen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004); S. Bode, Kriegsenkel: Die Erben der vergessenen Generation (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2009); H. Welzer and S. Moller, ‘Opa war kein Nazi’: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2015). 33. Holmes and Castañeda, ‘Representing the “European Refugee Crisis” ’.

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5 Causes, Critique and Blame: A Political Discourse Analysis of the Crisis and Blame Discourse of German and Greek Intellectuals Aristotelis Agridopoulos

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ublic discourses of crisis are always intertwined with aspects of causal investigation, critique of responsible actors and moral accusations. At their core lies the fundamental question: who is responsible for a crisis? Which subjects (for example, people, groups, elites) or structures (for example, markets, economy, society, culture) are to blame? Hegemonic struggles for answers begin. If we look towards Europe and the so-called eurozone crisis that emerged after 2008, we can identify several divergent interpretations of the crisis and as many proposals to resolve it in the public discourses of various actors (for example, media, governments, politicians, experts, civil society and social movements). These discourses have triggered a debate about debt, guilt and responsibility in many societies. Particularly in two very different EU states, Germany and Greece, multiple polarised debates have occurred over responsibility for the debt crisis. Both were severely affected by the crisis: Greece was facing national bankruptcy, the German economy experienced the largest contraction of its GDP in the post-war period in 2009, the eurozone threatened to collapse, and German banks made claims on Greek debt, thus triggering the German government’s crisis policy. In both countries, governments and above all the media very quickly established the discursive framework of a collective guilt of all Greeks from 2010 onwards.1 This strategy was used to justify austerity measures, ‘a process of creating and sustaining shame and guilt and thus legitimising punishment (in the form of radical impoverishment, sky-rocketing unemployment, liquidation of labour and other social rights)’.2 Thereupon, reflections and diagnoses on debates of crisis and guilt were offered by some German and many more Greek public intellectuals, ranging from internal and external subject constructions, guilt accusations, self-blame and culturalist constructions to a broad critique of finance capitalism, the eurozone and its 80

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power elites. After reviewing a wider range of these intellectual analyses,3 two discourses appear to stand out: the culturalist-identitarian and the politico-economic ones. The first accuses entire national collectives of causing the crisis by pathologising their cultural characteristics and their ‘way of life’­– ­in our case, ‘the Greeks’; the second sees the causes of crisis in the political and economic structures of the eurozone and in the decisions of the EU’s political elites. It is very interesting to note that there were no intellectuals in Germany who explicitly supported the culturalist-identitarian discourse. As other studies have shown, the German government, political parties and above all large parts of the German media have taken up this ‘cultural blaming’ role in German public discourse.4 I selected two intellectuals representative of each of the two discourses in order to carve out their discursive constructions of blame in a detailed analysis. I chose the philosopher Stelios Ramfos and the author Nikos Dimou as representative of the culturalist-identitarian discourse, and the economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck and the economist Yanis Varoufakis as representative of the politico-economic one. In this chapter I limit myself to one or two texts by each thinker, in order to reconstruct the respective crisis and blame discourse and its hegemonic implications. The goal of my hegemony analysis is, as Nonhoff puts it, to bring the ‘discursive relations of a text’ into a systematic order, which I will then display in my crisis and blame discourse schemas.5

Political discourse analysis as hegemony analysis This article makes use of the Essex School approach to discourse and hegemony analysis first developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and further advanced by Laclau himself and their followers.6 My aim is to reconstruct a specific type of discourse I will call crisis and blame discourse, as exemplified by writings from a selection of intellectual and public figures from Germany and Greece. What hegemonic strategy do these intellectuals pursue in their blame discourses? Drawing on Martin Nonhoff’s more advanced approach to hegemony analysis, I want to investigate the antagonistic dimensions of these intellectuals’ crisis and blame discourses and to reconstruct their specific discursive relations and hegemonic articulations (contrarieties, antagonistic frontiers, nodal points and empty signifiers).7 Nonhoff notes that three dimensions of any discourse always have to be taken 81

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into account: ‘[T]he multiplicity of individual articulations, the process of arranging these articulations [and] the (always preliminary) result of a structure of discursive elements.’8 Hence the discourse process and structure are always in flux. Starting from Laclau and Mouffe’s work, Nonhoff specifies further types of discursive relations between elements.9 Nonhoff’s great merit is the invention of the concept of contrariety, understood as mini-antagonism, which will play a crucial role for the analysis that follows. As Nonhoff puts it, we can identify a contrariety on the following basis: ‘what two equivalents share is that they both share the same relationship to elements of lack, which in turn can be articulated as equivalents’.10 As a result, the empty signifier is the constructed, over-determined moment as nodal point that is contrary to all moments of the antagonistic chain. My objective is to map these different articulations of blame factors through identifying discursive relations in schemas of antagonistic chains of equivalence. Doing so entails considering the hegemonic demands of their articulations as well. These intellectual diagnoses have huge, hegemonic structural implications for an alternative and ‘better’-instituted social order. First, they identify deficiencies of the European or Greek crisis; second, they propose solutions to overcome these elements of the absent fullness and thus advance demands based on their notions of what this fullness ought to look like. This becomes obvious when we reconstruct their demands as solutions for overcoming the crisis conditions or, in other words, the lack of the universal from the angle of each intellectual. With Nonhoff’s further differentiation between three types of demands­– ­cumulative, subsuming and encompassing­– i­ t is possible to categorise these intellectual demands in a more specific way.11 Only through hegemonic articulations consisting of subsuming and encompassing demands can hegemonic formations, projects and actually established hegemony emerge. But it is important to restate that ‘even an encompassing demand will always remain a particular demand’,12 and that it must establish itself within the discursive relations of hegemonic practices as a universal demand that tries to represent the universal in order to become hegemonic within a society or elsewhere. Particularly noteworthy is that direct relations of representations, equivalences and contrarieties are not often found explicitly in texts, according to Nonhoff.13 It is therefore crucial to identify the indirect relations in the textual corpus.14 82

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The concept of the intellectual: Antonio Gramsci with Laclau Intellectuals play a key role in the expansion of cultural and social hegemony and represent an important figure throughout Gramsci’s work. Starting from his famous thesis that all people are intellectuals, he nevertheless makes a crucial categorical distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals: ‘All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say; but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals. [. . .] Thus there are historically formed specialized categories for the exercise of the intellectual function.’15 Among traditional intellectuals, Gramsci counts priests, doctors, teachers and judges, who are confronted by new organic intellectuals of the bourgeois class or new social groups, such as, technicians, engineers or scientists, who emerge through the development of capitalism. However, the new forms of intellectuals try to win over the traditional intellectuals into defending their interests or, as Gramsci himself puts it, to ‘assimilate’ them.16 Thus, organic intellectuals have a special role to play in building consensus within the various spheres (superstructures) of civil society if they want to support the current ruling formation and thus form part of the hegemonic bloc, which is what most of them usually do. As Gramsci puts it: The relationship between the intellectuals and the world of production is not as direct as it is with the fundamental social groups but is, in varying degrees, ‘mediated’ by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of superstructures, of which the intellectuals are, precisely, the ‘functionaries’. [. . .] The intellectuals are the dominant group’s ‘deputies’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government.17 Laclau and Mouffe have not developed a concept of intellectuals in their post-Marxist theory. There are only very few places where Laclau talks about the role of intellectuals.18 In Gramsci’s wide conception of the intellectual Laclau recognises a reading that attempts to overcome Marxist economism and teleology, which therefore suits his post-­ foundational approach: This widened conception of the intellectual­– w ­ hich [. . .] now comprised people such as union organizers, technicians, journalists and others, to whom we could easily add today other groups like social 83

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workers, film-makers, consciousness raising groups, etc.­– ­Gramsci called ‘organic intellectuals’. It is this widened notion of the intellectual role in the construction of hegemony that I had in mind when I wrote about a contingent universality which requires political mediation and relations of representation.19 Laclau appreciates Gramsci’s expanded account of the intellectual and identifies in it the recognition of the contingency of every social subject position and identity within the hegemonic fabric. With regard to the examples given, Laclau points out, in the spirit of Gramsci, that many subject positions perform intellectual functions in society nowadays. The function of the intellectual is that of one who collaborates in the production of hegemony and constructs it by acting as mediator and representative of a hegemonic project within the discursive fields of a given society.20 Elsewhere, Laclau makes the following crucial statement: ‘The function of the intellectual­– ­or rather, the intellectual function, since the latter does not concentrate on a caste­– ­consists in the invention of languages.’21 This central thesis of Laclau is of enormous relevance for the discourse theory of the Essex School and for my subsequent hegemony analysis of intellectuals as well. If we combine these perspectives with Nonhoff’s discourse-analytical insights in regard to hegemonic projects, it is possible to summarise them in the following terms: intellectuals participate in and (re)produce hegemonic articulations connected with different types of demands in regard to an absent fullness within a particular hegemonic formation.22 When they finally adopt a position, they practise hegemonic operations and argue for how society should be from the angle of their particular interests, which are always conveyed as universal ideals in order to obtain general consent from the people. Intellectuals can therefore generally be regarded as privileged representatives of a particular political, cultural or economic hegemonic project.

The discourse of Stelios Ramfos: the timeless Greek condition Stelios Ramfos (born 1939) is a Greek philosopher who became a very well-known public intellectual in Greece through dozens of interviews on TV and radio shows and in newspapers and magazines after 2009. His books and essays became bestsellers and were published in many editions. 84

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Ramfos studied law in Athens and philosophy in Paris (Sorbonne), where he completed his doctoral thesis on Plato’s metaphysics in 1968. Afterwards, he obtained a teaching position in philosophy at the newly founded University of Paris VIII. In 1974 he returned to Greece and remained outside of academia, preferring to be an independent scholar, writing books and lecturing at various private institutes in Athens. Ramfos’s main philosophical interest and the common theme of all his works can be described as the ‘hermeneutics of Hellenism’.23 For the analysis that follows I chose Ramfos’s popular essay Time Out: The Greek Sense of Time, which is based on a public lecture delivered at Megaro Moussikis in Athens on 16 February 2012.24 The text contains many of the arguments and anthropological attributions that guide Ramfos in his diagnosis of the Greek condition, as well as the blame factors that have caused the crisis and his proposals for overcoming ‘Greek’ deficiencies. Ramfos states his intention at the outset of his essay: he intends ‘to attain a more systematic understanding of Modern Greek culture in the symbolic light of its time in order to illuminate better some components of difficulties of our productive coexistence with the contemporary European and global cultural environment’25 (p. 7) and poses the following central question: ‘What mentalities, perceptions, and behaviours are we dealing with in order to demonstrate the logic characteristic of the Greek sense of time?’ (p. 17). Ramfos’s overall thesis is that Greece itself, and thus each subject, is to blame for the crisis. He portrays the Greek population as standing in the midst of a huge spiritual crisis, which ‘is a cultural one first and a public financial one second’ (p. 12) and which has been going on for a long time: more precisely, since the foundation of the modern Greek state. According to him, the key to the solution lies in the hands of all Greeks themselves: What this means is that the cause of this challenge is predominantly our choices and actions. [. . .] [N]ow we must defeat the bad self within us with the wisdom of pain. We must finally acknowledge this and tame it so that we can get out of the historical impasse in which it has imprisoned us for at least two centuries. (p. 11) His entire reasoning functions through his specific philosophical concept of time and is associated with a harsh critique of emotions conditioning the supposedly backward ‘Greek way of life’. But what does Ramfos actually mean by time? This element also remains vague and 85

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general, which would indicate that it represents something else. In one place he tries to approach his notion explicitly: Non-belief [in yourself] [. . .] wants the subordination of time so that it reigns within us like a destiny. This timelessness of destiny annuls the logic of the attempt and any responsibility, that responsibility which is linked to the acceptance of time. (p. 15) This argument contains the lacking universal of Ramfos’s discourse, the timeless, unmoving present of all Greeks, who ‘avoid the time of responsibility’ (p. 41) and ‘instead of giving it [time] direction and form’ ‘kill it’ (p. 42). Ramfos tries to locate the Greek roots of being beyond the time in the Greek family and in the church, when he remarks that ‘only in the house and in the parish does time repeat itself constantly. The opposite applies in public space’ (p. 17f.). The Greeks are not interested in public space and the common good, according to Ramfos, and so they linger in stagnant time. Ramfos assembles many elements in his text to illustrate this Greek stagnation; for instance, ‘inertia’, ‘inaction’, ‘inactiveness’, ‘indifference’, ‘confinement’, ‘timelessness of destiny’, ‘sclerotic time’, ‘structural anachronism’, ‘unmoved time’, ‘absence and fear of the future’, ‘static present’ and ‘delay and slowness’. Hence, an ‘absence of the future’ (p. 24) lives in the Greek imaginary because ‘deep down, change frightens us as a commitment to time. Fear is a fear of the future’ (p. 40). Irrationality and emotions are therefore the major deficiencies to blame for Greek backwardness, according to Ramfos: All this pushes us to stick to our given perceptions, with the result that emotion is painfully seized by the present. This blocks the activation of citizens and the exit of society into the time of historicity that is looking into the future. With the unmoved time and the ready-made solutions in the present past, a structural anachronism emerges. (p. 23f.) According to Ramfos, responsibility for these Greek shortcomings falls on the closed self, family and society, the generalised mistrust in the society as a crisis of confidence, indifference to the common good, the other and the public sphere, the belief in the religious and mythological, and many other traits of the Greek self that he calls ‘emotions without future’ (p. 45). Ramfos’s hostility to emotions in general becomes 86

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clearer when we better understand the link he postulates between traditional existence and his concept of time. He writes: ‘when things get entangled with emotions, it makes us sick’ (p. 24). ‘The insistence on the timeless present arouses emotions. Time loses its purpose, which keeps it alive, and this separation causes an atrophy of thinking and a strengthening of emotion’ (p. 45). Consequently, he recommends we ‘achieve an active distance from our emotions’ (p. 24f.) in order to find a way to the future and to self-activity. The counter-image to the Greek is formulated by Ramfos only once: ‘In contrast to the Greek, the average European­– ­more precisely of the north­– d ­ oes not buy a house but mainly rents it, thus integrating his space into time’ (p. 21). And thus the Greek family has to change in order to become ‘European’: ‘The Greek problem we have been experiencing since the foundation of the state will find a solution if the closed Greek family opens itself to society and public space’ (p. 21).26 All these discursive relations of equivalentially linked blame factors culminate in Ramfos’s concept of the ‘non-European’ and thus ‘oriental’ Greek. The Greek mentality of ‘bribery of authorities and intermediaries’ represents ‘a pure oriental practice’ (p. 13). In another passage Ramfos tries to show that the movies of the popular Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos are an example of a ‘combination of the timeless oriental and postmodern gaze’ (p. 31). And the climax of Ramfos’s orientalism is the construction of equivalences between social figures that represent ‘oriental time’: ‘The “unmoving presence” of our spiritual culture, with its meaningful content and symbolic influence, provides mentalities and contributes to behaviours that lead us to be paradise hunters, coffee house visitors and slow rhythmists to sluggish people, like all Orientals’ (p. 38). Ramfos describes the Greek existence as a traditional and oriental one, which constitutes the anti-type of the (Northern) European and thus of ‘modern existence’. It is remarkable that he formulates this dichotomy explicitly only in very few places. He plays at greater length with the figures of his understanding of time and the pathologies of the Greek identity caused by emotions. The Greeks are trapped in a timeless present, an inactive prison of the past without historicity. For in contrast to the Greeks, Northern Europeans supposedly live with an open and rational mind in the moving present and work actively and with self-confidence towards the future: ‘Instead of freeing us for activity, the closed future causes us stress because it exerts pressure to act decisively, and thus emotion blocks our potentials’ (p. 41). 87

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The only way to get out of this impasse lies, for Ramfos, in a radical transformation of the closed Greek self in the direction of ‘activity’, the ‘future’, the ‘rational self’ and ‘Europe’: ‘An antidote for him [the anxious Greek subject] would be a differentiated analysis of time with a sense of life vindicating practice. A feeling of existential unity that opens time and opens itself in time’ (p. 50f.). But what exactly does Ramfos mean by opening up and accepting time? The answer can be found in his last major work, where he gives this a name. He ultimately hopes for a Greek ‘reconciliation with modernity’ or ‘modern temporality’.27 In this connection he writes: ‘The sense of responsibility will make him [the Greek subject] understand the urgency of the exit from the closed self and not from the European Union’ (p. 54). And through such articulations, it once again becomes clear that the EU and ‘Europe’ are for Ramfos the prototype of the rational and modern condition. To sum up, we can identify the central constructed antagonism or antagonistic divide in terms of the concepts of time in Ramfos’s discourse. On the ‘negative’ side of the chain of equivalence, the empty signifier of timelessness or traditional oriental existence condenses in itself the lack, equivalentially linking all blame factors as causes of the Greek condition of crisis. On the ‘positive’ side of the chain of equivalence, the empty signifier of opening or unity of time as modernity represents the absent, unredeemed fullness of the Greek condition, and thus all the articulated moments of proposed solutions are represented through it. We can describe this missing fullness in Ramfos’s work as an encompassing demand, and thus as a hegemonic articulation. The articulated moment of emotions follows the main source of blame­– ­timelessness­– ­as the second major nodal point. This in turn is followed by articulated moments of the religious and mythological, marked by faith in destiny and eternity and thus denying ‘open time’ and four of its nodal points that are recurrently invoked in Ramfos’s work: ‘reality’, ‘future’, ‘confidence’ and ‘giving time direction’. Just as many contrarieties can be found in Ramfos’s ‘closed entities’ as one nodal point: the ‘closed self, family, church, society, land’. The remaining moments are also condensed signifiers, thus nodal points, and contrary to one or more opposite nodal points. Every one of these singular demands can be categorised as a subsuming demand, because they all represent partial realisations of the universal ideal by overcoming the contrary singular deficiencies on the other side of the chain. We can speak of a closed discourse of collective self-blaming stabilised by two empty 88

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signifiers (universal and anti-universal) on both sides of the chain (see Schema 5.1), placing the entire blame on all Greeks who are living ‘behind the times’, trapped in a prison of the past and not in the right time of modernity.

The discourse of Nikos Dimou: collective self-blaming, again (and a little complicity of the ‘rational ones’) Nikos Dimou (born 1935) is a Greek writer and journalist. In 1975 he published his most popular book, On the Unhappiness of Being Greek, a collection of satiric aphorisms on the Greek mentality. With this publication, which was translated into several languages, Dimou reached an international audience, albeit belatedly. In Germany, the book was first published in 2012, thrity-seven years after its Greek publication. In 2014 another German-language book followed, which had never been published in Greek, with the title The Greeks Germans Are to Blame for Everything. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland both books were met with great interest and became widely discussed bestsellers.28 Ι will focus my attention only on this second ‘German’ book, which contains twelve fictitious dialogues with colleagues from other countries.29 With these dialogue partners, or rather, in conversation with himself, Dimou tries to discover the causes of the Greek crisis. The first three dialogues and the foreword were written exclusively for the German edition in the summer of 2013. I will limit myself to these, as well as to the German epilogue to the volume of aphorisms from 2012. Dimou’s overarching argument is that, due to many historical events, Greece represents a deeply fragmented subject having a ‘tragic destiny’, ‘divided between past and present, north and south, east and west’.30 As early as in his foreword, Dimou articulates a demand for gratitude which all Greeks ought to feel towards the Germans: ‘We Greeks owe a lot to the Germans. [. . .] But the most important thing we owe to the Germans is our identity, at least a part of it’ (p. 7).31 It is interesting above all that Dimou also addresses in this German ‘invention’ of ‘ancient Greeks’ a lack (p. 10), and thus implies an accusation of complicity against the ‘German’ Philhellenes. Dimou mentions only the German Philhellenes like Winckelmann, Herder, Goethe and Hölderlin, who had invented a ‘projection of an “ideal Greece” ’ which, according to him, contributed to a ‘false image of the new [modern] Greeks’ (p. 21). They demanded that the Greeks should become ‘successors of the ancients’ and ‘modern Europeans at the same time’ (p. 21). 89

90

‘confidence’ ‘belief as trust in us’

‘giving ‘reality’ time ‘experience’ direction and form’ ‘order’

‘opening/unity of time’ [modernity]

‘timeless (oriental, traditional) existence’ ‘unmoved time’ of the Greeks

Schema 5.1  The crisis and blame discourse of Stelios Ramfos

CE 2

‘new political rationality’ ‘legal order’

‘chaos’ ‘emotions’

‘activation of citizens’

‘delay’ ‘inaction’ ‘inertia’ ‘inactivity’

‘closed self, family, church, society, land’

‘opening to ‘future’ ‘potentials’ ourselves, ‘belief in society, the ‘praxis/action’ public, to possibility ‘creativity’ the other’ [of actively ‘self-activation’ altering the future]’ ‘active participation in the world of practices’

‘absence/ fear of the future’

equivalence contrariety antagonistic frontier (as effects of articulations of equivalences and contrarieties) chain of equivalence: articulated blame factors as causes of crisis (negative side) chain of equivalence: articulated demands as proposed solutions to overcome the crisis (positive side)

‘generalised ‘destiny’ corruption’ ‘religious and ‘guilty ‘irresponsibility’ mythological’ political ‘eternity’ system’

‘common good/ interest’ ‘public space’

‘crisis of confidence’

‘mistrust’

‘disinterest in common good’

CE 1

CE 1 CE 2

Key:

Schema 1 The crisis and blame discourse of Stelios Ramfos

‘selfresponsibility’ ‘selfconfidence’

‘lack of selfconfidence’

Causes, Critique and Blame

For Dimou, there lies herein a deep-seated problem and ambivalence at the heart of modern Greek identity: We still have identity problems. Our relationship to antiquity is ambivalent (pride and feelings of inferiority at the same time) and that to the West at least problematic. [. . .] The German scholars have placed a great burden on our shoulders, which we, like the old Atlas, must always carry with us. (p. 11) In the first dialogue, named ‘the big conspiracy’, Dimou is asked what the Germans had to do with the Greek financial crisis. Dimou sees two old and dominant traditions in Greece, one anti-Western and one conspiracy-theoretical. The first is strongly linked to the Greek Orthodox church, which considers ‘the West as the source of evil’. The second, according to Dimou, is a ‘tendency of many small states to blame the great powers for all their problems’ (p. 14f.). ‘Anti-Americanism’ prevailed for a long time in Greece and has morphed into ‘anti-Germanism’ since the outbreak of the crisis. A lot of Greek people believe that Germany and ‘new powers of order’ had planned a conspiracy against Greece and all of Southern Europe (p. 17). Dimou argues that ‘tradition’ outweighs everything else in Greece. This is its ‘fundamental dilemma’ because, according to him, ‘tradition is stronger than reality’, which gives rise to a ‘fickle Greek people’ (p. 16). Here too it becomes obvious that emotions are, again, interpreted as deficiencies within Greek culture. We can thus also identify a constructed contrariety between a Greek condition as ‘traditional’ and ‘reality’ as its opposite. However, Dimou states that ‘the lender’s cure was worse than the disease’ and so ‘the creditors murdered’ the Greek economy by ‘imposing extreme austerity’ (p. 18). Here Dimou constructs a remarkable second, ‘external’ complicity within his strongly centred focus on exclusively ‘Greek’ faults, which can thus be attributed to the wrong crisis management by the creditors. It is noteworthy, however, that all of Dimou’s other arguments point in a completely different direction, namely, that ‘Greece’s miserable situation is largely the result of these flaws in the national character’.32 Dimou’s interlocutor complains in the second dialogue that he still does not understand ‘what caused the Greek economic crisis’ (p. 20). Dimou opts for a historical-cultural explanation of the crisis and its causes. According to him, Greece is ‘an entity that is outside the European tradition’ and ‘does not actually belong to Europe’ (p. 20)­ 91

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– ­above all because the ‘thousand-year-old Byzantine and Ottoman tradition is neither Western nor Eastern’ (p. 21). Thus, for Dimou, it is a ‘no-man’s-land, a place between geography and culture’ but nevertheless a part of the ‘world of the Balkans’ (p. 21). Dimou discovers a further lack within Greek history in the absence of major historical upheavals akin to the ones in Central and Northern Europe in the early modern period. ‘In Greece there were [. . .] no Renaissance, no Reformation, no Enlightenment. [. . .] No bourgeoisie ever formed, no civil society emerged. We were catapulted from feudalism into modernity’ (p. 22). For him, all these ‘European’ processes that did not take place are the reasons why Greece is as it is today, ‘an anarchic, fragmented society, thrown together from families, clans, interest groups, trade unions, parties’ with ‘no summum bonum’ (p. 22f.). In a subsequent articulation, Dimou reveals a contrariety when he says: ‘A few politicians tried to organise and rationalise this hopeless mess, but failed miserably’ (p. 23). Here one recognises that two nodal points are constructed in contrariety to the equivalent blame objects mentioned above. ‘Organisation’ and ‘rationalisation’ are central demands of Dimou’s positive chain of equivalence, developments which, in his opinion, have still not been realised in Greece. And these two moments condense around the notion of modernisation when he asserts: ‘Well, traditions are hard to break, mentalities only change slowly. It takes generations to modernise a society’ (p. 23). Furthermore, Greece’s entry to the eurozone­– ­regarded by many elites as a step towards modernisation­– ­marks a turning point for Dimou, according to whom ‘Greece was not ready for a hard currency like the euro. That [. . .] was already the death blow’ (p. 26). He contends that ‘the main responsibility lies with our politicians, who supported and cultivated this development’ of indebtedness within the eurozone (p. 23). Then Dimou returns again to the issue of complicity and accuses Germany, the EU, the lenders and financial experts of being jointly responsible for the crisis. This passage is of particular interest for the analysis. The ‘rational ones’ of the EU, Germany or the World Bank probably made irrational mistakes. According to Dimou, they in particular should have seen that something was going wrong in Greece. But then he writes that loans were still being granted to the Greek state. Thus, he ascribes a share in the blame to ‘non-Greek’ ideal actors and institutions of rational modernity within his discourse, which in the following will be decisive for the formation of equivalential chains: 92

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The Germans and the lenders are complicit because they did not recognise the problem in time. EU and World Bank staff should have been aware of the financial situation in Greece if they had looked at the statistics carefully. [. . .] But the lenders continued to lend us money on very attractive terms. (p. 24f.) In his last dialogue Dimou considers corruption as one of the main causes of the Greek crisis, which he calls a ‘time-honoured tradition’ in Greece (p. 28). ‘Greece’, Dimou writes, ‘is a cemetery of laws that are never applied. [. . .] [N]ot to change or reform anything’ is the easiest response to a crisis (p. 31). Shortly before the end of the dialogue, a position is stated for the fourth time, in which Dimou ascribes complicity to specific German protagonists. The biggest corruption scandals in recent years concerned German corporates. The Siemens scandal [. . .], in which the company made donations to Greek parties and politicians to conduct business, became very famous. First place, however, went to the famous three submarines (EADS, ThyssenKrupp and Rheinmetall) for the Greek Navy. (p. 32f.) It is worth noting, however, that Dimou assigns moral debt only to those who are bribed (p. 33f.). In doing so, he returns to his main line of argument, collective self-blaming, despite occasional accusations levelled at other actors like Germany or the EU. In a further, final articulation, we can clearly identify in Dimou’s main frontier construction the contention that the Greek subject doesn’t know where it belongs, being definitely in a ‘backward’ position and more ‘oriental’ than ‘European’. ‘He [the Greek subject] is divided between his glorious past and his meagre present, between his oriental mentality and his European desire.’33 These discursive and hegemonic arrangements can be better grasped if we take a closer look at the chains of equivalence in Schema 5.2. In summary, the following remarks can be made: the central antagonistic divide in Dimou’s discourse is constructed around different nodal points, whereby most contrarieties refer to the Greek identity and deficits in its ‘character’. All historical events, or rather the failure or lack thereof, are connected by Dimou to this moment of ‘failed identity’. There are, however, other nodal points that also exhibit ­several 93

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contrarieties: the moment of ‘tradition’, situating Greek subjects ‘outside of Europe’, the notion of an ‘unorganised’, non-rationally constituted society and ‘corruption’. Almost all the current problems of Greek society are also always linked to those four moments by Dimou. In contrast, he constructs ‘modernity’ and ‘Europe’­– ­closely related to the elements of ‘modernisation’ and ‘rationalisation’­– a­ s signifiers for his missing universal. But one of the most important points arises when considering why no empty signifier can be found in his discourse. It is worth recalling that an empty signifier must be contrary to all elements on the opposite side and at the same time must be able to represent all partial objects on its own side. What is decisive now is that Dimou, however, in various places, also grants a range of ‘modern’ actors a share of the blame for the Greek crisis developments. The Philhellenes are named, Germany, the lenders, the EU, financial experts at the World Bank, those driving the adoption of false ‘rescue measures’ and corrupt German companies. We can interpret this partial blaming, following Laclau, as the failure of a single signifier to incorporate into itself the constitutive remainder of a hegemonic signifying operation. Unlike Ramfos, Dimou cannot therefore have a self-contained discourse with two empty signifiers (one universal and one anti-universal) facing each other because there are several sources of blame that cannot be bundled together. In other words, the fact that another particular object is made complicit means that it is not possible to empty the major nodal point of the ‘Greek lack of identity’. The remainders block the construction of an entire representative blame factor within the Greek objects, especially because Dimou demands that the Greeks should also be grateful to the Philhellenes and Germans who brought them their identity, freedom and institutions. This object is located on both sides of the chain, and here the contradiction in Dimou’s own discourse is revealed. It has become clear that Dimou wants to keep these external sources of error very small, for he repeatedly articulates that the blame factors that he isolates as causes of the crisis are to be found in the existence and history of Greece. Although Dimou calls this complicity on the part of the ‘Europeans’, he does not make any demands on them, as who must change is and remains the ‘Greeks’. Despite the lack of an empty signifier, Dimou’s discourse is to be interpreted as a hegemonic articulation, with a clearly formulated, encompassing call for Greece finally to become ‘modern’ and thus ‘European’, culminating in Dimou’s demand: ‘The Greeks must reinvent themselves if they are to survive in today’s world.’34 94

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‘common good’

‘reforms’

‘the Greeks must reinvent themselves’

‘modern Europeans’ ‘modernity’

‘no summum ‘Greek identity bonum’ problem’ ‘anarchic, fragmented ‘lacks in national character’ Greek ‘oriental society’ ‘hopelessness’ mentality’

‘modernisation, organisation, rationalisation of society’

‘inflated public sector’ ‘main responsibility’ ‘Greek politicians’

‘tradition of corruption’ ‘clientelism’

Schema 5.2  The crisis and blame discourse of Nikos Dimou

CE 2

‘admittance to the eurozone’ ‘death-blow’ ‘extreme austerity’

‘the biggest corruption scandals with German corporates’

‘joint guilt’

‘reality (and not tradition/ mythos)’

‘world of the Balkans’ ‘outside the European tradition’

‘no Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment’

‘proWestern’ ‘pro-EU’

‘anti-Westernism’ ‘anti-Americanism’ ‘anti-Germanism’

‘the Greeks owe a lot to Germany and to the Philhellenes’

‘conspiracy theories of small countries’

‘two dominant traditions’ ‘the Greek Orthodox church’

equivalence contrariety antagonistic frontier (as effects of articulations of equivalences and contrarieties) chain of equivalence: articulated blame factors as causes of crisis (negative side) chain of equivalence: articulated demands as proposed solutions to overcome the crisis (positive side)

‘Germany, creditors and institutions/EU, World Bank’

‘Philhellenes’

CE 1

CE 1 CE 2

Key:

Schema 2 The crisis and blame discourse of Nikos Dimou

Aristotelis Agridopoulos

The discourse of Wolfgang Streeck: neoliberal capitalism versus democracy Wolfgang Streeck (born 1946) is a German economic sociologist who was Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and Professor of Sociology at the University of Cologne from 1995 to 2014. With his book Buying Time,35 which is based on his 2012 Adorno Lectures at the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, he became a popular voice in the German debate around the fiscal and economic crises in the EU. Streeck’s main thesis is that since the 1970s a ‘neoliberal revolution’ has been taking place in the states of Western Europe, leading to a substantial de-democratisation of national democracies and to redistribution of prosperity ‘from the bottom to the top’ within European societies, above all through the ‘liberalization machine of the EU’ and especially with the introduction of the euro as common currency (see also Bo Stråth’s chapter in this volume).36 His starting point is the contradiction inherent in capitalism between capital and labour, which is reflected above all in the ‘distributional conflict between classes’ or between the ‘“wage-dependent” and the “profit-dependent” ’ (p. xv; emphasis in original). Within many liberal-democratic states, this led to various class compromises. Only if we accept this fundamental fact of capitalist societies and their growth imperative do we also understand that there never was a ‘non-crisis’ time. Thus, according to Streeck, ‘capitalism’ is ‘a sequence of crises’ (p. vii). His pivotal concern, which defines the framework of his book, is the tension-laden relationship between democracy and capitalism as contrary dynamics, which, however, took the form of a successful ‘forced alliance’ especially in the ‘Golden Age’ of the post-war period, with the establishment of the welfare state, strong trade unions and a social democratic form of capitalism in Western European OECD countries. However, this is all a thing of the past, as the capital side in particular has, for various reasons, abandoned this ‘forced marriage’ with democracy. For these reasons, in Streeck’s discourse we can find an antagonistic relation between neoliberal capitalism and democracy, with the latter understood by him as an institution of social justice. The latter forms Streeck’s missing universal, where capitalism could still be restrained by democratic forces. As Streeck puts it, we are now witnessing a ‘splitting of democracy from capitalism through the splitting of the economy from democracy­– a­ process of de-democratization of 96

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capitalism through the de-economization of democracy’ (p. 5; emphasis in original). Accordingly, the global financial crisis of 2008 can only be adequately analysed if historical-economic developments are taken into account. The central objective of Streeck’s analysis is to trace the historical transformations of capitalism and democracy as a ‘transformation of the Keynesian political-economic institutional system of post-war capitalism into a neo-Hayekian economic regime’ (p. 5) in the OECD countries from the beginning of the 1970s to the present day. Streeck himself describes several interconnected crisis processes of neoliberal transformation since that time: I could speak of three processes running in parallel and mutually interlocked [. . .]: the sequence of economic crises of inflation, public debt and private debt (today followed by dramatically expanding balance sheets of central banks, and a corresponding expansion of the money supply); the political-fiscal development from tax state to debt state to consolidation state; and a progressive shifting of the arenas of class conflict ‘upwards’, from labour market to welfare state to capital markets (and from here to the arcane sphere of central banks, financial-diplomatic summit conferences and international organizations). (p. x, n. 7) Therefore, Streeck’s title Buying Time stands as a critique of political crisis resolution strategies that do not represent systemic ‘solutions’, but have always postponed the systemic problems of capitalism to the future and even deepened them; as Streeck himself says, ‘common to these three phases is that each of them ended in a crisis whose solution was at the same time the starting point of a new crisis’ (p. viii). Thus, the neoliberal processes turned the welfare state, which was a tax state, into a debt state and finally into a consolidation state. Nowadays­– t­ hat is, since 2008­– ­Streeck identifies a so-called ‘triple crisis of banking, public finances and economic growth’ (p. 4) leading to an unambiguous present ‘downward spiral: declining growth, increasing inequality and rising overall debt’ (p. xxxiv; emphasis in original). If we turn to the main actors and thus to the ‘initiators’ of these developments, whom Streeck names in his analysis, then they are undoubtedly economic and political elites: In subsequent years [the post-1970 period], the capitalist elites and their political allies looked for ways to extricate themselves from the 97

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obligations that they had had to incur for the sake of social peace and which, broadly speaking, they had been able to meet during the reconstruction phase. (p. 19) Elsewhere, Streeck explains that these processes cannot be traced back to one coherent strategy of the elites. Instead, Streeck tries to describe them as processes of emergence, that is, an interplay of many decisions and processes (p. xvii f.). On the other hand, in a footnote, Streeck claims that the existence of powerful elites cannot be denied, especially those who are profit-dependent, when he speaks of the ‘existence and efficacy of small networks of elites’ (p. xvi, n. 20). The decisive factor is the shift during the last decades of the control over capital from parliaments and trade unions to the level of the so-called ‘arcane sphere of central banks, financial-diplomatic summit conferences and international organizations’ (p. x, n. 7), which means that capitalism has freed itself from instances of resistance or restraint. These new ‘arcane’ places of power, and thus the places where relevant decisions affecting millions of people are made, are no longer legitimate democratic ones. The thrust of Streeck’s critique is clear: governments, parliaments and policies no longer play a decisive and sovereign role in this framework­ – ­and they are themselves responsible for this development (p. 114f.). If we take a closer look at the EU, which Streeck describes as a ‘liberalization machine’, then this supra-national formation is essentially responsible for enforcing the Hayekian regime with the support of the respective national political elites over the last few decades, becoming especially pronounced in the 1980s and 1990s and above all in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. European integration therefore means liberalisation, structural adjustment programmes, making labour markets ‘flexible’, opening domestic markets, deregulation, privatisation and globalisation. A subsequent incisive turning point in this ‘integration’ was the creation of the EMU (European Monetary Union) and through it the introduction of the euro as common currency (p. 106). The result of this is that two ‘peoples’ stand in a relation of contrariety to each other, ‘the Marktvolk (people of the market)’ and ‘the Staatsvolk (the general citizenry of a state)’ (p. 80; emphasis in original). The policies implemented in recent years clearly prove that the only thing that governments have to achieve is ‘to regain the “confidence” of “the markets” ’ and so satisfy the Marktvolk, that is, the profit-­dependent (p. 9). In another formulation, Streeck acknowledges that European soci98

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eties have ‘different economic cultures’ and that they are also diverse in terms of economic production structures, so that the euro represents a case of ‘“ one size fits all” hubris’ (p. 185): ‘Just as a single economic way of life cannot impose itself without violence on different social practices, so different economic cultures cannot be forced into a common political order’ (p. 178). The euro has deepened the division between surplus and deficit countries and has thus created huge ‘new dividing lines’ within the EU (p. xlviii). Streeck clearly argues that the euro, as a hard currency with a stable exchange rate, is not suitable for many countries, notably the Southern ones, that previously had a soft currency. The central issue here is the elimination of the internal devaluation mechanism as a result of the introduction of the euro. This also means a loss of sovereignty and an immense strengthening of the European Central Bank (ECB). On the other hand, the markets have lent these states loans at the same interest rates, supported by the EU, through previous deregulation, privatisation and tax cuts for companies, just as states are supposed to refinance themselves through the capital markets and pay off their debts (p. 128).37 Streeck explains the consequences of the euro, using Greece as an example: Greece [. . .] may serve as an ideal-typical example of the privatisation of the EU’s international welfare state. In the mid-1990s, after it became known that the West European countries intended to include Greece in the EMU, the interest rate that it had to pay on its debts fell within five years from 17 per cent to just under 6 per cent. [. . .] Today, the only thing that Greece has definitely acquired from EMU membership is a public debt higher than where it stood in 1995 by nearly 60 per cent of its annual economic output. (p. 128ff.) Streeck’s demands for overcoming neoliberalism are clearly formulated: he pleads for the dismantling or abolition of the euro, the regaining of national sovereignty by means of national currencies, and the control of markets by society, and he calls for resistance by citizens to those policies of their governments, the EU and the ‘international financial diplomacy’ that have precipitated the present crisis (pp. 90, 188ff.). Streeck himself hopes such resistance can effect a return of social-democratic capitalism, or else ‘the completion of a Hayekian social dictatorship’ awaits us (p. 172). A first important step for Streeck would be to reverse the ‘political mistake’ of the euro by r­ eintroducing 99

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national currencies, with the acceptance of the heterogeneous economic spaces within Europe.38 He argues for a European Bretton Woods, a Keynesian-inspired idea of an anchor currency, allowing individual currencies to be pegged to the euro (p. 187). Streeck’s ­political-economic analysis assumes that democracy can only function in the framework of the state: he proposes ‘a strategic response to a systemic crisis, which points beyond the crisis it undertakes to solve by showing that, in the world as it is, democracy cannot be had without state sovereignty’ (p. 188). Today democratization should mean building institutions through which markets can be brought back under the control of society: labour markets that leave scope for social life, product markets that do not destroy nature, credit markets that do not mass-produce unsustainable promises. (p. 174) Streeck’s understanding of the re-democratisation of European societies and its purpose becomes very clear in this quote. Above all, he hopes that the people of Europe will resist these policies of impoverishment and de-democratisation, with ‘the hoped-for resistance of “the street” to market-technocratic eurofanaticism and [. . .] the consolidation state’, and for ‘new capacities for political action, in the struggle against the anti-democratic neoliberal project’.39 To sum up, in Streeck’s discourses we can detect two empty ­signifiers that represent the particular equivalent chains (see Schema 5.3). On the one side of the chain are all deficit objects bounded by the lacking universal of neoliberal capitalism. On the other side of the chain are all demands as equivalents fixed by the counter-hegemonic universal of democracy. This in turn means that both empty signifiers possess contrariety to all elements of the opposite side. In addition to these, we have other central moments with numerous relations of contrarieties, such as those of the ‘Staatsvolk’ and the ‘Marktvolk’, which in turn are condensed with the moments of international financial diplomacy and parliamentary democracy on the opposite side. Nevertheless, it must be mentioned here that Streeck is aware that capitalism is always an unstable and thus crisis-like entity. His unredeemed democratic universal is thus one that should bring capitalism under control again. Another central nodal point is the euro and the EU as the ‘liberalization machine’ that keeps the Hayekian regime alive. These condensations, which represent barriers to democracy, run counter to the main demands for 100

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democratic control of the markets, democratic parliamentary sovereignty and the dismantling of the euro in favour of national currencies, by which Streeck in turn means sovereignty over the economy through adjustable exchange rates. Streeck’s arguments thus represent a counter-hegemonic discourse that makes all-encompassing demands and advocates a re-democratisation of European societies.

The discourse of Yanis Varoufakis: the denial of European elites and the eurozone’s twin recycling problem Yanis Varoufakis (born 1963) is a Greek economist and Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Athens. From January to July 2015, when he was Finance Minister of Greece of the first SYRIZA-led government, he became a popular figure worldwide. But even before 2015 Varoufakis was publicly known and appeared in Greek and English media as an economic expert on the causes of the financial crisis, as well as with analyses on his blog ‘Thoughts for the post-2008 world’. My central focus will be on an essay that Varoufakis published in 2013 under the title ‘We Are All Greeks Now!’40 Furthermore, I will also partially consider his major work The Global Minotaur,41 and I will briefly consider his technical suggestions for overcoming the crisis, which he has developed over the years with colleagues.42 Varoufakis’s thesis is that the causes of the European debt crisis lie in the failed construction of the eurozone and its great imbalances between surplus and deficit states (p. 50).43 He identifies four present crises within Europe: a banking crisis, a public debt crisis, a crisis of under-investment, and a social crisis.44 Varoufakis traces the central role of the American economy for the world economy after the First World War by demonstrating how the USA had created ‘a glorious mechanism for recycling global surpluses of goods and capital’ that he calls the ‘Global Minotaur’ (p. 46). This means that the USA is a leading importer of exported goods from worldwide surplus countries, that is, the major industrialised countries. Varoufakis explains that Wall Street plays a central role in recycling the surpluses these countries achieved (p. 47). Through financialisation processes in the last four decades, after the end of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s, Wall Street banks have been ‘pumping out private money’ in the USA, Europe and Asia, especially in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2008, this ended with many bubbles bursting, which also had enormous consequences for EU states: ‘Wall Street’s pyramids of private money auto-combusted and turned into 101

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‘euro ‘deregulation, divides privatisation and market expansion’ Europe’

‘globalisation’ ‘financialization’

‘market‘EU technocratic liberalisation euro-fanaticism’ machine’

‘European multi-level governance regime’

‘oligarchy’ ‘technocracy’

‘neoliberal capitalism’

‘corporate global plutocracy’

‘new capacities for political action, in the struggle against the anti-democratic neoliberal project’

‘Staatsvolk (the general citizenry)’

‘Marktvolk (the people of the market)’

‘governance’

‘welfare state’ ‘tax state’ ‘post-war democratic capitalism’

‘consolidation state’

‘multi-level politics’ ‘neutralisation of domestic policies’

‘parliamentary ‘government’ democracy’ ‘state sovereignty’ ‘democratic nation-state’

‘international financial diplomacy’

‘arcane sphere of central banks, financial-diplomatic summit conferences and international organisations’

equivalence contrariety antagonistic frontier (as effects of articulations of equivalences and contrarieties) chain of equivalence: articulated blame factors as causes of crisis (negative side) chain of equivalence: articulated demands as proposed solutions to overcome the crisis (positive side)

‘social ‘national ‘dismantle ‘democratic justice’ currency’ the EMU’ control over ‘democracy’ ‘adjustable “the exchange markets”’ rates’ ‘different ‘the hoped-for economic CE 2 resistance of “the Schema 5.3  The crisiscultures’ and blame discourse of Wolfgang Streeck street”’

CE 1

CE 1 CE 2

Key:

Schema 3 The crisis and blame discourse of Wolfgang Streeck

Causes, Critique and Blame

ashes, Wall Street’s capacity to continue “closing” the global recycling loop vanished’ (p. 48). In other words, a dislocation occurred, that is, a failed closure of the system, resulting in an organic crisis as a collapse of hegemonic reproduction. The eurozone’s malaise and the flaws of its designers have now come to the fore: The basic reason why Europe’s politicians felt comfortable in designing and implementing a common currency area that lacked an internal surplus recycling mechanism was the presumption that America would be looking after global surplus recycling and that this would suffice within the Eurozone too. (p. 48) Then there was another reason: banks, businesses, states and private households in Europe took part in US-driven credit lending and, through the euro in particular, attained access to cheap loans: ‘This influx of private money contaminated continental Europe’s inane banking system, turning Europe’s banks into a cesspool of toxic derivatives’ (p. 48). And the private losses of banks and their partners were socialised into public debts: ‘With the private money gone, the banks became insolvent overnight, and the ever-reliable taxpayers had to replace the departed private money with freshly minted public money’ (p. 49). This is also the key to understanding the Greek case, as it was not until the American crash in 2008 that the overall deficiencies of the eurozone were revealed: The reason why Greece is in free fall, and economic history will mark the present moment as a definitive Greek tragedy, is none other than its membership in the eurozone­– ­a currency union that was never designed to sustain the shockwaves caused by the collapse of global finance, circa 2008. (p. 44; emphasis in original) Consequently, Varoufakis also expresses the following exceptional thesis: that ‘there is no such thing as a Greek crisis’; it is rather ‘a European and global crisis, of which Greece is an interesting part’ (p. 44). In the following, he even admits that there are innumerable problems within the institutions in Greece, but claims that they have nothing to do with the current crisis: ‘And yet, this crisis has nothing whatsoever to do with any of these very real malignancies of Greece’s state and private sector’ (p. 45). It is no less remarkable that Varoufakis, 103

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in a footnote, speaks of ‘pure economic forces’ that caused the crisis in Greece (p. 58, n. 1). Hedge funds and banks bet against the weakest members of the eurozone in the expectation that they would go bankrupt.45 This worsened the situation for peripheral states as interest rates on new loans rose immensely. Here, Varoufakis also criticises the indecisiveness of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who in 2010 for five months refused to recognise Greece’s impending bankruptcy and promised no support while not letting it declare bankruptcy, either. The reason is simple: ‘The German government could fathom neither the idea of assisting Greece nor the idea that Greece would default on so much debt held by the French and German banks (about €75 billion and €53 billion, respectively).’46 To return to the main blame factors: in Varoufakis’s eyes, these come down to the ‘eurozone’s faulty architecture’47 and the strong imbalances within the eurozone itself: ‘Europe’s crisis is caused by its institutional failure to confront two recycling problems’ (p. 50). Speaking of the first of these, Varoufakis writes: The surplus recycling problem has been a permanent feature of the Eurozone from its very inception. [. . .] Given that in a currency union the deficit regions cannot devalue as a means of keeping their deficits in check, some mechanism must exist by which the surpluses are recycled from the surplus regions and into the deficit regions, not as fiscal transfers but as productive investments that lessen the divergence and help with cohesion. (p. 50; emphasis in original) This means the imbalances in Europe have been exacerbated by the euro. The surplus countries became stronger and stronger, since they did not invest back in the countries that imported their products. These import countries lost their devaluation mechanism in the eurozone. All these developments ‘cultivate[d] and deepen[ed] two important imbalances within the Eurozone: an imbalance in competitiveness (primarily between Germany and the rest) and another one in trade and capital flows’ (p. 50). This was itself tied up with the second element of the twin problem Varoufakis identifies, which he summarises as follows: The debt recycling problem emerged after the crash of 2008. [. . .] In essence, the rapture in 2008, which was partly caused by the surplus 104

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recycling problem, led to the explosion of the debt recycling problem (after 2009), which then boosted the surplus recycling problem, which is now worsening the debt recycling problem. It is multiplied by ensuring that no one in their right minds will invest in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and so on, therefore increasing the competitiveness gap between core and periphery. This process has created a vicious cycle that peripheral states cannot escape. (p. 50f.; emphasis in original) Varoufakis sees another huge lack in the absolute denial on the part of the political elites in Europe, who, he says, did not want to see the real causes of the European crisis. For him it is a ‘clear-cut case of toxic denial’ (p. 51). Following on from his initial thesis, he rejects the claim of the European and German elites that it was above all a ‘Greek crisis’ and that the causes lay only in the shortcomings of Greece (p. 52). The austerity measures proposed by the elites have not improved the situation; on the contrary, they do not change anything about the existing systematic failures in the eurozone. Hence, Varoufakis argues that ‘Europe’s medicine is worse than the disease’.48 The ‘massive austerity on the deficit states’ offers no way out of this ‘never-ending circle’ of recession but rather magnifies the inequalities and asymmetries between the surplus and deficit states in Europe.49 For Varoufakis, the economic and political dominance of Germany is also a major cause of the imbalances in Europe.50 ‘The great difference between American hegemony worldwide and German dominance within the EU was that the United States understood well the importance of recycling surpluses.’51 Only in terms of this contrast can Varoufakis’s proposal for a ‘hegemonic Germany’, which he made in 2013 and 2015, be understood.52 He explains his idea of an investment and thus economic recovery programme, which could only come from Germany, as follows: Germany is the most powerful country in Europe. I believe that the EU would benefit if Germany understood itself as a hegemon. [. . .] I imagine a Merkel plan, modelled on the Marshall Plan. Germany would use its strength to unite Europe.53 But what does Varoufakis suggest in his so called ‘modest proposal’, and how are his demands articulated? What is central and remarkable is that Varoufakis does not demand new institutions; everything that needs to be, he argues, could be done in the existing framework (p. 52). 105

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Varoufakis and his colleagues propose four policies for the four crises, which should, above all, go hand in hand with a different strategy for the four principal institutions concerned: the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Investment Bank (EIB), the European Investment Fund (EIF) and the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).54 The details of these technical proposals are not reconstructed here; what is central for my hegemony analysis is the type of demand made here as well as Varoufakis’s constructions of discursive relations. In a nutshell, the following proposals are discussed: decoupling the public debt crisis from the banking crisis, placing banks under the direct supervision of the ESM, new debt restructuring options for the member states, a major investment and convergence programme through the EIB and EIF, and an emergency solidarity programme against the human and social crisis in Europe.55 Varoufakis speaks out against Greece’s and other Southern states’ withdrawal from the eurozone, and calls for a balance through investments ‘from the surplus regions into the deficit regions, not as fiscal transfers, but as productive investments that lessen the divergence and help with cohesion’.56 To summarise: Varoufakis locates his major blame factor for the European crisis in the poor construction of the eurozone and its two ‘recycling problems’, leading to even greater imbalances in the eurozone. A condensation of contrarieties takes place around these two nodal points in particular. Furthermore, Varoufakis also formulates a harsh critique of the European elites, who deny the real causes of the crisis and have chosen counterproductive means to solve it (austerity and punishment of the Southern European populations), which exacerbate the crisis and the disparities in Europe, and ascribe them to the scapegoat of the ‘Southerners’ and especially the ‘Greeks’. In Varoufakis’s discourse, there are no empty signifiers on either side of the chain, because there is no single moment that can represent all the negative or positive partial objects. This also shows that his discourse operates with many different nodal points that are set as equivalent to each other on the negative side of the chain, while on the solution side a strong focus is placed on alternative economic measures that equivalentially link his hopes for a more socially stable Europe. His demands can be described as cumulative, because they point to the economic obstacles to his universal idea of a ‘democratic and green Europe’. The latter were only formulated in Varoufakis’s more recent transnational political project, DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025). This new political project contains clear and 106

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encompassing demands (for example, to democratise the EU, and for a Green New Deal) which are not the focus of this chapter. Nevertheless, I have also integrated them into Schema 5.4. Varoufakis’s proposed solutions are specific financial-economic and political demands of a technical-institutional kind, instead of relying on a signifier for a missing universal like democracy, unity of time, modernity or Europe, as seen in the case of t­he other intellectuals discussed here. Nevertheless, it does not matter whether the demands are constructed as technical, moral or cultural, as long as they are articulated in the logic of equivalence along a division of space­– ­and this seems also to be the case with Varoufakis. I have tried to show that he isolates numerous blame factors for the economic crisis in Europe and that contrarieties are produced in his discourse. His political-economic demands can only be implemented by political actors or elites. Since all of Varoufakis’s demands require political actors, they have a hegemonic and political character, making his discourse a politicising one that recognises that structures and decisions can be different from the established ones.

Two types of blame discourses: culturalist-identitarian vs politico-economic I would now like to compare and categorise the four interpretations reconstructed above as two types of blame discourses by entering into more detail about their discursive relations in terms of three aspects: (1) deficiencies and the antagonistic structure, (2) discursive strategy and demands, and (3) intellectual function and its hegemonic consequences. (1) In each of the four discourses, we can discern different constructions of crisis, its contexts and locations of deficiencies. On the one hand, Ramfos and Dimou locate the main source of blame within every Greek subject himself or herself. The ‘biggest’ crisis, in their eyes, lies in the Greek culture and mentality, which is still not ‘modern’, ‘European’ and ‘rational’. In both discourses, it becomes clear that an antagonism between ‘abnormal Greece’ and the ‘normal’ rest of the world­– w ­ hich for both comprises only ‘the West’­– i­ s taking place. The context of the crisis is strongly focused on Greece, which, especially in Ramfos’s discourse, is regarded in complete isolation from the interactions within the European and global space. Dimou at least partly considers the European context and its ‘rational actors’, who also made ‘small mistakes’. Both 107

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‘social stabilisation’

‘toxic bailouts’ ‘social crisis’

‘Europe’s medicine is worse than the disease’

‘socially productive investment’

‘Europe’s and Germany’s denial of its systematic failures’

‘new surplus and debt recycling mechanism’

‘debt conversion programme’

‘German dominance within the EU’

‘four different policies’ of ECB, EIB, EIF, ESM

‘eurozone’s faulty architecture’ ‘bank crisis’ ‘disintegration ‘public debt through euro’ crisis’

‘Europeanised economic activity’

‘eurozone’s twin recycling problem’ ‘debt and surplus recycling’

Schema 5.4  The crisis and blame discourse of Yanis Varoufakis

CE 2

‘enhanced cooperation’

‘to democratise the EU and the ECB’ [DiEM25]

‘decentralised Europeanisation’

‘imposition of austerity’

‘massive austerity on the deficit states’

‘never-ending circle’ [austerity – recession]

‘imbalances within ’ the eurozone’ ‘increasing the competitiveness gap between core and periphery’

equivalence contrariety antagonistic frontier (as effects of articulations of equivalences and contrarieties) chain of equivalence: articulated blame factors as causes of crisis (negative side) chain of equivalence: articulated demands as proposed solutions to overcome the crisis (positive side)

‘authoritarian federation’

CE 1

CE 1 CE 2

Key:

Schema 4 The crisis and blame discourse of Yanis Varoufakis

‘Merkel plan’ ‘pan-European recovery programme’

‘Europe needs a hegemonic Germany’

‘America’s fault’

‘collapse of global finance’

Causes, Critique and Blame

discourses articulate a collective attribution of blame to all Greek citizens through culturalisation and pathologisation of the crisis. On the other hand, Streeck and Varoufakis locate the major blame factor in the political-economic structures of Western societies and, above all, in the transformations of European capitalism. It follows that both see Greece not as an isolated crisis object, but as part of a profoundly European economic and political crisis. Both consider the euro to be a central mistake on the part of the EU and the European elites that intensified the imbalances between the societies in the EU. The antagonistic structure of their discourses runs between the conflictual poles of capitalism and democracy, as well as between elites and populations. We can state that Streeck’s and Varoufakis’s discourses locate the main failures in the political-economic structures as well as in the decisions and neoliberal policies of the political and economic elites in the EU and its member states. (2) The discursive strategy of culturalist-identitarian discourses aims to attribute responsibility for the crisis to a national collective. As a result, the all-encompassing demand of both Ramfos and Dimou is that the ‘Greek subject’ must change radically in order to be ‘modern’, ‘productive’ and ‘active’ and abandon all its ‘pathologies’. In both cases, we are dealing with essentialisations and homogenisations of the ‘Greek subject’ and thus with a closure of this central nodal point and also of other related nodal points that supposedly characterise Greek identity, like ‘timelessness’, ‘inactivity’, ‘irresponsibility’ or an ‘inferiority complex’. Closure thus means that only certain notions are bundled and concluded in different moments as nodal points. The identities resulting from these totalising closures are naturalised and essentialised as firm truths by these intellectuals. At the same time, there is also an essentialisation of the ‘modern European’ as the counter-image and universal ideal of both, and of ‘an oriental identity’ that is constructed equivalentially to the Greek one, with both represented as inferior to the European. These blame strategies of essentialisation and, at the same time, collectivisation of guilt on all Greek people, who all share ‘one mentality’ and ‘cultural deficiencies’, are associated with totalising generalisations and strong naturalisations of social relations, effects and temporalities.57 In Varoufakis’s and Streeck’s politico-economic discourses, on the other hand, global interdependences of state and capitalism are pointed out, the class compromise is taken as a starting point and the blame factors are assigned primarily to structures, institutions and elites in 109

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economic, political and thus global governance networks. From a historical perspective, both writers diagnose, above all, failed economic policies that I have placed as equivalent to each other in the chain of blame factors. Both recognise that the capitalist system is always ­crisis-ridden and unstable­– ­an important insight that is not formulated by the other two thinkers and has implications for their respective articulations of universals. Streeck and Varoufakis analyse the political-economic dependencies and power relations invoked by the crisis in a context of global and especially eurozone capitalism, and call first for technical political-­ economic solutions to contain the crisis developments in Europe and especially in the eurozone. At the same time, however, both also hope for the politicisation of the peoples of Europe, that they will stand up for democracy and justice against neoliberal and authoritarian policies. In these discourses, economic and political decisions and power structures are questioned by Streeck and Varoufakis, leading to openings and de-essentialisations of social power relations and identities, and not to their sedimentation or closure. (3) Consequently, the culturalist-identitarian discourses indicate strong depoliticisations of social, economic and political relations and identities, because they do not seek alternatives in political and economic power structures, but rather assign individual and collective responsibility to an essentialised national subject that is enjoined to change itself. By contrast, the politico-economic discourses point to a politicisation of social, economic and political relations and identities, and thus open the horizon for contingency and alternative possibilities in ordering the social. This critique is directed against hegemonic imperatives and arguments of ‘alternativelessness’ (Alternativlosigkeit) that governments repeatedly use to implement policies, especially in the age of austerity. It is also noteworthy here that it could be the other way round as well: that is, we have (mainstream) economists that depoliticise the matter (‘there is no alternative’) and conversely humanists that caution against essentialising understandings of national character and cultural-identitarian interpretations. Through essentialisation by means of culturalisation, Ramfos’s and Dimou’s discourses are also depoliticising in the sense of bringing about a discursive closure, as stated above, since they also demand a radical change on the part of the Greek subject and not of other socio-economic or more democratic structures. Finally, the common denominator of both intellectuals must be seen in the all-encompassing 110

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demand for reform, modernisation and rationalisation, demands that have been articulated by the creditors and institutions of the troika since the outbreak of the euro crisis. Both arguments, but above all Ramfos’s, also rely on old and powerful colonial and thus racist dichotomies that emphasise orientalism,58 as well as a strong Eurocentrism, in which they pose Greece as an oriental and ‘other’ subject in binary opposition to modern Europe. Through these constructions of othering, we can detect a powerful stabilisation of hierarchies within and outside of Europe.59 These aspects give a strong indication that both intellectuals believe in a naively optimistic history of progress and the superiority of ‘rational Western’ thought over that of the rest of the world.60 Neither thinker is interested in global and European power relations and their developments before and after 2008. Both intellectuals can therefore be described as organic hegemonic intellectuals who produce culturalist and depoliticising neoliberal discourses of the collective self-indebtedness of all ‘Greek people’. A typical structural pattern of neoliberal discourses is ‘the general political technology of individualising blame and guilt. If a particular country is facing difficulties, this has nothing to do with systemic faults and is solely attributed to internal failings and pathologies.’61 We can conclude by noting that Ramfos’s and Dimou’s hegemonic effects are also reproduced in a whole series of other discursive offerings by different actors in the field of the same hegemonic formation, which produced similarly dominant images of ‘solely Greece’s fault’, not least in major segments of the Greek and German media or in the justificatory discourses of the troika and its austerity governments (see n. 1). The historically informed political-economic analyses by Streeck and Varoufakis open up a much broader view of the many structural causes of the European crisis. They take the capitalist economy and its global and European developments as well as political power structures as their starting point. Varoufakis’s discourse differs from Streeck’s in that he makes very specific technical proposals on how to overcome the eurozone crisis. Streeck, on the other hand, hopes that the democratic voices of the people will return on the streets. Another central difference is that Varoufakis continues to opt for the euro whereas Streeck rejects it in order to regain national sovereignty. The role of Germany is also viewed ambivalently by both; both are aware that Germany’s political-economic domination is in large part responsible for the huge imbalances in Europe. Hence, Varoufakis wants a more supportive Germany to lead a more balanced and cooperative Europe 111

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as hegemon. Streeck recognises that Germany and the other countries could regain some of their lost national sovereignty without the euro and criticises the neoliberal, Hayekian regime of the EU. Where the two meet, however, is in their political-economic demands for a social and democratic restructuring of the EU and for more intra-European investments. Their vehement critique of authoritarian transformations, technocratic austerity policies and de-democratisation processes in Europe leading to a policy of impoverishment point to the role of Varoufakis and Streeck as organic counter-hegemonic intellectuals opposed to the status quo neoliberal hegemony in Europe. Their ­political-economic discourse calls for a re-democratisation of the EU and its member states, social stability, and redistribution, and thus for curbing oligarchic capitalism and technocratic governance. They thus produce an alternative discourse that criticises capitalist and political structures and the neoliberal elites benefiting from them instead of essentialised national collectivities, and thereby contribute to the deconstruction of various hegemonic culturalist and isolated blame discourses of the crisis.

Notes The author expresses his sincere thanks to Seongcheol Kim, Florian Kochendörfer, Stefan Nygård and Peter Wagner for their helpful comments.  1. The Greek austerity governments (2009–15) have been circulating the same discourse over and over again, according to which all Greeks are collectively responsible for the crisis. The most famous expression of this is probably that of the former Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) politician and deputy prime minister (2009–12) of Greece, Theodoros Pangalos, who said in 2010 in parliament: ‘We ate all of it [the money] together.’ The counterpart in German politics and in Merkel’s government was: ‘They [the Greeks] lived beyond their means.’   2. Y. Stavrakakis, ‘Dispatches from the Greek Lab: Metaphors, Strategies and Debt in the European Crisis’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 18(3), 2013, pp. 313–24: 315.  3. The politico-economic discourse in Greece and Germany has been led by other intellectuals such as the economists Costas Lapavitsas and Heiner Flassbeck, who formulate a harsh critique of the troika of lenders (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) and advocate Greece’s withdrawal from the euro, or the economist Hans-Werner Sinn, who criticises the debt politics of the EU and the mighty role of the European Central Bank (ECB), and is also pleading for a ‘Grexit’. See H. Flassbeck and C. Lapavitsas, Against the Troika: Crisis and Austerity in the Eurozone (London:

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Causes, Critique and Blame Verso, 2015); H.-W. Sinn, The Euro Trap: On Bursting Bubbles, Budgets, and Beliefs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Claus Offe’s work can also be attributed to this discourse. He declares austerity policy to be Europe’s undoing and, like Varoufakis, writes in favour of a more democratic restructuring of the EU. C. Offe, Europe Entrapped (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).   Other intellectual discourses, which do not belong to the two I have differentiated, can still be named. They can be clearly distinguished from the culturalist-identitarian discourse, since not only national collectives but also structures and decisions are invoked in their interpretations of the causes of crisis, but not with a primary focus on political economy. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas pursues a discourse on constitutional-normatively oriented reflections on the EU’s crisis management. See J. Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union: A Response (Cambridge: Polity, 2012); J. Habermas, The Lure of Technocracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). Habermas criticises above all its ‘post-democratic executive federalism’; Habermas, Crisis of the European Union, pp. 12ff.   The social scientist Jürgen Link has, from his discourse-analytical approach of normalism, analysed German media and the EU’s crisis policies as denormalisation processes. See J. Link, Anteil der Kultur an der Versenkung Griechenlands: Von Hölderlins Deutschenschelte zu Schäubles Griechenschelte (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2016); J. Link, Normale Krisen? Normalismus und die Krise der Gegenwart (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2013). Also, a central figure in the Greek debate was the political scientist and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Greece (2015–18) in the SYRIZA government, Nikos Kotzias, and his interpretation of Greece as a debt colony from the perspective of intra-European imperialism. See N. Kotzias, Ελλάδα, αποικία χρέους: Ευρωπαϊκή αυτοκρατορία και γερμανική πρωτοκαθεδρία (Athens: Patakis, 2013).   In addition, the German historian Karl Heinz Roth has published a major archive-based study that deals with Germany’s continuing lack of reparations and a non-refunded forced loan to Greece from the period of the Nazi German occupation (1941–4) in the Second World War, and discusses this in the context of Germany’s strict austerity policies. See K. H. Roth, Griechenland am Abgrund: Die deutsche Reparationsschuld (Hamburg: VSA, 2015); K. H. Roth and H. Rübner, Reparationsschuld: Hypotheken der deutschen Besatzungsherrschaft in Griechenland und Europa (Berlin: Metropol, 2017). Kotzias and Roth are intellectuals who have drawn attention to Germany’s outstanding reparation debts.   4. For analyses of collective blame discourses in European and Greek media and politics, where the entire Greek population is assigned blame, see H. Bickes, T. Otten and L. C. Weymann, ‘The Financial Crisis in the German and English Press: Metaphorical Structures in the Media Coverage on Greece, Spain and Italy’, Discourse and Society, 25, 2014, pp. 423–44; H. Kouki and A. Liakos, ‘Narrating the Story of a Failed National Transition: Discourses on the Greek Crisis, 2010–14’, Historein, 15, 2015, pp. 49–61; J. Glynos and S. Voutyras, ‘Ideology as Blocked Mourning: Greek National Identity in Times of Economic Crisis and Austerity’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 21(3), 2016, pp. 201–24; T. Tsakalakis, Έλληνες:

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Aristotelis Agridopoulos Διεφθαρμένοι, τεμπέληδες και απείθαρχοι. Στερεότυπα του βρετανικού τύπου για τους Έλληνες στα χρόνια της κρίσης [Greeks: Corrupt, Lazy and Undisciplined. Stereotypes of the British Press about the Greeks in Years of Crisis] (Athens: Smili, 2016); C. Lykou and B. Mitsikopoulou, ‘The Chronicle of an Ongoing Crisis: Diachronic Media Representations of Greece and Europe in the Greek Press’, in O. Hatzidaki and D. Goutsos (eds), Greece in Crisis: Combining Critical Discourse and Corpus Linguistics Perspectives (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017), pp. 113–50; O. Hatzidaki and D. Goutsos, ‘The Discourses of the Greek Crisis’, in Hatzidaki and Goutsos, Greece in Crisis, pp. 3–44.   5. M. Nonhoff, ‘Hegemony Analysis: Theory, Methodology and Research Practice’, in T. Marttila (ed.), Discourse, Culture and Organization: Inquiries into Relational Structures of Power (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 63–104: 89.   6. E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, [1985] 2014); E. Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996); E. Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005); D. Howarth and Y. Stavrakakis, ‘Introducing Discourse Theory and Political Analysis’, in D. Howarth, A. Norval and Y. Stavrakakis (eds), Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 1–23; M. Nonhoff, Politischer Diskurs und Hegemonie: Das Projekt‚ Soziale Marktwirtschaft (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006); Nonhoff, ‘Hegemony Analysis’; O. Marchart, ‘Die Diskursanalyse der Essex School: Modell und Methode’, in O. Marchart (ed), Ordnungen des Politischen: Einsätze und Wirkungen der Hegemonietheorie Ernesto Laclaus (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2017), pp. 57–79.   7. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 91ff; Nonhoff, Politischer Diskurs, p. 207ff.   8. Nonhoff, ‘Hegemony Analysis’, p. 69.   9. Ibid., p. 73ff; Nonhoff, Politischer Diskurs, p. 86ff. 10. M. Nonhoff, ‘Antagonismus und Antagonismen: hegemonietheoretische Aufklärung’, in Marchart, Ordnungen des Politischen, pp. 81–102: 93. All translations from German and Greek into English in this chapter are my own. 11. Nonhoff, ‘Hegemony Analysis’, p. 75ff. A cumulative demand can be considered as the smallest category: demands of this type ‘specify one partial aspect of the universal’; ibid., p. 75. The second type is a subsuming demand that ‘brackets together a number of demands under its own name’, and with that ‘the fulfilment of other demands’ is also enabled; ibid., p.75. The third and last type is the encompassing demand, which builds ‘the core of hegemonic formations because only [it] aim[s] to fully represent a specific universal’; ibid., p. 76. 12. Ibid., p. 76. 13. Ibid., p. 91. 14. Nonhoff, Politischer Diskurs, pp. 264ff. 15. A. Gramsci, ‘Intellectuals’, in David Forgacs (ed.), The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935 (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 301–11: 304.

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Causes, Critique and Blame 16. Ibid., p. 304ff. 17. Ibid., p. 306. 18. E. Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990); E. Laclau, ‘Constructing Universality’, in J. Butler, E. Laclau and S. Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 281–307. 19. Laclau, ‘Constructing Universality’, p. 287ff. 20. Liv Sunnercrantz also sees this as an important insight for understanding the plurality of current intellectual discourses and their function for hegemonic effects: ‘This means that the intellectual activity of articulation and mediation becomes central for discursive, hegemonic, and consequently social, change’; L. Sunnercrantz, Hegemony and the Intellectual Function: Medialised Public Discourse on Privatisation in Sweden 1988–1993 (Lund: Lund University, 2017), p. 69. 21. Laclau, New Reflections, p. 195ff. 22. Nonhoff, ‘Hegemony Analysis’, p. 75ff. 23. S. Ramfos, Το αδιανόητο τίποτα. Φιλοκαλικά ριζώματα του νεοελληνικού μηδενισμού: Δοκίμιο φιλοσοφικής ανθρωπολογίας [The Unthinkable Nothing. Philocalic Roots of Modern Greek Nihilism: An Essay of Philosophical Anthropology] (Athens: Armos, 2010), p. 14. Ramfos uses the Greek notion of hellenism (ελληνισμός), which in its broadest sense embraces all the ‘Greek people’ in the world. Complementary to it, he also uses it to denote ‘Greekness’ or the Greek mentality. 24. S. Ramfos, Time Out: Η Ελληνική αίσθηση του χρόνου [Time Out: The Greek Sense of Time] (Athens: Armos, 2012). 25. This and all the following quotations are, unless otherwise noted, from Ramfos, Time Out. 26. In another essay, published at the end of 2012, Ramfos further develops his thesis of the pathological Greek self in psychoanalytical terms. Here, Ramfos wants to show that all Greeks have remained irresponsible and infantile characters. The Greek family and state as well as the Orthodox church are mainly responsible for these developments. S. Ramfos, Ο ‘άλλος’ του καθρέφτη: Ψυχογραφία της αγωνίας μας [The ‘Other’ of the Mirror: Psychography of our Agony] (Athens: Armos, 2012). 27. See S. Ramfos, Η λογική της παράνοιας [The Logic of Paranoia] (Athens: Armos, 2011), pp. 18, 83. From the mid-1990s, some academics have detected a radical turn in Ramfos’s thought, from a previously critical position towards ‘Westernisation’ from a neo-orthodox perspective, to a generally positive integration of concepts of individualisation and modernisation into his own thought and diagnosis of the Greek present. See V. N. Makrides, ‘Hat die Orthodoxie mit der tiefgreifenden Finanzkrise in Griechenland seit 2009 etwas zu tun?’, in R. Flogaus and J. Wasmuth (eds), Orthodoxie im Dialog: Historische und aktuelle Perspektiven (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), pp. 371–93: 374. Ilias Papagiannopoulos interprets Ramfos in a similar way, arguing that Ramfos wants to get Greece out of the

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Aristotelis Agridopoulos ‘nihilistic gap’ and on to the pathway of modernity. See I. Papagiannopoulos, ‘Krise und neugriechische Genealogien: Drei Beispiele’, in A. Agridopoulos and I. Papagiannopoulos (eds), Griechenland im europäischen Kontext: Krise und Krisendiskurse (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016), pp. 179–206: 198. 28. The Greek conservative newspaper Kathimerini noted that Dimou had received ‘70 reviews’ for his book of aphorisms ‘in 1.5 years in Germany, but only 8 in 38 years in Greece’. This is also an indication that Dimou has been much more popular in Germany than anywhere else in recent years. He gave several interviews to wellknown German broadcasters, newspapers and magazines, for instance: Deutsche Welle (29 March 2012), Die Zeit (26 July 2012; 16 July 2015), Wirtschaftswoche (27 January 2014), Die Welt (24 January 2015) and Der Spiegel (4 July 2015). See Kathimerini, ‘Nikos Dimou: If you make it, you’re not a “serious” creator’, 6 April 2014. Available at (last accessed 25 January 2019). 29. Most of these dialogues were written in the mid-1990s and published in the English magazine Odyssey. 30. N. Dimou, Über das Unglück, ein Grieche zu sein (Munich: Kunstmann, 2012), p. 70. 31. Unless otherwise noted, all the following quotations are from N. Dimou, Die Griechen Deutschen sind an allem schuld (Munich: Kunstmann, 2014). 32. Dimou, Über das Unglück, p. 71. 33. Ibid., p. 70. 34. Ibid., p. 71. 35. First published in German 2013, and 2014 in English. In 2015, an extended edition of Buying Time was published in German with an extensive new preface, in which Streeck also responds to criticisms, and this too was translated into English, in 2017. W. Streeck, ‘Vorwort zur Taschenbuchausgabe’, in W. Streeck, Gekaufte Zeit: Die vertagte Krise des demokratischen Kapitalismus, rev. edn (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), pp. 7–48; W. Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2017). 36. Streeck, Buying Time, pp. xv, 52, 103. All the following quotations are from Buying Time unless otherwise noted. 37. Streeck also addresses the active debt promotion of the EU Commission: ‘The convergence of interest rates at a low level, which enabled countries like Greece and Portugal to run up large debts, was actively encouraged by the European Commission’ (p. 128, n. 55). 38. This again clearly shows Streeck’s left-wing national position, which he shares with Lapavitsas and Flassbeck, who also support Greece’s exit from the euro. In contrast, the left-wing transnational positions of Habermas, Offe and Varoufakis argue for a deep democratic restructuring of the EU. 39. W. Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (London: Verso, 2014), p. 188. 40. Y. Varoufakis, ‘We Are All Greeks Now! The Crisis in Greece in Its European

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Causes, Critique and Blame and Global Context’, in A. Triandafyllidou, R. Gropas and H. Kouki (eds), The Greek Crisis and European Modernity (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 44–58. 41. Y. Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Causes of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy (London: Zed Books, 2011). 42. Y. Varoufakis, S. Holland and J. K. Galbraith, ‘A Modest Proposal for Resolving the Eurozone Crisis, Version 4.0’, July 2013. Available at (last accessed 25 January 2019). 43. Unless otherwise noted, this and all the following quotations are from Varoufakis, ‘All Greeks Now!’ 44. Ibid. 45. Varoufakis, Global Minotaur, p. 204ff. 46. Ibid., p. 206. 47. Ibid., p. 200. 48. Ibid., p. 207. 49. Ibid., p. 208. 50. Ibid., p. 202ff. 51. Ibid., p. 200. 52. Y. Varoufakis, ‘Europe Needs a Hegemonic Germany’, 22 February 2013. Available at (last accessed 25 January 2019). 53. Die Zeit, ‘Für einen Merkel-Plan’, interview with Yanis Varoufakis, Zeit online, 19 February 2015. Available at (last accessed 25 January 2019). 54. Varoufakis et al., ‘Modest Proposal’. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. For an alternative conception of time as temporality, above all from social-anthropological perspectives, which proceed from multiple temporalities in austerity regimes, see D. M. Knight and C. Stewart, ‘Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe’, History and Anthropology, 27(1), 2016, pp. 1–18. 58. E. W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003). 59. O. Thomas-Olalde and A. Velho, ‘Othering and its Effects: Exploring the Concept’, in H. Niedrig and C. Ydesen (eds), Writing Postcolonial Histories of Intercultural Education (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 27–51. 60. S. Hall, ‘The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power’, in S. Hall and B. Gieben (eds), Formations of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), pp. 275–320. 61. Stavrakakis, ‘Dispatches’, p. 317.

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6 The Tragedy of Recognition: Debt, Guilt and Political Action Carlotta Cossutta

Two myths have always faced each other. So powerful that man believes in them. The right of peoples, their primitive freedom, against the power of the market, immortal as its laws. The two fearful opponents fight for the unredeemed and destiny appears inextricable. The guilt [Schuld] that drags on, though often bitterly paid: since not only is debt paid tooth by tooth, but also interest­– ­with no way out. Now it is clear, in Attica the two are facing each other. Who has more weight, who has more breath? Who reconciles them? It would be like changing the world order. Divided is the art that sings them, it celebrates the weapons and the ear, the common market and the human community. Volker Braun, Putzfrauen1

T

his quote is taken from Putzfrauen, a text by Volker Braun, who stages the Greek debt crisis within the framework of ancient tragedy. The starting point is the layoff of the cleaning women of the Greek Ministry of Finance in the context of the crisis. In September 2013, in fact, 595 cleaners employed in the Ministry, mostly women, were laid off to outsource the service in order to implement the austerity measures that Greece was requested to take. Two years later, in court, the women finally secured their reinstatement and became a symbol of resistance to austerity. This suggestive event serves as a starting point for assessing the link between debt crisis and tragedy and trying to understand whether it is only an effective artistic and rhetorical tool, or whether it can offer a different understanding of the crisis itself and of the politics that lies beneath it. To analyse the relationship with the tragic, we start from the premise that in the course of the Greek debt crisis, and in the relationships between Greece and Germany, the tragic dimension 118

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has often been evoked, by government representatives, by the media and by common sense. In fact, observing the development of frantic negotiations and the rhetoric used by the participants was like watching the unfolding of the archaic fault chain, which forms the structure of tragedies. The inevitable transition from όλβος (‘happiness’), κόρος (‘satiety’), ύβρις (‘excess’) and άτη (‘blindness’) seemed to be a subtext of much discourse about the debt, its history and the future of Greece and Europe. The reading of the Greek debt crisis in the period in which the most hectic phases of negotiations with the European Union were taking place has often represented the actors in the field­– i­ndividuals and institutions­– a­ s actors in a tragic drama, led by unavoidable forces and trapped in a history of blindness and hubris. The predicament of Greece can also be called tragic because of the many citizens that are faced with unemployment, the closure of their shops, huge debts, and increasing insecurity as to their own future, that of their children and that of the society as a whole. Karin de Boer highlights how accounts of the recent history of Greece­– ­starting with its entering the euro zone in 2001­– ­are likely to refer to the tragic blindness of the individuals and institutions involved as well as to the tragic character of the events that threaten to result in the bankruptcy of the state and perhaps even in the end of the euro.2 The Greek crisis is therefore described not only as an inevitable conflict between two visions of the world­– t­ he hard-working Nordic mentality against Mediterranean laziness­– b ­ ut also as the result of a combination of forces and choices that go beyond rationality.3 And the collapse of the Greek economy has been interpreted as an outcome that derives from an unamendable original fault. In recent years many economists have pointed to the coincidence of debt and guilt in the German word ‘Schuld’. This connection is not a novelty or a theoretical discovery, but, as Elettra Stimilli points out, these economists rarely considered the reflections of Nietzsche, Marx or Benjamin, who had already noticed this overlap.4 This link between debt and guilt that also emerges in the economic debate further underlines the tragic dimension of the debt crisis: the act of getting into debt becomes a fault comparable to tragic hubris, which triggers the further mechanisms that appear as inevitable. Here I try to understand this financial crisis from a vantage point 119

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that differs from both economic and politological assessments. An alternative way of reflecting on the dynamic of historical events­– ­one that has repeatedly been employed in modern philosophy­– ­originated in Greek culture itself. Responding to the crisis caused by its modernisation during the fifth century BC, classical Greek culture produced tragedies that aimed to grasp the nature of the conflict that was undermining the society from within. Tragedy and democracy emerged in the same period, and tragedy itself represents the birth of democracy:5 in the Oresteia, Aeschylus presents the birth of democracy through the vote to decide the guilt of Orestes, who killed his mother. The The Erinyes (‘furies’, which at the end of the tragedy will be transformed into Eumenides, ‘kindly ones’), who accuse Orestes, believe that there is a debt of blood to be paid, while Apollo believes that the chain of guilt and blood debts has been interrupted by Orestes’ act, which therefore must be considered innocent. It is worth remembering that Greek tragedies were performed publicly to large audiences bi-annually, at the City Dionysia and Lenaia. By the end of the fifth century BC, the Dionysia festival was, in fact, second in prestige and popularity in Greece only to the great Olympian festival of the northern Peloponnese. During these festivals, democratic Athens would halt all activities, giving in to the spirit of revelry and inebriation. Performances drew as many as 20,000 spectators, and these included all classes of people from Athens and beyond. The spatial arrangement of the performance further intensified the spectacle. Everyday citizens were seated block after block, next to specially reserved sections for distinguished members as well as foreign dignitaries. It was one of Athens’ greatest occasions for self-dramatisation. Athenian tragedy was about the spectre of hubris in human existence: the compulsion to control, to transcend our humanity and to defy all that separates us mortals from the everlasting gods. In the following pages I propose to take journalistic narratives on the Greek crisis as a tragedy and the dramatic intuition of Volker Braun seriously, and to show how these narratives reveal the profound link between the tragic dimension and the political dimension. In particular, I will highlight the role of recognition in the Greek tragedy and its relevance for the Hegelian concept of recognition itself. Then I will consider the thought of Heidegger and Castoriadis in order to analyse two different interpretations of the link between tragedy and politics and highlight two different readings of ancient Greece. 120

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Recognition/anagnorisis The central point of every tragedy is hubris, the inevitable blinding that leads to ruin. A ruin intertwined with rage and grief, as Simon Critchley points out, suggesting that ‘there is something in grief that is politically unstable, unruly, and ungovernable, that contests the hierarchical rule of the city or state’.6 For many interpreters, starting from Hegel, the blindness that leads to ruin is the result of a lack of recognition. In this, Hegel was himself building on Aristotle, as Patchen Markell has observed: against the background of the tradition of recognition-scenes in Greek literature­– O ­ edipus’s shattering self-discovery; Electra’s recognition of Orestes via his footprints and hair­– ­Aristotle declared recognition, anagnôrisis, to be one of the constitutive elements of the best tragedies; since then, recognition has been a central concept in poetics, and has continued to be an important literary device.7 This lack of recognition derives from a fundamental conflict, not between two persons endowed with interiority, but between two worldviews. In this sense, the tragic conflict is always a political conflict, and the misrecognition that acts in the tragedy always involves an entire vision of the world. Creon is deaf to Antigone’s reasoning and vice versa. Oedipus is blind to Teiresias’s advice. Jason refuses to admit that Medea is the free agent who did so much for him. Pentheus does not see Dionysus as a god, and then becomes unrecognisable to his own mother. Hippolytus fails to pay tribute to the divinity of Aphrodite. Thanks to the vividness of theatrical language, the most theoretical concepts are made concrete. Nathalie Karagiannis8 points out that it is hubris that Cornelius Castoriadis follows as a guiding thread to the relations between tragedy and democracy. Although hubris­– ­human excess­– i­s one of the most common exegetical concepts of the Greek worldview, Castoriadis’s insistence on the absence of borders accompanying hubris renders his version distinct. Indeed, in the common understanding of hubristic action, humans arrogantly transgress their humanness, which distinguishes them from gods. In Castoriadis’s version, what is central is that humans do not know where the borders that should not be transgressed are: 121

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Hubris does not simply presuppose freedom, it presupposes the absence of fixed norms, the essential vagueness of the ultimate bearings of our actions. [. . .] Transgressing the law is not hubris, it is a definite and limited misdemeanor. Hubris exists where self-limitation is the only ‘norm’, where ‘limits’ are transgressed which were nowhere defined.9 It is in this sense that hubris is different from sin. Hubris becomes an area in which one suddenly finds oneself. That is why things happen to the tragic heroes. Despite this lack of determination, hubris can be defined in ethical, ontological and political terms. The ontological basis of tragedy is closely linked to its ethical aspect: it insists on chaos and catastrophe for and in humans. Chaos and catastrophe are closely related to not only the ultimate lack of control, by the tragic heroes, of their action but also the ultimate lack of meaning of their action. Heroes and those who watch them can therefore find themselves in hubris suddenly, without even understanding the sense of the consequences of their actions.

Hegel’s reconciliation A classical interpretation of the role of recognition in tragedy is that proposed by Hegel in analysing Antigone and the Eumenides, in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the Jena writings. As María del Rosario Acosta López points out, Hegel uses tragedy as a model for Sittlichkeit (‘ethicity’) in some of his early Jena writings, and treats the same themes in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but [w]hile in the former, Hegel uses the Eumenides as an image to explain the kind of spiritual movement that takes place in the intersubjective realm, in the latter, he chooses the tragedy of Antigone to show the same process. [. . .] While the Eumenides serves to introduce a concept of the political realm as an autonomous system able to resolve its own contradictions, Antigone opens up the question of the impossibility of such a definite resolution.10 In this manner, tragedy and its interpretations became a model on which to understand some political concepts and how they work in practice.11 In the 1802 essay The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Hegel 122

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introduces his idea of the ‘tragedy of ethicity’ in order to illustrate the way in which this notion of Sittlichkeit­– ­the ‘absolute ethical life of a people’­– ­is achieved. This occurs through a recognitional process among classes­– ­both the economic and the political ones. In his development of a notion of ethicity, Hegel is trying to put into question an atomistic notion of the individual, characteristic of the modern circumstances and theories that he thought were characteristic of his time. The atomistic notion had to be shown to be a one-sided perspective. Absolute ethicity is therefore that movement that reconciles the individual and the community, the liberal and the communitarian ­perspectives­– t­ he inorganic and the organic, in Hegel’s essay­– a­ llowing a permanent dialogue between them through both recognition of their equally valid claims and their mutual necessity: This reconciliation lies precisely in the knowledge of necessity, and in the right which ethical life concedes to its inorganic nature, and to the subterranean powers by making over and sacrificing to them one part of itself. For the force of the sacrifice lies in facing and objectifying the involvement with the inorganic. This involvement is dissolved by being faced; the inorganic is separated and, recognized for what it is, is itself taken up into indifference while the living, by placing into the inorganic what it knows to be a part of itself and surrendering it to death, has all at once recognized the right of the inorganic and cleansed itself of it. [. . .] Tragedy consists in this, that ethical nature segregates its inorganic nature as a fate, and places it outside itself; and by acknowledging this fate in the struggle against it, ethical nature is reconciled with the Divine being as the unity of both.12 In this attempt at reconciliation, tragedy, in the light of the Eumenides, enters the scene. Hegel writes: the picture of this tragedy, defined more particularly for the ethical realm, is the issue of the litigation between the Eumenides and Apollo over Orestes, conducted before the organized ethical order, the people of Athens. In the human mode, Athens, as the Aeropagus, puts equal votes in the urn for each litigant and recognizes their co-existence; though it does not thereby compose the conflict or settle the relation between the powers or their bearing on one another. But in the Divine mode, as Athene, Athens wholly 123

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restores to the people the man [Orestes] who had been involved in difference by the god [Apollo] himself; and through the separation of the powers both of which had their interest in the criminal, it brings about a reconciliation in such a way that the Eumenides would be revered by this people as Divine powers, and would now have their place in the city, so that their savage nature would enjoy the sight of Athene enthroned on high on the Acropolis, and thereby be pacified. [. . .] This is nothing else but the performance, on the ethical plane, of the tragedy that the Absolute eternally enacts with itself, by eternally giving birth to itself into objectivity, submitting in this objective form to suffering and death, and rising from its ashes into glory.13 Tragedy, therefore, in this interpretation, becomes the staging of the possibility of overcoming the individual in the Spirit, in a reconciliation that moves from tragic conflict, but which is possible, just as the Erinyes can be changed into Eumenides. Completely different will be the Hegelian reading of the Eumenides in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which, as is known, the pivotal tragedy becomes Antigone and its irreparable conflict, which leads to death and not to reconciliation. There, revisiting the manner in which the Eumenides is resolved, Hegel describes this world as an immaculate world, a world unsullied by any internal dissension . . . its process is a tranquil transition of one of its powers into the other. We do indeed see it divide itself into two essences and their reality; but their antithesis is rather the authentication of one through the other.14 But this world, Hegel affirms, is only a quiet and motionless and therefore a ‘dead’, ‘abstract’ concept. Antigone shows how reconciliation is just a static concept that does not correspond to the movement of action that always introduces an individual aspect into the world. While in the Eumenides divine and human law were shown to achieve, through a mutual recognition of the valid necessities and claims made by those representing the two principles, a reconciliation as constitutive of ethicity, in Antigone there are no survivors: both will have to collapse. That is the force of Antigone’s deed; that is her destiny. It is the destiny, as Hegel will show, of every ethical action­– ­that is, every action that is meant to be significant, 124

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every deed that is meant to be introduced into the light of the common, public, shared world: The doer cannot deny the crime or his guilt: the significance of the deed is that what was unmoved had been set in motion, and that what was locked up in mere possibility has been brought out into the open, hence to link together the unknown with what is now known.15 This reading of Antigone allows Hegel to highlight how innocent actions cannot exist, emphasising how ‘innocence, therefore, is merely non-action, like the mere being of a stone, not even of a child’. Every action is intrinsically transgression; it has to be if it is meant to be ethical, if it is meant to introduce­– m ­ ake manifest­– i­ n the common world the individuality of the agent: ‘the action is itself this splitting into two, this explicit self-affirmation and the establishing over against itself of an alien external reality’.16 As Acosta López points out, in this sense, Antigone, therefore, is not just Greece; it is also us. It is not just a shape that will be simply superseded and set aside in a progressive movement to a more developed and complete form of ethical life. It is the unavoidable ground where that fulfilled ethical life will have to raise itself. The wounds it may leave, therefore, are not going to be simply erased.17 The reconciliation will be marked by actions; the Eumenides will show the scars of the Erinyes. Hegel’s extensive use of Antigone, therefore, is precisely meant to demonstrate the intrinsic deficiency of an immediate ethical life and therefore the necessity for Spirit to move beyond it. So, as Miguel Vatter states, Hegel’s understanding of a ‘tragedy of ethical life’ is premised on his political interpretation of Greek tragedy (an interpretation he works out by way of Hölderlin’s interpretation of Antigone as a ‘republican’ tragedy). This understanding of tragedy is not merely symptomatic of the failure to realize either communism or authenticity in bourgeois civil society, as Lukács and Menke respectively argue. For Hegel, Greek tragedy and its ideal of freedom (as knowledge of necessity) are eminently political: they disclose the true structure of 125

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the state and the nature of the ethical, or sittlich, bond as something absolute.18 In this sense, the tragic conflict that Antigone describes is both constitutive of human action, which can be overcome in the path of the Spirit (Geist), through the dimension of the State (Rechtsstaat). What is interesting to note, however, is how the tragedy plays a central role in understanding how action can develop, what the political outcome may be and how the same author, using different tragedies and different readings, offers new perspectives for reading the political dimension of democratic life.

Heidegger’s uncanny Heidegger again links tragedy to chaos and conflict, but in a very different sense. Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) explores the superior kind of techne with the aid of Greek tragedy. Turning to the inception of philosophical thought, Heidegger relates Greek tragedy to the pre-Socratic thinkers who explored the antagonism that arises between creators and their environments, in order to uncover a form of thinking that does not harness itself to metaphysics. Tragic poetry is an act of thinking that does not ascribe to the inherited world of value but wrests Being (Dasein) from appearance, bringing it into un-concealment. Shifting from his more moderate language in Being and Time, Heidegger describes this passage from the familiar as the use of violence/ force (Gewalt) to create a self-understanding amidst the overwhelming power of beings as a whole. They use power against the overpowering, meaning that the only possible outcome is one of catastrophe. Heidegger believes that this violent quality captures the meaning of Sophocles’ use of techne, which he no longer translates as ‘knowing’ but as ‘transgressive knowledge’.19 For Heidegger, authentic human knowing looks out beyond that which is directly present-at-hand in order to set Being into work as something that is in such-and-such a way. Techne involves a very specific form of knowing that can mould something that in each case comes into being. In Heidegger’s terms, techne ‘puts Being to work in a being’.20 There is an ontological compulsion to techne and to setting-into-work what techne knows because Being is an over-power (Übermacht) requiring a ‘creative self-assertion’, a force that places humans before 126

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a ‘constant decision’ between un-concealment and non-being. History in its fullest sense is the act of violent creation that brings something new into being. This, for Heidegger, is achieved by works: ‘the work of the word in poetry, the work of stone in temple and statue, the work of polis as the historical place in which all this is grounded and preserved’.21 By going beyond the familiar, such work leaves humanity without a place or home­– ­the very meaning of historical creation. The making of a collective dwelling through violence within the absence of a home is the political horizon of Heidegger’s thought in Introduction to Metaphysics, the kind of making that could unite the German people with the Greeks in a common attack on ‘unhomelyness’. As Heidegger writes: Being human determines itself from out of a relationship to beings as a whole. The human essence shows itself here to be the relation which first opens up Being to man. Being human, as the need for apprehending and gathering a being-driven into the freedom of undertaking techne, of the setting-into-work of Being, a setting-into-work which is itself knowing. This is history.22 Moreover, this interpretation of history is itself the possibility of a unity of Greece and Germany. After 1935, Heidegger considers tragic thinking in a different way, thereby reconceiving the space of human creation. His lectures on Hölderlin during 1942, published as Hölderlin’s Hymn, in my opinion marks a significant and conclusive shift in his understanding of tragedy. The significant change that occurs between Introduction to Metaphysics and Hölderlin’s Hymn is that the struggle between techne and dike that Heidegger found in the choral ode of Antigone, the struggle between transgressive knowledge and nature, is replaced by the ontological struggle between polis and pelein. In Introduction to Metaphysics the artist was seen as the creative agent exemplified by Parmenides and Sophocles, who represent the transgression of metaphysics. This is the struggle between techne and dike. For Heidegger, this conflict emerges from the very plot of the text. Antigone is the example of human action that allows the power of Being to express itself and to lead her along her way. Polis designates the space of appearance that unfolds from the deinon nature of human beings. On the other hand, pelein refers to what is, the ontological semblance of beings within a historical setting determined by metaphysics. 127

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Deinon is a word that is difficult to translate without losing its original power.23 Heidegger’s unique translation, stemming from Hölderlin’s rendering, describes the human being as ‘the uncanniest of the uncanny’ (to deinotaton). This sense of ‘uncanny’ entails that human being necessarily finds itself cast out of its ‘home’. What Sophocles articulates in the choral ode is a description of the being that is constantly remaking the world, a being that has always already departed from the familiar (that is, from its nature). Heidegger suggests that we understand ‘the uncanny in the sense of that which is not at home­– n ­ ot homely in that which is homely’,24 and it is precisely this unhomely-homeliness that characterises the human beings named in the first line of the ode. And as Valerie Reed points out, as Heidegger’s discussion proceeds, it increasingly comes to focus on the (un)homely as the most essential meaning of both δεινός and unheimlich; indeed, to think of the uncanny only in terms of the powerful, extraordinary, and awe-inspiring, he says, misses the essence of uncanniness, which is precisely unhomeliness.25 In a paradoxical way, what if that which were most intrinsically unhomely, thus most remote from all that is homely, were that which in itself simultaneously preserved the most intimate belonging to the homely? What if this alone, of all things, could be unhomely in the proper sense?26 The Heidegger of Hölderlin’s Hymn argues that tragedy is a poetic form that points our attention to the site where the reversal of all things is possible, to the polis. In the context of Hölderlin’s river hymn ‘Der Ister’, the poet must speak from within the heart of Being in order to send people on their path. Heidegger’s renewed emphasis on the ground of humans pushing them along the path of history marks an attempt to overcome any remnants of self-grounded subjectivity that may still be present in his philosophy. Sophocles is no longer a profound example of a heroic resistance against the overwhelming semblance of being. Rather, he becomes the poet who profoundly gives voice to the opening of Being; the one who lets Being be by poetically depicting the human being in its uncanny essence. Heidegger thus destroys the dialectical element of tragedy that, according to Hegel, is essential to the tragic genre. Antigone’s transgressive action is no longer a bold resistance 128

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to consolidated notions of historical meaning but the embodiment of the uncanny essence of humans. By allowing her fateful calling to bury her brother, she answers to the call of Being. Death becomes the only way forward. Antigone, in Heidegger’s interpretation, could be homely only when dying, precisely in the process of dying itself. In Heidegger’s account of the polis in Hölderlin’s Hymn, the consequence of increasing emphasis on the activity of Being corresponds to a collapse of trust in the higher kind of techne he previously identified back into the techne of everydayness. In Introduction to Metaphysics, the polis marked the historical sphere of human being where history literally ‘turns’. In the polis (πόλις), creators are able to resist the ontological semblance of the apparent order, thereby bringing a new ­fitting-together of beings. For Heidegger, the uniqueness of the Greeks lies in their ability to devote their collective attention to the space where beings manifest themselves. In Hölderlin’s Hymn, instead, as Reed points out, Heidegger argues, not surprisingly, that the human relationship to the hearth is, like the relationship to the πόλις, necessarily uncanny. If the ‘swirl’ of the πόλις seems to draw beings ever closer to the homely, the δεινόν nature of human beings leads to their expulsion from that center and, at the same time, to their attempt to find their way back to it.27 In this interpretation there is no possibility of escaping the uncanny, unhomely way of being characteristic of Being. And in this sense Antigone is read as a heroine: not because she is the bearer of political resistance to the laws of the polis, but because she is a subject fully capable of highlighting the human situation­– t­he human condition, one might even say­– ­to always find herself driven inside and outside an uninhabitable house. And for this reason, the Greek polis becomes an ideal place of unveiling of this uncanny dimension of Being. At the end of this trajectory all creation is violence and struggle. There is no mode of creation without alienation, violence, negation or deceit. In this final stage of Heidegger’s use of Greek tragedy, tragic insight affirms being without transgression, as it no longer imagines or desires escape but can bear historical necessity joyously, actively allowing it to unfold. There is nothing Promethean about this kind of creation, and it has an implicit messianic structure. Here creation requires death and destruction in order for the new to emerge, generating an 129

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ever-expectant position of a creative age-to-come set to work by Being itself. Heidegger’s philosophy generates a circle so closed in on itself that even if a mode of action existed that could create peacefully or with novelty, it would appear only as a contradiction or an illusion. The only way forward is to resign from breaking out and to let Being break in, receiving ‘what is’ without predication or self-reference. The nostalgic structure of this waiting longs for a renewal of Greek spirit and knows the impossibility of bringing it about through creative techne.

Castoriadis’s praxis Castoriadis’s fundamental criticism of Heidegger is that after exposing the finite ground of human being that problematises all historical meaning (Being, abyss, Abgrund or chaos), he then presents it as Being. The intention of Castoriadis’s criticism is to argue that the ground of human being is not unified and cannot be represented as a totality. Castoriadis resists Heidegger’s ontology in order to provide a r­e-examination of the ancient problematic of nomos and physis, which he translates as ‘human law’ and ‘nature’.28 As Cooper points out, Castoriadis escapes Heidegger’s transcultural notion of the Greeks where we are united through our shared attention to being by arguing that the Greeks are present to us in the political rupture that we experience in our own times, one that finds its origins in Athens during the 5th century BC. Turning to the Greeks is thus a process of clarifying the ground of our own political order.29 For Castoriadis, therefore, tragedy is a place in which to see the making of a political process in which human actions are involved in a way that is profoundly different from the revealing of the Heideggerian Being. For this reason, Castoriadis takes up the classic conflict of tragedies, the one between nomos and physis, and considers it central to a reading of politics. For Castoriadis, the political dimension of tragedy lies first and foremost in its ontological grounding. What tragedy, not ‘discursively’ but through presentation, gives to all to see, is that Being is Chaos. Chaos is exhibited here, first, as the absence of order for man, the lack of positive correspondence between human intentions and actions, on one hand, and their result or outcome, on the other. More than that, 130

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tragedy shows not only that we are not masters of the consequences of our actions, but that we are not even masters of their meaning. Chaos is also presented as Chaos in man, that is as his hubris. And the ultimately prevailing order is, as in Anaximander, order through catastrophe­– ­‘meaningless’ order. From the universal experience of catastrophe stems the fundamental Einstellung of tragedy: universality and impartiality.30 Castoriadis found the basis for his account of nomos and physis in Marx, leading to his understanding of tragedy as a kind of presentation. In Castoriadis’s understanding, tragedy is not an original example of authentic praxis but a culturally specific institution. In his mind there is no definitive concept or essence of tragedy, only the history of tragedy as a dramatic art:31 people usually speak of ‘Greek tragedy’, but there is no such thing. There is only Athenian tragedy. Only in a city where the democratic process, the process of self-institution, reached its climax, only there could tragedy (as opposed to simple ‘theatre’) be created.32 Thus, it is clear that Castoriadis can only read the conflict between nomos and physis as a conflict that gives rise to self-created institutions, and he questions the process that leads to this creation. Even Castoriadis, then, uses Antigone as a model on which to prove his interpretation of the link between tragedy and politics. Against the classical distinction between human and divine laws, Castoriadis highlights how ‘for the Greeks to bury their dead is also a human law, as to defend one’s country is also divine law (Creon mentions this explicitly)’33 and how Antigone does not simply apply a divine law­– t­ hat of burial­– b ­ ut interprets it, claiming to have a greater duty towards a brother, who is irreplaceable, rather than a husband or a son. Castoriadis insists on the reason of Creon, who claims that no city can exist­– ­and therefore, no gods can be worshipped­– ­without nomoi; no city can tolerate treason and bearing arms against one’s own country in alliance with foreigners out of pure greed for power, as Polynices did. Creon’s own son, Aimon, clearly says that he cannot prove his father wrong (v. 685–6); he voices the play’s main idea when he begs Creon not to monos phronein, ‘not to be wise alone’.34 131

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This insistence on ‘not being wise alone’ is fundamental to understanding how political action is exposed to chaos, to the unpredictable, and cannot be based only on rationality, but needs to be shared, even if only as a safety net against the opening to failure. As Castoriadis explicitly points out, Antigone addresses itself to the problem of political action in terms which acquire their acute relevance in the democratic framework more than in any other. It exhibits the uncertainty pervading the field, it sketches the impurity of motives, it exposes the inconclusive character of the reasoning upon which we base our decisions. It shows that hubris has nothing to do with the transgression of definite norms, that it can take the form of the adamant will to apply the norms, disguise itself behind noble and worthy motivations, be they rational or pious. With its denunciation of the monos phronein, it formulates the fundamental maxim of democratic politics.35 The problem of understanding how self-institutions are created then becomes that of understanding how to ‘not be wise alone’, that is, how to construct collective dimensions that are habitable. In The German Ideology, Marx posited that it is clear that individuals certainly make one another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves. For Marx, consciousness is conscious being, a representation (Vorstellung) of actual life (the process by which humans produce the conditions for their experience) for each individual. However, as representation, consciousness is merely a shadow of actual life that Marx terms ‘ideology’, a type of consciousness where ‘men and their circumstances appear upside-down’.36 In other words, that which is derivative of actual life, such as class relations or monetary systems, presents itself as originative in ideology. Thus, to abandon the shadows of ideologies for life itself is to abandon representation (Vorstellung) for presentation (Darstellung). While Castoriadis accepted Marx’s split between ideology and ontology, he believed that Marx reified ‘actual life’, maintaining a determinate ground to social and historical life. Thus, Castoriadis shifted Marx’s basic ontology to argue that tragedy turns on the presentation of being as chaos, exposing the foundation that lies beneath the representations of social institutions as the groundlessness of creation. For Castoriadis, tragedy is an awareness of the absence of (complete) order for humankind, entailing that institutions and the world of nomos are 132

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radically open to question. Thus, for Castoriadis, tragic insight consists of an explicit self-awareness that humanity is not determined but self-created.37 Turning to the Greeks is not looking to a lost authenticity, but clarifies the distinction between nomos and physis in our own political imagination. What was unique about the Athenian polis in Castoriadis’s conception was that it promoted a critical self-examination of its own philosophical and political foundations.38 Rather than simply entrench a new and stable order, the emerging politics of democracy nourished itself with that same spirit of independence and radicalism that had propelled the democratic revolution in the first place. It captured the paradoxical nature of existence that had been suppressed under aristocracy: the simultaneous urge towards creation and destruction, expansion and retreat, inclusion and exclusion, or self-institution and self-limitation.39 It is a social creation in which criticism of ideas, opinions and shared values becomes an institution. For Castoriadis, this examination of the foundations of society is the work of philosophy, meaning that tragedy is a kind of philosophical praxis. While Heidegger argued that the polis allowed the Athenians to see the uncanny essence of human beings, Castoriadis suggested that as the Athenians created the polis, the polis created a kind of being that is aware of its creative abilities­– ­a new, anthropological type of social being. The polis revealed that the social world truly belongs to nomos, implying that social institutions only come into being because humans create them. As a cultural institution that questions the appearance of fixed order in human society, tragedy is a mode of criticism, calling into question both the order of the gods and the unfolding political structures of law and democracy that emerged consubstantially with tragedy in Athenian society.

Conclusion With the fundamental Hegelian reading in the background, the two different interpretations of tragedy and its meaning bring to light different interpretations of political action and history. If for Heidegger to turn to tragedy means to reveal the impossibility of action in favour of a manifestation of being, Castoriadis uses tragedy, on the contrary, to show the artificiality of human norms and thereby highlight the possibility of modifying them. 133

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In this sense also, the analogy between the debt crisis and tragedy can be analysed in different ways. On the one hand, in fact, the use of tragedy can amplify the lack of recognition between two worldviews that have been constructed as radically different (wasteful Greece and thrifty Germany), continuing to repeat the coincidence between debt and guilt. On the other hand, however, it is possible to interpret this understanding of tragedy in a way that is more similar to Castoriadis’s approach, underlining the artificiality of the rules regulating debt, which arise in a context in which chaos dominates, and which can be subverted. Without eliminating the tragic dimension, then, the relationship between the debt crisis and tragedy can be imagined in a number of new ways. What I have tried to highlight here are two different ways of understanding tragedy that can lead to two different readings of the debt concept. If we take up the analogy between the Greek crisis and tragedy that I mentioned at the beginning, it is clear that different interpretations of the tragic can lead to different interpretations of the crisis, of the debt and, potentially, of different solutions. If we interpret tragedy according to Heidegger, in fact, the Greek debt and the European reactions to it seem to derive from an inevitable destiny. By contrast, a position similar to that of Castoriadis makes it possible to think of debt as a structure of human relations, thereby distancing it from every perspective of salvation and of fallenness or of guilt and redemption. In both cases, however, tragedy shows how human action is characterised by impropriety, and how this is a fundamental and constitutive characteristic and not just an accident, a misfortune. This dimension of action and the material conditions that make it possible­– ­like the plurality and finiteness that constitute us­– ­make us powerful agents, although powerful beyond our control. It is an image of power that shifts the focus from the cause to the effects, from the sovereignty with which an action is taken to the consequences that it may have.40 From this perspective, efforts to achieve sovereign agency, whether through choice or through recognition, are themselves ethically and politically problematic misrecognitions­– n ­ ot misrecognitions of the identity of another, as that term usually implies, but failures to acknowledge key aspects of our own fundamental situation, including especially our own finitude in relation to the future. What emerges from the interpretations of the link between the tragic and political dimensions examined in the previous pages, and which overcomes the differences between them, is the need to rethink 134

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political action, not only imagining it (or not imagining it at all) as an action of a sovereign subject, as the result of a rational, controllable and solitary process. On the contrary, observing the political dimension from a tragic perspective allows us to highlight the unpredictable dimension of action41 and forces us, when we think back to the Greek crisis from which we started, to rethink the notion of responsibility and debt. Rethinking action by reading tragedy allows us to read the conditions of inequality and suffering as something other than the sum of individual faults for which specific individuals bear exclusive responsibility, the result of chains of actions that are always perfectly identifiable and explainable. Dividing creditors and debtors sharply, in this sense, would be nothing more than a way of reproducing those inequalities and those differences which that division seeks to avoid through restitution and repayment processes, without considering the unpredictability of political actions. And if this is right, then by preserving the fantasy of sovereign agency, all the political theory that reproduces the idea of a fully sovereign subject may inhibit acknowledgement, anagnorisis, thereby helping reproduce the structures of desire that sustain injustice. If, in fact, political action is always exposed to chaos, to the determination of Being, or if the claim to act according to an individual rationality can only lead to fractures and wounds, to reproduce chains of faults that need reparation can only lead us in a circle of tragic blindness, rendering us incapable of seeing other dimensions of politics, which go beyond reason and individuals. This does not mean not recognising the need for institutions, norms or recognition processes, but does mean being able to rethink the mechanisms with which those institutions, those norms and those structures of recognition respond to actions. Following Castoriadis, it is a question of using political imagination in the knowledge that institutions are self-­ established and open to contingency. Starting from a conception of the tragic that sees the failure of recognition as that which is at stake, one might think of debt not as a fault, but as one of the possible forms of openness to the other, of a link that can be re-signified by highlighting forms of reciprocity. In this sense, of course, the Greek crisis is a tragedy, but for this very reason it is capable of illuminating a different possible way of understanding and building practices of reciprocity, in which the action and subjectivity of those involved are intertwined in ways consistent with a democratic ethos.

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Notes  1. Putzfrauen is a radio play written in 2016 and broadcast on 10 April 2016 on Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk radio station.   2. Karin de Boer, ‘A Greek Tragedy? A Hegelian Perspective on Greece’s Sovereign Debt Crisis’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 9(1), 2013, pp. 358–75: 359.   3. For an economic analysis of the Greek debt see, among others: Jason Manopoulos, Greece’s Odious Debt: The Looting of the Hellenic Republic by the Euro, the Political Elite and the Investment Community (London: Anthem Press, 2011). Similar accounts are offered by Matthew Lynn in Bust: Greece, the Euro and the Sovereign Debt Crisis (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011) and by Michael Mitsopoulos and Theodore Pelagidis in Understanding the Crisis in Greece: From Boom to Bust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). While Lynn’s detailed reconstruction approaches the events resulting in Greece’s current crisis from the perspective of Europe as a whole, Mitsopoulos and Pelagidis focus on the internal weaknesses of Greece’s economic and political systems.   4. Elettra Stimilli, Debito e colpa (Rome: Ediesse, 2015).   5. Some influential works on the connection between tragedy and democracy are, among others, Robert J. Bonner, Aspects of Athenian Democracy (New York: Russell and Russell, 1933), Christian Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1988); J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); and more recently Mark Chou and Roland Bleiker, ‘The Symbiosis of Democracy and Tragedy: Lost Lessons from Ancient Greece’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 37(3), 2009, pp. 659–82. For a different understanding on the same topic, relevant for the issues of gender and grief, see Nicole Loraux, The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy, trans. Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).   6. Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (New York: Pantheon, 2019), p. 321, who significantly continues: What seems to be figured in tragedy is the genealogy of sovereign political power, in its doing and undoing. Tragedy is about a moment where the sovereign is a person, a person who has this role because of kinship, and the crimes against kinship perpetrated by the tragic hero culminate in the dissolution of political power. Oedipus is a disfiguration of the sovereign at the end of the play and might stand for the possible dissolution of sovereignty.  7. Patchen Markell, ‘Tragic Recognition: Action and Identity in Antigone and Aristotle’, Political Theory, 31(1), 2003, pp. 6–38: 7.   8. Nathalie Karagiannis, ‘The Tragic and the Political: A Parallel Reading of Kostas

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The Tragedy of Recognition Papaioannou and Cornelius Castoriadis’, Critical Horizons, 7(1), 2006, pp. 303–19.  9. Cornelius Castoriadis, Politics, Philosophy, Autonomy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 115. 10. María del Rosario Acosta López, ‘From Eumenides to Antigone: Developing Hegel’s Notion of Recognition’, responding to Axel Honneth, Philosophy Today, Supplement, 2009, pp. 190–200: 191. 11. Moreover, as Jacques Taminiaux points out, in Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, tragedy is construed to be, in one way or another, an introduction to metaphysics. However different their interpretation of the essence and the ground of Being might be­– ­Identity between freedom and necessity, Absolute Spirit, Will­– ­they have this in common: for all of them tragedy is the voice of Being.

Jacques Taminiaux, ‘Plato’s Legacy in Heidegger’s Two Readings of Antigone’, in Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore (eds), Heidegger and Plato: Toward Dialogue (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 22–41: 22. 12. G. W. F. Hegel, The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, its Place in Moral Philosophy, and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), pp. 104–5. 13. Ibid. 14. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), §463, p. 278. 15. Ibid., §469, p. 283. 16. Ibid., §468, p. 282. 17. Acosta López, ‘From Eumenides to Antigone’, p. 195. 18. Miguel Vatter, The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), p. 25. 19. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 170. 20. Ibid., p. 174. 21. Ibid., p. 146. 22. Ibid., p. 130. 23. As Valerie Reed points out: The term is a complex one, to be sure. Standard English translations of δεινός (the adjective of which το δεινόν and τα δεινά are the singular and plural nominal forms, respectively) in Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon include ‘terrible, fearful, in a milder sense awful; mighty, powerful; wondrous, marvellous, strange; able, clever, skilful’. To declare the human being to be the most δεινός being of all is, as Martha Nussbaum has said, ‘deeply ambiguous praise’. Nussbaum­– w ­ ho describes the δεινόν as something that is ‘somehow strange, out of place; its strangeness and its capacity to inspire awe are

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Carlotta Cossutta intimately connected’­– ­in fact also argues for the importance of this term to Antigone as a whole (although she approaches the tragedy with different questions in mind than those considered here), suggesting that ‘[w]e might see the play as an investigation of the δεινόν in all of its elusive many-sidedness’. And it is, in part, the importance of finding a single German word to capture this complexity that will lead Heidegger to translate the term as das Unheimliche, ‘the uncanny’, rendering the opening lines of the ode: ‘Vielfältig das Unheimliche, nichts doch / über den Menschen hinaus Unheimlicheres ragend sich regt’ [‘Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing / more uncanny looms or stirs beyond the human being’]. The choice is, he readily admits, unconventional, even in a certain sense ‘unrichtig’ [‘incorrect’]. Valerie Reed, ‘Bringing Antigone Home?’, Comparative Literature Studies, 45(3), 2008, pp. 316–40: 329. 24. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘the Ister’, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 71. 25. Reed, ‘Bringing Antigone Home?’, p. 330. 26. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn, p. 104. 27. Reed, ‘Bringing Antigone Home?’, p. 334. 28. Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments, trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 29. Andrew Cooper, ‘Being or Chaos? Heidegger and Castoriadis at the Crossroads’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 8(2), 2012, pp. 78–99: 98. 30. Castoriadis, Politics, Philosophy, Autonomy, p. 118. 31. His notion of tragedy as an institution builds significantly on the historical anthropology of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. See Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1972). 32. Castoriadis, Politics, Philosophy, Autonomy, p. 117. 33. Ibid., p. 119. Moreover, Klaas Tindemans points out that

Antigone uses the uncommon agrapta nomima, whereas the usual term of agraphoi nomoi indeed has its own political history. Nomoi refers clearly to an increasingly juridical notion of rules and customs, whereas agraphoi points to old rules that cannot be inscribed into a clearly political set of laws. At the same time, this unwritten character is seen as the umbilical cord of a different, archaic
tradition of ruling. And, finally, it functions as a last resort for undecidable
cases about which the written law keeps silent.

Klaas Tindemans, ‘Antigone and the Law: Legal Theory and the Ambiguities of Performance’, in S. E. Wilmer and Audrone Zukauskaite (eds), Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticisim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 185–93: 190.

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The Tragedy of Recognition 34. Ibid., p. 120. 35. Ibid., p. 120. 36. Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), p. 47. 37. Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, trans. H. Arnald (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 7. 38. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, in Cornelius Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 267– 89: 275. 39. See Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Athenian Democracy: False and True Questions’, in Pierre Leveque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Cleisthenes the Athenian: An Essay on the Representation of Space and Time in Greek Political Thought from the End of the Sixth Century to the Death of Plato (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), pp. 119–27. 40. See Markell, ‘Tragic Recognition’, pp. 6–38. 41. These reflections on the action and its unpredictable dimension are obviously indebted to the thought of Hannah Arendt.

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7 The Soul of Europe: Two Different Ways of Thinking Germany’s Debt to Greek Culture Simona Forti

1. At least from Romanticism onwards, German culture has been haunted by the feeling of a debt to Hellenic culture, a debt that is multifaceted and certainly not limited to philosophy; as if the primordial soul of Europe­– ­Greece­– ­should transmigrate into the new body of authentic contemporary Europe: Germany. In this chapter, I intend to investigate the ambiguity of this relationship, which in the twentieth century reached a perverse apex in a current of race-thinking that defines itself as ‘philosophical anthropology’, ‘Nazi and European’. On the one hand, it celebrates ancient Greece as the ‘Authentic Soul of Europe’, the place of origins and at the same time the climax of Western culture. On the other, while it conceives of Germany as the true heir of that Greek soul, it presents the German soil as its (the Greek soul’s) ultimate fulfilment, thus closing the horizon of debt. Thus Nazi philosophical anthropology ‘settles’ its debt to Greek thought, and particularly to Platonic theories, in a paroxysmal manner; that is, by referring to the virtue of a ‘soul of the German Volk’ that is more Greek then the Greek soul itself. As an example of an opposing stand­– ­although not without ambiguities itself­– I­ will refer to the works of Jan Patočka, who best represents the train of thought of some dissident thinkers of the East at the time. Although convinced that the supreme expression of contemporary European culture resided in German philosophy, Patočka opened the path towards a different idea of Europe, according to which not only Germany but the whole of Europe will never be concerned only about its own soul, community and destiny, because it has been and will always be ‘in a constitutive debt relationship’ with the ‘Greek beginning’. Through a comparison between these different ‘conceptual figures’ of soul, the radical divergence between two ways of thinking Europe will emerge. 140

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2. It is not broadly recognised that an important current of race theories does not proceed directly from Darwinism. It claims, instead, to be the result of a specific metaphysics, ‘a metaphysics of the form’, according to which race, people and soul (Rasse, Volk und Seele) must come to perfectly coincide. I am referring to authors such as Hans Günther and L. F. Clauss,1 very popular during pre-Nazi and Nazi times, who claimed to forge the ‘Aryan-Germanic’ soul in the fire of the Platonic idea of soul. For the Nazi anthropology, on the one hand, the Platonic idea of soul represents the summit of European history; on the other, it becomes the noble conceptual tool that allows Germany to eventually embody the promise of the truth of ancient Greece, saving, so to say, Greece from itself and from the threat of contamination and chaos that a disordered national soul has within itself. Let us bear in mind that Plato was the philosopher that Alfred Rosenberg and some other major Nazi intellectuals drew on, in addition to Nietzsche, in delineating their political, moral and racial world. Their interpretation originates from the idealisation of Greek culture that ran through German Romanticism and that developed its nationalistic vein through the ‘Platonism’ of Stefan George-Kreis.2 The thesis advanced in all of Günther’s works is the close correspondence between physical, mental and spiritual traits. The Nordic person is naturally distinguished by strong individuality, group loyalty, effectiveness and productivity, a carefully deliberated judgement, Führergeist (the spirit of a leader) and warrior strengths. Here we find the idea that the ancient Hellenic peoples represented the highest example of ‘Nordic character’, which was then corrupted by widespread interbreeding between peoples. The ‘Nordic character’ acquires all its vividness when compared and contrasted with the features of the Eastern European race: these peoples, starting with the Jews, of course, lack a deep and consistent creativity, since they are irresponsive to work and effort, affected only by an excitability that spurs them to transgression and falsehood. Plato serves as a warning to Germany, so that it will not repeat the mistakes that led to the decline of the great Greek civilisation. The German people must revive and even relive, in a ‘still more authentic’ form, the Greek beginning, the origin of true European culture; it must finally give shape to Platonic anthropology, politics and philosophy. Plato provides a valuable criterion by which to differentiate humanity according to degrees of value, starting from the Good and gradually moving downwards towards Evil. In Platon als Hüter des 141

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Lebens and Humanitas­– ­the two books by Günther that almost any good National Socialist would have owned3 –The Republic (especially book V, The Statesman) and The Laws offer the design for the perfect human specimen, the idea to be fulfilled that Germany will be able to bring into reality through spiritual purification. This process is essentially one of biological selection, the choice of a ‘transparently Nordic’ elite in which ‘the blond image of divinity’ may finally shine forth again. Beauty and Goodness partake of Truth when they become real and living. This is the kalokagathia (the Greek ideal of the inextricable connection between being good and being beautiful) that the Third Reich must advance from idea into reality, transmitting the ideal of individual perfection into a humanity made pure and perfect by the process of selection.4 Plato knew that virtue is a matter of race. Plato was concerned not with the life of the individual, but rather with the superior value of racial identity achieved through a process of purification that, in Günther’s terminology, is indistinguishable from a process of cleansing. Günther supports his claims with a long sequence of quotations playing on the two meanings of the German term Auslese (‘election’ and ‘purification’), both of which, to him, are synonyms of the Greek ekloge. The ethical and political goal of the politeia consists in the optimal management of the people’s life, making the best prosper and eliminating the worst. By emphasising the ‘monistic’ passages in The Republic, thereby attenuating the dualism between body and soul, Günther redefines the idea of the Good as the soul of the race’s fulfilment of its essence. According to Nazi anthropological monism, the body­– a­ t least the Aryan body­– ­is no longer meant to be transcended; rather, it becomes the external, phenomenal expression of an interiority or noumenon: the soul. Further, since Plato believes that the polis is ‘man written in capital letters’,5 the body to be preserved and no longer transcended is not the individual body, but the body of the genos: the body of the race, the expression of the eternal soul of the race. Thus, justice and health are no longer related only metaphorically: their relation becomes one of literal identity. The Good, which corresponds to the justice of the city, is the health of the genos. Kallipolis thus implies health, but health presupposes its identity with the Good­– a­ moral choice that expresses the right way to make a people just through selection. Günther’s monism is built on a selective mechanism that transforms selection into a true dialectical process of askesis (training), required to attain the One. Life is only realised if the soul of the genos­ 142

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– t­he race­– p ­ rospers and grows. Far from being a natural, biological, material given, the race as type must be pursued through selection, which enables the process of adaptation to the idea, to ‘True Life’, to the eternal life of the eternal soul, which, as a normative ideal, extends the movement of approximation and purification into an infinite period of time. The gaze of Plato: is always turned toward totality, toward the descendants of the future, toward the masses of young people who have yet to come into the world: thus Plato, unconcerned with individual cases, acquires the sort of imperturbability that we easily attribute to nature. Similar to nature: so accommodating to the ideal Type and so uncaring of the individual life.6 Measured against the ‘total psycho-physical ideal’, whatever appears to be bad must be eliminated. It becomes a moral duty. Putting people to death is thus inherent in the purification of the race and the health of the soul of the polis: a conception that adheres to Greek thought as it does to Roman and Germanic thought. It is the duty of the Nordic spirit, embodied ‘today’ by the German people, to eliminate as far as possible the contradictions between body and soul, race and people, people and nation, so as to finally bring into reality the Idea, the Type, the One and Eternal Soul.7 The only country that can recapture Plato’s heritage is Germany, because of a proximity of blood that is also a proximity of soul. Only Germany knows that the distinction between noble and ignoble is not a social, educational or class issue, but rather an ontological distinction­– ­an opposition between pure and impure.8 There is no escape from the soul of the race, because nobody can escape from his or her own body, which is, precisely, an expression of the type’s soul.9 The perfect correspondence between body, soul and type is dealt with more extensively in a work by a dear friend and colleague of Günther’s: Race and Soul: An Introduction to the Meaning of Corporeal Morphology.10 Written by the anthropologist Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, it was published for the first time in 1929, also met with great success and went through numerous reprints. Clauss’s study focuses on profiles of archetypal representatives. Whatever their social position, the Nordic types will show ‘the same rhythm in their features [. . .], that is to say, lines that follow a single morphology, one and the same style’. Nordic style expresses extroversion and a will to reach out to the world 143

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(Ausgriff ). Nordic peoples have slender, agile bodies, testifying to their predisposition to attack and predation.11 Nordic men are their own masters even when they serve others; they are men of action, vigorous and responsible. Their heads are oblong and ‘projected forward’; their bodies stand upright; everything in their physique reflects their way of living, their psyche, their soul. Actually, their propensity is not physical in itself: the origin of their attitude makes use of the physical to express itself, to make itself visible and realise itself in the world. All of the terms that Clauss uses refer to a hypothetical dynamic nature of the soul, which is expressed in the movement of the body. Every soul has its own form that materialises in a given body: ‘The form is the tracing of the lines of the soul.’ The body is not ‘a thing in itself’; it is a physical manifestation of the life of the soul. Take, for example, a tall stature: it is the best visible demonstration of a spiritual dimension. As in Rosenberg, body and soul are two faces of the same reality. In the fifth chapter of the book Clauss finally examines the ‘man of redemption’,12 meaning the Near Eastern race. The image we are asked to focus our attention on is that of a Kurdish Jew: a humble desert labourer who represents ‘his race at an elemental, primitive level’. In other words, he offers an archetype that is impossible to find in the Germany of the day, says Clauss, because German Jews have strayed from this primeval model by intellectualising themselves. But the truth of the Jewish soul reveals an ‘essential coarseness’. ‘The nose­– ­a large mass of flesh­– t­ he pendulous lips, the gaze­– u ­ nder heavy eyelids that almost cover the eyes­– e­ verything faces downward, showing a figure who will always be unable to be actively turned toward the world.’ Although the nature of this race appears to be its lack of a stable, fixed nature, one permanent trait can be established. This is Vergeistlichung, or spiritualisation, which is inimical to all instincts of vitality and safety and which tends to internalise everything and transform all physical drives into spiritual phenomena (umdeuten Geistiges). The spirit also lives in the Nordic type, but it does not absorb all other phenomena. For the genuine Nordic type, ‘the soul and body form a unity that must expand freely and with force in order to achieve a fully lived, fully affirmative life’.13 The Jew becomes in reality what throws into disorder the perfect correspondence between soul and type. The lines of his form express a soul’s tortuous work on itself and against itself: ‘There is nothing simple and straightforward about this type.’ Nothing about it is ever spontaneous or original. More than anything, Clauss seems to 144

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conclude, the Jew is never unambiguous­– ­in contrast to the Greek and, later, the Nordic man. He is double: internally divided between spirit and flesh, and divided from others because of his uncertain identity, which garners mistrust and resentment. Behind his spiritual and sacral aura is hidden a brute material that, no matter how much he tries, will ‘never become fully realized spirituality’. Clauss goes so far as to say that ‘they [the Jews] live for the sole purpose of hating and transforming their lives into a single-minded revenge against everything that lives’. All the values of their race, ‘which they go on about in the name of their law, transmute into their opposites’. This explains how this being, because of its inability to conform to its type, becomes the standard-bearer of nihilism: ‘Instead of sacralizing them [spiritual values], he desacralizes them; instead of going beyond the cult of the flesh, he makes it into an idol; instead of attaining spiritualization, he disseminates materialism.’14 Even when the Jew takes on the appearance of a German­– ­in stature, bearing, a fierce look, lightcoloured eyes, high forehead and so on­– ­what lies hidden and ready to pounce is the great nihilist: the true enemy of humanity. The morphological theory of racism is therefore forced to introduce an inconsistency into its metaphysics of form: for Rosenberg, as well as for the more ‘sober’ authors, Günther and Clauss, the Jewish race ranges in an often unconscious alternation between the being with the bodily expression of a low, vile and often evil soul and the being who is pure simulacrum, pure appearance that does not correspond to any idea and does not possess its own essence. We thus understand what prevented Germany, the sole heir of the Hellenic idea, from bringing the high values of the Greeks into reality, by embodying them. If the good needs to be restored, and if it consists in a sameness between essence and appearance, between soul and body, then the nihilistic semblance­– ­which undermines that sameness by making itself the bearer of eternal differing, as the herald of nothingness­– ­must be eliminated and expunged. This is how one goes about restoring the value of life, the value of the good­– ­the only good life that can properly be called ‘human’: when participation in the idea of a human life lived in accordance with justice will finally be possible, in which body and soul are united, and reason, passions and instincts are in close harmony. Hence, humanism must not be opposed, as some proponents of ‘provincial National Socialism’ believe, but rather its original meaning must be achieved in its true opposition to nihilism. 145

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Indeed, Humanitas is the title of a booklet published by Günther in 1937 that would become a sort of Bible or founding text for a theoretical circle in the SS that promoted a racially based United Europe. The text obsessively returns to the theme of German–Hellenic brotherhood, based on a common origin from Nordic stock located in Central Europe during the Neolithic age. The human greatness that developed ‘thanks to an uninterrupted process of selection’, starting from a few families in Greece and Rome, is, and will always remain, the ideal representative of the Nordic soul. It was Stoicism that began the process of decadence, by taking humanism in a direction that was hostile to the laws of life, by pursuing supposedly moral goals that are only suited to the isolated individual, indifferent to the health and safety of the genos’s soul.15 Authentic humanitas was gradually eroded, starting with Hellenism, by the process of de-Nordification (Entnordung) and degeneration. The Germanic–Hellenic concept is aristocratic: it demands the victory of man over everything in him that is lowly, over every physical and hedonistic weakness. It requires firmness, contempt for the utilitarian, moderation, decorum and discretion. To this inner dignity and nobility there corresponds the lofty, proud body of the Nordic type.16 Humanitas is thus the ideal of a Nordic purity that can always be improved; it is the Platonic idea that at times is transformed in Günther’s philosophy into Kant’s noumenon. What is important for the supporters of the Nordic good is that Nazism­– u ­ nlike the philos­ ophies of the past­– ­offers a historic opportunity for ‘embodying’ these absolutes, the idea or the noumenon, and phenomenolising them. Despite the brute simplifications, the logic of the discourse is stringent. ‘The idea of humanitas has an equivalent in the same IndoGermanic ideal of the noble man who in the Hellas, in a more strictly selective context, produced the two notions of eugeneia and kalokagathia.’17 This value was lost when it was transformed into an ideal of individual perfection. The Platonic correspondence between man, soul and polis became perverse and was debased into a fake humanistic ideal, which exalts the individual­– ­who is nothing on his own­– ­in his nullity, in his isolation and abstractness, in his unreality.18 It has fallen to the German people to bring the idea of humanitas into the German context, whose values, when examined closely­– ­like the original IndoGermanic ones­– ­are those of life itself, which seeks to assert itself and be strengthened. True humanitas ‘is a task to be performed, a model to be attained [. . .], an ideal of racial and marital selection, because only a concept that distinguishes between the best and the worst can preserve 146

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true ethics and ideals’.19 The lesson (Lektion) of humanism is selection (Selektion).20 ‘Learned’ Nazi literature pursued an intensive undertaking to redefine the human being that borrowed its idea of the good from the philosophical tradition, based partly on Plato’s works. The new concept of humanitas as it coincided with the bonum thus decreed that one part of humanity was incapable of raising itself up to partake of the idea, to reach reality. In a nutshell, not everyone is born human. True humanity­– ­the idea, the soul, the type, the good­– i­ s something one partakes of. It is not in the purview of anybody. One rejoins humanity through a course of purification, improvement and selection: the Platonic process of ascension towards the Idea. However, it is not a path that each individual soul can achieve in relation to the particular ‘earthly body’ that it has ended up in. It is not the ‘still Socratic’ Plato who appeals to the Nazis of Gestalt metaphysics. It is the Plato who seems to diminish the soul–body dualism almost to nothing and who is secretly united with an odd ‘loyalty to the land’, viewed by some as Nietzschean. Solidly connected, enclosed in a rigid and ineluctable system of correspondences, man is, in other words, the expression of the soul of the race, understood Platonically as ‘Man written in capital letters’. This is the Macroanthropos who will start the ascending path of the synagoghe, the process of approximation and of conforming to the idea, which is at the  same time always and already the return to the ‘Soul of the One’. This will take place through the selection of the material that the people are made from; through the purging of bodies that are the expression of an evil soul, or of bodies that only simulate the type: parasites that insinuate themselves into the limbs of the great body of the race, that do not belong to it and that try stealthily to annihilate it. And this is the point: Jews are by and large simulacra, that is to say, impure bodies, because they are deprived of a soul, or more precisely unable to partake of a soul of their own, that of the genos. The Jews are not only a different type, a different soul, of an inferior race: they are the anti-type par excellence. What drives these theories of race, therefore, is a push towards building up the construction of the positive image of a particular community through opposition to its contrary: countering rootedness, in the soil and in the blood, to uprootedness; historical and concrete being to abstract, ahistorical being; moral autonomy to the external observance of the laws; the personality of the type, solid in its correspondence with body, soul and spirit, to mere appearance concealing nothingness. 147

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In line with the metaphysics of form that we have mentioned (which may have found a home beyond the theoretical circle of the SS), if bodies are the mirror of the soul, and if true souls participate in a single great soul, in the process of approximation-purification, then bodies must become a single body.21 It does not suffice, then, to transform the body of the impure enemy or harmful parasite into a corpse, or to prove that this body (soma) has always already been a tomb (sema), the container of a soul without life, always already absent. For the body to finally, thoroughly partake of the soul of the race­– t­ he Nordic idea that continues to exert its mythical force­– ­it must reach the eternal Aryan body, the expression of an eternal soul. On the one hand, then, we have a corpse that finally shows itself to be precisely that, doing justice to its lack of essence, and its Seelenlos (soulless) and Gestaltlos (shapeless) being. On the other hand, we have a great, uncorrupted body, the expression of a pure soul, whose health and justice imply victory over all pathogenic and corruptive agents. 3. The identitarian logic, and perverse exclusionism, of this use of the idea of the soul is brought out and at the same time dismantled by an idea of the soul and of the European soul which, while moving also beyond Socrates–Plato, opens up to a radically different perspective. We refer to the example offered by the reflections of Jan Patočka. He also appealed to the legacy of ancient Greece to revitalise Europe, in this case post-war Europe. And Patočka also elects German philosophy as a means of effecting this transition. In a book entitled Plato and Europe (1973),22 Patočka also diagnosed the crisis of European culture as obliviousness to the notion of soul: the invention of the Greek philosophers. But far from being an entity or a substance, a conceptual dispositif aimed at tracing boundaries between those who are endowed with it and others who are not, the soul was something which one ‘had to take care of’. This is the true lesson of the Greeks, since Heraclitus. For the philosopher of Prague, the soul is nothing but an energy, an activity, a movement triggered by a specific way of being and perceiving. In this case, to give Europe its soul again, responding to the call of Europe through the very idea of soul does not imply any kind of identitarian and essentialistic presupposition. It figures an ethos, a praxis and not a permanent possession or status. Patočka’s notion of the soul not only does not at all respond to a metaphysical dualism, but can also be envisaged as a form of praxis and ethos that can become the very site of dissidence. Far from being 148

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the outcome of a normative set of rules imposed from above on a subject who becomes the true dissident after conforming to it, dissidence as conceived of by the Czech author is akin to Foucault’s concept of ‘counter-conduct’: a specific, ‘auto-normative’ ‘form of bios’.23 It is worth recalling that those who were involved in the Charter 77 movement, for which Patočka was the spokesman, formulated their political opposition and critique in philosophical terms, according to which domination, oppression and the Gulag of communist rule were not the outcome of some essence of evil power. They were rather the result of daily actions that reinforce each other and ensure the functioning of the regime. The aim of Charter 77 was first of all to tear down the image of a rock-like, anonymous state mechanism that left innocent subjects with the sole option of enduring it. In itself, power is neither guilty nor innocent. For this reason, the search for a ‘good power’­– ­constructed in order to counter an ‘evil power’­– ­is both naive and politically ineffective. The dissidents’ critique can thus be described as aimed at dismantling the myth of passive obedience and unmasking the subjective ‘desires’ of ‘depersonalisation’.24 This is one of the sources of Patočka’s criticisms, and later Havel’s,25 of the ideological justifications with which we allow the mark of conformism to be imprinted on us, in both the East and the West. If it is true that the political pathologies of the contemporary world are the result of a hyper-rationalism turned to nihilism, then appeal to universalistic, normative theories does not suffice to counteract its consequences. When subjectivity remains unchanged, all that happens is an overturning of those who monopolise political action, without changing the real structure of the exercise of power. A much more useful approach is to probe into the micro-physical dynamic of the collision between individuals­– ­their lifeworlds­– ­and the bureaucratic legality of the system claiming to be neutral and anonymous. As a matter of fact, all dissidents, regardless of their different origins (they ranged from rock fans to theologians), believed it was a duty to oppose the ‘institutional lie’ of the regime and to implement a series of actions and practices that responded to the so-called ‘life-in-the-truth’.26 According to Patočka, this conduct was part and parcel of the call to ‘take care of the Soul’.27 4. ‘To be pregnant,’ Patočka said at the end of the 1960s, ‘a philosophical thought, whatever it may be, should take a position on the front line.’28 Patočka’s life, of course, might have seemed an example of parrhesia. Arrested by the political police, Patočka was struck down by a brain 149

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haemorrhage following a series of gruelling interrogations, the last of which, on Sunday, 13 March 1977, lasted more than ten hours. While there can be no doubt about the political significance of his death, there nevertheless remains an unsolved question: what philosophical meaning can be attributed to it? Was it, perhaps, a sacrifice made in the name of the good which, according to many interpreters, defines the Christian horizon of the Prague thinker? Patočka’s language sometimes deceives. It seems often still in tune with a traditional humanist’s lexicon. This is the reason why many interpreters have numbered the philosopher amongst the supporters of a renewed, Christianised Platonism, of which the notion of ‘soul’ would be the main indicator. However, I am convinced that Patočka’s ‘asubjective phenomenology’, as he defines his own philosophy, responds to its heretical call through that very idea of soul, which carries no religious presuppositions, but rather a radical theory of the polemos.29 In Plato and Europe, Patočka viewed the true lesson of the Greeks, starting with Heraclitus, as an articulation of how care of the soul was in fact the only way in which mortals could become immortals. Immortality was not the true nature of the soul. Because far from being an entity or a substance, the soul was an energy, an activity, a movement, as said, a praxis triggered by a specific way of being in the world. In this sense, for Patočka the soul is that which enables one to overcome the simple dualism of the mythical world, the dualism between the everyday and the divine, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Here, then, in the text on Plato, the distinction emerges which recurs in all of his works: the difference between the ‘forces of the day’ and the ‘forces of the night’. The conflict between these forces­– w ­ hich constantly recurs in different forms in every human life­– ­is the movement of existence:30 a disturbance which shakes us from the guarantees of the forces of the day­– ­from institutions to intimate feelings­– ­and exposes us to the truth that reveals the precariousness of our life. Philosophy and thinking, then, mean ‘caring for the soul’; and ‘the care for the soul’ is nothing but the possibility that opens the way, for humans, to go beyond both: their daily strategies of surviving and their natural horror of death; beyond habits and customs and beyond the natural fear which mythology talks about. Pre-Socratic philosophy­– ­chiefly Heraclitus’s logos­ – t­hus discovered the ‘care for the soul’ to be that opportunity exclusive to man to question himself and reality. The Platonic doctrine brought this exercise to the apex of its expressive potential. To be sure, in spite of Patočka’s language, Plato and Europe already 150

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expresses one heretical intent. This is the intention to revive the notion of a soul not only as a guard against relativism, but also as a barrier to any substantialisation of thought, either Christian or rationalistic. In the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, published in 1975, the awareness of duality and polemos acquires all the weight of ethical and political demands. In this work, the crisis of European rationalism fully shows itself in the figure of the wars of the twentieth century.31 In reality, Patočka states, we are not simply facing the advent of the ‘kingdom of the night’. The wars for the domination and partitioning of Europe were aimed at making the continent a giant complex of energy at the service of the ‘kingdom of the day’. It was therefore ‘the forces of the day’, those forces that claim to work for progress and to seek peace, ‘which for four years sent millions of humans into hellfire’.32 What have the bloody wars of the twentieth century and the ideologies that inspired them taught us? What ‘secret’ of the time is Patočka revealing to us? It is this: that a distorted rapport between life and death reached the apex of perversion in the twentieth century. For the individual, ‘the forces of the day’, life, is everything. It is the absolute value. Paradoxically, from the standpoint of the ‘forces of the day’, for that power and strength that accumulate life and energy, the life of the individual does not exist.33 Both of them act as if death did not exist. So Patočka’s ultimate message is unequivocal: death was not the century’s great undisputed absolute, but life was, that worship of life that monopolises and captures both individuals and communities. The ‘powers of the day’ thereby lose their pristine innocence, and become the carriers of a power that moves downwards towards a final event of death. Not unlike Foucault, who interrogated biopolitics, a politics which brought about death in the name of life, Patočka accused absolutisation and maximisation of life of being a powerful instrument of death. If looked at from an ontological perspective, Patočka appears to conclude not only that such forces have haunted the twentieth century, but also that it was only in the twentieth century that they managed so completely to bring about the separation between death and life, in such a way as to make life into the complete opposite of death. Exactly in this dualistic separation consists the end of the care of the soul. In the pages of the Heretical Essays, the reciprocal otherness of life and death is one of the most powerfully questioned issues. So, just for having denied its nocturnal face, its inextricable link with death, life is submerged by violence and death. Denied, death returns, but in the guise of devastation. By closing one’s eyes to death, by never ending 151

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with the ‘preparations for life’, as Musil says, death takes possession of life. An appeal to offer our civilisation a faint possibility of change, of leaving behind the hegemony of force, comes to light in the lines of all the Heretical Essays. The call to take care of the soul­– t­he only praxis that could possibly save Europe­– ­to make a return to a different relationship between life and death, is mediated today, in contrast to ancient philosophy, by the words of those who, shaken by the experience of war, have been able to grasp its deeper meaning. So, then, what is Patočka suggesting to us? That there are two ways in which one can relate life and death, ways that are radically incompatible with each other. The first is that assumed by all the wars of the twentieth century and which continues to act not only in post-totalitarian regimes, but also under the surface of Western liberal democracies. To this way of thinking, death, the dead, are no more than the necessary tribute paid for the affirmation of life, the price paid for the stabilisation of its power. It is the cost demanded by the forces of the day to which in reality we all feel bound. Such forces are in the final analysis constituted and empowered by our ties, our needs, by everything that roots life together in a system of safeguards and protections. The government of the forces of the day objectivises our lives by promising to satisfy daily needs: in a word, by promising a way of life without any threat. By the eyes of those who have been at the front, however, the truth of a different relationship between life and death has been glimpsed. Only in this sense can one say that the sacrifice of the victims had a value: it has served to liberate us from the objectifying power of the forces of the day. Granting an ‘absolute meaning’ to the power of those who have died does not mean either sanctifying their ‘sacrifice’ or believing that it is the ultimate ethical conduct. Rather, it means recognising that those deaths cannot and should not be justified in the name of anything else. ‘Dying for’ socialism and communism, ‘dying for’ the race or for democracy, are only masks exploited by life to increase its power. Now, if death is instead accepted as constitutive of our individual lives, even the ‘sense of life’ can be rethought. Closer to Heraclitus than to Plato or Christianity, Patočka says that, as for those who had experienced the front line, there is another way of linking life and death together. First of all, those people know that death is not the nothingness that the forces of death claim it to be; the nothingness that they constantly use to enslave us while at the same time denying its relevance. Only by recognising the inevitability of the 152

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night can we overthrow, or at least distance ourselves from, the absolutist sense of the day conferred by the logic of power; only in this way do we manage to deconstruct all the narratives and calculations that maximise life. This is an experience that can be had only individually, but makes no sense if it cannot be shared and communicated. On it rests the ‘solidarity of the shaken’.34 It is the solidarity among those who, having had all their assumptions shaken, can no longer view them as obvious. It is a solidarity that transcends all forms of belonging, a solidarity that cannot be identified with any class, profession, nationality or culture. It is the community of those who have been able to understand what is at stake in life and death and therefore in history, and are able to understand that history is this conflict between naked life, shackled by fear, and ‘life at the peak’, which sees clearly that life and peace have an end. Only the individual capable of understanding this and capable of change, by a sort of metanoia, is a ‘spiritual man’. Only the men who had the experience of having been shaken can conceive of a new Soul of Europe: vulnerable but open to contingency. I do not believe, then, that Derrida, in The Gift of Death,35 is right: in Patočka, self-sacrifice and caring for the soul do not have primarily a religious meaning. When Patočka uses those words, he does not speak of a sense of an otherworldly salvation, of an eschatological end. At stake, that is true, is a metanoia, but an unusual one which has no other place and time than those of the attitude of the self to itself and the Self to other Selves. This is a Self who ‘lives in truth’ for the simple reason that he or she knows that the care for death cannot be dissociated from the care for life. And if a way out of the collapse of European history can be conceived by recalling the past, it is not a metaphysical or theological past, but rather the particular philosophical past of the ‘care for the soul’. Epimeleia, care of the soul, has been from the beginning the word that characterised Patočka’s ideas as a negative Platonism. The theme of epimeleia in fact stems from a series of writings from the mid-1950s posthumously published in a text entitled Negative Platonism.36 These essays contain incontestable evidence of Patočka’s attempts to distance himself, from the beginning, from every attempt to create an integral humanism as a possible escape from nihilism. More clearly than in the book devoted to Plato and Europe, and in a less dramatic way than in the Heretical Essays, in these pages it is already beyond doubt that the soul should not be understood in a metaphysical sense. ‘Care for the soul’ refers to the ‘movement of distancing ourselves from what we are immersed in’. As he would repeat in the 153

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1973 book, the soul is the place of ‘philosophising’, if by philosophy we mean the action of a life that allows itself to put itself into question and returns to itself. From Socrates on, philosophy was therefore not seen as a guide for a soul journeying towards the eternal truth. Rather it is the praxis of interrogation, that interrogation that triggers the process of thought. Such a perspective has no other objective than to avoid the identification of life with one of the simple opinions provided by its context. Patočka’s Socrates is therefore the heretic who shakes the foundations of Greek society; he is the merciless critic of all those who believe they have the truth and of those who presume to be able to deduce absolute rules from the doxa. In other words, ‘negative Platonism’ is something completely different from the metaphysical Platonism on which Western philosophy has built its structure. Patočka’s approach certainly owes a debt to Nietzsche and Heidegger, but while they rejected the Platonic works in toto, Patočka instead­– ­not unlike Arendt and Foucault­– ­saves and enhances the dialogues from which it is possible to extract an autonomous ‘Socratic moment’. The Heideggerian ‘step back from metaphysics’ cannot, according to Patočka, get over Socrates. Socratic philosophy is a ‘negative philosophy’, not only because it refuses to assume any positive content of truth, but also because it appropriates negativity as a condition of being able to be free; that is, being capable of a distance, of a shift, of overcoming of all types of objectivisation and identification. The greatness of Socrates, in short, was his ability to maintain the transcendence of the given reality without ever reaching a point that would put an end to actual transcending. This, according to Patočka, is Socratic freedom. In contrast to positive Platonism, which believes in the possibility of a path of elevation up to the idea, negative Platonism never claims to go beyond concrete, historical experience. It simply retains its awareness of its transience. Patočka compares Socratic freedom to the notion of chorismos, used earlier by Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics to try to explain the separation between idea and reality. Now, Patočka’s chorismos does refer to a separation, but not of two realms coordinated or bound by a third that comes to embrace them. Chorismos is the separation itself, or, better, it denotes the very movement of separation.37 We find the same idea of transcendence and movement at the centre of the Heretical Essays. There is an undeniable continuity between these early writings on Socrates and the essays of the mid-1970s, in which the figure of the 154

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dissenting intellectual takes form. ‘The spiritual man’, Patočka wrote in those years, ‘is a man who exposes himself to the negative.’38 It is he who lives without roots. It is he who has the sense of wholeness, a totality that is not anything objective, but the device of ‘a dis-objectivising power’. For this reason, it cannot be translated into a doctrine of the truth or into a doctrine of the good. But it is not, for this reason, arbitrary. Our capacity for truth depends on our ability to distance ourselves, to free ourselves from the clutches of objects and objectivity. The call to truth is the call to freedom.39 Patočka’s Socrates, viewed through the lens of Heidegger, intertwines freedom and truth; truth that means, as with Heidegger, ‘leaving things be’, but also and principally indicates a movement of life that is constituted as an ethos: that ethical freedom that in the first instance allows us to challenge the given norm and to distance ourselves from the naivety of passed-on convictions. The soul­– ­we may say, using other terms­– ­is a process of subjectivation, not too far from the care of the self as parrhesia in Foucault’s later works. It is a practice of continuous questioning by the subject of themselves and their conditions, of them having become what they are and of why reality is configured in its present form. While Patočka did not abandon the term ‘soul’, a heavily connoted term, he used it mainly in the Greek sense of a specific skill or ability. This is, in other words, the sign that stands for the action of transcendence,40 in the sense of being continuous differing. Becoming an ethical being is therefore to succeed in perceiving a difference, the difference between life as it is presented to us and life in its commonality with death, and being able to make this tension into the ‘non-ecstatic’ and ‘non-orgiastic’ antidote to the power of the everyday. The significance of the words that have been used by metaphysics receives a radical deconstruction in Patočka’s work. The soul­– a­ t least as I see it­– ­is not a substance separate from the body, neither is it something that survives the body and that can aspire to eternal life. It is that which in the subject constantly offers resistance. It is the movement that distances itself from the power of things, from the authority of politics, from the blackmail of violence, from the pressure of the desire of life. In a word, it is the power to resist another power.41 To repeat once more and conclude, the negative Platonism embraced by Patočka certainly revives the notion of a soul as a guard against nihilism, and also as a barrier to any substantialisation, either religious or national. And if a way out of the collapse of European history can be conceived by recalling the past, it is not a past that has to be 155

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accomplished and finally come to truth, but rather a past recalling the awareness of infinite polemos.

Notes This chapter draws on my book New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).  1. See H. K. F Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Munich: Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung, 1922). English version: The Racial Elements of European History, trans. G. C. Wheeler (Lonon: Methuen, 1927). See also H. K. F. Günther, Rassenkunde Europas (Munich: Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung, 1928) and his Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes (Munich: Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung, 1929). When the National Socialist movement was on the threshold of seizing power, Günther’s work was already integral to the ideology of the movement. Also very famous and important was L. Clauss, in particular: Rasse und Seele: eine Einführung in den Sinn der leiblichen Gestalt (Munich: Lehmanns, 1933).   2. For example, the weighty tome by Kurt Hildebrandt, Platon: Der Kampf des Geistes um die Macht (Berlin: Bondi, 1933). There were many writings between 1932 and 1934 that combined Plato’s philosophy with the National Socialist movement. I will limit myself to citing the ones most widely read and circulated: J. Bannes, Hitler und Platon (Berlin and Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1933) and Hitlers Kampf und Platons Staat (Berlin and Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1933); A. Gabler, Platon und der Führer (Berlin and Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1934). In Italy, this tradition was mainly followed by Julius Evola, Sintesi di dottrina della razza (Milan: Hoepli, 1938) and Il mito del sangue (Milan: Hoepli, 1942). Evola also viewed the body as a phenomenalisation of the soul­– ­of the soul of the race, not the individual soul. For Evola, too, the supreme value for each ethnic group was the perfect form of its bodily appearance and its ‘spiritual’ form, which had to correspond to each other. For an overview on other aspects of the relation of Nazism to antiquity, see J. Chapoutot, Le National-socialisme et l’Antiquité (Paris: PUF, 2008).   3. See H. K. F. Günther, Platon als Hüter des Lebens (Munich: Lehmanns, 1928), pp. 3–29. All quotes are translated from the German. See also H. K. F. Günther, Humanitas (Munich: Lehmanns, 1937). These two books also went through numerous reprints. Darwin is barely mentioned, and the modern auctoritates for these texts­– ­Vacher de Lapouge, Ammon, Galton and Gobineau­– ­are adapted to a peculiar ‘eugenic’ need that is presented as being entirely derived from Plato.  4. Günther, Platon, pp. 3–29.  5. All uses of ‘man’ or the masculine pronoun here and below, when signifying humankind in general, reflect the biased language of the original sources under discussion or their common translations and are reproduced here out of fidelity to the sources without reflecting any gender biases of the author.   6. Ibid., p. 70 (italics added).   7. Ibid., p. 88.

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The Soul of Europe   8. Ibid., p. 40ff.   9. Ibid., p. 56. 10. Ibid., p. 55ff. All quotations from Clauss are translated from the German. 11. Ibid., pp. 70–80. 12. The fifth chapter is called ‘Der Erlösungsmensch: Die Vorderasiatische Rasse’: see Clauss, Rasse und Seele, pp. 146–71. 13. Ibid., p. 170. 14. Ibid., pp. 171 and 180. The Jewish aspiration for spirit never sets its sights on high. The reason is ‘because in this type, the spirit is not something that flows freely from the inside outwards, so as to conceive the world as something to be adapted and bent to their law’, as befits the Nordic type. For the Middle Eastern type, the spirit comes from the outside, and must follow a schema predetermined from on high. This is also what their religion commands. If ‘in the beginning was the Word’, and the word is the letter, then the letter is something immovable and unchangeable: ‘Man’s duty is therefore to ingest the book, to be penetrated by its commandments to the point that they permeate, immobilise, and congeal everything internal.’ The Jew is the doctor of the Law, the executor of dogma. The Spirit understood as dogma, then, is nothing but life petrified, immobilised, and ‘frozen’. A dead word. In short, a spirit hostile to life. 15. Günther, Humanitas, pp. 10ff. All citations from this work are translated from the Italian. 16. Ibid., p. 24. 17. Ibid., p. 22. 18. Ibid., p. 30. 19. Ibid., p. 30. 20. Ibid., p. 30. 21. See p. 18 of the same work. But even if bodies, so conceived, are simply copies of the larger natural world, inside of which life degrades from its maximum power to total powerlessness, as the theorists of biological racism put forward, the objective does not change. 22. J. Patočka, Plato and Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1973] 2002); on Socrates see the series of lectures given by Patočka in Prague in 1947. Italian translation: Socrate: lezioni di filosofia antica, ed. G. Girgenti (Milan: Rusconi, 1999). 23. On the relation between Patočka and dissident thinkers in general, as well as Foucault, see Forti, New Demons, pp. 267–305. 24. On this see V. Belohradsky, Il mondo della vita: un problema politico. L’eredità europea nel dissenso e in Charta ’77 (Milan: Jaca Book, 1981), pp. 20ff., and more recently F. Tava, The Risk of Freedom: Ethics, Phenomenology and Politics in Jan Patočka (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015). 25. In particular, V. Havel, The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. J. Keane (London: Hutchison, 1985). 26. Not only in Prague, but also in Brno and Bratislava, everyone knew of the illegal meetings being held. Certain European intellectuals, mostly French­– ­Derrida

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Simona Forti and Vernant to mention the best known­– ­supported the clandestine groups with funding and ‘banned’ books, and very often also by participating personally in the discussions. It was in this context that the names of authors thought to be ‘decisive’ for political action emerged. Amongst them, in fact, most important of all, was Foucault. 27. It’s not surprising then that Foucault, already in the 1977–8 course on Security, Territory, Population trying to express the meaning of the so-called ‘counter-conducts’, mentions the relevance of what is taking place in Central-Eastern Europe as an historical example of practices of ‘counter-conducts’. Although disliking the term, for him still too tied to a rigid political schema, Foucault reads the ‘dissidence’ in the East as practices of disobedience to a sort of biopolitical pastoral power. ‘We could speak,’ he says, of the pastoralization of power in the Soviet Union. Certainly, there is bureaucratization of the Party. There is also pastoralization of the Party, and dissidence, the political struggles that we put together under the name of dissidence, certainly have an essential, fundamental dimension that is refusal of this form of being conducted. [. . .] The whole pastoral practice of salvation is challenged.

As if, Foucault continues, the ‘dissidents’, with their daily way of conducting themselves, of living and thinking their own lives, were refusing a pastoral system of obedience, its truth, and its endless examination that continually tells men and women what they are in the core of themselves, healthy or sick, mad or not mad, right or wrong. If not a true paradigm, the circularity taking place between the historical experience of dissent, the choices made by dissidents for an ethos of truth, and the involvement of philosophy provided Foucault with an example of the implementation of the deconstruction of a substantialised notion of power. It was for him the possibility of observing how a subject can constitute itself as a force field of ethical and political resistance and as a locus of resistance to the pressures of a system of domination. Now, in what direction should we rethink the relation among subject, power and truth? See M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France (1977–1978) (New York: Picador, 2007), pp. 267–8. 28. See ‘Entretien avec Jan Patočka’ (1967), in Etienne Tassin and Marc Richir (eds), Jan Patočka: philosophie, phénoménologie, politique (Grenoble: Millon, 1992), pp. 7–36: 31. 29. On the notion of ‘asubjective phenomenology’ see P. Ricoeur, Préface aux Essais hérétiques (1981), in Lectures 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1998), pp. 74–83; R. Barbaras, Le mouvement de l’existence: études sur la phénoménologie de Jan Patočka (Chatou: Éditions de la Transparence, 2007); R. Barbaras, ‘Phenomenology and Henology,’ in Ivan Chvatìk and Erika Abrams (eds), Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), pp. 99–110; D. Jervolino, ‘Reading Patočka, in Search for a Philosophy of Translation’, in Chvatìk and Abrams, Jan Patočka, pp. 57–70;

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The Soul of Europe R. Barbaras, L’ouverture du monde: lecture de Jan Patočka (Chatou: Éditions de la Transparence, 2011). 30. See J. Patočka, Le monde naturel et le mouvement de l’existence humaine (Dordrecht: Kluwer, [1946] 1989); and J. Patočka, ‘The Movement of Human Existence’ (1968), in Erazim Kohák (ed.), Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 274–84. 31. J. Patočka, ‘Does History Have a Meaning?’, in J. Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), pp. 53–78. 32. J. Patočka, ‘Wars of the Twentieth Century and Twentieth Century as War’, in Patočka, Heretical Essays, pp. 119–38. We also read: How do the day, life, peace govern all individuals, their bodies and soul? By means of death; by threatening life. From the perspective of the day life is, for all individuals, everything, the highest value that exists for them. For the forces of the day, conversely, death does not exists, they function as if there was no death, or, as noted, they plan death impersonally and statistically, as if it were merely a reassignment of roles. Thus in the will to war, day and life rule with the help of death . . . Those who cannot break free of the rule of peace, of the day, of life in a mode that excludes death and closes its eyes before it, can never free themselves of war. (ibid., p. 129) 33. Ibid., p. 125ff. 34. See ibid., p. 123ff. 35. J. Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), in which he analyses Patočka’s essay ‘Is Technological Civilization Decadent, and Why’, in Patočka, Heretical Essays, pp. 95–118. 36. Cf. J. Patočka, ‘Negativní platonismus’, in Sebrané spisy, vol. 1: Péče o duši I (Prague: Oikoymenh, 1996), pp. 303–36; English translation: ‘Negative Platonism: Reflections Concerning the Rise, the Scope, and the Demise of Metaphysics­– ­and Whether Philosophy Can Survive It’, in Kohák, Jan Patočka, pp. 175–206. 37. Patočka, ‘Negative Platonism’, p. 193. There we also read: Chorismos meant originally a sapereteness without a second object realm. It’s a gap that does not separate two realms coordinated or linked by something third that would embrace them both and so would serve as the foundation of both their coordination and their separation. Chorismos is a sapareteness, a distinctness an sich. 38. J. Patočka, ‘L’homme spirituel et l’intellectuel’ (1975), in J. Patočka, Liberté et sacrifice: écrits politiques (Grenoble: J. Millon, 1990), pp. 243–57: 246. 39. Ibid., p. 246. 40. On the soul as movement, see also P. Ricoeur, Préface aux Essais hérétiques, in P. Ricoeur, Lectures 1: autour du politique (Paris: Seuil, [1981] 1999), pp. 74–83. 41. It might be worth following the traces of Patočka’s appeals to ‘philosophy,’ as a

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Simona Forti constant practice of ‘care for the soul’ into the political works written by many of the intellectuals who gravitated around Charter 77. Moreover, the convergences among these ‘dissident’ texts, Patočka’s Socratism and the ethos of truth-telling as put forward by Foucault find one more piece of evidence. Dissident thought can be seen as posing to political reality the question of true life, of parrhesia. Allow me to mention Forti, New Demons, pp. 273ff.

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PART III

THE LOCAL, THE REGIONAL AND THE GLOBAL ‘SOUTH’

8 The ‘South’ as a Moving Target: Europe’s Debt to the Former Colonies Peter Wagner

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he island of Ireland is not normally conceived as being located south of the neighbouring larger island called Great Britain, or as south of Europe, but we want to suggest here that it could be. We have earlier already argued that the ‘South’ in the term ‘Global South’ is not a geographical but rather a socio-historical category.1 In what follows we want to deepen this reasoning and make it more concrete by applying it to Europe and its plural South. Towards that end, the current dispute over the withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (in what follows: UK) from the European Union (EU) is briefly discussed in light of the difficulties of separating political entities in our time of high global interconnectedness, focusing on the crucial issue of the relation between Great Britain and the island of Ireland. More specifically, the UK–EU dispute is compared to the separation of Algeria from France and the exit of South Africa from the British Commonwealth, thus opening the path towards pluralising the notion of the ‘South’. Such pluralisation allows the investigation of historically formed asymmetric relations between societies beyond the formal concept of colonialism, bearing in mind that the relation between Great Britain and Ireland could be formally called colonial at best with regard to few aspects and for limited historical ­periods. Against this background, subsequently, the transformation of the relation between EU countries and their former colonies from the 1970s onwards is analysed in terms of attempts to re-regulate the relation between Europe and its South after decolonisation. These attempts aim at drawing clear lines of separation, but they keep failing because the South reveals itself as a moving target, impossible to confine to a restricted space. Thus, in conclusion, current Northward migration and climate change are discussed in terms 163

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of global social and ecological injustice, the significance of which Europe cannot deny, as hard as it may try.

No exit On 23 June 2016, a referendum about leaving the EU was held in the UK, and the option ‘leave’ received a small majority of votes over ‘remain’. On 29 March 2017, the then UK prime minister Theresa May invoked article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union (TEU), thus starting the process of withdrawal. According to this article, withdrawal happens automatically if after two years of invoking the article no withdrawal agreement between the EU and the leaving member state has been reached. When 29 March 2019 was approaching, however, the UK Parliament had indeed failed to approve the agreement negotiated between its prime minister and the EU. The May government fell; the successor government led by Boris Johnson had the EU–UK agreement amended, but did not dare to have it scrutinised by parliament. National elections were called, which on 12 December 2019 provided the exit-minded Tory government with a strong majority in the UK Parliament. As a consequence, the UK exited from the EU on 31 January 2020, but the negotiations between the EU and the UK about their future relation will return to those issues under dispute that the current EU–UK agreement has only temporarily addressed. No conclusion to this process is in sight. The obstacle, namely, was not, as has sometimes been argued, that the prior UK parliament had a majority in favour of remaining in the EU, in contrast to the UK citizenry. After all, the two main parties, which together formed a formidable majority, had both promised to honour the result of the referendum. Neither does the problem reside in the considerable variety of opinion, both within and between the two main parties, with regard to the detail of exiting from the EU. This diversity would have been overcome had a compelling proposal for exiting been elaborated. But nor is the existing withdrawal agreement deficient because the EU negotiators outmanoeuvred those of the UK, as one also sometimes hears. There was indeed a difference between the negotiators, but it rather resided in the uneven awareness of the significance of another international treaty to which the UK is a signatory, the provisions of which needed to be observed in the withdrawal agreement with the EU. This other treaty is the Belfast Agreement, also called the Good Friday Agreement, signed on 10 April 1998 between the 164

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governments of the UK and the Republic of Ireland (in what follows, unless the reference is unclear: Ireland) as well as most political parties active in Northern Ireland.2 As we shall see, the UK turned out to be so entangled with its own geo-history that there was no reasonable way out of those entanglements, no way of erasing time and space,3 as much as the governing English nationalists tried.

Europe’s unexpected South As is well known, the Good Friday Agreement was meant to end the civil-war-like situation and provide the conditions for peace and prosperity in Northern Ireland, and it has been remarkably successful in doing so, despite considerable recent friction between the political parties in Northern Ireland. Until the current attempt at withdrawal of the UK from the EU, there was much less awareness of the fact that this agreement tied the UK and Ireland very closely together and, importantly, did so within the framework of the EU. The Agreement established a rudimentary all-Ireland executive, the North South Ministerial Council, with the purpose of ‘develop[ing] consultation, co-operation and action within the island of Ireland­– ­including through implementation on an all-island and cross-border basis’ (Multi-Party Agreement, strand two, article 1). Doing so, the Council is explicitly held ‘to consider the European Union dimension of relevant matters, including the implementation of EU policies and programmes and proposals under consideration in the EU framework’ (art. 17). The preamble of the British–Irish Agreement describes the UK and Ireland ‘as friendly neighbours and as partners in the European Union’. These clauses place the relation between the UK and Ireland firmly in a supra-national framework: the one developed by the EU after the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. Importantly, the Maastricht Treaty is a treaty between democratic states of equal legal standing. The other significant aspect of the Good Friday Agreement is that it formally ends the remainder of domination in the British–Irish relation, whether one wants to call it colonial or otherwise. The Agreement affirms the right to collective self-determination, a concept of international law used since the end of the Second World War for populations under colonial oppression,4 and it specifies the conditions under which the will of the peoples of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland can lead to the exit of Northern Ireland from the UK and the creation of a single state on the island of Ireland. The agreement also explicitly leads to the 165

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repeal of the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, the last formal-legal attempt by the UK to assert a kind of colonial domination over the whole of Ireland. As the term ‘Global South’ is today sometimes used as a synonym for the former European dependent territories, we can say, despite the geographical inadequacy, that the Good Friday Agreement was the attempt by the UK to finally recast or re-regulate its relations to the South. Unlike other EU member states, then, the UK had a land border with its South. It is for this reason that the question of the UK’s South had remained on the political agenda, whereas the EU otherwise had long assumed that it had already sufficiently regulated its relation to the South. As we shall see in what follows, though, this was only apparently the case, and the sudden centrality of the Irish question in the attempted withdrawal of the UK from the EU can help us to see that one’s relation to the South does not let itself be easily regulated at all.

Denied recognition In principle, the particularity of UK–Ireland relations was recognised at the beginning of the withdrawal negotiations. The UK government published a White Paper in February 2017, in which it underlined the unique relation between the UK and Ireland due to their ‘shared history, culture and geography’ and specifically mentioned the Belfast Agreement and the fact that Ireland is the ‘only country with which the UK shares a land border’.5 Indeed, the White Paper has a whole section (section 4) and an appendix on UK–Ireland relations that underline the need to keep the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland absolutely open for frictionless movements of people, goods and services and capital. But this programmatic statement turned out to have little relation to government practices during the negotiation period. The UK government was patently unaware of the fact that its White Paper made commitments that were incompatible with each other, and this mostly because of the Irish question. The paper praises the close and friendly ties between the UK and Ireland but does not acknowledge that much of this achievement is due to their common membership of the EU and the financial-economic as well as politico-legal support that the EU provides. Maybe most importantly, the document underlines the importance of frictionless trade across the border, failing to recognise that this achievement is due to common membership in a customs 166

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union or single market and will disappear when leaving them. In general, the paper does not contemplate complications that will arise from the to-be-created situation that one of the countries is a member of the EU, and thus applies EU border regulations, and the other one is not.6 When the significance of the Irish border issue had become clear, indeed had become the main stumbling block for any agreement in the UK Parliament about withdrawing from the EU, the UK government showed itself to be completely unprepared. One former cabinet minister, Dominic Raab, who had even been temporarily in charge of negotiations with the EU, revealed he had never read the – ­thirty-five-page­ – ­Good Friday Agreement to the maintenance of which his government was committed.7 The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Karen Bradley, admitted in September 2018 that she had not understood that Northern Irish politics was characterised by the opposition between unionists, favouring the status quo, and nationalists, aspiring to join the Republic of Ireland, rather than the one between Conservative and Labour parties, as in England,8 showing complete ignorance of the Northern Irish situation.9 Apparently exasperated by the emergence of an unsolvable problem, a well-known presenter for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), John Humphrys, suggested to the Irish Minister of State for European Affairs, Helen McEntee, that Ireland should leave the EU together with the UK, conveniently ignoring the fact that there is such a huge majority in the Irish population in favour of EU membership that the question does not arise at all.10 This combination of neglect, ignorance and stubbornness shows that British politics was not capable of recognising that Ireland indeed was a state of equal standing and not a (neo-)colony that could be forced to obey British will and power. Once the border issue had become unmistakable, furthermore, the expectation was that the EU would need to solve it by giving in to British demands. However, the EU did treat Ireland as one of its member states, of indeed equal standing with all others,11 whose interests needed to be defended against the presumptions of an exiting state. In turn, British politics was widely in disbelief that the former colony’s interests should rank as highly as those of a self-styled global power. As laudable as it is, one should also observe that the assumption of the equality of Ireland with all other member states is a form of misrecognition as well. Given the fervour of current English nationalism, it cannot be entirely ruled out that the UK will leave EU legal ­arrangements without agreeing on close future ties. This outcome would lead to the 167

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re-establishment of border controls between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The Irish and the UK economy are closely intertwined and, despite its considerable economic growth within the EU framework over the past decades, Ireland would have difficulties reorienting its economic relations quickly after customs controls and duties had been reintroduced in trade with the UK. At that moment, the de facto dependence of Ireland on the UK would become visible again.

Ireland as a metaphor Paraphrasing the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia,12 we may consider Ireland as a metaphor for the European South. While acknowledging a great variety of colonial configurations, early British–Irish relations can be seen as a version of settler colonialism since the Tudor conquest.13 Ireland witnessed military conquest followed by the arrival of a considerable settler population, mostly in the North. Subsequently, the residents were administratively divided according to religion, including differentiated civic and political rights, providing privileges for the settler population. Economic development was steered by the needs of the colonising state. In response, movements for independence arose, which were partly successful after the First World War, but left the Northern counties within what came to be called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. To start exploring the broader issues at stake, we may briefly look at two situations with some similar features. Algeria was colonised by France from 1830 onwards, with large numbers of Europeans settling on Algerian territory, the settlement often­– s­ uch as after the FrancoPrussian War of 1870/1 when Prussia annexed Alsace-Lorraine­– b ­ eing organised by the French metropolitan administration. In contrast to other French colonies, large parts of Algeria were integrated into the metropolitan state, and were thus not formally colonies. The anti-colonial liberation struggles led to an outright war which was concluded with Algerian independence in 1962. Many descendants of the French settlers returned to France. The joint effect of independence and return meant, apparently, that the emerging Europe had established a clear frontier to its (former) South. Let us assume, counterfactually, that France had retained those parts of Algeria in which the settlers were concentrated and/or that Algeria as a whole had become a member of the European Economic Community (EEC), to which it had belonged before by virtue of being part of France. In the former case, the EEC 168

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would have created a potentially conflictive land border with its South; in the latter case, it would have had an open border with it.14 Mutatis mutandis, similar reflections can be triggered by looking at South Africa. Parts of the territory which is today the Republic of South Africa were settled by Dutch and English settlers, leading by the nineteenth century to the creation of the Cape Colony and Natal, as part of the British Commonwealth, and the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (also known as Transvaal Republic), as independent states dominated by descendants of Dutch settlers. From 1910, the Union of South Africa included these states as well as territories formerly governed by native African societies. The Union was part of the British Commonwealth and applied differentiated legal regimes to what came to be called its different ‘population groups’, formalised and entrenched as ‘apartheid’ (‘separateness’) after 1948. After decolonisation had been achieved in wide regions of Africa and resistance to the segregation regime had increased, the British prime minister Harold Macmillan called on the South African government in 1960 to listen to the ‘wind of change’ and end oppression. The South African regime responded by reinforcing segregation and leaving the Commonwealth. Counterfactually, again, let us assume that the regime had listened to Macmillan. It might have separated the territories with significant ‘white’ population from the Union and requested their entry into the UK and the Netherlands respectively. Or it might have ended apartheid and requested letting the entire Union of South Africa join the UK, and later the EEC. As with Algeria, the former move would have created a land border between Northern and Southern societies, while the latter would have removed any such border between them. Counterfactual historiography has its limits, but it can serve to open one’s eyes to alternative trajectories­– ­and make one reflect on why those were not embarked upon. One question that one might pose is why something that happened in Ireland did not happen in Algeria or South Africa. The answer to this question would need to be found by exploring the sense in which, after all, Ireland is not Europe’s South in the same way that Algeria and South Africa are. We shall come back to this exploration at the end. Another question­– t­ he one that is here of central concern­– ­asks about the change in the relation between Europe and the South over time.

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‘The white man’s burden’: colonial responsibility The core concept of colonialism is closely connected to some notion of moral-political responsibility of the colonisers for the colonised, all exploitation and oppression notwithstanding. This core concept, as we understand it here, refers to situations in which a state external to the colonised territory sets the rules for, and governs, social life on the territory. Those situations are distinct from what we may call ‘pre-colonial’ situations, in which control of the territory is not possible­– ­because of limited administrative and military reach­– o ­r not intended­– ­because the maintenance of trading posts and trading relations is preferred (or, in some cases, both). These situations can be called pre-colonial because they were often, not always, followed by full colonisation. And ‘core’ colonial situations are also distinct from ‘post-colonial’ situations, a term that indeed refers to the situation after the end of colonial rule, after decolonisation. Some authors prefer to speak about ‘neo-colonial’ situations, indicating the continued asymmetry in the relation between the former coloniser and the former colony. However, one should not prematurely assume continuity; this transformation will indeed be further explored in what follows. It is a characteristic of ‘core’ colonialism only that responsibility for the colonised is expressed. There is a large variety of ways in which the distinction between the colonisers and the colonised was formulated within the colonising societies, reaching in its main line­– ­by now widely analysed­– ­from historically conditioned superiority to principled supremacy. The former view saw the colonised as, in principle, equal human beings whose capacities had for historical reasons not been as developed as those of the colonisers. Both technical and moral education were the means with which the colonisers could accomplish their ‘civilisational mission’. Until it was accomplished, though, the colonised could not be awarded equal rights with the colonisers. The latter view, in turn, was based on the assumption of an insurmountable difference grounded in physical, ‘racial’ characteristics. Very broadly, one can say that the historicising view of difference was more widely held in the early history of core colonialism, in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, whereas the principled view became more widely diffused in the late nineteenth century, due to entrenchment of colonial rule in the era of competitive imperialism and to the scientification of the study of human beings, including the rise of ‘scientific racism’. Thus, harder borders were drawn at the same time as more rigid, formal 170

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categories of persons were created. A third, less prominent view was premised on what one would today call cultural difference. In contrast to scientific racism, this view located difference not in biology but in culture, but in contrast to the historicising view, it saw this difference as persistent and not likely to wither away through civilising processes. It was applied mostly to ‘Old World’ societies of Asia and North Africa, many of which indeed were not, or only briefly, subject to ‘core’ colonialism. All views have in common that they assume responsibility of the colonisers for the colonised. This is most obvious in the historicising view, because there is a mission to be accomplished, but supremacism also carries responsibility because of the purportedly inferior capacities of the colonised. And even though the cultural-difference perspective lends itself least to interference, it still places the task of rule-setting on the colonisers, although only by virtue of the fact that they indeed rule. Rudyard Kipling’s famous expression ‘the white man’s burden’ captures the many meanings of this responsibility through the variety of ways the poem has been interpreted.

Avoiding responsibility: decolonisation and the idea of ‘separate development’ The EEC, predecessor of the EU, was founded by the Treaty of Rome in 1957. It historically overlapped only briefly with ‘core’ colonialism, given that most European colonies became independent states from the late 1950s on, with the decolonisation of the former Portuguese colonies after the Carnation Revolution in 1974 mostly seen as marking the end point, except for some small territories. The Treaty of Rome itself already included a section on the association of the EEC with the extra-European countries and territories that have ‘special relations’ with EEC member states; in other words, the colonies and former colonies of France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy.15 This meant that the EEC had to administer the relation of Europe to its South after decolonisation; it did so by moving from colonial rule to ‘development policy’. During the immediate aftermath of decolonisation, the EEC acknowledged its historical responsibility towards the former colonies and made this debt and duty the underlying rationale for its development policy. In the process of becoming an autonomous actor on its own with significant discretionary powers delegated to it by its member states, the EEC enabled itself to assume responsibility. Within the same 171

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move, as Nathalie Karagiannis shows, it maintained a hierarchical relation to the societies for whose further development it declared itself responsible, and thus left them in a situation of heteronomy. Already during the 1980s, however, the policy orientation changed, and the responsibility of each society for its own fate under conditions of market exchange was increasingly emphasised. As decolonised societies became autonomous, so the discourse goes, they assumed responsibility for themselves. The relation between the EEC and the ACP countries was now one of shared responsibility, and historical ties were de-emphasised. What was given greater emphasis, in turn, was efficiency, not least in the light of the failure of many decolonised societies to ‘develop’ as expected. The acceleration of European integration after the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 was an attempt to finally shed the moral debt to the former colonies entirely. With this move, the EU had become a fully autonomous actor on the global scene, and its ambition was to act globally and without special ties stemming from the past.16 The process of ‘European integration’, as it was called both in public debate and in scholarly analyses, appeared to have reached a high point with the Maastricht Treaty. Europe was to both become more fully integrated internally and fortify its external boundaries. Or, in the new terminology that was arising after the end of the Cold War, Europe was now a core part of the Global North and had fully separated from the Global South, to which it had earlier been tied by the colonial legacy.17 During the period briefly sketched here, from the 1960s to the 1990s, the globe had ever more become a political setting of independent states of formally equal standing, domestically mostly committed to equal rights for its citizens or subjects.18 Among the exceptions from this constellation, the case of South Africa is of particular concern here.19 The governing ‘white’ minority of South Africa had developed the doctrine and practice of ‘apartheid’, for which the notion of ‘separate development’ was offered as a justification. The doctrine was, on the one hand, based on the assumption that the South African ‘population groups’ were so different from each other that they could not live well and peacefully together. On the other hand, its promoters were conscious of the global politico-intellectual context of the early post-­Second World War period, in which the right to self-­ determination and to ‘development’ as a social right were dominant. Thus, ‘separation’ was connected with ‘development’, and the creation of ‘homelands’ was to be the means to implement the doctrine. There is no need to underline here what is obvious, namely that this doctrine 172

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was masking domination and oppression. The point here is to show that it included a justification that, without further historical, political and socio-economic context being given, is not entirely without plausibility. At a closer look, namely, the EU elaborated a ‘development policy’ that one can qualify as ‘global apartheid’. It started out from existing bonds between the populations of European countries and those of the former colonies, accepting the responsibility of the dominating groups for the dominated ones. But it proceeded by increasingly severing these bonds and claiming autonomy for each side. ACP countries should certainly develop, but they should do so within their own bounds and without making claims on Europe. The only task that had remained for Europe was to benevolently oversee the process in which the former colonies became independent and responsible for themselves. To give just one telling example from an EU report of 1997: After decades of blaming the colonial heritage of the Northern domination of an unjust international economic system for most of their problems, developing countries now increasingly accept that development depends primarily on the policies they adopt and implement. [. . .] While elites and pressure groups in many developing countries still resist necessary changes, they are no longer protected by a benevolent superpower and face increasing pressures from both their own populations and the international community to face up to their responsibilities.20 One could imagine a current president of a South Africa, in which counterfactually apartheid had persisted, addressing this remark today to the ‘elites and pressure groups’ of a ‘homeland’ that failed to develop under the conditions that had benevolently been provided for separate development. As the segregation laws of apartheid South Africa did, the travel restrictions of the EU try to make sure that the citizens of the ACP states mostly remain confined to the domestic territories.

The return of the South Thus, the history of EU development policy is a prolonged attempt at re-regulating Europe’s relation to its South after the latter had liberated itself from colonial domination; and it is an attempt that after a few decades of adjustments concluded with the aim of separating the South 173

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from Europe cleanly within a new global context of equal states. The new relations were meant to look towards future exchanges being motivated by cooperation and mutual benefit rather than being determined by responsibilities for a past that had supposedly been overcome. As it turned out, however, the South resists being regulated. It re-enters Europe in a variety of unexpected and barely controllable ways. First, during the ‘thirty glorious years’ of the early post-Second World War period, in particular, Europe had deliberately attracted workers from the South to do the work native Europeans no longer wanted to do. The assumptions under which this was done varied: that these workers would assimilate; that they would live side by side with native Europeans under conditions of cultural plurality and mutual toleration; or that they would return at some point. While some of this has come true, clearly not all of it has. In a currently more adverse economic situation, many descendants of immigrants live under conditions of considerable disadvantage and social exclusion, while at the same time xenophobic acts and attitudes are increasingly directed at them. Second, building on earlier measures of regional and agricultural policy, the acceleration of European integration with the Maastricht Treaty had meant to also lead towards some equalisation of living and working conditions across Europe. Convergence of economic development was explicitly seen as both condition and consequence of the introduction of a common currency across many EU member states. From the moment of the world-financial crisis of 2008 at the latest, however, it became clear that half-hearted economic-financial integration had led to divergence of economic development. As a consequence, a South–North divide has emerged in the EU.21 Third, deteriorating living conditions due to warfare, oppression and climate change in Africa and the Middle East have led to increasing numbers of people seeking refuge in Europe. Europe is committed to the right to asylum, but many of these refugees are not considered asylum seekers in legal terms and often they do not even reach Europe to make their case. The EU has stepped up border controls to limit the entry of Southerners into its territory.22 Fourth, climate change has led also in Europe to an increased frequency of adverse weather conditions, such as floods, droughts and heatwaves. Industrialisation started out in the moderate climates of the North, which arguably favoured the historical emergence of a rational conduct of life, to use Max Weber’s terms. But the long-term conse174

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quences of industrialisation have brought a ‘Southern’ climate to the North, along with the damages it can inflict on human lives and the economy. Thus, in all these respects the South returns to the North immediately after­– ­and, arguably, to a large extent, because­– t­he North had tried to erect and firm up its boundary with the South. We may see in this response an indicator of general limits of governmentality, especially when the subjects to be controlled are not within reach, for different reasons in the three ‘human’ cases and in the ‘natural’ case too. They escape from control; they move out of the places to which they had been assigned. There has been a version of critical theory and, in some form, there still is, that, having arrived at such a point, would just rejoice in the undomesticability of the subjects, in this case the Southern subjects, and leave it at that. However, this does not seem to be the appropriate end point of analysis. One may well see the return of the South as acts of resistance. But if so, then these acts of resistance as such are at best individually or collectively successful, while worsening conditions in the South that is left behind. Many Southern societies have less resources to cope with the consequences of climate change, to which, in turn, they are often more exposed than the Northern societies, all the while being increasingly integrated into a global economy in which they regularly occupy the worst position in the value chains across all sectors: increased resource extraction with high environmental damage; lowskill, low-wage industrial production; displacement of care work; and treatment of industrial and consumer waste. Thus, these observations on the return of the South should be made amenable to reflection in terms of a social and political philosophy combined with historical sociology. One may want to say that the South that returns to Europe claims that there still is a debt to be settled, or in other words, that the attempt of the Europeans to shed their debt and their responsibility is being rejected by their creditors. In two main areas, the spectre of the debt that Europe incurred during the era of its world domination keeps haunting the present. This is, on the one side, the ‘ecological debt’, a concept used since the 1980s to capture European use of resources and environmental qualities in other world regions without compensation of any kind.23 On the other side, somewhat less explicitly, European debt is addressed in debates about ‘global social justice’, often implying both that current global social inequalities are a consequence of past European exploitation and that they cannot be 175

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‘evened out’ because of the closure of European borders to migration. These are thematically rather separate debates, and furthermore they are also debates in which the connection between their public and their scholarly components is often tenuous. A tentative attempt to connect them in both of these senses will be made in what follows.24

A sociology of historical injustice The current global constellation can largely be analysed as the outcome of processes of specification and subsequent transformations of the modern commitment to autonomy, in the sense of both personal self-realisation and collective self-determination. Over the past quarter of a millennium, new normative premises have been created and have been interpreted in ways that were specific to the groups that promoted them and the historical contexts in which they were promoted. As a result, new forms of domination, inequalities and asymmetries have emerged, the consequences of which still shape the present, in some respects even more so than at earlier times.25 The two most urgent problems of our time, global social inequality and climate change, can be traced to these asymmetries. Current global social inequality is to a high degree the consequence of colonisation or, better, of European global domination since the end of the eighteenth century, and the global ecological question is a consequence of the trajectory of industrialisation on which European societies embarked in the early nineteenth century. These are the social transformations that have been characterised by sociologists as leading to the emergence of ‘modern societies’. Thus, it appears permissible to tentatively employ the concepts of sociology for the analysis of these historically created asymmetries. We can start with Émile Durkheim’s notion of organic solidarity, a supposedly characteristic feature of modern societies. Sociologising the theorems of classical political economy, Durkheim suggests that increasing specialisation and division of social labour make all members of society mutually dependent on each other. Organic solidarity is the consequence of this interdependence. The sociology of the late twentieth century rightly criticised the assumption of internal coherence of societies, which were implicitly seen by Durkheim as national societies, and pointed instead to interaction chains that can have variable extension. Some of these interaction chains reach global extension at the latest with the emergence of the ‘new international division of labour’ from the 1970s onwards.26 If that is so, then the question of 176

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global organic solidarity arises, which could or should be the expression of this new level of interdependence. One does not have to assume the existence of a coherent ‘global society’ to feel compelled to critically analyse the significance of extended social relations and to inquire into the extent to which the current structure of such relations is an expression of historical injustice. In other words, the question is about the extent to which it is plausible to characterise current global social inequality and the global consequences of climate change as forms of historical injustice, and to assign responsibility for addressing these issues on that basis.

Global social justice Building on Durkheim’s thought, Talcott Parsons further developed the sociology of ‘modern societies’ after the Second World War. A key criterion for distinguishing those societies from traditional societies was, for him, the determination of social status by achievement and not by ascription. Social research has been able to show subsequently that there are mechanisms for the reproduction of social hierarchies also in presumably modern societies and that the merit principle finds, in many respects, only very limited application. However, such research was mostly restricted to hierarchies within existing societies. Still today, social inequality is mostly measured within societies, and subsequently societies are compared on the basis of those measures, of which the Gini index is the most popular. True, the global social transformations of the past few decades have generated a discussion about global social justice.27 But this discussion is severely limited by the assumption that states are politically responsible only to their own citizens. The parallel debate about universal human rights does extend responsibility beyond state boundaries, such as in the ‘responsibility to protect’, but in the same move it loses sight of the principle of social justice.28 Thus, the possible existence of politically significant social bonds beyond state boundaries is being denied. At this point of the reasoning, Branko Milanovic’s empirical findings on global social inequality need to be brought in.29 By looking at levels of income and social inequality from a global perspective, Milanovic can show that a person’s place of residence at birth is the factor that most determines current social status and chances for social mobility. But one’s place of residence at birth cannot be chosen by oneself. Thus, assuming we had a global society, social position in that society would 177

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be determined by ascription and not by achievement; this society would therefore not be modern in Parsons’s sense. The population of the Global North­– ­at least most of it­– ­is a kind of global aristocracy whose privileges are obtained by birth.30 The passports issued by formally equal independent states have become the means to ascribe to their citizens a rank in the global social hierarchy. Furthermore, it follows that a member of a poor society has significantly greater chances for upward social mobility by migrating to a richer society than by effort and achievement within her or his society of birth.31

Ecological debt In global perspective, the ecological question can be discussed in parallel with the social question. The term ‘ecological debt’ arose within ecological social movements during the 1980s and has also been used in global environmental debates such as the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. In more academic debates, attempts have been made to calculate this debt in economic-financial terms and to assign responsibility in moral-political terms. In both respects, the argument is about a historical asymmetry that has consequences in the present and requires urgent redress.32 The underlying question is whether a debt exists in the sense that the measures to be taken today should take account of the past injustice. In contrast to the social question (and also to other aspects of the ecological question), formal global cooperation has indeed emerged with regard to climate change. The International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) enters continuously new findings about climate change into an action-oriented scholarly debate; the Paris Agreement of 2015 translates these insights into a strategy for action in which almost all states on the globe participate. These two institutions are, all intense and justified criticism notwithstanding, an impressive achievement of global cooperation33­– ­and this not least because the question of historical injustice and ecological debt has been thematised there from the beginning and has always again been placed in the centre of debate by the ‘victims’ and ‘creditors’. Furthermore, this thematisation has even found a normative-institutional expression, namely the ‘principle of common but differentiated responsibilities’ (CBDR). The principle expresses, on the one hand, the insight that there is a problem common to all states on the planet and to be addressed in cooperation, and accepts, on the other hand, that the 178

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degree of responsibility varies between states. The explicit formulation of this principle goes back to the Rio Summit, but its underlying ideas can be traced to the discussions about a new international order since the 1970s.34 The crux of the principle is obviously the justification for, and measure of, ‘differentiation’. There is no unanimous or even clear view on the matter. The Good Friday Agreement has been characterised as being based on constructive ambiguity, an interpretative openness that allowed diverging parties to sign up to the document without resolving their disagreements. With hindsight, this ambiguity has been both praised and criticised, and it may now come to a crucial test after the withdrawal of the UK from the EU. Something similar may be the case with the CBDR, and the outcome for global environmental policy-making is still rather open. The practical conclusion is that the principle needs to be interpreted when applied in specific treaties, such as the Paris Agreement. In theoretical debate, two very different lines of interpretation can be found. On the one side, the differentiation of responsibility is to be pursued in recognition of past injustice, that is, some historically stretched version of the ‘polluter pays’ principle of responsibility for environmental damage. On the other side, though, the need for differentiation is seen to reside in the current capacity of states for dealing with environmental problems. If this latter view became the predominant interpretation, then any ecological debt would be cancelled by the debtors. The past would be erased, and all that still counts is the present. Given that this struggle over interpretation is still open, the example of the CBDR principle at least shows that it is possible to deal with even large-scale and long-lasting debt and injustice by means of procedural and institutional rules. But it also shows that such rules will always tend to be ambivalent and highly open to different interpretations. There will be a persistent scarcity of criteria that can be set beforehand and whose mode of application is sufficiently clear. The assessment of damage and responsibility will always be more problematic for longterm and collective debt than for individual debt and injustice close to the present time.35 In the preceding sections, however, we have tried to show that past debts of this larger kind can be addressed through forms of sociological evidence, both of a historical and of an empirical-­ statistical kind, which permit the identification of such debt and some assessment of its degree and the responsibility for it. A more detailed analysis of the global social and ecological question with a view to the 179

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differentiated assignment of damage and responsibility would be the next step to take.

Debt, democracy and the South Such an analysis, if done well, could contribute considerably to enlightening and also guiding the global debate. Given the openness to interpretation, however, it will never arrive at saying in detail which political measures, both efficient and normatively viable, are the ones that need to be taken. Thus, such decisions will always need to be taken in deliberation between states and considering the opinion formation within states, at least in the democratic ones, as indeed happens with regard to the Paris Agreement. The recent experience in this regard is not encouraging. European states have fallen behind in fulfilling their commitments, and the US under President Trump even announced its withdrawal from the Agreement. Thus, a word needs to be added on how democracies can or cannot honour their debts, in particular to the South.36 The societies of the Global North are­– ­by and large37­– ­those societies that have, in global comparison, longer and more intensive experiences with inclusive-egalitarian democracy and, at the same time, those that are largely the beneficiaries of, and those responsible for, the historical social and ecological injustice that was briefly sketched above. Even though the benefits from these injustices have mostly been accrued within pre- or un-democratic contexts, it is also true that the citizens of these societies keep benefiting from the asymmetries that were historically created. Today, democracy in the North is very largely practised as the discussion-poor aggregation of individual preferences. Furthermore, these ‘preferences’, at the moment of voting, are ever more formed by technologically mediated exchanges of views between strangers, activated and mobilised by powerful interests and enabled by profit-­ seeking technological oligopolies. Under these conditions, it is much more likely that voters will tend to defend what they perceive as their short-term interests than that they will arrive at the insight that they might thus be trying to sustain their privileged position while at the same time undermining the very sustainability of their current way of life; or in other words, that they would be trying to cancel their debts by ruining both their creditors and themselves, engaged in a struggle that may end with ‘the common ruin of the contending classes’, as Marx and Engels had already surmised in 1848. 180

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Let us come briefly back to the plural European South of today: the descendants of immigrant workers in the urban peripheries; the refugees coming across the Mediterranean Sea and the south-eastern land borders of the EU; the countries of the European South; and the ‘Southern’ instability of weather conditions. These are all elements of a ‘new South’ that is emerging and coming close because past debts have not been honoured. When we look at how difficult it is for the UK to deal with that particular part of its South, Ireland, that has always been there and always been close, we might get an inkling of an understanding of what the task ahead is when we think in global terms.38 The Global South will not go away and Europeans cannot separate themselves from it. It has also always been there, and it has also always been close, only Europeans preferred not to notice and not to acknowledge it. But they will have to. The more Europe tries to gain distance from the South, the closer it comes. The climate catastrophe, the refugee catastrophe, and the immediately political catastrophe that results from national-authoritarian denialism are already there. It will require problem-oriented and participative processes of political communication instead of the aggregation of votes without reasonable discussion to fend them off again. Current European democracy is a core part of the problem, but a more communicative European democracy would also be the solution.

Notes Research for this chapter has additionally benefited from funding by the Russian Science Foundation (RSF) for the project ‘Varieties of Modernity in the Current Global Constellation: The Role of the BRICS Countries and the Global South’ (grant no. 18-18-00236), based at Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg. Work on the final version of this chapter was done during a stay as Guest Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities ‘Futures of Sustainability’ at the University of Hamburg. I would like to thank Gerard Delanty for comments on an earlier version.   1. Peter Wagner, ‘Finding One’s Way in Global Social Space’, in Peter Wagner (ed.), The moral Mappings of South and North, Annual of European and Global Studies, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017); for further elaboration, see also the chapter by Nygård in this volume.   2. The Good Friday Agreement is composed of two separate agreements, the British– Irish Agreement between the governments of the UK and the Republic of Ireland, and the Multi-Party Agreement between these governments and most Northern Irish political parties. The former provides the general framework, and the latter sets out the politico-administrative details.

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Peter Wagner   3. See Peter Wagner, Progress: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).   4. Peter Wagner, ‘Towards a Conceptual History of the Present: Freedom, Rights, and Democracy in the Current Catalan Conflict’, Social Science Information, 58(4), 2018, pp. 588–615.   5. The British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, over which the UK claims sovereign control, also has a land border with the EU, namely with Spain. But it is dealt with elsewhere in the White Paper.   6. Arguably, membership in the EU of both the UK and Ireland, which dates from 1973, was a precondition for successfully addressing the conflict in Northern Ireland and indeed paved the way for the Good Friday Agreement (for similar reflections, see Nicolas Wright, ‘Brexit and Ireland: Collateral Damage?’, in Benjamin Martill and Uta Staiger (eds), Brexit and Beyond: Rethinking the Futures of Europe (London: UCL Press, 2018), pp. 105–13). The last highly violent eruption of the conflict occurred on so-called Bloody Sunday, in 1972, before both countries had joined the EU.   7. Rafael Behr, ‘Britain Treated Europe Like a Game: Brexit Hasn’t Changed That’, The Guardian, 2 April 2019. Available at (last accessed 31 May 2019>.   8. Rory Carroll, ‘Karen Bradley Admits Not Understanding Northern Irish Politics’, The Guardian, 7 September 2018. Available at (last accessed 31 May 2019).   9. She also claimed that British soldiers had not committed any crimes during the violent conflict in Northern Ireland, always only acting according to duty and law, even though several of them have been accused of killing innocent civilians. See Gerry Moriarty, ‘Killing by British Soldiers During Troubles Were “Not Crimes” ’, The Irish Times, 6 March 2019. Available at (last accessed 31 May 2019). 10. Lisa O’Carroll, ‘Ireland Dismisses Suggestion It Should Quit EU with UK’, The Guardian, 26 January 2019. Available at (last accessed 31 May 2019). 11. Arguably, in marked contrast to the way in which Greece was treated during the euro crisis a few years earlier (for detail, see the chapters by Stråth and Agridopoulos in this volume). Here we have to leave open whether this difference is due to a learning process or to the fact that the financial crisis pitted member states against each other and the current crisis pitted a reamining state against a leaving one. 12. Leonardo Sciascia, La Sicilia come metafora (Milan: Mondadori, 1979). 13. For an early comparative analysis of settler colonialism, which is still instructive despite conceptual flaws, see Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1964). 14. For a reminder of Algeria’s ‘withdrawal’ from the EEC, see Kiran Klaus Patel,

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The ‘South’ as a Moving Target ‘Something New Under the Sun? The Lessons from Algeria and Greenland’, in Benjamin Martill and Uta Staiger (eds), Brexit and Beyond: Rethinking the Futures of Europe (London: UCL Press, 2018), pp. 114–20: 117. 15. Nathalie Karagiannis, Avoiding Responsibility: The Politics and Discourse of European Development Policy (London: Pluto, 2004), pp. 9–10. Of the six founding members of the EEC, in 1957, (West) Germany did not hold colonies any longer, and Luxemburg never had any. This section draws extensively on Karagiannis’s Avoiding Responsibility, which analyses in detail the relations between European states and their former African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) colonies as expressed in the EU–ACP treaties and the debates around them. 16. Karagiannis, Avoiding Responsibility, pp. 14–17 and 74–7 in particular. 17. The currently frequent use of the terms ‘Global South’ and ‘Global North’ suggests that a territorial delimitation coincides with specific socio-economic-political properties. The intention behind this terminology is critical. Looking at European discourses and practices, however, one recognises that there is a clear interest in keeping the South outside of Europe in order to be able to keep up the differential of affluence between Europeans and their others. The geographical terms convey a sense of neutrality behind which the asymmetries of past and present disappear. 18. The rise of the new constellation entailed a weakening of the principle of collective self-determination and a strengthening of that of (individual) human rights in international law as well as, more broadly, in societal self-understandings, as Samuel Moyn critically shows in The Last Utopia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 19. A significant exception of a different kind is legal inequality between men and women, which persists in numerous states. A very particular exception, furthermore, is Palestine, with the hardening asymmetric relation between Israel and the Palestinian territories. 20. Commission of the European Communities, The Future of North–South Relations: Towards Sustainable Economic and Social Development (Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 1997), p. 74, quoted after Karagiannis, Avoiding Responsibility, p. 164. 21. See the chapters by Agridopoulos and Stråth in this volume. 22. See the chapter by Siapera and Rieder in this volume. 23. For a recent overview, see Rikard Warlenius, Gregory Pierce, Vasna Ramasar, Eva Quistorp, Joan Martínez-Alier, Leida Rijnhout and Ivonne Yanez, ‘Ecological Debt: History, Meaning and Relevance for Environmental Justice’, EJOLT Report No. 18, 2015. Available at (last accessed 9 May 2019). 24. What follows draws on and elaborates further some reflections first provided in Peter Wagner, ‘Historisches Unrecht im Zeitalter von Menschenrechten und Demokratie’, WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 2, 2019, pp. 137–48. These reflections start out from the very notion of historical injustice and its significance in the present time. 25. This diagnosis has been developed in detail in earlier works and will need to be

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Peter Wagner presupposed here for reasons of space; see, for example, Peter Wagner, Modernity: Understanding the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 2012); Wagner, Progress; Bo Stråth and Peter Wagner, European Modernity: A Global Approach (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Aurea Mota and Peter Wagner, Collective Action and Political Transformations: The Entangled Experiences of Brazil, South Africa and Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). 26. Folker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs and Otto Kreye, Die Neue Internationale Arbeitsteilung (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1979). 27. See, for example, Lea Ypi, Global Social Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 28. See Moyn, Last Utopia; Samuel Moyn, Not Enough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 29. See, for example, Branko Milanovic, ‘Global Inequality: From Class to Location, from Proletarians to Migrants’, Global Policy, 3(2), 2012, pp. 124–33; Branko Milanovic, ‘Global Inequality of Opportunity: How Much of Our Income Is Determined by Where We Live?’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 97(2), 2015, pp. 452–60. 30. Many readers of this chapter will be among the top 1 per cent in the global income pyramid, the majority of them at least among the top 5 per cent. Maybe critically minded citizens of the Global North should be more careful with assuming an antagonism between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent. 31. See also Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz, ‘Inequality: Towards a World-Historical Perspective’, in Elizabeth Jelin, Renata C. Motta and Sérgio Costa (eds), Global Entangled Inequalities: Conceptual Debates and Evidence from Latin America (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 21–41. 32. For the term ‘ecologically unequal exchange’, see also R. Scott Frey, Paul K. Gellert and Harry F. Dahms (eds), Ecologically Unequal Exchange: Environmental Injustice in Comparative and Historical Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 33. See Felix Ekardt, Jutta Wieding and Anika Zorn, ‘Paris Agreement, Precautionary Principle and Human Rights: Zero Emissions in Two Decades?’, Sustainability, 10(8), 2018. Available at (last accessed 6 March 2020); Aurea Mota and Peter Wagner, ‘The Amazon, the Rhino and the Blue Sky Over the Ruhr: Politics and Ecology in the Current Global Context’, Changing Societies and Personalities, 3(1), 2019, pp. 6–21. 34. Giacomo Sebis, ‘Inwieweit ist das Pariser Klimaschutzabkommen Ausdruck des Prinzips der gemeinsamen, aber unterschiedlichen Verantwortlichkeiten?’, Bucerius Law Journal, H. 2, 2018, pp. 92–7; for the place of the principle in international law, see Christopher D. Stone, ‘Common but Differentiated Responsibilities in International Law’, American Journal of International Law, 98(2), 2004, pp. 276–301 . 35. See the chapter by Karagiannis and Wagner in this volume. 36. On the relation between debt and democracy, see also the chapter by Bissonnette in this volume.

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The ‘South’ as a Moving Target 37. India is the major exception. 38. There is only space for a short excursion into the question concerning the sense in which Ireland is a different South to Europe from Algeria or South Africa, the tentative promise made at the outset. This is, at first sight, the question of whether there is a category difference between people or spaces that classifies some as North and others as South, bearing in mind that the categorisation is made by the North. In spatial terms, Ireland is closer to ‘core’ Europe than South Africa but hardly much closer than Algeria. In socio-cultural terms, religion was used as the divide between the UK and Ireland, but to argue that two Christian denominations are necessarily closer to each other than, say, any version of Christianity is to Islam is hardly convincing against the background of religious wars in Europe. Elements of racial categorisations were used within European countries as well, in particular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (for Italy, see the chapter by Nygård in this volume), so that this categorisation cannot mark the difference between Europe and the South either, despite widespread use in colonialism. Thus, rather than looking for categories, one needs to investigate the relation of Europe to ‘its’ South. As we have tried to show, this relation has undergone historical transformations, but across all change the South is always that which in some way exceeds European social, economic, political and/or cultural organisation; see Mota and Wagner, Collective Action. More specifically, as Europe ‘organised’ its modernity (see Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge, 1994)) through domestic inclusion, the South became that which was not­– ­could not?­– ­be included: primary sector, informal, precarious work against industrial, formal, secure work; large, uncounted numbers of excluded subjects against equal political rights of well-delimited numbers of citizens; passions against interests (see Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977)); and related oppositions. Ireland was in many respects and over extended periods rather on the ‘Southern’ side, but it proved ‘includable’, not least for reasons of size and proximity. The same is not true for South Africa and Algeria, and indeed for large parts of what one calls the Global South. In the mainstream view, the history of modernity is seen as entailing the steady progress of inclusion; from that angle, European post-Second World War societies were seen as a model to follow. But it is then overlooked that increasing the quality of inclusion leads to setting firmer boundaries and that extending inclusiveness is likely to decrease internal equality. Furthermore, a high degree of social organisation itself may entail loss of meaning (for a recent analysis of this type, see Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1999)). That is why a South always re-emerges both outside and inside, and often the more so the more a boundary with it is meant to be created. Societies that were not very Southern can become more Southern in that process, which is to some extent what happened to Algeria and South Africa.

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9 Debating the South in Unified Italy Stefan Nygård

I

n the novel North and South (1854–5), Elisabeth Gaskell explores the clash between tradition and modernity through the conflicting lifestyles and worldviews of the rural gentry in the south and the industrial entrepreneurs in the north of England. The title was suggested by Charles Dickens and part of the book is indeed focused on tensions between southern landed interest and northern industrial capitalism, as well as the regional particularities that contributed to the uneven distribution of industrial and social progress in England. But Gaskell’s novel also shows that the relationship between geography and social relations in nineteenth-century English society was much more complex than the binary framework of North and South implies. Physical, socio-economic and discursive at the same time, the North–South divide was at the centre of a moral map of national space, and the fact that internal North–South tensions in England were affected by the very same globalisation it had been instrumental in producing added complexity to the issue. Just as the Global South today is more of a social than a geographical category,1 these insights by the Victorian novelist draw attention to the interplay between geography, society, culture and the economy with respect to the North–South relation, at a time when the political and intellectual elites in Europe devoted their attention to the project of consolidating ‘national territory’. The unified Italian nation-state that came into being shortly after Gaskell’s novel appeared provides a paradigmatic example of the North–South division and its many layers between the local and the global. Ever since unification in 1861, Italy has struggled to overcome regional imbalances, mainly although not exclusively along a North–South axis. With an emphasis on the post-­ unification decades, the period in which the divide became articulated as an opposition between a North and a South, the present chapter sur186

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veys the lingering debates on Italy’s so-called Southern question. This question emerged in the context of the specific dynamics of nationstate formation in Italy. Political relations were transformed from a multi-polar situation before 1861, when the peninsula was divided between seven states, to a more binary relation between North and South after the process of unification, which also entailed consolidating the divergent economies and public debts of the pre-unitary states. The contested history of this process includes debates over economic and moral debts caused by the uneven distribution of gains and sacrifices between North and South as a result of unification. Socio-economically, two North–South divides developed in parallel after unification; the more significant one between Italy and transalpine Europe, and the initially minor but eventually growing divergence between the northern and southern regions within Italy. The purpose in what follows is to underline the different understandings of ‘South’ that came together in the process of unification as well as different forms of interdependence (economic, social, civilisational and moral) between North and South. The first part of the chapter summarises how the Southern question in Italy became a key issue in national politics and how the ‘South’ came to be conceptualised as a macro-area covering both the southern mainland and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. The second part highlights different understandings of debt between North and South, first in terms of civilisational discourse, then in the context of economic unification and public debt, followed by a discussion on how Italy’s North–South divide in the nineteenth century became aligned with the social question. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the global dimension of Italy’s Southern question.

A Southern question On the mental maps of eighteenth-century Grand Tourists, Naples sometimes marks the southern border of civilised Europe. In the words of the French traveller Augustin Creuzé de Lesser, Europe ‘ends there quite badly’.2 But at the time of Creuzé de Lesser’s southern Italian journey in the early years of the 1800s, the territories of the different states on the Italian peninsula had not yet been organised into northern and southern macro-regions. The distinction was put into place only a generation or so after unification, when northern and southern Italy, greatly varied territories in themselves, were perceived as more 187

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i­nternally cohesive than before. A combination of economic, social, political and cultural developments that connected local Italian concerns with ideas about European modernity underpinned the making of these regions. The big picture is well known. In the mental cartography of Enlightenment and nineteenth-century idealistic philosophy, history was seen as progressing in a kind of temporalised space, towards the North and the West, leaving Italy and the Mediterranean world confined to the realm of the past. In the process, southern Italy in particular became the target of an orientalising and musealising exercise, whereby European intellectuals depicted Italy south of Rome as the primitive, Catholic and conservative Other of modernity. Such representations were sometimes reproduced and sometimes rejected by intellectuals on the Italian peninsula. Some of them accepted the invitation to ‘northernise’, others contested the categorical judgement on Italy and Southern Europe as a backward region. The latter often mobilised the Greek, Roman and Catholic legacy for justifying Italy’s claims on European modernity. For the mid-nineteenth-century Catholic intellectual and politician Vincenzo Gioberti, who in Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843) described Italy as the ‘most cosmopolitan of nations’, the ‘autonomous and authoritative’ nation par excellence, the Risorgimento was a universal affair. Indebted only to its own past, the Italian nation was now reconnecting to its divine mission as ‘the mother nation of humankind’, which had been interrupted by centuries of decline. Similarly, the poet-professor Giosuè Carducci considered Italy a model nation without literary debts to other nations; it was the container of the Latin and Greek traditions and consequently bore the seeds of all the other literatures.3 Such claims to the position of a cultural creditor nation served to offset the ingrained sense of inferiority among Italian elites with regard to the country’s position vis-à-vis dominant European countries such as England and France. At the same time, nationalist discourse exemplifies the two faces of debt as a unifying and fragmenting force: national societies define themselves by a refusal to import or plagiarise, while constantly borrowing ideas from each other. The universalisation of the nation-state form in the period of early globalisation was driven by the assumption that larger states came with economic and military benefits, provided that these states were sufficiently coherent internally. But establishing relations of trust between previously autonomous regions required great efforts. In Italy, progress has been notoriously moderate in terms of closing the socio-economic gap between North 188

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and South.4 The Southern question in Italy eventually came to be seen as an indication of the extent to which the state had failed to create an integrated national society by incorporating the Southern regions into the Northern core of the unification project.5 Consequently, the idea of an Italian nation only partially became a framework for the social bond, and for many Southerners the state remained an extrinsic power.6 The scholarly attempts at explaining the persistence of the divide are far too wide-ranging and contested to be discussed in detail in this chapter. Instead, the following pages will focus on debates on the South that conceptualised the divide in terms of debt and that illustrate overlapping ideas of an Italian, European and global ‘South’. Any regional divide tends to produce disputes over who is indebted to whom. The questions raised in the Italian context include: who were the winners and losers of unification? Was the South ‘liberated’ or ‘conquered’? Were some regions forced to make sacrifices for the sake of ‘national progress’, and if so, how should they be compensated? Have fiscal, industrial and distributive policies favoured the North? Is a colonial and racial framework helpful for understanding Italy’s North–South divide? In trying to answer such questions, Italian historians have devoted a fair amount of attention to assessing economic conditions in the South before and after 1861, and to exploring the extent to which the socio-economic realities around the Southern capital of Naples and the Northern industrial and political centres drifted further apart or converged during the post-unification decades. Some of them underline the relatively minor financial gap between North and South before unification, and point out that the divide was more pronounced with respect to infrastructure and social indicators such as malnutrition, education and literacy. It has been argued that the economic divide widened only as a result of the combined effects of unification, which moved the centre of gravity to the North, closer to the border, the European core and railway networks, and a modest, late-nineteenth-century industrial take-off in the North, which by then was already part of a north-western European economic system. But other pathways have been proposed as well. In terms of GDP, Naples and Campania in particular appear to have been above the national average well into the twentieth century, implying that economic divergence only then increased between­– ­but also diminished within­– t­ he North and the South, which in turn has inspired counterfactual speculation on how the developmental trajectories of these regions would have turned out had it not been for unification.7 189

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If scholars often disagree on the causes of the North–South divide, most of them acknowledge that Italy’s South and North joined the new Kingdom from rather different socio-economic points of departure. For instance, different attitudes to public debt illustrate the dissimilarities between the Northern and Southern economies. Whereas Piedmont had opened its economy to massive French investments in public securities and private enterprise, as part of its transformation into a modern, debt-driven economy oriented towards the commercial and industrial centres of Europe, Ferdinand II in Naples was notably unsupportive of the debt economy, placing stockholders’ assemblies under police surveillance, restricting banks and dissolving insurance companies because they expected interest on their capital.8 These differences between an indebted and expansive Northern economy and a Southern economy that borrowed, spent and invested less have nourished longstanding debates on the disadvantages of unification especially for the South. The anti-unity debate (‘Anti-Risorgimento’) is as lively today as ever, notably in the journalistic sphere, but with reactions also from academic historians. The diverging attitudes to unification among scholars and citizens alike are reactivated in these debates, which demonstrate the endless possibilities provided by a contested history for defending political positions in the present by mobilising a specific narrative of the past.9

A civilisational question Invoking a strong distinction between North and South in Italy entails glossing over regional complexities to the point where it is questionable whether it makes any sense to use these terms even as broad spatial descriptions. In the nineteenth century, the divide was closely related to a hierarchical vision of leader and follower societies, of civilisational creditor and debtor nations. The place of Italy in this imaginary­– ­Southern Italy in particular, or other European peripheries for that matter­– ­is ambivalent. While being located outside the politically and economically dominant centres, these regions were for the most part not subjected to overt military colonisation, which is not to say that they escaped colonial attitudes and manifestations of power stemming from the alleged superiority of the core. In the late twentieth century, post-colonial scholarship updated an already-existing division in the field of Italian historiography between those who dismiss attempts to situate the Italian question within a 190

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colonial framework and others who consider it worth exploring the extent to which the Italian South was sacrificed for Northern progress. The question of whether the Italian South was ‘colonised’ by the North is as old as the Italian state. The argument proceeds from the assumption that the annexation of Southern territories was driven by colonial, anti-Southern racism and the ‘civilizing mission’ discourse.10 Scholars who caution against applying the terminology of colonialism to Italy’s North–South divide, such as the economic historian Emanuele Felice, argue that this framework risks externalising Southern ‘guilt’ by focusing on the narrative of Northern exploitation, obscuring the responsibility of the Southern elites, the shared interests of elites in the North and South, especially the ‘passive modernisation’ favoured by Southern elites­– m ­ odernisation only insofar as pre-­existing privileges were allowed to remain intact­– a­ nd the prevalence of extractive institutions and higher levels of social inequality in the South, in contrast to the more inclusive political culture in the North. It also carries with it the moral risk of offending the less ambiguous victims of colonial violence in other parts of the world.11 At stake in these debates is what to make of the overlapping histories of European colonialism, scientific racism, the making of Italy’s internal South in the wake of civil war­– s­ truggles over landownership and guerrilla wars waged in the early 1860s by brigands in the South (the ‘great banditry’) against the National Guard, the Italian Army and landowners­– ­and ‘orientalism’, broadly understood as the practice described by Edward Said of defining oneself against an allegedly inferior Other, which is often homogenised, exoticised and demonised at the same time.12 Bridging the gap between core and periphery in and beyond Europe in this period was, after all, described in terms of broadening the realm of civilisation by actors in the centres of modernity who saw themselves as indebted to a larger project of humanity and responsible for drawing underdeveloped areas into the sphere of civilisation. The case for linking internal developments in Italy with the broader history of colonialism finds support in Northern racism or statements by Southern Italian officials who, at the time of unification in 1861, accused the Piedmontese government of treating the Southern provinces as Cortés and Pizarro had treated Mexico and Peru, or the English had treated India.13 Italy’s Southern question was thus from the beginning connected to a broader framework of the ‘North’ relating to the ‘South’, including the perceived need of the more advanced to colonise and cultivate (both 191

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terms derived from the Latin word colere) backward regions. These ideas found different expressions as Italian intellectuals positioned their national space between the centres and peripheries of European modernity and in relation to the world beyond and to ‘Eastern despotism’ or ‘Southern primitivism’. Boundary-making between Europe and the Arabic world was a central concern for the Genevan historian and political economist Sismonde de Sismondi, a key figure in this strand of civilisational history. Considering the place of Southern Europe in the geography of European modernity, Roberto Dainotto has traced the orientalising dynamics at play when parts of Southern Europe in the early nineteenth century were aligned with the sphere of Arab influence.14 The Mediterranean South was seen as the mythical source of European modernity, albeit separated from the present by such a large temporal gap as to render it insignificant. The ‘discovery’ of the new world and the resulting transatlantic networks of trade and slavery had, along with political and technological modernisation in Northern Europe, moved the centre of gravity from Latin Europe closer to what had formerly been known as the primitive North. This shift was registered by the likes of Montesquieu and Madame de Staël, who famously linked the differences in Northern and Southern sensibilities to climate.15 When Sismondi in De la littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813) contrasted German-Protestant soberness with unorganised and immoral Southern-Catholic culture, he too portrayed the South as an important but surpassed stage of Arab influence in Europe. Northern tourists in turn documented Southern decay in their travel reports. In Creuzé de Lesser’s already-mentioned account of his Southern Italian journey, the roads built by the ancient Greeks on Sicily were hardly visible after ‘centuries of misgovernment’. Such reports reinforced the idea that Europe ended somewhere south of Naples, or south of the River Garigliano between Rome and Naples, which used to separate the Papal States from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, or even further north.16 The idea of two Europes, anchored in the view of progress as a trajectory from South to North and from Catholic and Arab to Protestant Europe,17 translated into an idea of two Italies by projecting the revolutionary struggle between progress and reaction onto the map of Italy. Sismondi, in his multi-volume Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen Âge, which began to appear in 1807, introduced another notion that became central in the cultural construction of the South: the position of Tuscany and the centre-North. Taking an interest in the history 192

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of political representation and the medieval communal traditions of the city-states in the region, Sismondi and others began to portray Tuscany and Florence as the Athens of Italy, thus elevating the region to the centre of debates about European political modernity. Of particular importance for nineteenth-century politics of history was  the idea that preparing Italy for modernity required paying attention to two historical debts: the abrupt ending of antiquity and the crisis of the late fourteenth century, which was described as a sudden stop at the threshold of modernity after a promising start.18 In Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (1828), the French historian-statesman François Guizot confirmed the superiority of urban life in Tuscany, speaking of the ‘immense early superiority of Italian towns; where poor communes were struggling to form elsewhere, here saw the birth of republics, states’.19 Taking his cue from the attention devoted by Sismondi and Guizot to the medieval Italian republics, Pasquale Villari, a historian, politician and Southern intellectual who had left Naples for Florence after the revolutions of 1848–9, contributed to the making of his new place of residence into Italy’s Athens. Focusing on the city-states,20 Villari redefined Europe’s relations with classicism by turning attention from a direct connection with antiquity (in Rome, Naples and the South) to the mediating role played by Tuscany through the rediscovery of antiquity. The way in which Florence was promoted in the hierarchy of Italian national identity was thus part of an attempt to write Italy into European modernity by reordering the historical trajectory of modernity. As is well known, the legacy of the Italian city-states in modern European political culture has continued to attract attention, including more recently the interest of political scientists such as Robert D. Putnam in Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993).21 For Putnam and for his predecessor in the genre Edward C. Banfield, the Italian South was plagued by what Banfield, in the context of post-Second World War anthropological interest in the ‘underdeveloped’ Southern margins of Europe, characterised as anti-communal ‘amoral familism’. This much-debated concept, which referred to a cultural deficiency that supposedly stood in the way of the development of a civic ethos in the South, is at the centre of Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958), based on fieldwork in the Southern town of Chiaromonte in Basilicata and emerging from the author’s interests in the cultural origins of trust, reciprocity and mutual aid as preconditions for human cooperation. The frequent ­references 193

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to these works in social scientific literature, notwithstanding strong criticism22 of their treatment of historical sources and failure to consider forms of urban self-government in the South and feudal traits in the North, testifies to the great allure of dualistic reasoning in both scholarly and public debate. The dualism in this particular case relates to an opposition between ‘Northern’ civicness and ‘Southern’ resistance to expanding allegiances beyond the nuclear family. Similar topics and the strategic place of Florence and Tuscany were later taken up by Villari. As a historian, he traced the ebbing and flowing of Latin and Germanic culture on the peninsula, which was another way of positioning Italy as a whole in the history of progress that for Montesquieu and Hegel had left the South behind. Such sweeping idealist philosophies of history did not convince critical observers like Fedele Lampertico, an economist and politician from Veneto­– ­a region that had seen plenty of entanglement between ‘Germanic’ and ‘Latin’ culture­– ­who opposed the way in which Villari and the German historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus used broad categories such as ‘Latin’ and ‘German’ to contrast peoples, races and civilisations with each other.23 But they were indispensable for the purpose of forging a national community. As Villari wrote to his fellow Hegelian Bertrando Spaventa in 1850, ‘without philosophy, one cannot become a nation’.24 If Italy was strategically positioned for negotiating civilisational debts between Latin and Germanic culture, Islamic civilisation had historically played a decisive role in drawing the shores of the Mediterranean closer to each other. Reconsidering the place of his native Sicily and Arabic culture in European history, the historian Michele Amari, Villari’s colleague at the University of Pisa and a prominent Sicilian academic, politician and senator in the new Italian Kingdom, focused his scholarly attention on Europe’s debts to the Muslim world. Rejecting the unfavourable position of Sicily on the mental maps of Enlightenment philosophers, Amari’s project centred on bringing back the long history of European entanglement with Arab culture. By highlighting the importance of Arabic connections for European progress, his 1843 reinterpretation of a Palermitan uprising against Charles I of Anjou in 128225 (recounted in Verdi’s 1855 Les vêpres siciliennes) objected to the way in which the South was pushed further back in history and to pre-modernity by connecting it with the Orient.26 According to Roberto Dainotto, Amari sought to turn Muslim culture into an active component rather than a passive background for European modernity. Re-evaluating the Mediterranean past and trac194

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ing the keywords of freedom, constitution and revolution in the history of Sicily were key elements in this project, which also formed part of the efforts of Risorgimento historians in the different pre-unitary states to forge a national history out of local traditions.27 Amari linked the appeal of Mediterranean culture as a buffer zone against the totalising visions of European universalism to what he saw as a less colonising Arab legacy. He thus reclaimed a position for a marginalised factor in the history of European progress and freedom, by bringing another civilisational debt into the discussion and by tweaking the narrative of European modernity that originated in the salons of Paris.28

A financial question When, in 1866, the news that Italy had imposed new taxes on foreign capital reached Paris, the financier Alphonse de Rothschild reacted by calling Italians ‘rogues’ and giving himself credit ‘for having always considered them as such despite the lyricism of the discourses in their favour pronounced in England and France’.29 Clearly the financial elites were not immune to stereotypical representations of Italians inherited from the grand tourists of the previous century, or from liberal representations of the Neapolitan South as a ‘paradise inhabited by devils’ or ‘the negation of God, erected into a system of government’, in the words of William Gladstone.30 Anti-Southern sentiments seemed to surface every time there was a clash of interests, and unification was indeed partly bad news for the Rothschilds, who were forced to close down their branch in Naples.31 But more generally as well, cultural codes and identities were part of the international debt system, where reputation on international credit markets functioned as a check on borrowers in a system that was essentially based on trust,32 as the Latin term creditum (from credere, ‘to trust or believe’) implies. The history of Italian state finances began in the 1850s when Piedmont-Sardinia was governed by the liberal reformer Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour. With his French language and Englishoriented politics, Cavour was perhaps an unlikely candidate for the pantheon of Italian nation builders. But with its constitution, parliament and liberal regime, Piedmont mobilised the support of many progressive nationalists across the peninsula, enabling Cavour to launch a programme of political and industrial modernisation. The free-trade aspects of the liberal reform programme, in particular, came at a cost for the Southern mainland that had relied on protective policies for 195

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its own manufactures. The benefits of free-trade policies depended on where a country, or region, stood in the world economy, and when it was integrated into the international system.33 Italy’s North and South were clearly unevenly positioned economically, but initially attention to economic divergence was overshadowed by political tensions that emerged in the void left by the dissolution of the Neapolitan Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Cavour, who was more at home in Paris and London than Naples or Rome and who considered uniting Italy’s North and South as difficult as fighting with Austria and Rome, was well aware of the precariousness of the situation.34 But despite his last wishes (he died shortly after unification) to avoid a coercive solution to the problem and seek the support of public opinion in the annexed provinces, the unification process deteriorated into violence and emergency legislation against the ‘great banditry’ in 1863 (the Pica Act) in the South, and reinforced the French-inspired centralised administrative system that the new state had adopted. The road to financial unification was equally rough. The finances of the Neapolitan kingdom before unification stood in contrast to those of Piedmont, which through agricultural, industrial and administrative modernisation had developed into a modern, debt-driven economy. In order to meet the economic requirements for building infrastructure, strengthening the military, servicing loans and making indemnity payments to Austria for the ‘First Italian War of Independence’ in 1848–9, Cavour incurred substantial financial and political debts to the Rothschild banking house and Napoleon III in France, who supported the Italian project as a way of counterbalancing Austrian power. The Piedmontese debts weighed heavily after 1861 as Italy struggled to escape from its position on the periphery of global capitalism, where non-dominant states with a large debt burden were vulnerable to economic domination. In this period, the business of underwriting government securities constituted an important activity for the banking houses that expanded their activity not least by offering their services to under-funded states carrying out costly wars. Italy serviced part of this national debt by raising taxes on income and property, privatising common lands and railways and selling church property, but even so, state expenditure far exceeded revenue in the years after unification, even more so after the ‘Third Italian War of Independence’ in 1866, which coincided with an international financial crisis.35 The financial order and economic progress that had enabled Piedmont to assume leadership on the 196

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peninsula relied on foreign credit, assistance and know-how. Having brought in French entrepreneurs, railway engineers, gas companies, banks and insurance companies, Cavour perceived the debt incurred to France and the bankers as a necessary evil in the initial phase of unification, and he was determined to show Europe ‘that he was not tied to Rothschild’s purse strings’.36 If borrowing enabled new states to enter the international society of nations and to secure their place in political and industrial modernity, debt also provided the means for the older states to dominate the newcomers, whose performance was measured by creditworthiness and interest rates.37 The role of Paris completely overshadowed investments in Italy from other countries in the first decades after unification.38 Throughout the 1860s Cavour and his followers were engaged in negotiating the public debt with the financiers and mobilising trust for the Italian project on international markets. The bankers not only provided financial backing for Italian unification, but also nurtured their own project for railway unification. Linking northern Italy to the rest of Europe was an important part of this project. Seeing that markets did not align with political borders, the House of Rothschild was financially involved with all parties in the Italian wars of unification, supporting not only France and Italy but also the Habsburgs in Vienna and the Pope in Rome. Political boundaries were, for the financial elites, after all little more than lines on a map that should ideally intrude as little as possible into market integration and into the creation of a united Europe of railways, which for the investors was more important than the Europe of borders.39 Military conflicts had been the triggering factor in the formation of an international system of public debts facilitated by stock exchanges. After the Napoleonic wars, lending to foreign countries constituted a globally thriving market, with the London Stock Exchange at the centre. This market eventually became so overheated that a Scottish adventurer by the name of Gregor MacGregor managed to sell a large number of bonds to European investors in the name of a fictional Central American state (‘Poyais’) that he had invented and declared himself the ruler of.40 In Italy, the accumulation of Piedmontese and Italian national debt was directly linked to the subsequent problems of regional divergence within the country. When the liabilities of the Italian pre-unitary states were unified in the summer of 1861 in a ‘Great Book of Public Debt’ (Gran Libro del debito pubblico), issued 10 July 1861 by the Finance Minister Pietro Bastogi, Piedmont’s debt was more 197

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than twice the size of the public debt of any other state incorporated into the new Kingdom.41 How did these economic pressures relate to the broader task of unifying Italy’s North and South? In a classic work on Italian state finances from 1900, the Southern economist, reformist socialist and later prime minister Francesco Saverio Nitti examined the role of wealth disparities and transfers from South to North in the decades after unification, especially through an uneven distribution of the fiscal burden and the selling of state and church property. In his account, Italy’s national debt was serviced not only by new taxes but also by the privatisation of common lands and the sale of church property, with most of the over three million hectares of privatised land being located in the South.42 At the time Nitti was writing, the issue of uneven development within Italy was becoming increasingly condensed into a binary North–South divide, leaving aside a complex reality of convergence and divergence not only between and within the North and the South, but between other macro-regions such as the Centre and the North-east as well, which, judged by economic indicators, occupied an intermediate position between the North-west and the South.43 With respect to the debts between geographical regions in the Northern and Southern parts of the peninsula, Nitti pays attention to the politically tense question of who owed what to whom, noting that when the debts of the pre-unitary states were consolidated in 1861, the highest share was carried over from Piedmont. While these early analyses by Nitti are contested among economic historians, there is some agreement on the basic observation that unification involved ‘a transfer of real resources from the South to the North’ and that new fiscal rules were particularly painful in the South, which also suffered from trade liberalisation and from becoming a market for Northern industrial products. Other developments, such as the localisation of public contracts for industrial projects in the North, added to these asymmetries.44 The outcome was a distinctly undecided debt relation between North and South, the main point of contestation being whether one should see the North as developing the South or, conversely, the South as developing the North by making sacrifices for Northern industrial and urban development. Contemporary economic historians have considerably re-dimensioned the claims about Southern sacrifices made by earlier generations of ‘Southernists’, but the field remains contested and the data available is often insufficient for making conclusive judgements.45 Bearing in mind that state formation was a violent process involving 198

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wars between previously separate political entities and popular insurrections in the South in the early years of unification, assessing that early period was always a controversial issue. Nitti himself suggests that the failure to generate positive rather than negative solidarity in Italy was in part due to the North’s refusal to acknowledge Southern sacrifices. It is worth noting that he did not take issue with unification as such, nor did he object to Northern prominence in the unitary state (it was considered necessary for various reasons), or to the South losing its bureaucracy (it was Bourbonic and inefficient) or its military (the land borders were now in the North, which also justified investments in Northern infrastructure, railways and defences). These were all factors that reinforced Northern industrial development. But even so, Nitti’s main concern seems to have been Northern hubris, compounded by an unequal distribution of the fiscal burden and public spending. He concludes, quoting Shakespeare: ‘What is done cannot be undone.’ Unification was an accomplished fact, but the North had too quickly brushed aside Southern sacrifices for national progress. To be sure, the ‘billions that the South has given’ could, according to Nitti, perhaps be justified as the price for ‘the South’s entry into civilization’.46 But he challenged the North’s unwillingness to acknowledge the debt and, importantly, the historical dynamics of uneven development that resulted when one region was given a head start. The refusal to acknowledge the debt relation led to an essentialisation of the divide, which was further reinforced by scientific racism and the way in which supposedly superior or inferior socio-economic and racial qualities became associated with different regions. While Nitti considered as pure fiction the Northern view of the South as an obstacle to progress and a source of reaction, he recognised that the narrative was remarkably stubborn, despite the fact that many of the country’s leading writers, politicians and scholars were Southerners. For him, overcoming the divide was crucial, not least because modern nation-states ‘do not tolerate fragmentation’.47 The North–South divide investigated by Nitti is based on an argument about interdependency, which has been debated extensively in economic and social theory before and after him. The argument stands in opposition to another family of explanations that, in the words of Jason Hickel, perceive unconnected regions and countries as runners on a track racing in their own separate lanes; some are faster and some are slower for a variety of reasons, but success or failure is ultimately down to one’s own achievements.48 In the Italian context, the debate 199

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stands between an emphasis on autonomous development, on the one hand, and interdependence, on the other; that is, between arguments centred on the internal socio-economic, cultural or institutional characteristics of Northern and Southern society and what the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal called ‘cumulative causation’, by which he was referring to how even minor initial differences of economic development are magnified over time.49 Also at stake is the question of whether to emphasise backwardness and poverty or inequality. In Italy, the contested term in Nitti’s work­– a­ nd in the critical response to it by Corrado Gini (1914), the inventor of the Gini coefficient­– w ­ as ‘sperequazione’, unequal distribution.50 Was this expression appropriate for describing the North–South relationship, or should that instead be described in terms of uneven development, backwardness and catching up? Debates on this issue tend to provoke strong emotions, not least because different answers put the North in a different light. If the South was poor and underdeveloped, the North­– t­he Italian or the global­– ­could be seen as a progressive and beneficial force combating poverty through investments in infrastructure, industry and development. If the relationship instead was one of dependency and growing inequality, the North could be seen as having a more active role in bringing about  the problem that it was seeking to solve. Debt clearly plays a lesser role in the paradigm of autonomous development, where the South is not so much subordinated by as temporally separated from the North. The North can help the South ‘catch up’ but is not morally obliged to do so. The opposite is true when the question is approached from the standpoint of interdependence. For a South that is subordinated to the interests of the North, there is less equality of opportunity and the developmental path of the latter is out of reach for the former. Debates on not only Italy’s South but the country as a whole in relation to the European core countries mirror the longstanding discussions among economists on global development and inequality. Invoking the so-called infant industry argument of the nineteenth-­century German economist Friedrich List, Ha-Joon Chang asks whether the leading industrial nations of the world, having reached a certain stage of development during the period of early industrialisation, had ‘kicked away the ladder’ by denying the latecomers the kind of protectionist measures that they themselves had relied upon in building their own economies. Protectionism had enabled the forerunners to get to where they were, but, the argument continues, after Adam Smith the protectionism of the strong was concealed by free-trade rhetoric. This sentiment was 200

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echoed in early Italian parliamentary debates. Italian political elites felt the need to adopt free-trade policies as a token of gratitude for the French and English political and military support for unification, but not everyone was prepared to open up their developing markets for English and French industrial exports, or surrender to the widespread view that climate and geography stood in the way of Italy’s development into an industrial nation. Some early Italian parliamentarians and textile industrialists were not at all happy about the fact that Italy by 1863 had some of the lowest tariffs in Europe. Echoing List’s argument in The National System of Political Economy (1841), they maintained that free-trade policies had to be put into place gradually, and accused France and England of opening their markets only after having enjoyed long and necessary periods of protectionism.51 Similar objections have been made in the internal Italian context as well, in relation to rising profits in the industrialised North, with its comparative advantage over the South, all of which tended to perpetuate the uneven distribution of prosperity, education, skills and welfare. The picture that emerges from recent research in nineteenth-century Italian economic history, however, is one in which the divide in terms of industrial development is significantly blurred. Carlo Ciccarelli and Stefano Fenoaltea, for example, underline the rapid, export-driven growth fuelled by agriculture and artisanal industry in the Mezzogiorno in the first two decades after unification, the highly uneven geography of accelerated industrialisation in the North-western ‘industrial tri­angle’ from the 1880s between the subalpine regions of Lombardy and Piedmont (textile), Turin and Milan (engineering) and Liguria (naval industry), as well as the strongly sub-regional character of industrial development overall in post-unification Italy.52

A social question In the foreword to a landmark collection of essays on Southern misery entitled ‘Southern Letters’ (Lettere meridionali, 1878), the already-mentioned Pasquale Villari speaks not of the South, but instead of the poor conditions of the multitude and the spectre of socialism. Indeed, the subtitle reads ‘and other writings on the social question in Italy’.53 If the cultural paradigm of North and South had perpetuated hierarchies in the international public debt system of the late nineteenth century, the mutually reinforcing relationship between the idea of the South and the social is no less important. These ideas came together in a 201

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specific historical context. Villari’s ‘Southern Letters’ appeared in the wake of the Paris Commune in 1871, which placed the social question at the centre of European politics. Against this background, the Italian South was increasingly seen as the region that needed to be reformed to prevent social revolution, even more so following the 1876 defeat of the so-called Historic Right, to which Villari belonged. The spread of anarchism in Naples in the years preceding the Paris Commune gave an additional flavour to the Northern fears of the South, as the locus of the emerging social question. Combined with concerns for the country’s performance internationally, such factors contributed to the way in which the South became aligned with the social question. Poverty, crime, illiteracy and corruption dominated the image of the South conveyed by a group of Southern Italian intellectuals, one of them being Villari, who after the revolutions of 1848–9 had settled in Florence and Pisa. Scholars such as Marta Petrusewicz have stressed the role played by these Southerners, many of them living in Northern exile, in the making of the Southern question.54 Disillusionment after seeing their progressive ideals crushed by the defeat of 1848 heavily influenced these intellectuals’ subsequent depictions of the South as a degenerating region. Given the history of poverty, illiteracy, crime, malnutrition and so on, on the Southern mainland and Sicily, the Southern question was clearly not merely a construction, but after unification the South was increasingly made to symbolise everything that was dysfunctional in the country as a whole and the obstacles that needed to be overcome for the sake of national unity.55 As backwardness in the South eventually crystallised into a ‘question’, in the wake of the Risorgimento, it contributed not only to essentialising the divide between North and South but also to homogenising the regions internally. It is worth noting that how the South was depicted among the political elites was by no means a trivial matter. Considering that the main architect of unification, Cavour, never travelled south of Florence and relied on reports and letters from his generals and administrators, representations of the South shaped and justified Northern policies vis-à-vis the Mezzogiorno. Considering also the broader framework of European colonial expansion, ‘orientalising’ aspects were certainly not absent from the early representations of the Italian South. One way of closing the gap between (Northern) Italy and the European centre, a constant concern for the political elites of the new Kingdom, was to push back against an internal Other­– n ­ otwithstanding the fact that the distance, socio-economically speaking, between North and South on 202

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the peninsula was less significant than the distance between Italy as a whole and Europe north of the Alps.56 While reformers like Villari in the 1870s did not speak of the ‘Southern question’ as a binary opposition between two macro-regions, the relationship became increasingly conceptualised in those terms somewhat later, notably by the Southern politician Giustino Fortunato at the turn of the century. Between unification and 1900 we cannot assume the existence of any coherent Southern identity that would have united Sicily and the Southern mainland, dominated by Naples, not to mention the remote island of Sardinia. The objective of reformers like Villari was rather to identify obstacles to national consolidation, such as crime, high levels of social inequality and low levels of education, all of which were accentuated in the South. But his public interventions, as well as those of his Tuscan colleagues Sidney Sonnino and Leopoldo Franchetti, did have the inadvertent effect of amplifying the construction of the South as a repository for the collected problems of Italy. The South was, according to Salvatore Lupo, made into a symbolic territory, the locus of the social question, upon which a physical territory was constructed across age-old divisions between regions as diverse as Sicily and the Neapolitan mainland, which had been united only in 1816.57 The first scientific inquiries into Southern crime produced by Villari (the first two of the ‘Southern Letters’ concerned the camorra and the mafia), Franchetti and Sonnino played a key role in the making of the South as the key focus area in debates on the social question.58 The process had begun in the earlier part of the century, when (Tuscan) statisticians translated negative views of Southern Italy ‘into hard, “positive” evidence, endowed with an authority superior to that of travelers’ descriptions’.59 In Italy, as elsewhere, statistics played a central role in mapping the national population and distributing characteristics between different regions. The question of representing the South was also connected to what Nelson Moe calls ‘the geography of textual production’, by which he means a spatial framework for social discourse in which Southern intellectuals published their texts in the North for a primarily Northern, or central-Northern, audience. Mobilising the language of debt and guilt in writing about the South for the North, Villari appealed to the conscience of the readers of the influential L’Opinione, and its audience among the national elites in the capital (that is, first Turin and then Florence and Rome). Both in the ‘Southern Letters’ and in earlier texts on the social question and the educational system, Villari 203

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urged his Northern liberal collaborators to familiarise themselves with the deprived popular quarters of Naples and the South in general.60 Merging the Southern and the social questions suited Northern elites insofar as associating Italy’s social problems with the South airbrushed the Northern masses out of the picture. Addressing this issue at the turn of the twentieth century, the Southern socialist Gaetano Salvemini solicited an alliance between Northern workers and Southern peasants, against the support of the Italian Socialist Party and its leader Filippo Turati for the hegemony of the most advanced parts of the country, which were expected to eventually emancipate the backward Southern regions.61 The assumption of a binary opposition between North and South often prevailed over a focus on interconnection. For instance, while the thesis according to which the conservative interests of Southern landowners would have condemned the South to a peripheral position in the wake of unification has been called into question by scholars stressing the Southern support for unification,62 once the idea of a Southern macro-region had entered the national imagination, it continued to shape political debate by aligning the regional with the social. With hindsight, the Southern historian and politician Fortunato regretted that blurring regional and social demands constrained the ‘Left’ government that came to power in 1876. According to him, the Southern protests, often more regional than social, robbed the country of a ‘real progressive party’.63 Before Fortunato, Villari too lumped region and class together. He linked the debt between North and South to the debt between the privileged and the masses, arguing that by ignoring the regional question the more ‘civilised provinces’ were as guilty as the ‘educated and prosperous classes’ who abandoned ‘the less fortunate of their society to their own destiny’. Villari reserved the right to make such accusations to Southern reformers like himself (‘We men of the Mezzogiorno have the right to say to those of central and northern Italy: Your indifference and our indifference would be equally immoral and guilty’). Speaking in the name of the South, he identified the Southern question as the primary obstacle to national unity.64 While these critical theories of the South, of which Villari was an early proponent, depicted the South in opposition to the North, they also saw the South as a measure of the ‘national condition’ that was inseparable from the development of the country as a whole. The idea is famously expressed in a formula that has been attributed to Mazzini: Italy will be what the Mezzogiorno will be (‘L’Italia sarà ciò che il Mezzogiorno sarà’). 204

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If Pasquale Villari represents a Southern intellectual’s take on the North–South divide, the attention devoted to similar topics­– c­ rime, poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy and so on­– ­by Cesare Lombroso and his school of criminal anthropology turned Northern prejudice into scientific racism. Published a year after Villari’s ‘Southern Letters’, Lombroso’s ‘Criminal Man’ (L’uomo delinquente, 1876) anchored civilisational hierarchy in evolutionary biology, against the backdrop of the kind of moral cartography of modernity outlined above, in which the Southern parts of the Italian peninsula were depicted as the antithesis of progressive Europe. To be sure, civilisational debts to Southern Europe continued to be acknowledged, but the future lay elsewhere and its planners, having settled their debt to ancient civilisation, competed for the position of the new Rome. This general framework was sharpened in the shadow of colonialism and military conflicts within Italy. As a young military doctor in Calabria during the Southern wars in the 1860s, Lombroso had carried out anthropometric studies of the crania of brigands, at a time marked by mutually reinforcing trends towards racial, political and social hierarchisation in nineteenth-­ century Europe, including liberal-meritocratic arguments about advanced regions progressing by virtue of their internal characteristics. Taken together, these trends converged in providing the advanced regions with a moral justification for dominating their inferiors.65 Given the historical context of high imperialism, it was also at this moment that the Italian North–South divide was clearly influenced by colonial discourse. In his ‘Criminal Man’, Lombroso relates the greater frequency of homicide in the Italian South to the ‘African and Eastern’ elements in the Mezzogiorno, as opposed to the ‘Nordic races’ in Northern Italy.66 In Lombroso’s work, the past, the South and the criminal came together in an understanding of a modernity that generated not only progress but also degeneracy. As ‘inferior races’, Southern Italians and Africans were counted among categories of modern society that, along with women, youth and the lower classes, were thought to require special attention. While Lombroso’s ideas certainly divided the scholarly community of his time, in this context they draw attention to connections between moral geography, the history of civilisation and evolutionary theory. As a specific contribution to the debate, Lombroso gave the South­– ­as the social and the past­– ­a bodily expression: the past manifested itself as atavistic traits interpreted as signs of national degeneracy inscribed in the bodies of criminals and savages. Depicted as naturally inclined to violent or sexually profligate behaviour, his 205

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category of a ‘born criminal’ was an underdeveloped representative of an earlier stage of evolution. The non-European, primitive and underdeveloped South was thus brought closer to home and identified as a pathological feature, as Daniel Pick demonstrates, within modernity.67 In much the same way as the success of Montesquieu’s climate theory in the previous century rested not only on the centrality of the French-speaking Europe from which it emanated, but also on the scientific language in which it was presented,68 anchoring the Italian North–South divide in biology gave an ‘empirical’ direction to the racialised divide between a ‘European’ North and a South that struggled to find its place in civilisation. If Lombroso himself perceived the idea of a racial North–South divide within Italy with some ambivalence and recognised the virtues of racial mixing, his follower, the Sicilian Alfredo Niceforo, constructed a more binary opposition between ‘Aryan’ and ‘Mediterranean’ races within the boundaries of Italy. For the young Niceforo­– ­he was twenty-two when he published L’Italia barbara contemporanea in 1898­– ­Southern Italy constituted a ‘great colony to civilise’ for those higher up in the moral hierarchy.69

A global question Two general features stand out in the history of the North–South division in Italy. First, in the course of the nineteenth century, Southern Italy became the object of three kinds of imaginaries that more generally concerned Italy and Southern Europe vis-à-vis the North as well, echoing what Larry Wolff discovered with respect to Russia and Eastern Europe: the Other of North-western Europe, a romantic projection, and a macro-region that came to be seen as significantly more coherent than it had previously been perceived to be.70 Second, despite its prominence in Italian national debates, the country’s North–South divide has not been overcome, which is not to say that it has been constant or stable. On the contrary, periods of convergence and divergence have succeeded each other, with the gap widening especially in the era of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s and again more recently after the decades of post-Second World War economic growth and state-led industrial programmes. Like any regional divide, the Italian one is certainly distinctive in many respects. But it also mirrors debates on how to tackle the problem of uneven development globally. It demonstrates how, even in the context of a single country at a specific moment in time, the 206

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North–South divide is spatially and temporally embedded in ways that do not align neatly with the borders of nation-states and historical periods. Italy’s Southern question has radiated far beyond the country’s borders and has been of particular interest to outside specialists. Development economists in Europe and the United States in the 1940s considered Southern Italy a specific case of ‘underdevelopment’ in a European periphery; a region that after the war was considered to be in need of support for not only reconstruction but also development. In this context, the Mezzogiorno, alongside the Tennessee Valley in the United States, came to be seen as a laboratory for exploring ways of modernising underdeveloped agrarian regions through large-scale development programmes. In terms of policy-making, this was a transatlantic project carried out by a relatively tight circle of economists and policy experts engaged in sketching the contours of global development programmes for the post-war era. Members of this group were to some extent divided over the fundamental questions of core–periphery or North–South relations, regionally and globally. One line of disagreement with regard to the underlying sources and possible solutions to uneven development are illustrated by two landmark studies, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1959) by Walt Whitman Rostow and Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions (1957) by the already-mentioned Gunnar Myrdal. The differences between the two are reminiscent of the question asked by Francesco Saverio Nitti about North–South debts in Italy; that is, to what extent, if at all, the North should be held responsible for ‘underdeveloping’ the South. For Rostow, who as President Eisenhower’s foreign policy adviser played a key role in launching the idea of development, it was less about interlinked than about parallel modernisation trajectories. Myrdal, who in 1947 was appointed Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, was much more inclined to stress interdependence. With his theory of cumulative causation that sought to explain how even small socio-economic advantages were magnified over time, Myrdal underlined the difficulty of reversing regional imbalances once they had been established, on any scale. But the divide between North and South was cemented over time, and development was locked in a certain direction.71 The promises and the limits of treating Italy as a particular case of such general problems have long been debated among economic historians, but in the post-war context this question attracted attention as part of a broader concern with bringing together the experiences 207

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of the different Souths of the world. An example is the special interest taken by the World Bank in the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, the development fund for Southern Italy, as a model for interventions elsewhere, and the bank’s collaboration with the Southern Italian development association SVIMEZ (Associazione per lo sviluppo dell’industria nel Mezzogiorno). While the World Bank saw Southern Italy as the largest underdeveloped region in Europe, the region had the advantage of being equipped with advanced financial and political institutions. These factors contributed to the bank becoming ‘deeply involved in the design and implementation of the development plan for the Italian Mezzogiorno, which became a pilot project for the World Bank itself’.72 The development programmes for Southern Italy were designed in the context of widespread support for New Deal policies in different regions of the world.73 Latin America played a central role in the formulation of early development policies. The Argentine economist Raúl Prebish, Gunnar Myrdal’s transatlantic collaborator as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the 1950s, shared his Swedish colleague’s attention to the interdependent developmental trajectories of different regions. Prebisch’s analyses of interdependence and the unequal terms of trade in rich and poor countries paved the way for what came to be known as dependency theory. At the centre of these discussions is the claim that there is a debt between North and South that has to be acknowledged, against the opposite view that focuses on autonomous or parallel development and rejects or downplays the debt relation. Another source of dependency theory, and of post-colonial theory, can be traced back to the debates on Italy’s North and South and their diffusion beyond Italy. Moving from the local to the global, we could start by tracing this diffusion to Piedmont, the French-oriented engine of Italian unification that in the mid-nineteenth century was a modernising region around the city of Turin, with its own underdeveloped South in the island of Sardinia. At this time, the southern parts of mainland Italy and the conservative Neapolitan Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had, as we have seen, firmly established their position as an anti-North in the eyes of nineteenth-century liberal progressives in Europe. These two Souths, the Neapolitan one and Piedmont’s local South of Sardinia, came together in the beginning of the twentieth century in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, a Sardinian, on the Southern question and the predicament of Italy’s Mezzogiorno. In the next phase, after the Second World War, texts by Gramsci, including his ideas of the Italian South as 208

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a semi-colony, greatly inspired intellectuals in Western academia and in the Global South from Argentina to India. Subaltern and post-colonial studies reinvented Gramscian terms such as ‘subaltern’, ‘hegemony’ and ‘passive revolution’. We can thus conclude that the different Souths of the world are diverse but interconnected, structurally, theoretically and by transnational networks. As Paolo Capuzzo and Sandro Mezzadra suggest, Gramsci himself would probably have agreed: ‘The inter-penetration and increasing overlap between the local, the national, and the global would have been a topic of great interest for Gramsci himself, who was particularly sensitive to the mobility and elusiveness of spatial coordinates.’74 The circulation of Gramsci’s work across the world has been described as an example of South–South connections, with or without the involvement of Northern mediators. One account traces this circulation to a meeting between the future leader of the Italian Communist Party Enrico Berlinguer, another Sardinian, and Ranajit Guha, the Indian historian and founder of the Subaltern Studies group. The two had supposedly crossed paths in Budapest in 1949 at the Second World Festival of Youth and Students, where Berlinguer is alleged to have handed Guha a booklet containing Gramsci’s notes on the Risorgimento, including a text titled ‘On the margins of history (the history of subaltern social groups)’. But the narrative is apparently fictional. Guha was more probably introduced to Gramsci by his teacher Susobhan Sarkar in Calcutta in the late 1950s, with British Marxist historians such as E. P. Thompson playing a mediating role.75 Recent developments in such a global intellectual history of Italian Southern theory are marked by Gramsci’s return home, as it were, from his travels around the world, filtered through Indian and Latin American scholars and American campuses, as witnessed by the recent interest in exploring Italian history, culture and society from subaltern and post-colonial perspectives.76

Notes I thank Maria Stella Chiaruttini and Viviana Mellone for their helpful suggestions and Cesare Cuttica for his comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. In preparing the chapter, I have also benefited from the COST Action (CA18140) ‘People in Motion: Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean (1492–1923)’.   1. See the chapter by Peter Wagner in this volume and the introduction in Peter Wagner (ed.), The Moral Mappings of South and North (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

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Stefan Nygård   2. Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 87.   3. Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia: The Myth of the Nation in the Twentieth Century, trans. Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), ch. 2 (Gioberti cited on p. 41); Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro, Giosuè Carducci et la construction de la nation italienne (Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2006).   4. Better results were achieved as early as the nineteenth century in terms of, for example, educational or administrative modernisation. See, for instance, the introduction in Guido Pescosolido, La questione meridionale in breve: Centocinquant’anni di storia (Rome: Donzelli, 2017).   5. Most of the Northern states had been united before, first in the revolutionary Cisalpine Republic, then in the Napoleonic Republic and finally in the Kingdom of Italy between 1797 and 1814.  6. Among the vast literature on Italy’s Southern question I draw especially on recent works by Francesco Barbagallo, La questione italiana: il Nord e il Sud dal 1860 a oggi (Rome: Laterza, 2013); Emanuele Felice, Perché il Sud è rimasto indietro (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013); Salvatore Lupo, La questione: come liberare la storia del Mezzogiorno dagli stereotipi (Rome: Donzelli, 2015); Pescosolido, La questione meridionale; Lucy Riall, Under the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For the history of Northern ideas about Southerners in relation to Italy, see Moe, View from Vesuvius, and Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).   7. For example Guido Pescosolido, Unità nazionale e sviluppo economico, 1750–1913 (Rome: Laterza, 1998), ch. 2; Lupo, La questione; Emanuele Felice, ‘The SocioInstitutional Divide: Explaining Italy’s Long-Term Regional Differences’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 49(1), 2018, pp. 43–70; Vittorio Daniele and Paolo Malanima, Il divario Nord–Sud in Italia 1861–2011 (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2011); Barbagallo, La questione italiana. For a response from two economic historians to the counterfactual debates, see Carlo Ciccarelli and Stefano Fenoaltea, ‘La cliometria e l’unificazione nazionale: bollettino dal fronte’, Meridiana, 73/4, 2012, pp. 258–66. Available at (last accessed 6 March 2020).   8. Rondo E. Cameron, France and the Economic Development of Europe 1800–1914: Conquests of Peace and Seeds of War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 429, 434–5.   9. For a summary that situates the Italian debates in an international context, see Carmine Pinto, ‘Crisi globale e conflitti civili: nuove ricerche e prospettive storiografiche’, Meridiana, 78, 2013, pp. 9–30. 10. Miguel Mellino, ‘De-Provincializing Italy’, in Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (eds), Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 83–99: 84. 11. Felice, Perché il Sud è rimasto indietro; Felice ‘Socio-Institutional Divide’.

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Debating the South in Unified Italy 12. For instance, it has been argued that in this period brigands and revolting peasants in general belonged to an imaginary of the un-modern, violent, Catholic and conservative countryside, from Ireland to Southern Italy. Niall Whelehan, ‘Revolting Peasants: Southern Italy, Ireland and Cartoons in Comparative Perspective, 1860–1882’, International Review of Social History, 60(1), 2015, pp. 1–35; Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536–1966 (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1975). 13. Roberto Martucci, L’invenzione dell’Italia unita 1855–1864 (Milan: Sansoni, 1999), pp. 294–5. 14. Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 15. Guido Franzinetti, ‘Southern Europe’, in Diana Mishkova and Balász Trencsényi (eds), European Regions and Boundaries: A Conceptual History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017). 16. Augustin Creuzé de Lesser, Voyage en Italie: fait en 1801 et 1802 (Paris: P. Didot l’ainé, 1806), p. 96; Moe, View from Vesuvius, p. 87. 17. Dainotto, Europe, pp. 55, 162–4. 18. As suggested by the title of an abbreviated English version of Sismondi’s book, A History of the Italian Republics: Being a View of the Origin, Progress, and Fall of Italian Freedom. See Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, ‘“L’Atene d’Italia”: identità fiorentina e toscana nella formazione dello Stato nazionale’, Meridiana, 33, 1998, pp. 107–23. 19. Unfortunately, however, Guizot thought, this superiority had not been consolidated by a ‘despotic centralization that would have forged a people and made her independent of the foreigner’. Mauro Moretti and Ilaria Porciani, ‘Italy’s Various Middle Ages’, in Robert Evans, John Weston and Guy P. Marchal (eds), The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States: History, Nationhood and the Search for Origins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 177–96: 180–1. 20. In Pasquale Villari, L’Italia, la civiltà latina e la civiltà germanica (Florence: Le Monnier, 1861). 21. Alfi Mastropaolo, ‘From the Other Shore: American Political Science and the “Italian Case” ’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 14(3), 2009, pp. 311–37. 22. Salvatore Lupo, ‘Usi e abusi del passato: le radici dell’Italia di Putnam’, Meridiana, 18, 1993, pp. 151–68; Sidney Tarrow, ‘Making Social Science Work Across Space and Time: A Critical Reflection on Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work’, The American Political Science Review, 90(2), 1996, pp. 389–97; Filippo Sabetti, ‘Path Dependency and Civic Culture: Some Lessons From Italy About Interpreting Social Experiments’, Politics & Society, 24(1), 1996, pp. 19–44. 23. Fedele Lampertico, ‘Il Gervinus e il Villari’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 3rd ser., 1(2 [38]), 1865, pp. 95–108. 24. Bertrando Spaventa, Dal 1848 al 1861, ed. Benedetto Croce (Bari: Laterza, 1923), p. 78. 25. Michele Amari, La guerra del Vespro Siciliano (Paris: Baudry, 1843). 26. Dainotto, Europe, pp. 193–8.

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Stefan Nygård 27. Moretti and Porciani, ‘Italy’s Various Middle Ages’, p. 187; Giuseppe Giarrizzo, La storiografia della nuova Italia: I, Introduzione alla storia della storiografia italiana, ed. Lina Scalisi (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2018), ch. 3. 28. Dainotto, Europe. 29. Quoted in Niall Ferguson, The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), p. 614. 30. In the wake of unification, Northern Italian generals in their correspondence confirmed the image of Italy south of Rome as a naturally rich and fertile region, and the beginning of Africa. Moe, View from Vesuvius; Patriarca, Italian Vices. 31. Francesco Barbagallo, ‘The Rothschilds in Naples’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 5(3), 2000, pp. 294–309. 32. Michael Tomz, Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt Across Three Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [2007] 2011). 33. Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Why Global Markets, States, and Democracy Can’t Coexist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 30. 34. Moe, View from Vesuvius, p. 156, n. 1. 35. Harold James and Kevin H. O’Rourke, ‘Italy and the First Age of Globalization, 1861–1940’, in Gianni Toniolo (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy, 1860–1990: Recovery after Decline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 169–78. 36. Cameron, France, pp. 437–9; Ferguson, World’s Banker. 37. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (London: Routledge, [1913] 2003), pp. 399–425. 38. The Great Book of Public Debt was modelled on a Piedmontese register from 1819, which in turn was adapted from the French revolutionary Grand livre de la dette publique (1793). 39. Ferguson, World’s Banker, pp. 612–13; Charles S. Maier, Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging Since 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016); Cameron, France, pp. 300–1. 40. Tomz, Reputation and International Cooperation. 41. Francesco Saverio Nitti, Nord e Sud: prime linee di una inchiesta sulla ripartizione territoriale delle entrate e delle spese dello Stato in Italia (Turin: Roux e Viarengo, 1900), pp. 139–41. 42. Ibid.; Zamagni, Economic History of Italy, p. 175; Pescosolido, La questione meridionale, pp. 151–2. 43. For example, Lupo, La questione; Felice, ‘Socio-Institutional Divide’. 44. Giovanni Iuzzolino, Guido Pellegrini and Gianfrano Viesti, ‘Regional Convergence’, in Toniolo, Italian Economy Since Unification, pp. 579–81. 45. For a summary, see Pescosolido, La questione meridionale, ch. 3. 46. Nitti, Nord e Sud, p. 13. 47. Ibid., pp. 6–7, 15–16. 48. Jason Hickel, The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions (London: Penguin, 2017), ch.1.

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Debating the South in Unified Italy 49. Gunnar Myrdal, Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions (London: Duckworth, 1957). 50. Corrado Gini, L’ammontare e la composizione della ricchezza delle nazioni (Turin: Bocca, 1914), pp. 265–77. 51. Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (London: Anthem Press, 2002); Zamagni, Economic History of Italy, pp. 110–11. 52. Ciccarelli and Fenoaltea. ‘La cliometria e l’unificazione nazionale’, pp. 258–66. 53. Moe, View from Vesuvius, pp. 225–36. 54. Marta Petrusewicz, Come il Meridione divenne una Questione (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1998). 55. Cf. Pescosolido, La questione meridionale, ch. 4, and Barbagallo, La questione italiana, ch. 3. 56. On the internal Italian and the Italian–European divides, see, for example, Pescosolido, La questione meridionale, ch. 2. 57. Lupo, La questione, part I, ch. 3 (‘Questione sociale, piuttosto che meridionale’). 58. Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, La Sicilia nel 1876 (Florence: Barbèra, 1876); Giuseppe Giarrizzo, Mezzogiorno senza meridionalismo: la Sicilia, lo sviluppo, il potere (Venice: Marsilio, 1992). 59. Silvana Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in NineteenthCentury Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 60. Moe, View from Vesuvius. 61. Barbagallo, La questione italiana, p. 75. 62. Gramsci also aligned the North–South divide with the urban–rural opposition, underlining the incomplete dispersal of urbanism, broadly understood, in Italian society. 63. Lupo, La questione. 64. Pasquale Villari, Le lettere meridionali ed altri scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia (Florence: Le Monnier, 1878), quoted in Moe, View from Vesuvius, p. 235. 65. Jürgen Osterhammel, Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 494–5. 66. See Enrico Dal Lago, ‘Italian National Unification and the Mezzogiorno: Colonialism in One Country?’, in Róisín Healy and Enrico Dal Lago (eds), The Shadow of Colonialism on Europe’s Modern Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 57–72. 67. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 5; Mary Gibson, ‘Biology or Environment? Race and Southern “Deviancy” in the Writings of Italian Criminologists, 1880–1920’, in Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s ‘Southern Question’: Orientalism in One Country (New York: Berg, 1998). 68. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Le Nord et le Midi: contribution à une analyse de l’effet Montesquieu’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 35, 1980, pp. 21–5. 69. Alfredo Niceforo, L’Italia barbara contemporanea (Milan and Palermo: Sandron,

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Stefan Nygård 1898), pp. 6, 297; John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 2–3. For Niceforo, the idea of a North–South divide in terms of higher and lower social sentiments was important as well. 70. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 71. Myrdal, Economic Theory. 72. M. Alacevich, ‘The World Bank Loans to Italy and the History of Postwar Development Policies’, working paper, Columbia University, 2009, p. 1, quoted in Amedeo Lepore, La Cassa per il Mezzogiorno e la Banca Mondiale: un modello per lo sviluppo economico italiano (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2012), p. 28. 73. Kiran Patel, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 74. Paolo Capuzzo and Sandro Mezzadra, ‘Provincializing the Italian Reading of Gramsci’, in Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya (eds), The Postcolonial Gramsci (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 34–54: 48. 75. Cosimo Zene, ‘Subalterns and Dalits in Gramsci and Ambedkar: A Prologue to a “Posthumous” Dialogue’, in Cosimo Zene (ed.), The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B. R. Ambedkar: Itineraries of Dalits and Subalterns (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 1–32: 2; Michele Filippini, Gramsci globale: guida pratica alle interpretazioni di Gramsci nel mondo (Bologna: Odoya, 2011), pp. 99–101. 76. Schneider, Italy’s ‘Southern Question’; Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, Postcolonial Italy.

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10 Economic Theory as Morality: Europe’s and the World’s North and South Bo Stråth

T

his chapter is about the ethics implicit in economic theories and their connection to the European and global North–South divides. It explores how the issue of historical debt and guilt was a core dimension of a moral message, and how this message historically provided preconditions for bridging or deepening the two North–South divides and how the European and the global divides were connected. The time span it considers is the period since 1945. The framework for articulating these imaginaries of debt and guilt, with their associated moral message, was economic theory. During the period since 1945 there have been two competing economic theories, each with hegemonic status for a specific period, with the 1970s as the divide marking the shift between hegemonies. The theories were Keynesianism and neoliberalism. Although both argued that they were value-free economic theory, they were value-loaded with moral implications. The prelude below examines the historical connection between economic theory and morality. It will, furthermore, discuss the Keynesian response to the debt and guilt challenge, a response that ended in the attempts to bridge the global North–South divide that emerged in the 1970s. The interlude then investigates the breakthrough of neoliberalism, and its moral appendix, in the 1980s, and the emergence in the wake of neoliberal ideology of a European North–South divide after 2008. The postlude argues for the urgent need to close the connected European and global North–South divides and will suggest the theoretical and value premises on which this could be defended.

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Prelude The illusion of economics as value-free science Some people may oppose the national debt because they believe that a good moral code requires that the government finances its expenditures by taxation. These people, however, are making value judgements: they are taking a normative approach to a positive matter. The great majority of arguments about the national debt are not of this type, but are, rather, predictions about observable behaviour and thus belong to the field of science. One line of argument is that if we increase the size of the debt we will have inflation. Another is that if we have a debt we will transfer responsibility for paying for our activities to a later generation. These are factual assertions on which evidence can be brought to bear.1 The quotation is from a textbook used in undergraduate and graduate classes in economics in Western Europe and the US in the 1960s. It distinguished between debt as a moral and as a scientific issue. As positivist science, debt was about predictable and observable behaviour. It was a technical issue where one could compare choices on the basis of the foreseeable consequences of various alternatives for action. The time was the peak years of Keynesian belief in managing political economies in ways that guaranteed full employment and sustainable growth. This built on the long reconstruction boom after the Second World War, with its promises of permanent affluence ahead. Depending on policy choice, which was subject to political contention and divergent preferences, one could manage the economy with higher or lower rates and levels of growth, employment, inflation, budget balance, trade balance and so on, and the choice had predictable consequences for long-term employment and growth. The more sophisticated the Keynesian toolkit got in the pursuit of affluence through welfare politics, the more it became removed from Keynes, who wrote the General Theory against the backdrop of depression and crisis and emphasised the human condition of uncertainty about the future as a main predicament of economic theory. He looked for ways to reduce feelings of uncertainty, but never lost sight of its ultimate inescapability.2 As to debt, the textbook discerned three sources of income for financing government spending: taxing, borrowing and the minor selling of government services. The argument of the book was for value-free economic 216

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analysis, proposing alternatives for value-based political choice between the alternatives. State borrowing was an objective instrument for enabling the choice between consumption in the present or in the future, between consumption and investment. It was maybe difficult to decide whether military expenditures or expenditures on, for instance, education and research were present consumption or investment with future yields, but the principle of choice between harvesting in the present or in the future was not called into question. Taxes and debts were technical instruments whose functioning did not in itself call values into play, because the consequences of taxes and debts were predictable, the book argued. The level of taxes and debts, on the other hand, depended on political choices and preferences that were based on values. The distinction that the textbook drew between value-free science and value-based policies/politics connects to a long and contested history of understanding economic theory as value-based moral inquiry or value-free science. The academic discipline of Adam Smith was moral philosophy. The moral issue was central when he developed his economic theory. He published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations. Sympathy with other people was a central theme when he explored how value orders and action norms emerged historically. Moral norms and ideals were, in his view, inscribed in historical processes. His goal was to connect normative orders with economic theory and his action directives, theoretically derived from the norms, were based on virtue-ethics rather than rules of the sort defended in the ethics of Kant and the utilitarian school. The debate on Smith has emphasised the tension between the two books, the former written with a focus on the social context of the acting individuals, the latter on their self-interest. There is convincing research questioning this difference, however, and denying that the two books are incompatible. They merely stress different aspects of human behaviour that depend on the social and historical context. Self-interest is present in both books and sympathy is the moral faculty that controls self-interest. The two volumes outline similar market models as the basis for their vision of a large-scale social and economic order. Smith wrote in a pre-industrial time when the economy was still based on agriculture, handicraft and trade. Economy was value creation and economic theory dealt with how value was created. The theory was ­supply-oriented. The question of how the yield of value creation was distributed was not very central, and the perspective of the value ­creators, the entrepreneurs, defined the moral outlook of the theory.3 217

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As industrial capitalism broke through in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, the darker sides of the order became visible. The accumulation of wealth went hand in hand with new forms of poverty. Regularly recurring unemployment was a new phenomenon that still did not have a name. In the 1820s, against the backdrop of this development, the economists pursued the ‘big glut’ debate. Sismonde de Sismondi and others questioned Adam Smith’s supply-oriented perspective with the value-creating entrepreneur as the central factor of the economy. They focused on the demand side, on the prospects of the working poor and their purchasing power. In so doing they eroded the liberal value theory of Smith and its grounding in sympathy. It did not respond to the emerging social question. In the debate on the glut a French school emerged arguing for a social economy, as opposed to the English school in the tradition of Smith arguing for a political economy.4 Ever since the big glut debate 200 years ago there has been an oscillation in economic theory between supply- and demand-oriented approaches. Each approach has had its specific value base or moral outlook on the world from the perspective of producers or consumers, capital or labour. The argument for value-free theory is ideology. A generation later, Karl Marx developed Sismondi’s ideas in new directions. Marx described how Smith’s artisans and merchants became a new rising class of capitalist entrepreneurs, confronting the old elite based on birth privileges, and demanding privileges of achievement. They represented their own class interests. Marx’s innovation was to situate these interests against those of the working class with its own, different interests. He drew attention to the poor, with whom Sismondi had been concerned, and assigned them an important capacity for action. In Marx’s value theory, two opposite value and moral orientations emerged, which were connected through class struggle.5 Like Marx, John Maynard Keynes assumed different class interests, but argued that they need not necessarily lead to class struggle. Instead, he envisioned a compromise between opposing class interests organised by the moderating welfare state and by means of top-down redistribution of the yields of the economy.6 Alongside these oscillations between supply and demand orientation there emerged early on another binary tension, between economics as value-free social science separated from politics and as value-oriented policy recommendation. From the 1870s on, the German historical school around the Association for Social Policy continued the tradition of the social economy around Sismondi’s work. However, whereas 218

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Sismondi drafted a political project from the left, the orientation of the historical school was rather to the right. They saw as their goal the elaboration of policies for national integration through social integration. The social question­– ­the debate over how the newly formed, immiserated urban masses were to be treated­– ­and the emerging Marxist class struggle discourse were their main concern. They offered an alternative to the Marxist view.7 The neoclassical marginal utility school around Carl Menger, with Vienna as its intellectual centre, argued against the historical school, represented by, among others, Gustav Schmoller, for an economic science that was value-free and purified from history and culture, and with a subordinate role for politics. Politics had to adjust to the laws of the economy. The neoclassicals rejected the labour theories of value as developed by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and the other classicals and argued that the marginal utility of a product determined its value. The two approaches of the historical school and neoclassicism led to two different moral views around the connection between the social question and politics and economics. The approach of the Kathedersozialisten, as the historical school were sometimes called by their detractors, which aimed at formulating direct policy recommendations, led to ever more contradictory proposals and recommendations at the cost of academic distance and erudition.8 The dilution of the message from the historical school became the concern of a younger generation of social scientists who wanted to break the deadlock between the two approaches as to the question of theory and values. Max Weber argued, against the backdrop of the normative approach of the historical school, that it could never be the task of the social sciences to explore binding norms and ideals in order to derive political action recommendations. Values could not be derived from empirical science; however, the reverse operation was possible, and the empirical sciences could investigate values. In doing so, aims (values) had to be analytically separated from means. One could judge whether, in a particular historical situation, an aim made sense or not, but one could not undertake value-driven consequence analysis of various action opportunities. Weber’s proposal was to separate goal-setting politics from means-proposing science.9 Weber’s value debate occupied the social sciences until the 1960s. At this time, however, the Keynesian paradigm began to dilute the sharp distinction between politics and science. After the war, the economists inspired by Keynes, who died in 1946, developed his thought 219

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into an interpretative framework of a politically managed social market economy. It was a political economy driven by the imaginary of public welfare provision, redistribution of the yields of the economy through progressive income taxes, and mass consumption and mass production in mutually reinforcing dynamics. The political management dealt with stimulating or slowing down demand, decreasing or increasing the interest rate, and so on, depending on the cyclical situation. The inflation rate, the budget deficit or (in theory but seldom in practice) surplus and the unemployment level provided other management tools for the economy. This was the economic theory that the textbook quotation at the beginning of this section referred to. The economy that the textbook described was distinguished by a balance between state and market and was called a mixed economy. The argument of the textbook, that the choice of instrument in this repertoire was positive objective science beyond partial values and morality, was sheer ideology, of course. The preferences and the policy choices in the elaboration of the action alternatives were contentious and full of value implications with a moral dimension.10 The Keynesian political economy was not just a matter of technique and variable drill, a value-free science in the Weberian sense, but embedded in and entangled with values that could be epitomised as social democracy, not connected in the narrow sense to a particular political party or ideology but in the broader sense of appealing to Enlightenment values like solidarity, fairness, justice and community. The Keynesian model intervened through top-down redistribution in order to decrease social inequalities and reinforce the purchasing power of the masses. There was, of course, a contentious and controversial debate on the level of redistribution and the progressivity of the taxes, but this debate welded together rather than split the political community and reinforced the legitimacy of the model, by merging values and technique.

Debt and value Moral values, though always potentially contestable, need not in practice be tied up with disputes over value. Moral relationships can rather be consensual, such as debts based on a moral commitment to pay them back. The etymology of debt goes back to the Latin and Italian debitio/debito, which connotes duty and commitment (to pay or give back). However, debt also connotes offence and sin, as in debito d’on220

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ore, debt of honour, or as in the Christian prayer rimetti a noi i nostri debiti, ‘forgive us our sins’. The German Schuld and the Scandinavian skuld possess the same ambiguity by encompassing both debt in a more technical sense and guilt or sin in a moral sense. The other side of debito is credito: trust, respect, reputation, credit, confidence, belief, faith. There is no debtor without a creditor. They are entangled in relationships based on trust and commitment that the debt will be paid back. This is the distinction between gift and debt. The other side of a gift is a giver and there is no expectation of repayment, but the reason need not be altruistic. Self-interest can play a role and there can be a mixture of altruism and egotism in giving a gift. There might also be feelings of guilt behind the gift, whereas debt is more a matter of mutual interests. Of course, connected to self-interests, gifts are also a matter of mutuality. In the 1950s, the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of (Western) Europe involved loans but was mostly in the form of grants/gifts from the US to Europe. The philosophy of both the loans and the grants was a mutual interest in boosting demand in the reconstruction economies. The giver/creditor did not have any feelings of guilt but did have a strong sense of self-interest.11 In the 1960s, state debt in Western Europe became a rather technical issue of intergenerational borrowing for investments in the future. There was hardly any particular imaginary of North and South in terms of debt/guilt but rather one in terms of difference. During the Cold War the prevailing European division was between the West and the East. Southern Europe meant Italy as a key member of the West European integration project, belonging to the core rather than a Southern periphery. Greece was a poor agricultural economy, seen as exotic rather than relevant to the integration project. Spain and Portugal had military regimes, like Greece after 1967, and were therefore excluded alongside Eastern Europe from what was understood as democratic Europe. On the other hand, exactly because of the Cold War and the East–West divide there was a political interest in Greece (and Turkey) as a defensive shield on Europe’s southern flank, and an interest in Southern Europe as a region for investments in development, not least in the tourist industry (for this latter point, see Nygård’s chapter in this volume). Furthermore, there was in social-democratic Northern Europe a certain interest in learning from Yugoslavia, which in political terms looked for a neutral position between the East and the West and served as a source of inspiration for progressive industrial 221

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democracy and workers’ co-determination. Yugoslavia, on the crossroads between the North and the South and the East and the West, was a bridge as much as a divide. It was a bridge from Europe’s external East and South to its perceived democratic centre. In general terms, the distinction between Northern and Southern Europe was framed in terms of difference rather than division (see the chapter by Nedimović in this volume). Between Europe’s North and South there was an accelerating movement of people in both directions, bridging the obvious ­prosperity–­poverty gap and bringing the perceived periphery closer to the perceived centre. The more industrialised North had higher productivity and purchasing power. Labour migration from the agricultural South to the industrial North in the 1950s and 1960s, and mass tourism from the North to the South in the 1960s, helped bridge the gap, although labour migration declined rapidly in the 1970s against the backdrop of mass unemployment in the North. Financial remittances home from labour in the North and tourist spending in the South gave hope of economic development in the South and closure of the economic gap with the North. There emerged in the 1960s a global North–South imaginary in terms of decolonisation and development through development aid for future economic self-reliance in the former colonies. Until the 1950s, the colonies were seen as continuous with and as appendices of the imperial centres in Europe rather than in terms of rupture and division. The question in the 1960s was how to maintain the relationships with the ex-colonies in new forms. A high degree of European self-interest, as in the American Marshall Plan, underpinned the aid flow from the North to the South. In both the European and the American cases, self-interest was also a way to nurture a bond of commonality and shared interest, not as an alternative but as a supplement to self-interest. Self-interest was entangled with considerations of the interests of the Other in mutually reinforcing dynamics. The definition of interests in the 1960s was expansive, and built in the West on the belief in a sustainable economy of growth maintained by mutually reinforcing dynamics between mass consumption and mass production. The precondition of this expansive approach was the social embedding of welfare capitalism with Keynesian top-down redistribution in a European as well as a global imaginary. Debt was a technical instrument for investments in the future. Two threatening points of reference underpinned the model: a reiteration of the 1930s and the spread of the Soviet system in 222

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the present. The developmental promise of a better future through aid packages to the decolonised world was released from the connotation of the historical guilt of colonialism, although there was a lingering note of bad conscience.

The 1970s: the global North–South divide The US and the dollar guaranteed the post-war order in the North. The lesson of the economic crisis in the 1930s was that the gold standard, through which all currencies were tied to a fixed gold price, was too rigid and imposed austerity politics against mass unemployment when financial expansion would have been the correct response. In the post-war order the dollar guaranteed the value of gold whereas the other currencies had scope for a certain fluctuation in their exchange rates to the dollar. The costs of the Cold War overstretched the dollar commitment when the US government expanded the dollar stock in order to respond to growing military costs. European governments began to doubt the American capacity to redeem the gold commitment and threatened to exchange their dollar reserves for gold. The dollar commitment took on a moral dimension of guilt and blame when the mutual respect on which it depended eroded. The pressure on the dollar grew and in August 1971 President Nixon threw in the towel, declaring that the US would no longer guarantee the gold price. This was the beginning of a deep crisis and the transformation of the world economy in response to it. The labour markets collapsed in the North and mass unemployment prevailed for the first time since the 1930s when key industries like steel, coal and shipbuilding broke down. According to Keynesian theory, mass unemployment had by then been relegated to a historical category. The memories of the 1930s, only a generation previously, recurred and alarmed the political leaders, who intervened with massive subsidy packages to prevent labour markets from totally collapsing. Inflation soared in the wake of the financial expansion even while mass unemployment persisted, which was an impossible combination according to the Keynesian prescriptions, and received a name: stagflation. Perplexity prevailed and the subsidy packages resulted in growing state debts. Confidence in the future, based on mutual trust, was lost in the North and feelings of muddling through and gloom ahead spread to the developing South.12 Modernisation theory about a common path towards higher stages of development through investments, technology transfers and trade 223

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had underpinned the belief in development, decolonisation and democracy in the former colonies. This view was challenged by dependency theory, which argued that resources moved in the other direction, from the poor, underdeveloped periphery to the wealthy core, amounting to continuous exploitation even after formal decolonisation. The functioning ‘world system’ was not decolonial but neo-colonial, with continued impoverishment of the poor and enrichment of the rich.13 The question of historical guilt returned, this time in a global North–South perspective. Two years after the dollar collapse, the oil price shock signalled a new international order in which a challenge to the sense of continued colonial dependency was raised. The Arab oil sheiks exploited the dollar collapse and the chaos in Europe as well as the Yom Kippur War between Israel and the neighbouring Arab states for a dramatic increase in oil prices in October 1973. Other raw material-producing countries in the South that, unlike the countries of the sheiks, were poor saw an opportunity for change. In 1974 the newly independent states of the poor South demanded a so-called ‘New International Economic Order’ with redistributive Keynesian economic politics at the global level. The global South thereby stood up and demanded more of the pie. Frustration over continued dependencies still a decade after decolonialisation, and over lack of development despite a decade of development aid, drove the leaders of the South. The issue of historical guilt and debt was put on the table in a global North–South perspective. At the same time as fear for the future spread in Europe, the winds of independence gained new force throughout much of the developing world. In order to mitigate a North–South confrontation, a ‘North–South Dialogue’ was convened in Paris in the mid-1970s, with the aim of redistributing income, protecting commodity prices, ensuring ‘control’ of the economy and economic transactions, and accelerating the flow of technology.14 An eighteen-month ‘dialogue’ between the rich North and the poor South, which had begun with much enthusiasm and great hope, finished on a faint and joyless note. The search for dialogue and compromise instead of the stronger language of exploitation and imperialism was not least in the interest of the rich world in the wake of the oil price shock in 1973. Against the backdrop of the difficulties with the North–South negotiations, in January 1977 Robert McNamara (the Keynesian-oriented president of the World Bank, former minister of defence in the Kennedy admin224

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istration, involved in the escalation of the Vietnam War, but growing increasingly sceptical of American involvement and resigning in 1968) announced an intention to establish a commission of experienced and respected politicians and economists from the North and the South. Those on the commission were to represent their governments but remain formally independent, and were tasked with making proposals on how to break through the existing political impasse. McNamara shifted the focus of the World Bank towards poverty reduction. In September 1977 Willy Brandt communicated that he was going to chair the commission, with a majority of its members coming from the developing countries. The members represented the political left as well as right, industry as well as trade unions. They came from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. There were no communists, but Brandt kept in touch with the Kremlin, where he had good contacts after his appeasement approach as a German chancellor. He had just resigned from that position after an East German spy was revealed in his office. The Brandt Commission (officially the Independent Commission on International Development Issues) delivered two reports: North–South (1980) and Common Crisis (1983).15 The reports emphasised the biases inherent in North–South relationships in terms of economic power, food and agricultural development, energy and trade, and underlined the need for aid, for international monetary and financial reform and for global negotiations. They addressed problems they considered common to the North and the South, such as environmental deterioration, the arms race, population growth and the uncertain prospects of the global economy. These problems ultimately concerned the survival of all nations, the Commission concluded. Its recommendations were presented as a structural programme to address the world’s problems collectively, as a global Marshall Plan. The proposal continued, basically from the perspective of the North, on the same track of self-interest for mutual benefit as the Marshall Plan and the development aid of the 1960s, but the framework and the conditions had changed considerably. The initiative no longer came from the North. The threat that mere self-interest adjusted for mutual benefit would not be enough was obvious and made the Brandt approach more concrete and more precise than general references to development aid. The Commission was exposed to a much more immediate threat where the Global South tended to define debt and guilt as a zero-sum game of taking from those who had, rather than an expansive win–win situation. 225

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The Commission argued that developing nations were economically dependent on developed nations. The latter dominated the international rule-setting mechanisms and institutions for regulating global trade, money and finance. The economic gap between developing and developed nations led to political instability not only in the poor nations but across the world. It was therefore also in the self-interest of the rich nations to change this situation. Implicit or explicit arguments about solidarity and responsibility for past injustices supplemented the reference to self-interest in Brandt’s vision: At the beginning of a new decade, only twenty years short of the millennium, we must try to lift ourselves above the day-to-day quarrels (or negotiations) to see the menacing long-term problems. We see a world in which poverty and hunger still prevail in many huge regions; in which resources are squandered without consideration of their renewal; in which more armaments are made and sold than ever before; and where a destructive capacity has been accumulated to blow up our planet several times over.16 The Commission stated that under democratic conditions world leaders need backing by the international public for decision-making. As a necessary political counterweight to the corporate and financial policies of globalisation, the Commission argued for a global citizens’ movement with a focus beyond singular issues and nationalistic viewpoints. The Commission proposed that with broad and informed public support, representatives of the international community should initiate two sets of negotiation with the task of linking together objectives for solving the world’s basic needs and reforming the international economy. The two sets were a summit of world leaders and, on the basis of the work of the summit, a popular international (‘multilateral’) referendum organised by the UN General Assembly to guide the restructuring of the international economy. Representatives of governments, major corporations, private capital banks, central banks, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and other international institutions constituted the basis of the referendum, together with members of NGOs and civic and regional groups from around the world. Together they would negotiate an agenda for a new global economy, including major initiatives for environmental protection, fair trade, regulation of the global economy, and consensus for a new global economy. The focus had to be ‘not on machines or institutions, but on people’ and on the 226

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creation of an environment in which they could live long, healthy and productive lives, the Commission declared.17 The theoretical core of the Brandt Commission’s vision was ­value-based Keynesian redistribution at a global level where the political management of the world economy was based on a global social movement. ‘Dare more democracy’, as Brandt said in a response to the ‘1968’ protest movement, but now at a global level. His vision was a social embedding of capitalism at the global level.

Interlude The debt and a new moral: neoliberalism Brandt’s attempt to develop a social democratic, Keynesian redistributive approach at a global level was difficult. A new economic doctrine popped up at a time that was about to shift to something fundamentally new in response to the crisis in the 1970s. It was about to supersede Keynesianism. Friedrich Hayek was the mastermind of the definition of freedom and neoliberal democracy. With his focus on price formation instead of Keynesian demand and purchasing power, the reason for the unemployment crisis in the 1970s was clear to Hayek. All-powerful trade unions had driven up wages to levels where labour became too expensive. The precondition of a return to full employment was to decrease wages and break up the power of the trade unions. Similarly, the state had to refrain from artificial stimulation of demand. Equilibrium was a consequence of the free competition between supply and demand on labour and commodity markets. State intervention disturbed and undermined the onset of equilibrium in the long run. Milton Friedman, a prominent economist belonging to the Chicago School of economics, supplemented Hayek’s focus on prices with a monetarist approach. The key was to control the government’s expenditures and the equilibrium of state budgets. The problem was not so much debt as such, since the aim was investment in the future with interest payments to creditors. The problem was government debt, based on government spending in the present, where budget deficits are equal to a hidden taxation or a form of value destruction through inflation when governments print money. Like the Keynesian economists, the neoliberals understood their opinions in terms of positive science beyond morality, ignoring the fact that Friedman’s argument for monetary equilibrium had 227

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a moral ­dimension in its advocacy of austerity that supplemented Hayek’s moral about wage cuts for a better labour market balance. The neoliberal approach argued for market enclosure through rigid rules derived from economic theory. Politics should not intervene in market performance, as in the Keynesian approach. The only role of politics was to monitor market actors’ compliance with the rules. This Hayekian neoliberalism had obvious historical links to the neoclassical school around Menger and its belief in value-free economic theory. Additionally to the Hayekian supply-side definition of market rules, the American neoliberals around Friedman and his colleagues in the Chicago School brought laissez-faire liberalism back in again through the appeal for deregulation. The implication was that in addition to  the theoretically derived rules for market enclosure from political intervention, there was also the laissez-faire punch of the powerful as the decisive argument.18 Hayek’s and Friedman’s neoliberal project was against public debt, public welfare and public service. Profit-driven private business would do these things more efficiently. The state guarantee of the freedoms of the market was very different from the Keynesian redistributive role of the state. The 1970s was a hard ideological struggle between top-down, redistributing Keynesianism and the new bottom-up, redistributing neoliberalism, the latter characterised by the systematic channelling of societal wealth towards a rich elite through market mechanisms, wanting to abandon the economy as a moral order to the benefit of the economy as rule-governed power, with the rules allegedly theoretically derived from value-free economic theory.19 In 1982, the reform package labelled by the economist John Williamson as the ‘Washington Consensus’ promised the unification of the world and the prospects of development through the market for those countries that were not yet developed. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank under a new director from the banking industry, and the US Treasury Department used the new neoliberal language for global macroeconomic stabilisation. The thoughts of the Brandt Commission were sidestepped. The theoretical protagonists behind the new narrative were Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and the political promoters Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. They­– ­along with the IMF and the World Bank − prescribed a new standard for crisis-wracked developing countries. Williamson identified ten policy prescriptions in their reform package: fiscal discipline with the limitation of budget deficit relative to GDP; redirection 228

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of public spending from subsidies towards private, profitable provision of pro-growth services in education, health and infrastructure; tax reforms with moderate marginal tax rates and broader tax rates; market-determined interest rates on loans; competitive exchange rates; trade liberalisation of imports; liberalisation of foreign investments; privatisation of state enterprises; deregulation, meaning the abolition of rules impeding market entry or restricting competition; and legal security for property rights.20 The prescriptions were elaborated for crisis-hit developing economies in Latin America, but the approach soon spread to developing countries in general. In the debate that ensued in the 1990s, the prescriptions became embedded in neoliberal language emphasising market opening, reduction of state responsibilities, and state-financial rigidity. The new spirit of the Washington Consensus permeated the developing African countries and choked the aid packages to them from the rich world. The strangulation of the aid flows activated the old independence ideal of self-reliance at the same time as it deactivated the political responsibility for this reliance. Hopes were invested in the market. The end of the Cold War also meant the end of competition between the superpowers through support packages that promoted corruption, and the beginning of an era of financial rigidity and economic austerity, which, however, hardly made an impact on corruption levels. The introduction of reciprocal trade relations in tandem with the application of the austerity principles of the Washington Consensus changed the economic preconditions of the development debate. Previously, trade relations under the overall label of development aid were non-reciprocal and governments were donors. Here the question must be raised of how sharp the rupture was and how many continuities there were with the colonial situation. The neo-colonial argument that dependencies continued after formal decolonisation is convincing and well elaborated.21 Transnational corporations and global institutions joined forces, thereby perpetuating colonial exploitation. Corporate capital and its supporting nations continued to dominate subject nations. The partners which the Washington Consensus extolled were there all the time, making use of privileged relations with the former colonies as bridgeheads. Instead of newly formed states partnering with their former colonial masters in egalitarian ways consistent with the promises of decolonisation, old capitalist enterprises were replaced by new or newly remodelled ones, and political alliances were steered by 229

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considerations that followed the logic of corporate profit-maximisation through circuits of global capital, rather than those of people-centred development and generalised affluence. However, something did change with the neoliberal takeover. Under the new Washington Consensus turn in the 1980s public donors withdrew, handing over the initiative to private capital, which sought out partners in the poor countries under the assumption of equality. New branding labels, like performance-based partnership agreements, described the shift. If partnership referred to remaining partners from the colonial era, the language of partnership, with its connotations of formal equality, was hypocritical. If the meaning was native domestic partners, the assumption of equality was perfidious, not to say cynical. Nonetheless, the imaginary of equal, independent partners, where the partners on the rich side became globally operating representatives of capital rather than the state representatives who used to manage aid, did not change the fact that dependencies deriving from inequality remained. Under the dust of a powerful ideology, and a hypocritical partnership vocabulary that glossed over remaining features of colonialism, the question of how to resolve the debt- and guilt-loaded global North–South relationships remained unanswered in an act of Freudian repression. Guilt was formulated in the South through accusations of past wrongs by the colonial powers rather than through an act of self-­ reflection in the North, as was the case with the Brandt Commission. European unification and German reunification On another stage, the expectations of one unified Europe speeded up after the implosion of the Soviet regime. One unified Europe in one unified global market, and the establishment of Europe as a Union in 1992, swept issues of historical differences, inequities and wrongs in Europe under the carpet. However, the German reunification in immediate connection with the collapse of the Soviet empire provoked apprehensions even while being unstoppable. The project of a European Monetary Union (EMU) condensed the conflicting interests under the surface of what looked like a new, harmonious order. The underlying interest conflict dealt with two spectres: on the one side, the historically founded French apprehension of a powerful Germany, and on the other side, the concern among the Northern EU members about the lack of economic efficiency, visible as lower productivity levels among the Mediterranean member states. More precisely, the concern 230

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in this Southern case dealt with lax fiscal politics, for which the historical remedy had been continuous inflation-driving devaluations. Italy and France were the cases in point. Latent xeno- and auto-stereotypes of Southern Europe as lazy, epicurean, hedonistic and extravagant, and Europe north of the Alps as hard-working, industrious, entrepreneurial and thrifty, were prepared for activation. Greece became a member of the European Communities in 1981, and Spain and Portugal in 1986. Spain and Portugal became members of the eurozone in 1999, and Greece in 2001. This was an attempt to unify the North and the South in Europe, despite obvious economic differences, before the unification of Eastern and Western Europe through the big enlargement of the EU in 2004. As to the first spectre, the French president François Mitterrand did what he could to prevent German reunification. When he failed, his substitute goal became the Europeanisation of the strong German mark in a move that applied the old coal-and-steel strategy in the European unification project in the early 1950s to the economic realities of a generation later, where the finance industry rather than the old basic industries was becoming key to power. The German chancellor Helmut Kohl accepted the price of unification as Konrad Adenauer had accepted the price for Western protection in the Cold War in the early 1950s. However, Kohl was keen to maintain the new European currency as a respectable hard currency, protecting it from going the way of the Italian lira. The hard nut in the negotiations was finding a balance between the weak monetary cultures in Europe, such as Italy and France, which operated with adjustment of the exchange rates and monetary expansion, and the hard currency cultures around Germany, which developed a rigid monetary approach after its historical experiences of hyper-inflation, and which operated with a stable monetary value and financial rigidity. The plan for the EMU was not the consequence of German reunification, however. It was rather so that the EMU could facilitate the work on compromise between contentious interests in the German reunification and European unification processes. In the 1970s there were experiments around a European substitute for the dollar-based post1945 Bretton Woods order, with a 2.25 per cent band (‘the snake’) within which the European exchange rates could move around the dollar as they previously had. However, the system was too flexible and lacked a fixed point of reference like the gold peg of the dollar. Everything was floating in what can be described as a devaluation competition between 231

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the currencies. In a further step, the European Monetary System (EMS) was introduced in 1979. The German mark soon emerged as the centre of the EMS. Because of its relative strength, and the low-inflation policies of the German central bank, all other currencies were forced to follow its lead if they wanted to stay inside the system. In the end, this situation led to general discontent, not least when the Hungarian-American investor George Soros began launching speculative attacks against the weaker currencies such as the Italian lira and the British pound. The decision on the Single Market in 1985, envisaging the free movement of commodities, services, capital and labour within Europe, brought with it new incitements to solve the exchange rate problem. It became an important goal to reduce the high transaction costs because of exchange rate fluctuations. The idea of an EMU took concrete form. In 1988, a committee under Jacques Delors, the president of the Commission, was set up to study the EMU. The report in 1989 proposed the introduction of the EMU. The transition towards the introduction of the euro as the single currency began with the full liberalisation of capital movements in 1990 and was completed in 2002 with the introduction of one set of banknotes. With one currency, productivity differences could no longer be adjusted through exchange rate change. Instead, those with lower productivity were expected somehow to achieve the same efficiency as the high-performing economies. In order to assist them, a rigidity corset was invented, the so-called Maastricht criteria. The two most important were a ceiling of 3 per cent of the GNP for budget deficits and 60 per cent for state debts. The symbolic number 3: three point zero, zero, zero The 60 per cent state debt was a kind of average at the time and was chosen as a reasonable target supported by political practice rather than economic theory. The choice of a 3 per cent budget deficit had roots in French domestic politics. In the presidential election in 1981, François Mitterrand campaigned against Giscard d’Estaing on an expansive financial programme aimed at defying the high inflation and unemployment figures at the time. Mitterrand was the last Keynesian in a world where neoliberal principles were about to become key. The official budget deficit of the Giscard government was around 30 billion francs, and the real but not communicated figure was 50 billion, which was an extraordinary number and without precedent. Giscard argued that Mitterrand headed towards 100 billion, which was a number 232

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unheard of and impossible to communicate. The figure was symbolic and a political message about the limits of political action, a promise not to exceed it. There was absolutely no theoretical argument for a higher deficit. Mitterrand won the election. His first budget operated with a 95 billion deficit which sounded better than the magic 100. However, after a year and two devaluations of the franc, Mitterrand had to abandon his Keynesianism in one country and looked for an argument for going better than the 100 billion mark, which nobody gave credit to as an absolute, unsurpassable borderline any more. Mitterrand needed a credible and communicable norm, a ceiling that stopped the pressures on the budget and calmed down the enthusiasm and the expectations that the election triumph had provoked. Budget experts in his administration told him that the actual budget deficit was 2.6 per cent. They knew that 3 is a symbolic number with a high value load in Western culture and mysticism. So 3 per cent was the perfect number with a mobilising power with absolutely no support in economic theory when, in the autumn of 1982, Mitterrand declared that henceforth there would be an insurmountable 3 per cent budget deficit barrier. Since the actual deficit was less, it even gave him a certain breathing space for levelling out rather than coming to a dead stop.22 In the Maastricht negotiations on the EMU it was soon clear that Helmut Kohl’s enthusiasm for a real step towards a federal Europe with federal fiscal politics had to give in to Mitterrand’s politics for a Europe of the nations. Mitterrand wanted control over the German currency but had no intention of Europeanising French currency autonomy more than necessary. The problem was to find a formula that satisfied Kohl’s insistence on a hard euro, important in order to sell the project in Germany, and defend Mitterrand’s interest in a certain budgetary flexibility. What would become known as the Maastricht criteria were the last items in the negotiations, and among the criteria the budget deficit was the most important. What would the French negotiators suggest if not 3 per cent? The Germans accepted. The symbolic power of 3 was not smaller in Germany than in France. Stark wie die Mark, Kohl trumpeted, ‘strong like the mark’, and added Drei komma null, three point zero (and not a per thousand more). A regional Bavarian politician with statesmanly pretensions excelled in invoking Drei komma null, null, null (‘three point zero, zero, zero’) in order to make even stronger the reassurance that politics would never ever exceed the limit.23 What was invented in order to hide an enormous budget deficit 233

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had become the holy number to delimit government spending and guarantee that the euro would be a hard currency and a symbol of European strength. Thus 3 per cent became the borderline between moral and immoral, industriousness and laziness: 3 per cent determined the difference between orderliness and moderation, on the one hand, and extravagance on the other. It became a borderline defined and defended by hypocrisy.24 The Maastricht criteria would in due course activate the North– South division within the EMU. An important question is how the development from harmonious, not to say euphoric, unification around the shared banknotes in 2002 to a deep division between North and South ten years later occurred. The underlying problem in discussing this question deals with the attempt to impose the criteria without any attempts to develop policies that promoted a convergence in economic efficiency, such as a common fiscal policy and transfers between countries with higher and lower productivity. During the EMU negotiations, economists warned against the ‘impossible triangle’: the long-term incompatibility between free movement of capital, exchange rate stability and independent monetary policies: the Mundell Trilemma. Since the single currency made devaluation between the member states impossible as a corrective instrument, there was nothing but the hope that the market and voluntary cooperation and coordination among the member governments would do the job. The political instrument to support the equalising work of the market was in the end austerity politics, which resulted in a backlash and triggered the emergence of a European North–South divide. The construction of the EMU was based on a dream of European monetary unification sustained by the fiction of the market hand in hand with the belief in voluntary fiscal coordination of economies that had very different productivity levels. The euphoria of the time glossed over economic realities that entailed considerable productivity differences. This euphoria repressed, in a Freudian sense, the warning of the economists that the construct had no common fiscal politics beyond the vague appeal to ‘coordination’ without binding commitments.

The structure and construction of the European North–South divide The introduction of the euro made it possible for eurozone countries to get similarly low interest rates for government bonds and private 234

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credit. For the Southern euro countries this possibility opened up new horizons. Credit became considerably cheaper. Private and public borrowing and spending triggered an economic boom that seemed to confirm the euro dream. At the time of the introduction of the euro as banknotes in 2002 nobody feared competition from Germany, which after 10 years of reunification costs was economically exhausted, with over 10 per cent unemployment and a very low growth rate, at an average of just above 1 per cent between 1998 and 2005. Through downward wage pressures because of the low-wage situation in Eastern Germany and Europe, and through the hard neoliberalism of the so-called Hartz reforms in 2003, German competitiveness grew at the expense of high social costs.25 In 2018, Germany exported to the EU some 30 per cent more than it imported from it, and created one of the world’s largest current-account surpluses. The nineteen-member eurozone functions as a vast home base for Germany from which it can expand on foreign markets. Its economic performance since around 2005 has given Germany a particular power in the EU. It has become both a model to emulate in terms of economic efficiency, especially in Northern Europe, and a model that is frightening because it bases its power on the weakness of the others. The intergovernmental Fiscal Stability Treaty in operation since 2013 is a stricter version of the Stability and Growth Pact of 1997, which, in turn, was a strengthening of the Maastricht criteria by giving them a procedural corset, ensuring that fiscal discipline would be maintained through the strengthening of control over the member state budgets and the speeding up of the legal procedures in the case of excessive deficits. The Fiscal Stability Treaty of 2013 is based on a series of German proposals in response to the debt crisis in the wake of the collapse of the global financial markets in 2008. The intention was not to establish a fiscal union in the short term but to make the monetary union more resilient to crisis. More resilient means more rigid. The coordination of fiscal politics that the EU countries undertook was based on a balanced budget framework through national legislation, preferably at the constitutional level. The aim was the legal guarantee of future compliance with the pact’s promise of a clear cap on new debt, strict budgetary discipline and balanced budgets. Implementation of the debt brake was envisaged to imply much tighter fiscal discipline than the existing EU rules of the 3 per cent limit. The Treaty on Fiscal Union precludes deficit finance to boost growth.26 There is a German spirit to this treaty, promoting rigidity and austerity, and stereotypes of 235

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industrious and disciplined Northern Europeans in contrast to slack and undisciplined Southern Europeans. Because of its economic performance since around 2005, Germany has become a kind of spokesperson of Northern Europe. There are thus important structural differences between the North and the South in Europe, both recently created and more historical, on which the construction of a North–South divide in more cultural and stereotypical terms draws. The dream of European monetary unification was that the euro, through locking the exchange rates, would make the national economies converge in productivity, and if this did not happen, labour would move to countries with higher productivity. The opposite happened. The productivity gap between the North and the South increased. The most recent attempt to emulate the German model was undertaken by President Macron, in an enterprise that ended up in a conflict with the gilets jaunes (‘yellow vests’), the self-appointed representatives of ‘the people’. The argument that the Southern euro countries are less capable or willing to reform their economies is ideology, since reform is a concept full of ideological implications. Another way to formulate the difference is that the Southern euro countries have resisted productivity increases through lowering labour costs. One might also say that they were more capable of defending standards. Irrespective of which line of argumentation is employed, the remaining fact is that there were and are considerable productivity differences between Southern and Northern Europe, and this has implications for the monetary union since the market has failed to reduce these differences. To function, the EMU would need either a fiscal distributive transfer component across the eurozone or the possibility of exchange rate adjustment. Since the single currency excludes internal exchange rates, the only alternative is a fiscal union, which Germany is particularly opposed to. The sustainable solution in the long run is the introduction of a fiscal union with a euro budget with a social redistributive capacity, which, in turn, would require a European parliament with much stronger competence, authority and legitimacy than it has today. The construction fault of the common currency − the lack of a European democracy and transfer possibilities­– ­not the resistance against downward labour market standards, is the cause of the euro crisis and the North–South divide. Jürgen Habermas has developed this argument in rich and convincing detail, which does not need any reiteration here.27 As an intermediate step Robert Skidelsky has suggested the introduction of 236

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a clearing union, following Keynes’s 1941 plan for an International Clearing Union instead of the dollar-based Bretton Woods order that in the end triumphed: a European clearing bank with simultaneous pressure on creditor and debtor countries to balance their accounts by charging interest rates on persistent imbalances.28 The fact that floating exchange rates can no longer compensate for the different productivity levels suggests that the gap between the North and the South is a balance of payment problem rather than a debt problem and that this problem emerged with the euro. The banking crisis in 2008 invalidated the model for market freedom without political or social obstacles. It became impossible when panicked governments began to describe the market as an enemy instead of a benefactor. Before the bank and state debt crisis, the market had been the key honorary concept of the European integration process, particularly from the internal market project in the 1980s onwards. Without any attempt to really reflect on how it could happen, the market suddenly came to figure both as an enemy and as a threat. Firewalls had to be erected to protect Europe against its ravages. Trillions of euros were mobilised to defend Europe against the market, resulting in an escalating loss of legitimacy for the European Union. The gigantic debt commitments were referred to as ‘bazookas’, lending ‘fire power’ and building ‘firewalls’ to ward off the attacks by the market. The ­struggle was abstract because it was fought with inconceivable figures and because the enemy was anonymous. The new language emerged as a last-ditch attempt to explain what nobody really understood. It was a linguistic U-turn.29 To paraphrase Karl Marx, the scenario of the solid neoliberal market utopia melted into thin air. At the same time, the European political leaders continued inconsistently with the Hayekian language on one specific point: the imposition of austerity and deflationary politics in the Southern euro states. On this point the leaders refused to draw any conclusions from the experiences of 1929, as they had done when they saved the banks. The experiences of 1929 foretold not only the enormous damage if the banking system collapsed, but also how social protests confronted the rigidity imposed by gold and forced governments to abandon gold en masse. Attempts to stick to Hayek on this point but not on others led to a growing opposition between North and South in the EU, underpinning European renationalisation and popular protests against the power of the market. Latent stereotypes about North and South were activated when the North required austerity and the South protested but complied. 237

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Wolfgang Streeck’s Buying Time is an excellent analysis of the present crisis of Europe, democracy and capitalism that cannot be ignored. The analysis is seductive in its clarity, but it raises serious question marks. Through a series of crises the welfare-producing tax state became the bank-saving debt state, which became the present consolidation state with austerity politics as the tool for the re-establishment of lost solidity.30 The political responses to the crises are depicted as a series of retreats from continuously losing positions. Governments are buying time in a delaying struggle where the last battle seems to occur in the revived national welfare states. Is it a backs-to-the-wall struggle, doomed to be lost? Or is it set to continue by post-democratic authoritarian regimes gaining legitimacy through programmes of xenophobic nationalism and national social welfare? The end point in the time-buying retreat is not clear, but a disturbing determinism suggesting some kind of logic of capitalism hangs over the analysis. Democratic organisation and participation are declining and organised labour is weakened. Here Streeck is no doubt right. He is convincing in his depiction of the EU as a market-activist project, but must this be the end point? Isn’t it possible to imagine a re-regulating instead of deregulating EU? A tax-collecting and redistributing instead of a belt-tightening EU, correcting divisions and injustices between poor and rich, South and North? A social and democratic EU?31

Postlude The urgency of closing the growing European and global North–South divides A chorus of economists has dismissed the argument that excessive spending on social welfare caused the European debt crisis in the wake of the crash of the financial markets in 2008. The large bailout packages to the financial industry caused the increased public debts. The average budget deficit in the euro area in 2007 was only 0.6 per cent, before it grew to 7 per cent in the financial crisis. Excessive lending by banks, not deficit spending, created the crisis.32 The argument about excessive social costs was the argument for austerity. From the aphorism that moralism is a bad answer to a moral crisis it follows that austerity is a bad answer to poverty and unemployment. The Greek crisis in 2015 was the culmination of the morality of austerity. The bailout of speculating German and French banks that had 238

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overplayed their hands was in the end paid for by austerity for the people. The situation was a culmination not only of the morality of austerity but also of European hypocrisy. In 2015, the refugee crisis in the wake of the war and civil war in Syria superimposed itself upon the euro crisis and the South–North divide. According to rules for the free movement of people within the internal market­– t­he ‘Dublin regulation’, in Brussels jargon­– t­he member states with external borders are responsible for the admission of foreigners. This means that the burden rested on the Southern member states, which had mounting problems when handling the increasing migrant pressure, whereas a country like Germany had no external borders. Despite the fact that the problem was getting ever more intolerable, there was no serious attempt in the North or in Brussels to assist the border countries or change the immigration rules. The German chancellor’s welcoming of refugees into the EU in 2015, and then the request that they be jointly distributed throughout the other member states, drove the North–South wedge ever deeper into the continent and split it even more by means of another wedge between the West and the East, since the East rejected immigrants that were seen as competing with the domestic populations for welfare resources. The problem was not the welcoming of the refugees but the total lack of any follow-up policies. The crisis of legitimacy, which, beyond the euro and the refugee problems, must be seen against the backdrop of declining social competence under the neoliberal regime, undermined European cohesion and underpinned xenophobic nationalism, populism and authoritarianism. The implications for the question of democracy in Europe are obvious. Tens of millions of refugees knock at the door of Europe, fleeing drought and other man-made environmental catastrophes, hunger, unemployment and economic destitution, wars and political violence. These developments provoke questions of historical debt and guilt (see also the chapter by Siapera and Rieder in this volume). The argument that the proper response to these developments is xenophobic nationalism is naive. Africa’s population today is 1.3 billion. In 2050, in one generation, it will (according to most prognoses) double to 2.5 billion. The belief that this growth is a problem basically for Africa­– ­a problem that, to the extent it is a concern for Europe at all, can be solved by means of xenophobic nationalism, racism and the closure of borders­– ­is sheer madness. To hand over the solution to global capital, as seems to be the intention behind unhistorical political talk about a Marshall 239

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Plan for Africa, is not a lesser folly. Global capital in its present, politically uncontrolled shape is not the solution but the problem. The solution must be looked for in a redesign and updating of Willy Brandt’s project in the early 1980s. If there is a point in time with a political imaginary worth retrieving in the present search for orientation and guidance, and for alternatives to the accelerating search for solutions in xenophobic nationalism, it is the suggestive thinking in the Brandt Commission.33 There is one particularly interesting dimension of the Brandt Commission in connection with debt as historical guilt. The argument about guilt in the 1970s did not come through critical self-reflection in the North but through massive accusations from the rising South referring to the wrongs of colonialism. The Brandt Commission responded to the accusations not in an act of mea culpa flagellation and through work focusing on coming to terms with the past, but by taking the South seriously, offering respect to the South and granting recognition to its Other in the search for a better future together, through responsibility for what had been wrong in the past and reconciliation through action rather than confession. In the euro crisis in 2015 there was as little self-critical feeling of guilt in Germany and the North as there had been in the global polarisation in the 1970s. The issue of guilt was brought forward in Greece as an accusation and a demand for compensation for the crimes committed in the Second World War. The European North, that is, Germany, ignored the accusation and accused Greece of not complying with the EMU rules. The Greek call for the Germans to adopt a mea culpa approach to the present guilt complex by paying for their war crimes is problematic because it risks focusing on the past and repressing the future. The German ex-chancellor in the early 1980s and his future-oriented demonstration of reconciliation, responsibility and recognition had been a German model to emulate in 2015. The failure to do this was a missed opportunity to thematise the past, debt and guilt in new, creative ways with eyes facing forward. There is an obvious connection between the free global movement of capital and the unfree global movement of people. This connection, in turn, connects the European with the global North–South divide through present debt and historical guilt. With this in mind, recognition and reconciliation must be the response to such accusations, and must go beyond the question of guilt in an expansive move. In order to close one of these divides it is necessary to close both. The current trend of reinforcing fortress Europe will necessarily reinforce both divides. 240

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Rather than unification inside the fortress, there will be civil war driven by xenophobic nationalism, and the violence will spread outside the fortifications. This is why the Brandt Commission and its approach to the North–South issue are so important today.

Notes  1. Richard G. Lipsey and Peter O. Steiner, Economics (New York: Harper International, 1966), p. 16.   2. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936); cf. Lars Magnusson and Bo Stråth, A Brief History of Political Economy: Tales of Marx, Keynes and Hayek (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2016).  3. James Otteson, Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Robert Ekelund and Robert Hebert, A History of Economic Theory and Method, 6th edn (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2013).   4. Bo Stråth, Europe’s Utopias of Peace (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 113–18.   5. Magnusson and Stråth, Brief History, ch. 1.   6. Ibid., ch. 2.   7. Peter Wagner, Sozialwissenschaften und Staat: Frankreich, Italien, Deutschland 1870-1980 (Frankfurt: Campus, 1990).  8. Stråth, Europe’s Utopias of Peace, pp. 181–3.   9. Max Weber, ‘Der Sinn der Wertefreiheit der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften’, Logos, 7, 1918, pp. 40–88; Max Weber, ‘Die “Objektivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 19, 1918, pp. 22–87. 10. Magnusson and Stråth, Brief History, ch. 2. 11. Benn Steil, The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 12. Bo Stråth and Peter Wagner, European Modernity: A Global Approach (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), ch. 9. 13. For early dependency theory as a critical alternative to development thought, see Raúl Prebisch. ‘El desarrollo económico de la América Latina y algunos de sus principals problemas’, El Trimestre Económico, 16 (63(3)), 1949, pp. 347–431; Joseph L. Love, ‘Raúl Prebisch and the Origins of the Doctrine of Unequal Exchange’, Latin American Research Review, 15(3), 1980, pp. 45–72; Hans Singer, ‘Economic Progress in Under-Developed Countries’, Social Research, 16(1), 1949, pp. 1–11. Immanuel Wallerstein elaborated dependency theory to his imaginary of a ‘world system’. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vols. 1–3 (San Diego: University of California Press, 1974–88). See also Samir Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Foundation of Peripheral Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), and Alvin So, Social Change and Development: Modernity, Dependency, and World Systems Theory (London: Sage, 1990). 14. G77 website: (last accessed 6 March 2020); CIEC,

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Bo Stråth ‘Conference on International Economic Cooperation: Final Communique on Energy, Raw Materials and Trade, Development and Finance’, American Society of International Law, 16(4), 1977, pp. 970–6. 15. Independent Commission on International Development Issues, North–South: A Programme for Survival. Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, with an Introduction by Willy Brandt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980); Independent Commission on International Development Issues, Common Crisis North–South: Cooperation for World Recovery. Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, with an Introduction by Willy Brandt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 16. Address by Willy Brandt. Independent Commission on International Development Issues, North–South, p. 13. 17. Ibid., p. 23. 18. Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013). 19. For the bottom-up redistributive impacts of neoliberalism, see Thomas Piketty, Le capital au XXIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2013). English translation: Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 20. John Williamson, ‘What Washington Means by Policy Reform’, in John Williamson (ed.), Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for International Economics, 1990), pp. 7–20. 21. The term ‘neo-colonial’ was coined by Jean-Paul Sartre in Les Temps modernes in 1956 (‘Le colonialisme est un système’) and remained a subcurrent under the language of decolonialism, growing in strength after the neo-colonial breakthrough. See also Philippe Ardant, ‘Le néo-colonialisme: thème, mythe et realité’, Revue Française de Science Politique, XV(V), 1965, pp. 837–55. The Rome Treaty on the European Economic Community in 1957 played a particular role for the emergence of the perspective through its section on association agreements with the French, Belgian, Italian and Dutch colonies. See Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 22. Dominique Seux, ‘Déficit public: l’histoire secrète du 3 %’, L’Écho, 3 October 2014; David Marsh, The Euro: The Politics of the New Global Currency (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Jean Quatremer and Thomas Klau, Ces hommes qui ont fait l’euro (Paris: Plon, 1999); Hans Tietmeyer, Herausforderung Euro (Munich: Hanser, 2005). 23. Marsh, Euro; Tietmeyer, Herausforderung Euro. 24. For connected discussions of the symbolic power of figures, see David Beer, Metric Power (London: Palgrave, 2016); on the entangled connections between power and metrics, see Gustav Peebles, The Euro and Its Rivals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), which is an anthropological approach to the practices and the rhetoric around the creation of the euro. More generally, about the anthropol-

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Economic Theory as Morality ogy and symbolic constructions around money, see David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011). 25. Christian Dustmann, Bernd Fitzenberger, Uta Schönberg and Alexandra SpitzOener, ‘From Sick Man of Europe to Economic Superstar: Germany’s Resurgent Economy’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(1), 2014, pp. 167–88; Robert Skidelsky, ‘Germany’s Hour’, Social Europe, 22 September 2017. 26. Skidelsky, ‘Germany’s Hour’. 27. The question of the probability of a European democracy was the subject of a German debate in 2013 between Jürgen Habermas and Wolfgang Streeck. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Demokratie oder Kapitalismus? Vom Elend der nationalstaatlichen Fragmentierung in einer kapitalistisch integrierten Weltgesellschaft’, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, May 2013, pp. 59–70; Wolfgang Streeck, Gekaufte Zeit: Die vertagte Krise des demokratischen Kapitalismus (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013); English translation: Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (London: Verso, 2014); Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Was nun, Europa?’, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, April 2013, pp. 57–68; Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Vom DM-Nationalismus zum Euro-Patriotismus? Eine Replik auf Jürgen Habermas’, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, September 2013, pp. 75–92; cf. Jürgen Habermas, The Lure of Technocracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). 28. Skidelsky, ‘Germany’s Hour’. 29. Stråth, Europe’s Utopias of Peace, pp. 389–99. 30. Streeck, Buying Time; Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? (London: Verso, 2016). 31. See here the review of Streeck’s How Will Capitalism End? by Adam Tooze, ‘A General Logic of Crisis’, London Review of Books, 39(1), 5 January 2017, and the exchange between Tooze and Streeck in London Review of Books, 39(2), 19 January, and 39(5), 2 March. 32. Robert Skidelsky, ‘The Euro in a Shrinking Zone’, Project Syndicate, 14 December 2011. 33. Independent Commission on International Development Issues, North–South.

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PART IV

DEBT AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY

11 Europe’s Debt Denied: Reflections on 1989 and the Loss of Yugoslav Experience of Direct Democracy Svjetlana Nedimović

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omewhere and sometime between 1989 and 2009 Europe lost its East. It ceased to be a monolithic political actor and broke into individual national elements with diversified situations and relations within the European Union.1 With its disappearance as a distinct political actor, its legacy has been subjected to reworking, which has rendered it meaningless at best, and at worst made it appear harmful to Europe’s present and future. To some this was the result of a long-desired revolutionary transformation that returned Eastern Europe to the main course of European history. In this view, the forty-five years of Eastern European history appear as a history gone astray. To those on the other side of the ideological divide, which is getting more visible in European politics after the political vertigo of the so-called post-ideological age, the loss was a counter-revolutionary motion, a conscious and intentional erasure of the legacy of social revolutions, and it created a debt that may well be paid off by contracting our present’s visions of the future. More specifically, the historical process of regime change has been complemented by a conscious political erasure of the legacy of socialist politics. The transition obscured the political experience of democratic practices of socialism, as well as the revolutionary experience of anti-fascist struggle and later uprisings and resistance to the regimes, which finally culminated in 1989. It is argued here that a political debt has thus been incurred, which is made visible and felt in present-day Europe through its political crisis of the so-called democratic deficit. The narrative of the triumph of the Western model in the Cold War has nowadays come to appear more and more as something of a pyrrhic victory because, as Susan Buck-Morss suggests, ‘the historical experiment of socialism was so deeply rooted in the Western modernising tradition that its defeat cannot but place the whole Western ­narrative 247

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into question’.2 It is my intention to show that post-1989 motions against the legacy of the socialist East, particularly Yugoslavia as a politically and culturally hybrid society, seriously shrank the horizons of our political future as seen from this present. I shall try to tackle this task by answering some of the 5+1 questions that elementary journalism derived from Aristotle: who, what, when, where, why and how. A welltold story should answer all of those, but as in all large-scale historical processes, not much is clear-cut. In this narrative, when and where are very clearly demarcated­– ­the latter already in the opening sentence of this chapter. What is looser but still not entirely elusive. How is easily mapped even though controversial. Who and why are, however, highly ideological and remain contentious to the present day: they necessitate interpretation even more than factual analysis, and this interpretation is actually about taking a political position in present-day struggles.

The Yugoslav legacy erased When Yugoslavia met its violent and tragic end, not many, outside or inside the country, believed that there was anything from its experience to be taken into the new epoch. While it is generally recognised that socialist Yugoslavia cannot be equated with the Soviet model of state socialism, the break-up and wars that followed have cast a long shadow over its legacy. The blanket condemnation of its legacy has been justified by the fact that the country did not peacefully undergo transition. Most of the country and its population was pushed into bloodshed, and that was done by the elites, among whom many actors were formed and trained by the League of Communists. Its violent break-up in war sealed its fate in history, even though its socialist history was a repository of interesting, even experimental political practices that differed from those that prevailed in the Soviet Bloc.3 In terms of history, it appeared as if there was nothing Yugoslavia could teach either its successor states or Europe as a whole. The official politics of the successor states has remained explicitly or implicitly revisionist vis-à-vis the socialist past and Yugoslavia, including the anti-fascist struggle during the Second World War. Political messages from the European Union communicate indifference or meek disapproval, specifically in cases of relativising the war crimes committed by collaborationists. Contemporaries and commentators on the development after Yugoslavia observe that the greatest loss accompanying the transi248

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tion was revolutionary, societally cohesive anti-fascism. In addition to purging the anti-fascist struggle of its revolutionary and emancipatory aspects, transitional political elites in the region have engaged with different forms of official revisionism ranging from honouring lower-profile collaborationists,4 to official judicial proceedings to rehabilitate leaders of regimes installed by occupying fascist forces (Serbia), and to implicitly or explicitly official celebrations of fascist forces (Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina).5 Many of the new regimes in Yugoslav successor states openly build on traditionalist nationalist ideology, which was the main ideology of collaborators during the Second World War, and to which the anti-fascist movement at the time responded with an ideology of brotherhood and unity that remained the official Yugoslav line until the break-up. These regimes’ relation to the Second World War and its main actors in the region is shaped accordingly.6 Official European liberal anti-fascism is a meek response to these tendencies, whereas official documents, such as the Resolution on European Conscience and Totalitarianism from 2009 (discussed further below), fuel the right across Eastern Europe by delegitimising the left. It is a story with strongly Benjaminian overtones, insofar as his prophecy rings painfully true: the defeat will spare no one; not even the dead will be safe from the new victors. In the case of Yugoslavia this meant discrediting the only political option and movement that historically, in a politically articulated and organised manner, stood up to and against the divisive and belligerent nationalism of political elites in that part of the world. I would, however, like to deal here with another loss cum erasure: the practices of wide political participation and organisation through direct democratic mechanisms in the form of self-management. Self-management mechanisms and practices, which had been characteristic of Yugoslav socialism, persisted until the very break-up of Yugoslavia, even if their potency gradually became more and more restricted. The fact that society, at the moment of transition, was still versed in self-government or at least vibrant participation in political life was, however, ignored in the course of democratisation. Some authors argue that the (by no means independent) decision by Yugoslavia’s successor states, and all throughout Eastern Europe, to perform an abrupt and swift rupture with policies and institutions, thus ‘dismantling most elements of the socialist self-managed economic system’, hampered their development and augmented social inequality. The only exception to this model has been Slovenia, which retains some of the elements of the old Yugoslav 249

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model to the present day and enjoys a much more successful transition not only than other former republics, but also than some other Eastern European countries.7 Mechanisms of direct democracy and self-management in the workplace and places of residence could have formed a nucleus of a ‘vibrant democracy’, so often evoked in the donors’ wish lists and NGO applications. But these practices were quickly scraped away, through the joint venture of European advisers and national elites in the process of redesigning institutional arrangements and the corporate sphere. The demos was reduced to the electorate, and participation in ‘public debate’ (mostly through the media, which exchanged state control for owner control) replaced direct decision-making. Factories were transferred to the state and then privatised, as a consequence of which democratic workers’ control mechanisms were removed. There had never been an attempt to incorporate any of these previous democratic practices into the model constructed under democratisation,8 although some democratic theorists considered worker self-management a form of democracy.9 No example is more illustrative of these outcomes of transition in Yugoslavia than that of ongoing battles over public space and resources in the successor states. Wild rivers designated for water power plants in Serbia, Montenegro, the Republic of North Macedonia (RNM) and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and entire city beaches or green areas in Croatia rented out or sold to private hotels, are only the most visible examples of major decisions, with a long-term bearing upon the everyday life of local communities, taken without consulting or with only a pretence of consulting the people of these communities.10 These examples of mobilisations against decisions taken without any inclusion of the most affected, as well as mass social protests and movements in Yugoslav successor states over the last decade, may be suggesting that there was more to Yugoslav political experience than the transition would allow to be seen. Gathered in popular assemblies, people evoke the old and long-abandoned principle of equality and practices of self-organisation, direct democracy and resistance, with specific reference to the Yugoslav past.11 The problems of our times seem to suggest that there are lessons missed. Apocalyptic visions often accompany periods of transformations and distort the diagnosis of the present and the assessment of possibilities. However, there is no doubt that, while the apocalypse may not be imminent, there is a prolonged crisis of political and eco250

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nomic order(s) across Europe, and formerly Yugoslav republics are no exception. The tendency to ignore the signs may have prevailed for a good couple of decades, but as of the onset of the financial crisis in 2008 the denial seems irrational. The public sector is shrinking, and once-­guaranteed provision of public goods, such as health care or even water, is becoming a luxury. Everyday life, even though a good deal of Europe is enjoying ever greater access to the most diverse and even extravagant material goods, is marked by uncertainty, and gloomy forecasts dominate numerous areas, from financial prospects and migration to climate. There are repeated protests against the fact that the invisible centres of power are deciding the fate of entire national economies. Only thirty years after the ideological (re)unification of Europe, promises of democracy are being buried under the increasing technocratisation and bureaucratisation of politics. From the gilets jaunes (‘yellow vests’) in Paris and climate strikes in Brussels, to Polish women protesting against attempts to curb abortion rights and Albanian villagers defending wild rivers, people contest the situation of powerlessness that prevails under the regime that promised the rule of the people but has ‘undone the demos’.12 The rather short history of socialist Yugoslavia was a history of experimenting with alternatives. Socialist Yugoslavia may have built a bureaucratic system that had little to do with the revolutionary ideals of the early Balkan communists, but the system also incorporated direct democratic mechanisms and practices at the places where it most immediately mattered to people: work and living places. These mechanisms and practices originated from Yugoslav experiences of self-organisation among communist-led partisan forces and the people who supported the struggle during the Second World War. The wartime organisation of both the armed forces and social life bore important lessons for the actual experience of democracy, which demanded that democratic experience be conceived in far broader terms than institutional design and procedural norms. As social theorist Darko Suvin writes, it was ‘a direct continuation of the creative imagination of the partizan [sic] war’.13 In addition to the theoretical orientation of the leading Communist Party ideologues, the decision to integrate this experience into the postwar reality of Yugoslavia had much to do with the political situation of the break-up with Stalin’s Soviet Union and Comintern in 1948. From that moment Yugoslavia strove to build a hybrid model that retained similarities with the state socialism of the Soviet Union in terms of state 251

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control, while at the same time experimenting with opening up internationally and ideas of direct democracy introduced by the October Revolution. It is not without relevance that the Yugoslav revolution truly occurred at the grassroots level and was enacted through national anti-fascist resistance, which necessitated organisation of collective life on the basis of self-management and self-government. This in turn became an important underpinning of country-wide cohesion and mobilisation against external, Soviet or Western control over its future. Self-management in practice was not unproblematic and, over time, it lost much of its political power due to the interventions and interests of different actors. It had been a leap forward along the Communist Party’s revolutionary path, but at the same time it was also curbed by the Communist Party, particularly at a later stage. The Party played the role of a revolutionary avant-garde but at the same time failed to resist its own bureaucratic tendencies. It was itself only partly democratic and hence exerted an ambivalent influence upon democratic mechanisms in the society. The revolutionary imagination that directly confronted the counter-revolutionary trends within the Party was never revived in its full transformative power at a later stage.14 Sharon Zukin found that already in the 1970s Yugoslavia was troubled with a growing problem of the evident and sobering gap between official ideology, persistent in its evocation of the ideals of resistance from the Second World War, on the one hand, and on the other a social reality marked by increasing inequalities, uncertainties and individualisation. In that political climate self-management was no longer a societal goal in the sense of emancipation, but an instrument of economic growth.15 Branko Horvat, one of the most prominent Yugoslav economists of all times, himself devoted to a labour-managed economy, wrote in the 1980s most critically of Yugoslav self-management in real life, convincingly arguing that the system betrayed its rationale, generated individualisation and contributed to the rise in inequalities.16 The Party and unions were not encouraging workers’ participation, but rather tried to streamline all initiative and action.17 The workers’ focus on the interests of their own enterprise weakened workers’ solidarity. What is often overlooked in the various insights into the Yugoslav past is that self-management was not limited to factories. Mechanisms of direct democracy and self-government spread beyond the sphere of work and shaped decision-making processes in different spheres of collective life, in combination with a delegate system of representation that ensured a much stronger control of the ‘base’ over representatives, 252

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in matters of social interest such as education, utilities, housing and so on.18 This is particularly important insofar as it shows the wide reach and deep roots of democratic practices in a system that was at the same time marked by characteristics of autocracy, which also indicates that its political culture was likely to have been much more complex and diversified than the later transition processes acknowledged.19 In Carole Pateman’s inquiry into participatory democracy, where the case of Yugoslav self-management is analysed as a possible model for ‘decentralization of control in modern large-scale societies’, participation of workers at the lower level of decision-making is found to be significant for higher-level participation, in terms of their political education and experience.20 The Yugoslav Communist Party and society in general were redefining and curbing their initial revolutionary goals and idealism, but democratic practice was nevertheless present and broadening at the level of capillary politics. It continued to inform people’s understanding of politics­– ­until the transition rendered the practice meaningless. Successor states have copied parliamentary, representative institutions of capitalist liberal democracies, leaving very little room for unmediated vox populi: different protest campaigns, grassroots initiatives and popular assemblies that emerge periodically in the region communicate the same sense of the powerlessness of people over their individual and collective lives, the same disempowerment of the demos.21 Nowadays activists working against the current of transition find that the new hegemony radically suppressed or erased from the cognitive map of entire generations the basic concepts and categories that would have been crucial for elementary insights into the nature and problems of the contemporary world as well as the world of the past.22 The memory of experiences of democratic praxis is continuously denounced and condemned as uncritical nostalgia.23 Societies in formerly Yugoslav lands are habitually described as retrograde and their culture as authoritarian by academic researchers as well as policy-makers. Whatever authentic democratic experience there was has been thoroughly purged. The above observation by Nebojša Milikić shows that the purge has gone even deeper, into the foundations of societal self-understanding. It was politically tragic for Yugoslav lands, but it was also detrimental to the possible innovation of contemporary 253

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democracy, as Pateman argued in her work on participation: Yugoslavia was a modern, industrial, large-scale society, and as such it was experimenting with mechanisms for dispersed and inclusive societal control over collective life, as opposed to centralised state government. No democracy in Europe can claim to have solved the problem and recent events, about which more will be said in the conclusion, demonstrate that a democratic deficit persists and even rises.

Where has the East gone? During the years of transition, the ambivalent past of the East retained a consistent presence in the European present as a negative reference only. The East underwent ‘an othering that pathologized post-socialist Eastern Europe as backwards and in need of imported models of civil society, capitalism, and even feminism’.24 The ‘East’ had meandered through various transformations. Once ‘ex-communist states in transition’ became ‘New Europe’ almost overnight, for the purposes of politics and political rhetoric on the eve of the war on Iraq.25 As the European Union grew larger, the distinctions seemed to lose currency, but to be labelled ‘East’ meant to be defined not per se but in relation to the European Union.26 The relation has been fundamentally unequal: to be East continues to imply a ‘sense of inferiority’­– t­o long not to be East. Although the real, historical East disappeared, it has not taken with it the category ‘Easternness’, which has continued to play a role either as a disciplining tool in EU discourse27 or as a threat of the ‘Polish plumber’ in the heart of Europe.28 This inferiority is not necessarily reflected in all political dealings within the European Union, nor is it uncontested. The pendulum of power is not immobile, which is perhaps nowhere as evident as in the recent discussions on refugees from non-European countries, where the former East insists on the sovereignty of its policies and decisions, and openly defies attempts to define a common European policy.29 Differentiation among the countries of the East is also observable and may even be viewed as a political project in its own right.30 On the other hand, economic indicators draw an altogether different picture of intra-European relations. To those more critical of EU policies among the economists, the categories of the East and the periphery have never lost their relevance. Economic interactions reveal perpetuation and reproduction of the pattern of inequality. Thus, Lapavitsas argues that the EU core has multiple peripheries and among them the 254

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East is still recognisable, even if its geography is somewhat different. There are peripheries of minor importance, such as the Baltic states or Romania and Bulgaria. And there are important peripheries such as Southern Europe and Central Europe. Central Europe includes most of the former East and is doing better economically than Southern Europe after 2008. But it is almost totally dependent upon Germany and shows very low political independence within the EU.31 It also faces depopulation.32 These patterns suggest that core–periphery arrangements within the EU continue to exist, even though this is clearly not the only or the most important dynamic at work within Europe. In that sense there is still a referent for the term ‘East’, but that referent is now more significant in terms of its current relations with the Old Europe, rather than its socialist past, and it is far from monolithic or homogeneous. The socialist East seems to be evoked only to account for the failures or flaws of transition, and practically never as a repository of potentially meaningful historical and political experience, which is far from what it stood for at the height of the events surrounding 1989. The ideological complex of socialist and communist ideas and practices, this plural, hybrid political life that had often been generated or rekindled in internal strife, ongoing critique and contest, including open resistance to Party bureaucracy­– ­all that was amalgamated into the dead body of the Eastern Bloc and buried with the specific, contingent political arrangement under the label of totalitarianism, including, as Traverso points out, the social and political revolutions themselves.33 A historical irony pervades this process, as Boris Buden observes in his book on the end of post-communism. Masses in the East, practically overnight, underwent metamorphosis from revolutionary subjects whose rising for freedom seemed to promise a revival of the tree of democracy all throughout Europe, to politically immature and ignorant children who needed close guidance and supervision in the process of democratic learning and maturation, in order to be fit for democracy, which their own political action brought about in the first place.34 Jean Baudrillard made it painfully evident that the revolutionaries of yesterday were transformed into victims that needed tending and guidance: The West is discovering the Eastern bloc countries, weak and drained, as once it discovered the survivors of the concentration camps. The danger is to feed them too quickly since this kills them. [. . .] they live in another space­– ­shattered by catastrophe.35 255

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The later Resolution 1096 of 1996 by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, entitled ‘Measures to Dismantle the Heritage of Communist Totalitarian Regimes’, suggested that the Easterners needed to be freed from ‘the fear of responsibility’ (Item 996).36 The journey from heroes of Europe to victims in need of special care was swift and irreversible. While it was not necessarily visible back then, the new, revolutionary vision was defeated by its own victory, which did not develop independently but was co-opted into the historical course of the ‘West’. Both the ‘West’, which at some point looked at the velvet revolutions as its own chance for a revival of the political ideals of freedom and equality that mark its modernity, and the revolutionary ‘East’ shied away from the open-ended future and traded it for a secure present: the status quo of the ‘West’. The future was already in place; the call to move on to the bright future was actually a call to join Old Europe in its present. It is in this sense that Buck-Morss speaks not of revolutions in the East, but of a fall into the capitalist system.37 Habermas gives a different interpretation of 1989. In the states where socialism had not been a result of ‘independent revolution’, the events of 1989 manifested ‘the clearest articulation of the desire to connect up constitutionally with the inheritance of the bourgeois revolutions, and socially and politically with the styles of commerce and life associated with developed capitalism, particularly that of the European Community’.38 On the other hand, Žižek suggests that the case was less straightforward, and depicts the historical event as an ethical tragedy of the group that Jameson aptly calls ‘vanishing mediators’: (here)those who took socialism seriously and who attempted to fulfil its promise that had been betrayed by the ossified and counter-revolutionary Communist Parties’ structures. Žižek writes of the opening that was ‘for a moment visible (and) immediately became invisible’.39 Masters of history for a moment in time soon became historical losers, says Buden, as the ‘West’ declared the revolution to be the historical victory of Western capitalist democracy,40 even though at the point of historical turnaround, in 1989, it was not at all clear that revolutionaries in the East had cried out for procedural, electoral democracy and capitalism.41 The universal cry of the masses was for freedom, more democracy, better living standards and more social equality. These ideals were, however, translated into a programme of transition to electoral, multi-party parliamentary democracy and capitalist economic organisation. This was done by the political elites trapped in 256

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that moment, who were gently steered towards the new order by the combination of stabilising financial injections and endless supply of advisers and experts, both coming from the West. In that process, the revolutionary experience was silenced on the pretext of its irrelevance. Buden, however, believes that this was done not due to the lack of relevance for the new age but, quite the contrary, due to the excess thereof, insofar as the revolutions pointed to the intrinsic connection between revolution and democracy that was carefully hidden in Western liberal democracies.42 The revolutions of 1989 exposed, or could have exposed, the failings and limitations not only of state socialism but also of consolidated democracies where procedures and norms marginalise the sovereign­– ­the demos. As it happened, however, they were followed not by a radical transformation to the visions of European future on both sides of the Iron Curtain, but by a certain shrinking of the political horizon of Europe, persisting to the present day. The radical imagination of the 1989 revolutions did not last, and in the place of radical transformation there emerged a controlled replication of the existing model in the West, on the basis of the understanding that the future was already in place. The possibilities that could have been opened through the democratisation of socialism were not explored, and the East transited not into a new future but into the present of what was then known as the West, almost as if the future had already been written, and revolutions or radical transformations were not part of it. Limits were set to the politics of transformation and what it could be about. How was this done?

How: democratising cum disciplining What is widely known as the democratic transition after 1989, which later on continued through the mechanisms and procedures of accession to the European Union, breaks down into the following main political and legal elements: establishing multi-party representation in political institutions; the rule of law; a strong emphasis on fundamental civil and political rights and the freedom of individuals; introducing institutional mechanisms of minority protection; and building civil society. While the contexts differ, there are many similarities in the democratic transitions in the 1970s and 1980s in the South of Europe and in post-1989 Eastern Europe, which can basically be subsumed under the replication of the historically contingent model of liberal democracies common in the (Global) North. 257

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In economic terms, there was also a common matrix involving the privatisation of public companies, the deregulation of the banking sector, the liberalisation of the market, full integration into the international financial system, opening up markets to foreign investments, and curbing labour rights and social welfare expenses. Much of this was done through some sort of shock therapy. What it produced was not necessarily a desired outcome of 1989. We see today a number of dependent, small-scale economies; much more dependent than, for example, Yugoslavia had been. The transition was expected to raise living standards and lead to general prosperity. In practice, this objective has been achieved only partially. The new course towards capitalism has, however, produced increasing income inequalities even according to the World Bank, which designed and led many of the transformation programmes.43 The social costs of the transition to the market economy have been grossly underestimated in all countries in Eastern Europe,44 but they have hit the countries hard, and particularly so most of the Yugoslav successor states, which also had something to do with their semi-­peripheral condition. Horvat and Štiks, in their introduction to Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism, argue that ‘the very concept of transition as an ideological construct based on the narrative of integration of the former socialist European countries into the Western core actually hides a monumental neo-colonial transformation of this region into a dependent semi-periphery’.45 The programme of the post-1989 transition, along the lines described above, was sketched out against the historical background of the region’s past and mapped out in a document of the Council of Europe from 1996. It is the above-mentioned Resolution 1096 by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The document condemns the entire legacy of communism as harmful and implicitly barbarian, since the final goal of the process should be a ‘civilized, liberal state’. An underlying presupposition of this statement seems to be that the socialist state was not civilised, whereas the ‘West’ stands for civilisation. Apart from the above-described complex of changes to the political and economic reality of countries under transition, the document calls for a curious intervention: ‘This process must include a transformation of mentalities (a transformation of hearts and minds).’46 People are perceived as politically immature, ignorant of liberal-democratic practices, with an authoritarian political culture, which subdued them 258

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civically. Therefore, the main task of the transition must be to form ‘an authentic democratic mentality and political culture’, as that is ‘the best guarantee for the dismantlement of former communist totalitarian systems’.47 Nothing from the past was to be taken into the new age, and people needed to be educated for the new system in a manner that presupposed a thorough cleansing of previous experience and norms: the main goal should be to eliminate the fear of responsibility, and to eliminate as well the disrespect for diversity, extreme nationalism, intolerance, racism and xenophobia, which are part of the heritage of the old regimes. All of these should be replaced by democratic values such as tolerance, respect for diversity, subsidiarity and accountability for one’s actions.48 Buchowski sums it up as a process designed to get rid of homo sovieticus.49 In his usual direct and uncompromising manner, Buden sees in this approach the making of the new citizen for the new/old order; a citizen he describes as a political dummy, deprived of his or her political past, infantilised and thus rendered indifferent to the political present.50 It is a neutralised citizen tailored to the model of democracy that is still considerably indebted to Schumpeter’s model of electoral democracy, which severely restricts citizens’ participation.51 There are reminiscences of an older model of democratic politics that was designed to defer the dangers of ‘too much politics’ and the presence of the masses in politics,52 or Huntington’s ‘excess of democracy’.53 Society had to be prepared for its new future through a learning process that was designed to proceed from scratch and from the assumption that the previous political life of this society had no relevance for the newly emerging democracy. Democratisation ultimately worked as tacit unlearning of the rich, even if ambivalent, political experience derived from the past, which included diverse forms of political parti­ cipation and organisation, as well as resistance. The revolutions of 1989 brought about not new democratic politics but a close mimicking of the West. The denial of this pre-transition democratic political experience and silencing of the legacy of the 1989 democratic revolutions (as well as the earlier instances of revolutionary experiences that attempted the institution of some sort of popular council democracy, as in Hungary 1956, or sought to dismantle bureaucratic structures, as in Czechoslovakia 259

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1968 or Poland 1980) shows elements of different types of forgetting that conform with the typology developed by Connerton.54 It is a process led from state and supra-state levels, which could suggest repressive erasure in its broader sense of a complex of encrypted and covert moves. Yet it is not entirely concealed or masked, because starting the transition from ‘clean slates’ was widely accepted as legitimate in the interest of the future; it was a strategy to move away from a bankrupt past and the equally bankrupt visions of the future that the bankrupt past projected.55 It rather resembles structural amnesia, even though it is more often associated with individuals and smaller communities; in the case of Eastern European societies, since catching up with Europe for these societies was established as a social and political absolute, this meant renouncing the legacy that was socially unimportant or even harmful.56 As a result, the wealth of experience that the past was made of is denied to the contemporary society.57 The defeat is even greater when it is known that any form of remembrance of the socialist history of Europe, save for the sake of tourist attraction, is labelled nostalgia. Generally, rightly or wrongly, ‘nostalgia’ has negative connotations of passivity, untimeliness and unproductive mourning, and presents a feeble challenge to the official policies and narratives, even though some authors see the past as a politically potent critique of the present, and specifically ‘Yugonostalgia’ as a ‘voice of resistance’ to the contemporary hegemony.58 Buden also likens this condition to amnesia. I prefer the metaphor of engineered political dementia. One cannot be too cautious when employing medical terms in relation to the phenomena of social life. I do not, however, suggest turning this metaphor into a diagnosis or concept. It is meant to help visualise the effects upon society of barring ways into its past and denying its experience. The metaphor conveniently, even if provocatively, links technical and medical jargon, which indicates the intentional crafting of desired outcomes, which then turn out to have semi-desired implications. Dementia is not forgetting. It entails a rupture in one’s access to one’s history as a repository of experience and knowledge, not only memories, and ultimately of the self. To struggle with dementia is not to struggle with remembering specific events but with not being able to get in touch with the meanings of events. It obstructs positioning oneself in the world and the passage of time. The relation with one’s past is distorted, out of joint. The past does not slide into oblivion but retains a fragmented, meaningless, 260

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disarranged presence that confuses the actor and undermines the formation of historical consciousness. Dementia is perhaps more problematic on another level. It suggests a passivity in societies, denies historical agency to the people and reduces them to instruments of national and international elites. One has, however, to acknowledge the problem of building something new not from scratch but ‘on the ruins of utopia’, as the editors of a new magazine on Eastern Europe explain;59 it therefore fed off a total defeat, and the defeat which at that time seemed to have been inscribed into utopia, inherent to its grand ideas. State socialism was in many ways experimental. It was trying to revolutionise social relations, and there were no handbooks for that; nor was there comparable historical experience to guide the enterprise. It therefore needed frequent reforms and adjustments to its course, which contributed to the sense of instability and uncertainty. So one could say that among the general population there was a measure of saturation with adventures into the terra incognita of societal ordering and a longing for something that ‘simply works’. But in addition to this more or less general feeling, there was also a concrete conditionality of the process of European integration, and as Tanja Petrović shows, one of the requirements was the erasure of the past. Once the general course was selected, and the process of harmonisation with the European Union’s norms and standards was launched, there was not much debate, inclusive or otherwise.60 It is important to stress that the entire process was only partly exogenous. It was the members of the nomenklatura across Eastern Europe that proved most adaptable to the new system.61 But some authors detect in the transition traces of the new form of colonialism. It was particularly visible among former Yugoslav republics that had been directly affected by the wars of the 1990s, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Kosovo.62 Yugoslavia may, however, be interesting in a different way as well. Throughout Eastern Europe we have seen the negation of the multi-­ layered socialist past and reductionism in engaging with it.63 However, the case of Yugoslavia is striking insofar as even the references to it are hidden behind especially invented names, to the point of turning it into a taboo.64 Speaking of formerly Yugoslav lands, the famous Yugoslav writer Dubravka Ugrešić observes that all that we hear of Yugoslavia these days is a product of false memory, which reworks the past to justify the war and explain the failings of the present.65 At the same time, it was the socialist Yugoslavia that enjoyed an 261

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exceptional status within the former Eastern Bloc. It was also exceptional in how it met its end, and that may be the reason why its historical occurrence is nowadays considered exceptional to the point of insignificant anomaly. It is used as a reason to discard Yugoslav experience as entirely sui generis and without any general validity. In contrast, I would suggest that precisely its exceptionality shows the contours of the entire project of transition more clearly, without a certain blurring of images for the rest of Eastern Europe. This blurring comes from the fact that political regimes in the countries dependent upon the Soviet Union were more repressive and, to the extent that they were exogenously controlled, also more inauthentic. Yugoslavia can also be seen as a testimony to historical possibilities missed by the movement of 1989 and unrecognised by the movement’s Western patrons, which continues to restrict the political horizons of the region and possibly of Europe in its entirety to the present day.

A tentative why: memory condemned­– ­future denied? It could be, and mostly is, argued that a political debt, of forgetting the East of 1945–89, was incurred because there was a more important debt to be paid, one that takes precedence over all others: the debt to the victims and survivors of criminal actions by Eastern European regimes. Justice was owed to those upon whom the institutions and norms of socialist states inflicted suffering and death, because of either the victims’ political views or their social standing. In that sense, justice encompasses much more than juridical proceedings, especially as it would be difficult to deal juridically with actions over such a long time span. It is about recognising past suffering, a duty to alleviate or remedy the consequences, and finally, a duty to prevent repetition, which entails dealing with the causes of claimed injustice. One of the steps in that direction was the Resolution on European Conscience and Totalitarianism that was passed by the Parliament of the European Union in April 2009, with over five hundred votes in favour and only thirty-three votes against. It shows that ‘previous emphasis on the Holocaust as the sole historical “contra-part” of the European Project has been replaced by acknowledging National Socialism and Stalinism as equally evil’.66 The Resolution was initiated by the countries of Eastern Europe, primarily the Czech Republic, Poland and Bulgaria. The common European traumatic legacy is recognised in this document as being made up of both fascist and communist regimes lumped 262

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together, upon which historical judgement is passed with no attempt to differentiate between fascism and communism or communism and Stalinism.67 In fact, the Resolution is unambiguous about this: it reads (under Item N) that to victims it is immaterial which regime inflicted damage. Political and ideological differences are rendered insignificant and inconsequent in light of ethical concerns. While the EU Parliament is prolific in resolutions, many of which do not come anywhere near actualisation in the material reality of European societies, this Resolution bears a particular significance insofar as it legitimates the course taken by political elites of Eastern Europe in 1989: ‘the new democratic systems which emerged in Eastern Europe after 1989 are first and foremost counter projects to the Communist past’.68 Denouncing the socialist past in Eastern Europe in this unconditional, absolute manner serves a present political project. It is crucial for the legitimacy of new, post-transition democracies.69 This, however, is nothing new in the history of relating to the past. At historic crossroads, ‘processing of the past is a source of legitimacy for new social forces’.70 In this case, processing of the past was understood as an ‘overcoming of the past and liberation from the legacy of socialism’, and set as a ‘precondition for “Europeanisation” ’; the European Union in this regard lent support, through official discourse as much as documents and policies, to national political elites in their revisionist projects.71 Ironically, therefore, the peoples of the East in 1989 had stood up for democratising socialism and stabilising the economics of solidarity. Twenty years later their political elites crafted the political criminalisation of the very idea that guided that mass movement, and institutional political actors across Europe accepted as legitimate the official narrative which equated communism with fascism. The old elites played a significant role in this loss of socialist political legacy after 1989. With enormous crowds of people in the street, unanimously demanding change, the elites had to be careful indeed in navigating the crisis. The old communist vision of the future was delegitimised in these societies through the prolonged economic crisis, the conservativism of the elite and the failure to close the gap between ideology and reality. Change was needed but the direction in which it should lead was not clearly visible. Moving westward seemed like the safest option. The rationale of the new position with regard to the past, according to the Resolution, appears to be that a shared European future has to be built upon a shared European past, where sharing implies the sharing of an interpretative framework. In this regard, the Resolution suggests 263

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that only a European Union that recognises the tragic transgressions of the past can build lasting common political projects and a united front against any new totalitarian tendencies.72 Only if it relates to the past ‘appropriately’ can the (re)united Europe position itself in the world as the model of ‘peaceful and democratic social order’, a ‘historic achievement’ that claims the status of a universal norm. This approach is underpinned by a highly schematic and teleological view of history: it juxtaposes Europe’s ‘dark past’, 20th-century totalitarianism, with its ‘bright present’, and thus makes contemporary Europe appear as a version of the ‘end of history’ claims made especially after the fall of Communism.73 The present-day Europe becomes a sort of eternal present and serves as a yardstick for all political projects.74 The spirit of the Resolution materialised in numerous derivative programmes for engaging with the past and remembrance.75 The absolute and universal condemnation of crimes and regimes pushed into oblivion the history of social and political struggles that had prepared the ground for the great revolutions of the twentieth century. Moral reckoning blanketed a rather diverse history of a no less diverse conglomeration of states. The fact that independent forces of the left in Eastern Europe also struggled to build a more just world was obscured by the domination of the Soviet Union; back then it was a political strategy to strengthen the front against the capitalist world, but it nowadays serves to justify total historical blindness to autonomous actors of the left in the countries of Eastern Europe. It is a paradox of our time that the leftist revolutionary ideal, especially in terms of communism, is kept alive primarily by its enemies, even though more as a threat than as a horizon: ‘they keep communism firmly within their sight. They see communism as a threat, twenty years after its ostensible demise. To them, communism is so threatening that they premise political discussion on the repression of the communist alternative.’76 Why this was done requires a multi-layered answer which is more interpretative than factual and remains a contentious political ground with considerable significance for the present day. For example, Ghodsee and Sehon observe that it is not a mere accident that the wave of investment and support for, and interest in, anti-communist 264

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campaigns coincides with the post-2008 calls for more equality and resistance to capitalism, and with the rise of political articulations of these demands from the streets within the institutional arena, through either the old but rejuvenated parties of the left or new left-wing forces such as Podemos in Spain, SYRIZA in Greece and Slovenia’s Združena levica.77 In these circumstances, the unbalanced condemnation of the socialist past appears more as a move against critique and contestation of the present, and pre-emption of a future different from that projected in the aftermath of 1989,78 than as a means of dealing with the troubled past for the sake of moral recognition of suffering. Opponents would argue that the rejection of the legacy of both communism and state socialism was a duty of the new East European regime and governments. It was the appeal and promise of Never again!­– ­the recognition and acceptance of a moral debt. While this may be true, it does not refute that the manner in which it was done may, however, have generated new historical debts. The attempt to deal with the Stalinist tendencies of socialist regimes has entailed a general damnatio memoriae of ideas that inspired struggles for justice against exploitation and domination. This has incurred a new debt, which I would categorise as also political; a debt to the politics of resistance and struggle, revolutionary imagination and the vision of radically transformed democratic collective life. These ideas may not have had much to do with bureaucratic regimes of the socialist East of Europe, but the regimes falling short of the revolutionary ideal served as a pretext to condemn the ideal itself in post-1989 Europe, especially in the East. While the Soviet Union’s record in Europe was dark and tragic, dealing with the past in the East went far beyond past-reckoning: it unfolded as decommunisation, most evident and drastic in the purges of memorials not only to international figures such as Engels and Marx, but also to national anti-fascist heroes.79 It unravelled not as the honouring of victims but as ‘a project designed to rewrite history, forgiving fascism and condemning those who fought it’.80 As observed by a group of left-wing members of the European Parliament with regard to the Resolution, the communist past is selectively treated and equated with National Socialism and fascism in this document: according to them, that was done deliberately with the intention of discrediting left ideologies.81 One line of answering the question why would therefore run from the direction of the effects produced: the thorough uprooting of the left in Eastern Europe that continues to pull its political scene to the right. Politics of the left in the East seems more remote from the valid 265

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political spectrum than politics of the far right. In the old West, leftist ideas are more lively; still, the left treads with extreme caution within the bounds of reforming capitalism. This line of tackling the question why also directs the answer to the question who. Responsibility for the erasure of Yugoslavia and other similar repositories of a rich political and social experience, pregnant with historical possibilities, lies with two main sets of actors who held stakes in constructing and stabilising a new order as far away from left revolutionary ideals as possible. First, it was the political elites of the newly emergent states who almost invariably combined 1970s and 1980s Communist Party bureaucratic nomenklatura with old (far) right opposition to the socialist order, mainly those defeated in the Second World War. The nomenklatura was decisive at that point. Contrary to the expectations at the time, the transition put them in a situation to preserve and augment their privileges, which the demands for more socialism and more democracy in the 1980s could have seriously endangered. On the other hand, it was the European Union that lent support to this new/old project. As diverse as the EU remains in terms of national political forces, interests and goals, at the time it worked in unison towards the common project of unifying Europe economically, politically and ideologically. While the project remains rather broad to the present day, it has never wavered from the basic model of capitalist market economy and multi-party electoral democracy that is defined more implicitly through the fundamental requirements of the rule of law, civil liberties and internationally articulated human rights. And this set the grid lines not only for the new East but also for the political horizon of the entire continent. The masses on the streets followed, and not necessarily through manipulation only. To embark on the path of transition with, as it was advertised at the time, a set and clear course to a known destination­– ­which, as it was also said at the time, ‘worked’­– ­offered relief from the effects of historically accumulated waves of destabilising reforms, at least in the beginning, and inspired hope.

The future contained In a tone of historical nostalgia, Scribner writes that, with the eclipse of the East, utopia collapsed in our thinking of our condition. With it, a different ordering of life in common, joined together in solidarity through common work, disappeared from our reality.82 The erasure of 266

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the pre-transition political experience of the East, and the reworking of the past to delegitimise state socialism and communism by equating them with National Socialism and fascism, created a representation of the past that does not offer much to either the present or the future. The new representation blocks up entry points into the past, which could be a source of (once missed) possibilities, on account of its errors and failings. It also prevents us from seeing that the revolutionary legacy is more than the excess and hubris of the revolutionary moment. It is an entire history of experience, imagining, experimenting, constructing, innovating, organising, and also erring and failing, in an attempt to change the world. Yugoslavia was perhaps the best example of that history. Subjecting that history to uncompromising while decontextualised or universalised moral and legal condemnation may be about a debt to the victims, but there remains a problem of the new debt this incurs: to the ideals and vision of a different world. Badiou writes of this in a tone that communicates historical anger: The truth of all this is that the terrorised ideology of ‘human rights’ likes to reduce the greatest, most fundamental and new movement of the second half of the twentieth century to a collection of unpleasant anecdotes and improbable statistics.83 This produces a situation in which the past of political unrest, and especially revolutionary unrest (which in this case is more than an event of violent uprising and encompasses decades of transformative waves or processes), is demonised, which contributes to sustaining the status quo that for many Europeans has entailed a deterioration of living conditions.84 As Balibar observes, counter-revolutionary discourse today ‘refers to the return of “revolutionary illusions” as a mortal threat for society, the economy, “democratic institutions”, etc. against which a preventive ideological war should be waged’.85 How the socialist past is being treated in Eastern Europe can be seen as one of the ‘preventive war’ strategies. It is both morally condemned and politically obliterated. What remains of it in our public life resembles more the flapping of an old suit that poses as a scarecrow in the field than a historical landmark pregnant with political experience. As I am closing this series of reflections on the lost past, the streets of European cities fill with protesting masses that demand substantive freedom and more equality. The massive wave of 1989 267

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that swept through Eastern Europe, calling for more freedom and equality, was laden with democratic potentials much greater and more revolutionary than a regime change. The pre-1989 experience of Yugoslav self-management, not to mention the lessons of its federation of different nations, was pregnant with possibilities of greater popular autonomy and more immediately democratic organisation of collective life in all its spheres; possibilities that still merit exploration, understanding and acknowledgement. Ignoring the fullness, and ambivalence, of the experience of both 1989 and pre-1989 not only denies recognition of the wealth of Europe’s past, but also shrinks the horizon of its future, a future that can be much more than a derivate of the narrow present. As Balibar dialectically concludes: there are pasts that return in the future to produce a new future.86 The past, however, returns to produce a new future only if this is made possible by a certain representation of the past, which means that Europe, without acknowledging it, still bears a double debt: to the past silenced and the future contained. The debt to the past must be understood as being as polyvalent as the past itself. In moral terms, for us today, it inevitably entails recognition of human suffering and tragedy. The left has its debts to pay in that respect. Politically, however, we learn from Benjamin that engaging with the past directs us to the traces of possibilities that were missed when that past was the present, in which case repayment of debt entails ensuring that these possibilities are (re)called into being­– t­ o create an alternative future.87

Notes Ideas in this chapter were initially shaped through the project ‘School of Knowledge: Srebrenica­– ­Mapping Genocide and Post-Genocide Society’ by FAMA Methodology (Sarajevo). My special thanks go to Suada Kapić, the author of the project, for having provided the opportunity, map and framework to think about post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina in these terms.   1. P. Ballinger, ‘Whatever Happened to Eastern Europe? Revisiting Europe’s Eastern Peripheries’, Eastern European Politics and Societies, 31(1), 2017, pp. 44–67: 45. Ballinger quotes Van Rompuy, former President of the European Council, who at the 2011 EU–US Summit proclaimed with triumphalism: ‘Since the end of the Cold War, there is no East anymore.’ Ballinger explains that this statement should be read as saying that, ‘while there still existed states located physically to the east of the EU, the “East” as a meaningful discursive configuration no longer exists’.

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Europe’s Debt Denied   2. S. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. x.   3. There are strong historical arguments in favour of the denial of sovereign political agency to Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989­– t­ o almost all its countries but two: Albania and Yugoslavia. Interestingly enough, it had been the latter that served as the most inspiring example of socialism for over forty years of development independent of the Soviet Union, but whose legacy got most thoroughly wiped away.   4. Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was the ground of some of the most ferocious campaigns of Nazi forces and their local supporters against partisans and the civilian population. The city recently experienced a heated public debate over the attempt of local authorities to name an elementary school after a Second World War journalist who had worked at Radio Roma in Mussolini’s Italy and propagated openly anti-Semitic views.   5. The salute of Croatian fascists is repeatedly used in public, and courts dismiss charges against those who use it on the ground of its full legality and legitimacy. See ‘Sud presudio: Ustaški pozdrav “Za dom spremni” izraz legitimiteta vlasti u Hrvatskoj’, Oslobođenje, 14 August 2018, Available at (last accessed 9 March 2020). In Serbia there were several judicial proceedings to rehabilitate Second World War war criminals, and this is how Draža Mihailović, the Second World War leader of Serbian Chetniks, fascist collaborators who slaughtered entire Muslim villages in Bosnia, got rehabilitated as a ‘victim of communist persecution’. See ‘Brojne osude rehabilitacije Draže Mihailovića’, Aljazeera Balkans, 14 May 2015. Available at (last accessed 9 March 2020). In Bosnia and Herzegovina, historical revisionism is rampant among all three ethnic communities. D. Markovina, ‘Udruženi postjugoslovenski revizionizam’, Peščanik, 23 March 2018. Available at (last accessed 7 May 2019).   6. N. Kopyosov, ‘Memory Laws and Nationalist Lies’, Project-Syndicate, 24 March 2018. Available at (last accessed 7 May 2019). Kopyosov’s work on memory laws suggests that this is the case across Eastern Europe. The concern with past injustice and crime is deprived of the call to resistance and radical transformation, and limited to dogmatic commemorative conservatism and, in some cases, whitewashing of present-day right-wing extremism and nationalism.  7. M. Uvalić, ‘The Rise and Fall of Market Socialism in Yugoslavia’, Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute, 27 March 2018. Available at (last accessed 20 December 2018).   8. Želimir Žilnik, Yugoslav film director and one of the consistently dissonant voices in the public space over the span of five decades, offers a precious insight into the

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Svjetlana Nedimović workings of self-management as someone who actually filmed with workers in their factory collectivities: ‘Even through there were various obstacles to democracy in a one-party system, I recall people talking of their collectivities as an entity within which they have not only a right to speak out loud but also the right to fight for their position and right to decide.’ Ž. Žilnik, ‘Zaboravili smo na revoluciju’, interview by D Konjikušić, Portal Novosti, 28 November 2018. Available at

(last accessed 24 April 2019).   9. J. J. Linz and A. Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 238. Linz and Stepan, however, also draw attention to the fact that expectations of these democratic theorists were betrayed as the Yugoslav transition slid into a tragedy of civil wars and genocide, but there is no attempt to contextualise this claim. What happened in Yugoslav lands should not be explained through historical over-determination, nor can self-management as a political experience be denied potential utility in democratic transitions, precisely because that opportunity was never taken. 10. See Svetlana Jovanovič, ‘Thousands Rally Against Small Hydropower Plants on Mt. Stara Planina’, Balkan Green Energy News, 3 September 2018. Available at (last accessed 9 March 2020). Also in Bosnia and Herzegovina: ‘Flussschützer in BiH gewaltsam von Protest entfernt’, RiverWatch 31 August 2017. Available at (last accessed 18 March 2020). In RNM: RiverWatch, ‘Growing Protest: Nearly 100,000 Against Dams in Mavrovo National Park/ Macedonia’, 9 September 2014. Available at (last accessed 9 March 2020). In Croatia: Relja Dusek, ‘Croatian Islanders Fight to Preserve Golden Beach’, Balkan Insight, 28 April 2017. Available at (last accessed 9 March 2020). 11. S. Horvat and I. Štiks (eds), Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism: Radical Politics After Yugoslavia (London: Verso, 2014). 12. W. Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015). 13. Quoted in C. Samary, ‘A Utopian in the Balkans’, New Left Review, 114, November– December 2018. Available at (last accessed 20 April 2019). 14. Resistance to this ossification came from inside and outside the Party, especially in the period between 1968 and 1971. It started with a student movement that demanded more democracy and more socialism, but as the movement was distorted the wave continued with nationalist forces that spelled the doom of Yugoslavia in the end. M. Kalik, ‘Studentska revolucija 1968: u svetu i kod nas’, Novi plamen, 27 December 2017. Available at (last accessed 28 April 2019). See also Zukin’s insights into the peculiar connection between ethno-nationalist tendencies and young progressive forces, and the failure to unite workers at Yugoslav level, above local concerns and the institutional framework of (national) republics, in S. Zukin, Beyond Marx and Tito: Theory and Practice in Yugoslav Socialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 255–60. 15. Zukin, Beyond Marx and Tito, p. 247. 16. B. Horvat, ‘Two Widespread Ideological Deviations in Contemporary Yugoslav Society’, Sociologija, 24(2–3), 1982, pp. 314–22. 17. Bilandžić, in D. Mihaljević, Zbogom avangardo: Na razvalinama jugoslovense socijalističke modernizacije (Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung South East Europe, 2017), pp. 2–3. Available at (last accessed 9 March 2020). 18. Uvalić, ‘Rise and Fall’. 19. Thus in 2018 the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced its exhibition ‘Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980’ with the following description: ‘The architecture that emerged­– f­rom International Style skyscrapers to Brutalist “social condensers”­– ­is a manifestation of the radical pluralism, hybridity, and idealism that characterised the Yugoslav state itself.’ See (last accessed 18 March 2020). 20. C. Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 101, 97. 21. See Horvat and Štiks, Desert of Post-Socialism; D. Arsenijević (ed.), Unbribable Bosnia: The Fight for the Commons (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2014). 22. N. Milikić, ‘Implantacije vs. implementacije­– I­ deo’, DeMaterijalizacija umetnosti, 2018 (my translation). Available at (last accessed 7 May 2019). 23. See L. Bogdanić, ‘Yubilej: “Pretvorba” društvenog vlasništva nije mogla proći bez krvi. Interview by S. Pulig’, Portal Novosti, 6 December 2018. Available at (last accessed 18 April 2019). 24. Ballinger, ‘Whatever Happened to Eastern Europe?’, p. 52. 25. The connotations of ‘Old Europe’ in the given moment were potentially more interesting­– ­rather than just being the core of the European Union and, possibly, Europe as such, it connoted something inert, anachronistic, unable to adjust to new circumstances, even decadent and intrinsically rotten. The New Europe, rather than being simply a newcomer in the history of the EU, appears renewed and reborn, ‘fresh blood’. Habermas and Derrida, in their plea for a common European foreign policy, gave a more refined account of these d ­ istinctions;

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Svjetlana Nedimović J. Habermas and J. Derrida, What Binds Europeans Together. Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War (London: Verso, 2005). The terminological couple soon withered away, as its political utility devolved. 26. P. Ballinger, ‘Recursive Easts: Shifting Peripheries’, Eastern European Politics and Societies, 31(1), 2017, pp. 3–10: 8. 27. Ibid., p. 3. 28. Michał Buchowski writes of the salience of orientalism in relating to the East, even though it could be redescribed as neo-orientalism­– ­it is ideological and not strictly cultural. He further observes that as such it cuts across societies, that is, internally, setting apart ‘losers’ from ‘winners’ in the post-1989 transition. M. Buchowski, ‘The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother’, Anthropological Quarterly, 79(3), 2006, pp. 463–82: 471. 29. For example, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland boycotted a mini-summit on migration in 2018, rejecting documents by the European Commission and their policy recommendations and denouncing the organising states as a ‘migrant-loving group of friends’. M. Dunai and K. Than, ‘AntiImmigrant Eastern EU States Defiant as They Boycott Summit’, Reuters, 21 June 2018. Available at (last accessed 17 April 2019). 30. Delanty writes of the project of Mitteleuropa as situated in contrast to the Southeast, which becomes Mitteleuropa’s new ‘Other’; G. Delanty, ‘The Resonance of Mitteleuropa: A Habsburg Myth or Antipolitics’, Theory, Culture and Society, 13(4), 1996, pp. 93–108: 102. The South-east ‘is seen as a regressive manifestation of Byzantine decadence with which Orthodox Christianity, Islam and Communism are all identified’; ibid., p. 103. 31. C. Lapavitsas, interview by L. Petrović, ‘Ako se levica sabere, stvari se mogu drastično promeniti: Interview with C. Lapavitsas’, Mašina, 19 January 2018. Available at (last accessed 20 April 2019). 32. Ten countries with the fastest-shrinking population are all located in Eastern Europe. See Peter Kotecki, ‘10 Countries at Risk of Becoming Demographic Time Bombs’, Business Insider, 8 August 2018. Available at (last accessed 4 May 2019). 33. E. Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 2. 34. B. Buden, Zona prelaska: O kraju postkomunizma/Zone of Transition: On the End of Postcommunism (Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2012). 35. J. Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 49. 36. Council of Europe, ‘Measures to Dismantle the Heritage of Communist

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Europe’s Debt Denied Totalitarian Regimes’, Item 996. Available at (last accessed 28 January 2019). 37. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, pp. 228–9. 38. J. Habermas, ‘What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Rectifying Revolution and the Need for New Thinking on the Left’, New Left Review, I(183), September/ October, 1990, pp. 3–21. 39. F. Jameson, ‘The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber’, New German Critique, 1, Winter, 1973, pp. 52-89; S. Žižek, quoted in Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 240. 40. Buden, Zona prelaska, p. 50. 41. Quite the contrary: Susan Buck-Morss reminds us of the fact that radical communists, rather than liberals, were in the front rows of the velvet revolutions and the Internationale was among the songs sung by the crowds. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe. 42. Buden, Zona prelaska, p. 34. 43. P. Mitra, ‘Increasing Inequality: Is There More to Come?’, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4007, September 2006. Available at (last accessed 6 May 2019); A. Alam, M. Murthi and R. Yemtsov, Growth, Poverty and Inequality: Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2005). 44. See M. D. Nuti, ‘An Overview of Transition’, paper presented at Founding Conference, Centre for Research of Economic and Socio-Cultural Development of CIS Countries, Central and Eastern Europe, St Petersburg, 26–7 June 2014. Available at (last accessed 25 April 2019). 45. Horvat and Štiks, Desert of Post-Socialism, p. 16. 46. Council of Europe, ‘Measures’, Item 6. 47. Ibid., Item 16. 48. Ibid., Item 6. 49. Buchowski, ‘Specter of Orientalism’, p. 469. 50. Buden, Zona prelaska, p. 56. 51. J. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1947). 52. G. A. Almond and S. Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963). 53. M. J. Crozier, S. P. Huntington and J. Watanuki, ‘The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission’, 1975. Available at (last accessed 27 April 2019). In the post-1989 world it features a peculiar neo-Tocquevillean turn. See A. Ishkanian, ‘(Re)Claiming the Emancipatory Potential of Civil Society: A Critical Examination of Civil Society and Democracy Building Programs in Armenia since 1991’, Armenian Review, 51(1–4), 2009, pp. 9–34. The transition(s) in Eastern Europe were invariably marked by an enormous inflow of funding for civil society, but in the specific form of professional

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Svjetlana Nedimović ­ on-governmental organisations and networks, as heralded by the Resolution n from 1996, which appeals to ‘consolidated democracies’ for ‘aid and assistance’ to the countries in transition, particularly in building a new civil society; Council of Europe, ‘Measures’, Item 16. This resulted in, by and large, exogenous engineering of the North American type of associational civil society, which was uncritically promoted; R. Mandel, ‘Seeding Civil Society’, in C. M. Hahn (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Europe (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 298–308. In order to help consolidate democracy and steer it along the desired course of the transition, the new civil society, tamed and controlled primarily through financial schemes as opposed to past direct state intervention, was to give up ‘holistic aspirations’ and accept that it can have ‘at most an indirect effect on the self-transformation of the political system’; J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 367. 54. P. Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’, Memory Studies, 1(1), 2008, pp. 59–71. 55. Ibid., p. 60. 56. Ibid., p. 65. 57. This has interfered with people’s private memories as well. For example: I have come to understand that memories of Eastern Europe and the period of Communism that nowadays dominate screens, books and magazines have next to nothing in common with my memories. [. . .] History is indeed written by the winners so what does not fit in the accepted narrative must be forgotten. B. Milanović, ‘Kako sam izgubio prošlost’, Peščanik, 22 September 2017 (my translation). Available at (last accessed 9 March 2020). 58. T. Petrović, Yuropa: Jugoslovensko nasleđe i politike budućnosti u postjugoslovenskim društvima (Beograd: Fabrika knjiga, 2012), p. 193. 59. M. Edwards, ‘Meet the Editors of a New Journal Challenging Prejudices about Eastern Europe’, Open Democracy, 18 October 2018. Available at (last accessed 20 March 2019). 60. Petrović, Yuropa. 61. Ibid., p. 471. 62. D. Majstorović, ‘Construction of Europeanization in the High Representative’s Discourse in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Discourse & Society, 18(5), 2007, pp. 627–51. Yet even Slovenia, which completed the integration process swiftly and successfully negotiated many of its aspects on its own terms, finds Austria’s relationship with it to be colonial. See Petrović, Yuropa, p. 76. 63. M. Todorova, ‘Daring to Remember Bulgaria, pre-1989’, The Guardian, 9 November 2009.

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Europe’s Debt Denied 64. Petrović, Yuropa, p. 110. 65. D. Ugrešić, ‘Kako to da nitko ne traži lustraciju i reviziju povijesti na crkvenu terenu?!’, interview by Heni Erceg, 12 July 2016. Available at (last accessed 20 August 2018). 66. M. Prutsch, European Historical Memory: Policies, Challenges and Perspectives (Brussels: European Parliament, Directorate-General for Internal Policies, 2015), p. 23. 67. In the ‘Platform of European Memory and Conscience’ that sprang from the Resolution of 2009, the opening paragraph reads: With the accession of the post-Communist countries to the EU in 2004, the legacy of Communism became an integral part of common European heritage. For the 10 new member states, the EU accession opened a new level on which to address the insufficient coming to terms with the totalitarian past in Central and Eastern Europe.

The Platform reads that: (1) communism is equal to post-1945 regimes in Eastern Europe; (2) communism is made into a common European legacy only through EU expansion eastward; that is, the history of communism in Europe is the history of Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989; (3) communism is equivalent to the totalitarian past. The Platform is silent on the history of communist ideas prior to 1945 and does not deal with workers’ struggles or various organisations in Western Europe or Europe-wide intellectual debates on the proper course of the left and rejection of Stalinism. Available at (last accessed 20 September 2018). 68. Prutsch, European Historical Memory, pp. 24–5. 69. T. Kuljić, Prevladavanje prošlosti: uzroci i pravci promene slike istorije krajem XX veka (Belgrade: Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2002), p. 456. 70. Ibid., p. 46. 71. Petrović, Yuropa, p. 10. 72. Lossurdo is very critical of the category ‘totalitarianism’. He problematises its conceptual and empirical value, and argues that the politics of ‘denunciation of totalitarianism’ is not an attempt to overcome politics and ideology in relating to the past but is itself a highly functional and powerful ‘ideology of war against the enemies of the Western world’; D. Lossurdo, ‘Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism’, Historical Materialism, 12(2), 2004, pp. 25–55: 53. Both fascism and communism are ahistoricised by being subsumed under the term ‘totalitarianism’, which remains conceptually controversial, but pragmatically allows for the criminalisation or negation of any political alternative to the present order of things in Europe; S. Horvatinčić, ‘Totalitarni “Disneyland” i europske politike negativnog naslijeđa’, Bilten, 21 December 2018. Available at (last accessed 6 May 2019). 73. Prutsch, European Historical Memory, p. 26. As Prutsch also observes, we see much less effort invested in dealing with colonialism as shared European past. 74. S. Löytömäki, Law and the Politics of Memory: Confronting the Past (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 27. 75. See, for example, the above-cited ‘Platform of European Memory and Conscience’. 76. J. Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2018), pp. 6–7. 77. K. R. Ghodsee and S. Sehon, ‘Anti-Anti-Communism’, Aeon, 22 March 2018. Available at (last accessed 5 Jan 2019). 78. This could also explain why this newly constructed European remembrance contains no reference to the main Cold War rival of state socialism­– ­capitalism (M. Todorova, referred to in Horvat and Štiks, Desert of Post-Socialism, loc. 37%). In its relativisation of the complex and ambivalent history of Left ideas, not only is communism equated with fascism but socialism is not contrasted with its direct opposite­– c­ apitalism. The problematic history of capitalism, with its association with fascism, of which Simone Weil, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote, is, however, also absent from Europe’s encounters with its past. 79. Material traces of national liberation and social revolution were meticulously destroyed. For example, in Croatia alone over 3,000 monuments to partisan forces, Second World War struggles and victims were destroyed, most of them almost three decades ago, without anyone being charged or prosecuted; Radnička Fronta, Facebook Available at (last accessed 17 January 2019). 80. R. Burtenshaw, ‘Fascism’s Face-Lift’, Jacobin, 12 May 2017. Available at (last accessed 9 March 2020). 81. The dissenting voices took the position that new common European remembrance, for future generations, should not be built on ‘the historical lie that seeks to put Communists on a par with Nazis, nor should they be encouraged to forget both the Fascist dictatorships that once held sway in southern Europe and the colonial past’ against which communists fought and fell in that battle; MarieChristine Vergiat, Lothar Bisky and Inês Cristina Zuber on behalf of the GUE/ NGL Group, ‘Minority Opinion Pursuant to Rule 52(3) of the Rules of Procedure’, quoted in Prutsch, European Historical Memory , p. 49. 82. C. Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 83. A. Badiou, ‘We Are at a New Beginning of Marxist Thought’, interview by Mathieu Dejean, Les Inrockuptibles, 28 August 2018. Available at (last accessed 2 May 2019). 84. T. Kuljić, ‘Pojam levica je višeznačan i neoperativan’, interview by N. Drobnjak, Novi Plamen, 7 July 2017. Available at (last accessed 5 May 2019). 85. E. Balibar, The Idea of Revolution: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 27 August 2017. Available at (last accessed 7 May 2019). 86. Ibid. 87. M. Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).

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12 The Use of the Past under Conditions of Disorientation and Instability: The Spanish–Catalan Political Conflict Gerard Rosich

T

he Catalan commemorations of the third centenary of the end of the Wars of the Spanish Succession (1714)­– ­which are associated in Catalonia with its conquest by the Spanish state and the subsequent abolition of independent Catalan political institutions­– w ­ ere a turning point in a debate, held in numerous scholarly books, at academic congresses and in media articles, aiming to reinterpret the past conflict between the Spanish state and Catalonia from the perspective of the present historical configuration at the beginning of the twenty-first century.1 The debate culminated at a historical conference entitled ‘Spain against Catalonia’, convened by the public Institut d’Estudis Catalans, which counted among its participants a wide range of professional Catalan historians, many of them internationally recognised. This event triggered a massive media and political conflict in Spain and prompted some Spanish political parties and the Spanish Attorney General to attempt (unsuccessfully) to ban the conference, an unprecedented occurrence in post-Francoist Spain.2 Historical discussions on the Catalan question have been a permanent site of debate in the Spanish state at least since the nineteenth century, but they were in general restricted either to the academic sphere or to elite circles. This state of affairs was transformed by the political conflict created by the Spanish state and the Constitutional Court from 2003 onwards. It began with the amendments made to the new Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia, approved by the Catalan parliament through the legislative action of the Spanish parliament in 2006. The new Statute expressed the political aspirations of Catalan society after years of public consultation that culminated in a referendum earlier that year. The definitive clash occurred in 2010 with the Constitutional Court’s decision to remove many sections of the Catalan Statute. The Court explicitly stated that Catalonia was not a ‘nation’ in any political 278

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sense. The political conflict surrounding the Court’s decree came at a time when the effects of the euro crisis were being felt most dramatically by the population. The budgetary cuts imposed by the central government on Catalonia had a multiplying effect with respect to the political consequences produced by the Constitutional Court’s decision and the executive action of the Spanish government. This led to an internal conflict in the Catalan self-understanding, articulated by most Catalan civil society and state organisations, as well as a wide range of social movements, and expressed in massive demonstrations. At issue was whether the Catalan people had a ‘right to decide’ in democratic terms. After the blockade imposed by the Spanish state on the Catalan demands, a political majority in the Catalan parliament was created around the idea that the only viable future for Catalonia was to become ‘a new European state’. This political determination was translated into electoral terms in 2012 with the formation of the first pro-European independence government, thirty-five years after the end of the Francoist regime. From that moment onwards, history ‘left’ the academy and became mobilised in the public sphere, where it was used as a political resource in a radically different setting that bears almost no resemblance to the past. In Spain, the engagement of professional historians3 in the use of the past takes place in relation to the way in which the political dimension itself is constituted. In contrast to other social contexts, the limits that define the internal/external sphere of the political field have constantly been contested and the effort to link the state to the nation has always been a problematic project.4 This current state of affairs has revitalised nineteenth-century historiographical writing projects that attempted to (re)construct political collectivities with a view to (re)constituting the foundations of society.5 Accordingly, there is no dimension of social life that is not altered by this collective work of reinterpretation. However, the historical conditions under which these forms of historiographical production have been consolidated are irremediably linked to the past. The new global and regional constellation at the beginning of the ­twenty-first century imposes not only new constraints and ­opportunities for the interconnections between historiography and collective political self-understanding, but also new regimes of justification. Therefore, exploring what particular elements of the present might influence historical production within the Spanish state seems not only pertinent to the present stand-off between Catalonia and Spain, but also relevant to an interrogation of more general questions. 279

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This chapter discusses the field of tensions that shaped the new conditions under which a meaningful use of the past could be performed in the historiographical disputes pertaining to Spain. It develops a different perspective from that which is commonly adopted in discussions of this theme by highlighting novel contemporary elements that are too often neglected by historians themselves: the ‘professionalisation’ of history and the subsequent and recent debate on the Catalan question are intermediate situations that both try to avoid confronting the issue that a historian’s perspective is always influenced by the present. In that respect, we should not presuppose that the impact of these new elements has a global relevance: they appear to be more significant in Europe than in other parts of the globe­– s­ ometimes in connection with Europe’s loss of global hegemony­– ­and they are dependent upon each other. The research programme from which this chapter stems has developed as working hypotheses, relevant for understanding the historiographical conflict regarding the ‘Catalan question’, the following: these debates take place in the wider context of the European Union, namely with respect to questions of supra-state belonging, which are not based on issues of domination, especially when (re)constitutions of collective subjects occur, in contrast to the past, under democratic conditions. This constellation impacts on how the political question in Spain is framed in relation to how historians interpret the past in public debates. The account proposed here shows that the impact of the present on the study of the past by historians conditions both the epistemic frameworks and normative justifications of historians themselves in terms of how they use the past when they intervene in public debates on the ‘Catalan question’. I shall argue that mainstream historiography in Spain does not take into account in such interventions the elements of the present that are at work in the conflict between Catalonia and Spain. On the contrary, it is precisely because historians work with an understanding of the present that no longer structures the world as in the past, that is, the international system of sovereign nationstates, that their interpretation of the conflict is narrow and their use of the past is primarily based on means–end reasoning. I will claim that the ‘primacy’ given to a present that is already past in the debate on the Catalan question is both a consequence of a lack of orientation for future action and a way to disregard the normative and epistemic consequences imposed by the novel conditions under which history writing in the Spanish state presently takes place. I shall maintain that 280

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historians have to include a sociological perspective in their public interventions in the present to fully understand all the social dimensions at play in the Catalan context and to critically reflect upon their own work. I will argue that we live in a moment of transformation and that our present is shaped by high levels of instability and disorientation, which in turn have an impact at the global, national, regional and local levels. Interrogating the nature of this constellation helps to explicate why the connection between past and present is controversial in the current historiographical conflict. Accordingly, state-centric historiographies seeking to conquer the present through political use of the past can no longer claim hegemony over emerging self-understandings better attuned to the actual and potential supra-state dimension of collective action today. The argument develops in two stages. The first stage defines the relevant components of our time­– ­EU membership and the democratic imperative­– ­which influence the ongoing political relationship between the Spanish state and Catalonia and demonstrate that the conflict is being intensified by an antagonistic interpretation of the present, resulting from a divergent integration of these elements in the conflicting historical narratives. The first part shows that the creation of and belonging to the EU has transformed the conditions under which this political conflict takes place in the present and how a partisan political decision can be justified. This part argues that Spanish historiography interprets the European project as being driven by a logic of unity as a means of undermining the Catalan justifications for independence. In contrast, Catalan historiography privileges a logic of plurality in order to justify claims for independence. The second part argues that the (re) construction of collective subjects under democratic conditions can no longer be interpreted along the lines of historiographical methodologies that were created either to understand or to justify the formation of collective identities under non-democratic conditions. A definition of democracy is provided to show the constitutive tension existing in the justifications for the construction of a democratic collective subject in the Spanish state from an historical perspective. The second stage, which corresponds to the third part, shows that the framework within which the current ‘history war’ regarding the ‘Catalan question’ operates is structured as a means to ‘minimise’ the impact of the present at the local level. I will claim that history writing under conditions of uncertainty, instability and disorientation cannot circumvent this conjuncture without being hoist with its own petard. The chapter ends 281

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with a reflection on whether the historian has a debt to the past that he or she must honour and how this debt is problematised when historical legacies are disputed through calls for historical injustices to be redressed.

The EU as a polity The historical efforts of the Catalan people, institutions and political parties to transform the Spanish state into a pluri-national and federal state, which began in the second half of the nineteenth century and reached their apogee during the 1978 transition, have apparently definitively failed.6 They failed as a result of the 2010 legal decision of the Constitutional Court, which invalidated the Catalan Statute that had been approved by the Spanish parliament and voted for by the Catalan people in a referendum. This is an unprecedented decision by a legal court, based on political premises negating not only the existence of a Catalan demos, but also the most fundamental elements of a democratic regime, by invalidating a decision by the Catalan and the Spanish parliaments and a legal plebiscite held to validate it in Catalonia. Together with the other institutions of the Spanish state, this decision gave rise to further state legislation to recentralise the state that, in the opinion of a significant number of Catalan voters, enforces domination under a new guise.7 Though the project of internal recognition within Spain is perceived as being irremediably inconsistent, precisely because it contradicts the Spanish nation-state’s self-understanding as a unitary and indivisible political unit guaranteed by the military in article 8 of the Constitution, the Catalan organisations are now devoting their efforts to seeking external recognition, most overtly by becoming a new EU member state. The only current just solution to transforming this history of domination is, from this perspective, for Catalonia to create its own state and maintain a relationship with Spanish institutions on equal terms.8 The debates held within Spain in relation to the Catalan question are to some extent superseded by the belonging of both political entities in the European Union, one as a state, the other as a region. This offers new possibilities and constraints for the political reconstitution of collectivities and different frameworks of justification, at a moment when projects of European unification based on questions of domination are being discredited. As a result, politically under-represented nations like Catalonia are positing a divergent interpretation of the political project 282

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of the EU and invoking a different reading of European history to make sense of the current situation.9 Such works of collective self-reinterpretation not only make use of the past of Spain and Catalonia in different ways, but also offer divergent interpretations of the history of Europe to justify the legitimacy of the various claims against a more encompassing backdrop of continental history.10 These divergent interpretations are articulated in tandem with a contest over the meaning and histories of the concepts of state sovereignty, independence, solidarity, democracy and institutional formation, which are in turn linked to debates on the use of the European past that took place when a constitution for the EU was discussed and no agreement on a common interpretation could be reached.11 Thus, this political situation also bears a resemblance to the ambivalence of European self-understanding regarding the continent’s history and the history of European institutions. However, the current European crisis seems to suggest that this ambivalence is no longer an engine of progress, but has exhausted all of its potentialities and has produced a divide similar to the current one in Spain, which is quickly leading to a disintegration of consensus at the national level. Against this background, engaged historians are in a difficult situation: they can no longer uphold the nation or state as the unit of analysis, as in the production of national historiographies, but at the same time they cannot fully embrace post-/trans-national historiographies, since the historical transformations leading to a post-/trans-national perspective have not yet come to an end or been fully resolved, if such a resolution is indeed necessary. Nowadays, the interconnectedness of political and economic relations between human beings has made it clear that neither nostalgia, through the reinforcement of the old certainties regarding nation-states, nor utopia, through the promotion of global supra-national political institutions, seems the appropriate way to (re)construct a political subject.12 In this regard, a sociological impasse becomes a historiographical problem from the moment that the absence of a teleological horizon fails to provide the tools needed to assess the present. The difficulties in using a positive ‘unit of analysis’ are reflected in the current interpretation of the European crisis. The absence of clear analytical political categories for understanding the manifold, sometimes contradictory, actions of political actors has reinvigorated the use of old historical conceptualisations­– t­hat is, the reintroduction of geographical divisions between a Northern and a Southern Europe in opposition to the classical East/West divide­ – ­and highlighted the tension between federation and empire in the 283

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c­ onstruction of the EU, both of which are crucial for understanding the present field of tensions. First, the conflict between Catalonia and Spain has been boosted by opposing interpretations of the causes and effects of the euro crisis.13 A contested view on the notion of reciprocity and solidarity and the internal reintroduction of European imaginaries of a North–South divide, which are, paradoxically, inverted in the Spanish context, is at work in the present reinterpretation of both collectivities: in the context of Spain, it is also the ‘South’ that dominates the ‘North’. Very briefly, those opposed to the creation of a Catalan state see Catalonia as part of the ‘North’ in the Spanish state. It is a region that owes its wealth and progress either to the different waves of internal Spanish migration from the South or to the collaboration of Catalan elites with Spanish elites.14 Thus, Catalonia is historically indebted to the poorer Southern regions of the Spanish state. Solidarity with the South is also justified on the grounds that discretionary fiscal transfers were decided by the Spanish central government. Solidarity in this instance is based on a political notion of community that pre-dates the imposition of the idea of national sovereignty and is limited to state citizenship only.15 On the other side, the institutional creation of a Catalan state is a way to overcome the historical domination of the Spanish state and, in spite of all the central state efforts to undermine the Catalan economy, prevent social exclusion and economic subordination.16 ‘Solidarity’ is, from this angle, connected to a history of economic domination and fiscal plundering based on enforced national assimilation designed to alleviate Spain’s endemic fiscal crises and sovereign debt defaults, and to subordinate economic progress to the local interests of the Spanish elites.17 The impossibility of achieving economic sovereignty through the state management of a ‘national’ economy under conditions of globalised capitalism has been partially addressed by the Spanish state through the exclusive exercise of political domination over the Catalans. The comparatively higher budgetary deficits and the inability of the Catalan government to finance Catalonia’s public debt are, on this account, a strategy of the Spanish state adapted to a new global context for the continuing subordination of Catalans. Hence, creating a Catalan state would introduce reciprocity, and not subordination, into one region’s relations with the Spanish state and help construct bonds of solidarity at the European level: the only space that has the capacity to manage Europe’s ‘national’ economies in a multi-centred socio-economic 284

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world. Thus, conflicting interpretations of the meaning of austerity measures and ‘national’ public debt go beyond mere instrumental economic analyses and are intertwined with political and normative discourses, which are justified with respect to a divergent use of the past in relation to irreconcilable political projects.18 Nonetheless, actors use a broad understanding of political concepts in relation to differing narratives regarding the transformation of the collective self through recent interpretations of economic history. The contested use of the past is translated into the present via disputes over the meaning of these concepts, producing a stalemate and a divide that mirror the crisis currently affecting the eurozone. Second, the creation of the euro and the political management of the euro crisis have led to a reintroduction of a sense of the longue durée in European history.19 Even if the EU is considered, from a political perspective, as a complex and innovative institutional arrangement, the history of the EU up to the creation of the euro can be understood as consisting of a loose union of democratic nation-states putting an end to the historical fragmentation of Europe, a fragmentation that explains Europe’s history of violence.20 However, recent events demonstrate that deep historical continuities continue to shape the political structure of Europe. The modern history of Europe has been mainly constituted by the tension between federation and empire and not by the dynamics between states or nations.21 In historical terms, the internal configuration of Europe can be understood through the interactions between ‘nation-states’ only from the end of the Second World War up to the Maastricht Treaty and in connection with the consolidation of the welfare state.22 However, historical interpretations of this short period of time are increasingly becoming problematic. The internal configuration of Europe can no longer be situated in such a linear historical trajectory with respect to the internal logics of European history moving irrevocably from fragmentation to unity. This suggested logic was based indirectly on a Hegelian dialectical understanding of the role of law in the state and a liberal reinterpretation of European history at the end of the twentieth century: European conflicts were interpreted as consecutive steps leading ultimately to unity as a means of transcending the dialectic. The current crisis has called into question this interpretative framework and suggests that the period must be understood more as an exception in the history of Europe than as the last step. It is precisely for this reason that an alternative and c­ onflict-ridden logic of European history, the logic of plurality, which does not produce an 285

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interruption of ‘history’, is now being reintroduced to interpret the present: the tension between federation and empire.23 This particular conflict between both logics can be clearly perceived in Spain in relation to the Catalan question. Engaged historians interpret the Catalan claim to independence in accordance with the particular European logic they choose to support. Those opposing the political reconstitution of Catalonia tend to support the logic of unity and interpret ‘independence’ as an ‘anachronism’,24 one that goes against the policy promoted by the EU and that is understood as an arrangement between nation-states in order to overcome the legacies of fragmentation and violence. At times, the reasoning is more ambivalent and introduces the logic of plurality insofar as it is circumscribed only within the domestic sphere of the Spanish state and implies a federal transformation only of the Spanish state. In that respect, they try to combine the logic of unity with respect to the EU and the logic of plurality, still subscribing to the Spanish nationalist interpretation of the state even while supporting the constitutional provisions for autonomous government. In contrast, historians aiming to historically justify the Catalan claims to independence have, in general, a slightly different interpretation of European history. They are more inclined to broaden the historical perspective on the current crisis and situate Catalonia in the trajectory of European history. They emphasise the contradictory elements of the European project, which stem from the logic of plurality, most notably with respect to the EU’s promotion of a ‘Europe of regions’ versus a ‘Europe of states’ or the slogan ‘unity in diversity’. They call attention to the ‘imperial’ legacies of Spain, due to the particular logic of unity, which helps to explain the reasons why a majority in the Catalan parliament, in light of the current institutional architecture, supports independence. These historians likewise tend to see the federal transformation of the Spanish state as a failed project of the past and favour a federal bond at the European level in order to transform the current hegemonic understanding of the EU as a club of nation-states, which, in the end, only reintroduces the imperial logic of a Northern Europe dominating a Southern Europe due to the manifest imbalance in power and economic relations. According to this view, the only way to transform both Spain and the ongoing path privileged by EU elites is to support independence as a democratic movement with transformative implications for the whole EU. Once more, the concept of a ‘unit of analysis’ becomes radically indeterminate in these debates. The limits between the local, regional, 286

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national and European levels are constantly reshaped depending on the historical use of the past retrieved for political reasons. However, since the past stability that made it possible to use methodologically different layers as the unit of analysis is now gone, there is no epistemic criterion that justifies the empirical use of a unit of analysis without assuming a partisan normative standpoint. In political terms, the federative or imperial bond, in contrast to the logic of unity based on nation-states, does not define the types of the units that will actually enter into this relationship. This political and contextual indeterminacy makes it very difficult for observers and participants to interpret the ongoing reconfigurations of boundaries in the current European-wide crisis. This inability to interpret the present is causing many European states, intellectuals and politicians to desire a return to the past, as if the conditions that stabilised democratic nation-states after the Second World War could be reproduced.25 Indeed, the justification for defending the Spanish state is paradoxical: on the one hand, advocates argue that the existence of the Spanish state as a single nation is the best strategy for defending ‘Spanish interests’ at the European level and avoiding disintegration, while on the other, they support the view that states have to be coordinated politically to strengthen the EU. The external loss of sovereignty is desirable insofar as it does not imply an internal weakening of the nationalist understanding of the state.

The democratic collective self Ontogenetically, democracy requires a demos, a collective self, which exercises kratos, meaning that the political subject must already exist and cannot be constituted by democracy itself. The reflexivity of the democratic subject might qualitatively change the nature of the subject: a subject was already something before its political constitution and becomes something different afterwards. This refers to the historical dimension of democracy: the democratic self is self-transformative. The question of who counts, of just who the transformative self is, cannot be resolved democratically. In this context, the collective ‘self’ refers to the entity that results from or is performed by the (more or less) collective process of understanding. The entity does not exist prior to the process itself, and the process yields something that did not exist before in this specific way.26 The meaning and boundaries of the collective self change over time due to the interpretations given to particular historical experiences by the people participating in them, with 287

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these historical experiences understood as moments of re-instituting the collective self, that is, as moments of self-institution.­­­Democratic institutions are shaped in such a way that they cannot close the interpretative and temporal spaces opened at the moment they are created. The more such institutions are open to transformation by the collective self, the more democratic they are.27 The inherent temporality of the democratic self alludes to the problem of how to deal with historicity and violence at the moment when political collectivities are being constituted. Independence is a means to achieve autonomy through self-exclusion, while empire- or state-making can be considered a kind of domination through forced inclusion. Moreover, the relationship between democracy and otherness is extremely problematic. This is due to the fact that democracy entails a double process of exclusion/inclusion, one which occurs simultaneously during the (re)constitution of new democracies. First, it establishes an external boundary, even if it is porous and flexible­– ­that is, if ‘identity’ is not given and fixed­– ­between the demos and the other. Second, the internal workings of a democratic regime presuppose a division between part and people, because, as Claude Lefort has convincingly demonstrated, power in a democratic regime is not consubstantial with any individual or group: it can neither be occupied nor represented; that is, it is an emptied space.28 This double process is tension-ridden: in order to constitute the demos as the collectivity that creates the necessary external boundary by which a democracy determines itself, the internal division between part and people must be overcome and the people must appear phenomenologically as one, as an indivisible whole. This representation creates an internal conflict because it imposes limits on the possibilities of the self to become transformed; that is, the self must correspond to the representation of the people-as-one, thus restricting the possibilities for democratic action. At the same time, the political division between parties is established as a contest to represent the people-as-one, the indivisible whole: a part aspires to become the whole. To make matters more complicated, when the demos is seen from the perspective of its interactions with the others, it appears as a divided part that is excluded from the absolute whole. In short, democracy presupposes some degree of wholeness while still precluding totalisation. Or, in other words, it requires divisiveness but posits oneness. The constitution of political collectivities right up until the institutional consolidation of the democratic regime is the result of contingent 288

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factors and relations of domination. However, when the democratic regime establishes an institutional framework, the collectivity resulting from this history of domination and arbitrariness can reflect upon its own past and act to remedy the legacies of historical injustices and/ or overcome the political consequences of contingency and violence. In that respect, the imaginary boundaries of the collectivity are constantly called into question by divergent uses of the past, politically performed to act in the present against the background of the past imposition of actual boundaries. Thus, the transformation of politico-legal boundaries can be, in some cases, an effective measure to put an end to the ongoing effects in the present of past injustices due to a recognition, under democratic conditions, of the imposed nature of actual boundaries. In theoretical terms, the main problem is how the collectivity constituted historically as the result of past injustices can become independent in democratic terms from the moment that, as stated above, the demos is presupposed by the inner workings of the democratic regime. In sociological jargon, the ‘existence’ of a single demos is a functional requirement of democracy.29 In the context of the Catalan question, this is a central issue in dispute among engaged historians in their antagonistic use of the past. The two dimensions being contested have to do with just who the demos refers to and whether there is any particular interpretation of history that supports the view that Catalans constitute a political collectivity different from the Spanish one, and if so, whether or not relations of domination exist between both collectivities. However, the theoretical framework of the dispute rarely takes into account the fact that the uses of the past occur under democratic conditions, which makes mainstream approaches impractical. Spanish historians ‘use’ two main approaches in their interpretations of the past, namely liberalism and constructivism,30 to refute the antagonistic uses of the past aimed at justifying claims concerning the existence of a Catalan demos and the domination of Catalans by the Spanish state. First, these historians adopt an interpretation of the transition to post-Franco Spain as marking the transition from dictatorship to constitutional democracy based on the guarantees of equal freedom and political rights for all Spanish citizens. In this respect, the claims of domination made by Catalans would be totally unjustified, insofar as individual freedoms are preserved by the Constitution and political rights granting universal suffrage and a multi-party system of rule.31 The end of legal domination is the end of domination tout court. Even the most ardent of Spanish 289

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liberal ­historians must acknowledge the fact that ‘the Constitution is based on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation, the common and indivisible homeland of all Spaniards’: the Constitution establishes a pre-political legal condition that sets the constraints on and possibilities for political action based on Spanish nationalism. It is at this moment that Spanish constructivist historiographies counter the Catalan critique of the nationalist framing of the Constitution and interpret it as a useful legal tool against the background of recent history.32 In some versions, they try to show the fictional nature of the Catalan collective self, portraying it as a construct by Catalan elites to help them gain influence in the Spanish state from the nineteenth century onwards.33 Alternatively, constructivist historiographies claim that, ever since the creation of the Spanish state, the invention of a Spanish nation has also been a co-creative process adopted by Catalans themselves.34 Therefore, Catalans belong to the Spanish nation and domination ends with the transition to constitutional democracy. Claims to historical injustices may be justifiable, but only insofar as they refer solely to the injustices done in the past to ‘fellow citizens’, with the civil nature of the Spanish Civil War being the paradigmatic event. The combined liberal and constructivist approaches can be fruitful conceptual strategies in contexts where non-democratic regimes have imposed collective identities and have not granted political rights to the population, but they fail to adequately grasp the transformation of political collectivities under democratic conditions in contexts of past domination. That the demos cannot be decided democratically plays out differently in political terms and with different implications, with the absence of violence being the most significant transformation. To merely say that the demos in question is the one recognised by the constitution in a democratic context is a circular argument: while it must be accepted that the legitimisation of the constitution emanates from a source other than the law itself, namely the demos, the same constitution decides just who the demos is. Thus, the historiographical use of the past by Spanish historians is also affected by such aporetical reasoning. Second, the relationship between discourse, imagination and the formation of a political collectivity is different in substance under democratic and non-democratic conditions. Claims to authority and qualified expertise are challenged in the public arena thanks to the substantive link between critique, democracy and the need for discursive justification.35 A democratic regime does not recognise any absolute political foundations in society that are not autonomously 290

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self-determined in the constituent moment.36 This condition of uncertainty and indeterminacy requires of political actors that they ground their positions in democratic terms and justify them through particular forms of communication, but, since no political position is privileged due to the absence of any other absolute political foundations, it is only through the public contest of positions that any one of them becomes hegemonic. This feature of a democratic regime is quite relevant when it comes to discussions of the invention of narratives that sustain a collective self. Traditional constructivist accounts historically tap into the invention of these narratives in contexts where a democratic regime is not in place; thus, relations of domination and inequality form the basis according to which these narratives are created.37 The collective self can resist or participate in the narratives being imposed, but the political framework under which they emerge is radically different from a democratic one. Accordingly, analytical and normative concepts for interpreting the sustainability of a collective narrative in non-democratic regimes, such as ‘alienation’, ‘consent’, ‘elites’, ‘structure’, ‘class conflict’ or ‘manipulation’, can be helpful in understanding the hegemonic construction and perpetuation of collective imaginaries, but they need to be epistemically and normatively reworked, and in many cases abandoned, when explicating the construction and self-appropriation of these narratives by the demos in a democracy. This is because, in order to become hegemonic, they have to be non-coercively self-created and self-sustained. This fact alters the relationship between the present and the past and poses the question of whether a democratic use of the past is possible when taking into account the fact that historical discourse refers to something that is non-discursive, that is, to ‘reality’. This circumstance points to the particular gap between truth claims and ‘opinion’ in a democracy, a gap that no interpretation can overcome given that socio-historical ‘realities’, in contrast to ‘natural’ ones, come into existence because people only ‘produce’ them when engaging in self-reflection and taking appropriate actions based on such reflection. Socio-political reality is by its own nature a human construction that creates a complex dialectical relationship between human interaction and institutions. The longer that social realities remain stable as a result of becoming institutionalised, the greater the impression that such realities exist independently of human beings and are driven by a self-propelled logic.38 Democracy is a regime that explicitly recognises the collective 291

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capacity of a self-instituting polity.39 Thus, in situations where the demos that helped establish a democracy in the past is no longer the same one that is governed by democratic institutions in the present, a conflict emerges if these institutions impose limits on the self-transformation of the demos, thereby causing these institutions to be perceived to be anti-democratic. In contrast to the long history of the democratic imaginary, the history of the trajectory of modern democratic institutions is quite short.40 Indeed, as explained before, it is plausible to date the origins of this history only to the period after the First World War, a history that amounts to less than a century, the lifetime of an individual. Against the background of this short history, interpreting the dynamics that arise between collective practices of self-invention and the sedimentation of democratic institutions, and situating such a history within a long-term trajectory, is a complex issue. This present condition implies that new concepts and methodologies are needed to renew and broaden the constructivist approach in order to recognise that the very existence of a democratic regime, a very recent phenomenon in modern history, radically transforms the main assumptions underpinning the approach, which mainly emerged at the end of the twentieth century to interpret the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. The question of how the demos and ‘elites’ use history under democratic conditions is a radically different question from that of how it is used under non-democratic conditions. The challenge is to make sense of this difference in theoretical terms in order to do justice to the capacity of human beings to act autonomously.

The inescapable but unattainable past The competing historiographies in the Spanish state reacted to this new relation to the past by retrieving opposing historical narratives for the purpose of justifying a divergent course of action. The interpretation of the past in the context of the Spanish state has been, and still is, a deeply controversial task due to the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist regime.41 This well-known conflict between historians regarding how to interpret Spanish history in the twentieth century, which is quite common in almost all societies attempting to deal with the violent history of the century, has contributed in the long run to a common framework of understanding and a shared imaginary on both sides. This sort of ‘conflictive consensus’ has allowed historians to ‘bracket’ the social struggles connected to a troubled past and keep 292

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them under control for the sake of the stability of the institutions created by the 1978 Constitution.42 Nonetheless, Catalonia’s current political aspirations to become a new EU member state are destabilising both this past consensus on the nation’s relationship to the past and the framework under which conflicting historiographies have made use of the past since the 1978 political transition. Thus, discordant and polemical interpretations of the past are entangled with a divisive use of present socio-political projects, with the aim being to justify antagonistic courses of action and mobilise the public sphere in order to radically subvert and alter the political boundaries of collective subjects. This political conflict calls into question not only the ideology of ‘national’ reconciliation, which was imposed during the transition in order to avoid a revolutionary rupture with the past,43 but also deep and long-lasting structural and institutional continuities of Spain as well as the history of Europe. As has been discussed in the previous sections, on the one hand it poses the question of whether democracy in Spain has been consolidated forty years after the transition or, on the contrary, whether the historical legacy of Spanish authoritarianism and patronage still has an impact on the present.44 On the other hand, changes in the institutional architecture of the EU are also likely to depend on how the Catalan question is politically ‘addressed’ by the Spanish state. The increasingly important role of the Spanish state in the EU after Brexit will influence the European attitude towards Catalonia. Thus, the ‘Spanish’ interpretation of the history of Europe is of paramount importance with respect to both how the Catalan question is addressed in ‘domestic’ terms and how the Spanish state envisages the future of the EU. The current situation in Spanish and Catalan academic institutions only mirrors at the scholarly level the debates held in other dimensions of both the public and private spheres, where different arguments are being made regarding the historical, political, cultural and economic justifications for supporting or rejecting the new Catalan self-understanding supporting independence, most importantly with respect to the Spanish Constitutional Court’s 2010 decision to invalidate the Catalan Statute.45 A conflicting interpretation of the past has been mobilised in the public sphere in order to historically justify partisan political positions, which can go back as far in time as the ‘formation’ of the Crown of Aragon in the twelfth century and extend to the 1978 transition to Spanish constitutional monarchy. Thus, an ambivalent conceptualisation of the past is at work in the various discourses used 293

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to justify the conflicting interpretations. On the one hand, the past is, in and of itself, unsettled and necessarily open to (re-)interpretation: it becomes a political resource in the present connected to future expectations of transformation,46 which embody the idea of political progress. On the other hand, the past has been firmly and irrevocably resolved once and for all, with the transition to a constitutional democracy representing the Stunde Null of the new ‘Spain’: any reopening of the past jeopardises social cohesion and will only promote the re-emergence of the same conflicts that historically constituted the Spanish state itself. It entails regression. From this standpoint, we should not overlook the relation between the socio-historical significations sustaining a society, which are collectively created and impersonal,47 and the historian as an individual who, as a member of society, is deeply enmeshed in these significations. Admittedly, every member of society employs self-­distancing devices that permit him or her to reflexively act upon his or her self-understanding and make visible the implicit socio-­ historical significations at play in social interactions. History writing can be considered one particular self-distancing strategy in relation to a society’s past, but the issue becomes problematic when there is an ongoing transformation of these socio-historical significations, as in transitional or revolutionary moments, which cause a society to redefine itself. The lack of a stable social world alters the dialectical relationship between the self and the distancing device from the moment that the spatio-temporal setting becomes disarranged. This situation of instability due to a conflict over competing social imaginaries struggling to become hegemonic does not only alter the spatio-temporal locus but, as in the case of the Catalan question, also transforms the meaning and the boundaries of the collective self. Hence, the social bond that links a historian to their own society can no longer be assumed to be either transparent or coherent. This mismatch creates a methodological constraint that should be recognised by historians in their use of the past when intervening in public debates: the less they are aware of it, the less historically minded they are. Surprisingly, the framework within which the public debate between engaged historians takes place, instead of connecting the present to the past, reproduces the conflict at another level. Accordingly, engaged historians not only typically make use of one-sided methodologies, but also introduce via the back door a highly partisan political philosophy. At best, this philosophy is explicitly stated when needed, but even when the historians involved are internationally recognised and 294

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are fully engaged with the current state of the art, sometimes they are ‘unable’ to avoid the safety and easiness of using a positivist historiography in public debate: their detailed knowledge of ‘facts’ may qualify them to appear as ‘experts’, but it can conceal the political dimension and the epistemological biases of their work. Such biases not only limit and constrain the terms of the discussion, but also frame the debate normatively within outmoded and dangerous epistemic dichotomies, such as truth/myth, fact/manipulation or history/fiction.48 In contrast to what they do in their international academic publications, they barely acknowledge in their dealings with the mass media that there is no interpretation and study of the past that does not ‘construct’ its own access to the ‘archives’, such that study of the past is by its very nature shaped irremediably by normative and epistemological preferences.49 Moreover, in many instances historians ‘discover’ in the past what they were already looking for, which makes historical investigation tautological. From this perspective, there is no ‘useless’ study of the past. The public role acquired by historians is blurring the epistemic layers upon which historical discourse is formed and is contributing to the growing importance of public history, which challenges the boundaries of the discipline: historians are becoming one type of agent among various other agents involved in creating history.50 This development is not necessarily problematic in normative terms, but it indirectly gives space in Spain to other social actors to play a role in epistemologically reshaping the past, most prominently judges and journalists, who are more inclined to produce polemical historical narratives because their work and interests are inherently related to an understanding of the present that is not mediated by theoretical historical categories. As a consequence, the ‘historical past’ becomes, in paradoxical terms, ‘the practical past’ of historians themselves when they intervene in public debates.51 They no longer hold exclusive narrative supremacy over the study/use of the past, and thus they are confronted with the practical dimension of their work when they have to compete with other social actors over representations of the past. In that respect, their strategy of focusing the discussion on historical facts can no longer conceal its practical implications, which mainly consist of reifying the social world or consolidating the desired status quo. This situation in the Spanish state resembles other similar conflicts in the discipline, such as the ‘Historikerstreit’ in Germany in the 1980s or the ‘History Wars’ in Australia or the US in the 2000s, and it has 295

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created a battleground in the mass media, political institutions and academia. It is one which underlines again the unsolvable methodological and philosophical problems of the work of historians at a time when almost all possible scholarly turns have occurred (linguistic, cultural, postcolonial, spatial, analytical and so on).52 This fact repeatedly illustrates a tension in the status of historical knowledge that cannot be resolved either discursively or pragmatically; it can only be conceptualised by taking into account its political dimension and the paradoxical nature of its own epistemological status: there is no Archimedean point from which to look back on the past.53 These problems are well known in the discipline,54 but the insistence on the theoretical and conceptual conundrums of the study of the past fails to adequately take into account the new conditions of our ‘present’ that are radically transforming the historical battleground and the prevailing assumptions. Indeed, the present alters both the perspective on and the interpretation of the past as well as the ‘facts’ and sources used to investigate it. Yet our present seems to be shaped by high levels of instability and disorientation without possessing a definite constitutive horizon.55 Thus, the past is being transformed and reopened to interpretation even as the contours of the present, the standpoint from which we look at the past, are unclear, and we do not possess thus far a clear view of just what shared understanding of the present will emerge over time. On the one hand, it is precisely because there is no definite horizon in the present that the past is being reopened to evaluation in order to look for a point of orientation, a reference point, for one’s own actions. But on the other, the more pronounced the collective experience of uncertainty is, the stronger remains the impression of living in a non-future-oriented perpetual present.56 The basic methodological proposal of this chapter is based on the recognition that the production of historical knowledge and philosophies of history cannot be disentangled from a sociology of the present. Experiences and events that have the capacity to initiate a new historical trajectory structure the world in a way that demands new approaches and methodologies for understanding it.57 Classical examples of such experiences, with respect to the transformation of historical studies, are the Nazi genocide, the decolonisation of Asia and Africa after the Second World War, or the end of the Cold War (for the last, see the chapter by Nedimović in this volume). These experiences transformed our relationship with the past and the way history is produced: respectively, they triggered the emergence of memory in historical studies, 296

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the post-colonial turn and the restoration of world history as a field of specialisation. Hence, we cannot assess in abstract terms the new elements that play a role in reshaping our relationship with the past: one always needs to contextually and empirically scrutinise the ‘new’ structuring elements that emerge from a particular experience in order to evaluate its general relevance for our relationship with the past. This perspective is different from but complementary to other approaches that consider the present as the engine of history-making. In contrast to Foucault’s histoire du present and the related concepts of genealogy or archaeology, the issue at stake is not mainly to understand the present through the past by means of paradigm changes that produce deep transformations in our frameworks of understanding, but, on the contrary, to reinterpret, sometimes even create, the past by looking at the transformations in the field of tensions that constitute our present. This approach is similar to Vann Woodward’s understanding of the past as always being in need of reinterpretation due to the transformative impact of historical events.58 However, I am more interested in understanding how our theoretical and methodological frameworks for gaining access to the past are being transformed by the events that structure our present. It is an approach claiming that the best strategy for understanding ‘the past’ is to reflexively investigate the connections between the historiographical, philosophical and sociological dimensions of the dialectics between past, present and future. Moreover, this approach does not by any means inadvertently bypass the difficulties imposed by the hermeneutic circle­– a­ n inescapable but often neglected condition that makes historical reasoning possible­– ­which can produce a fertile terrain for making explicit one’s own historical horizon of interpretation for the sake of understanding the past.59 Seen from this perspective, the way the ‘Catalan question’ is being framed is an example of a privileged site from which to analyse the current insufficiencies and dead ends of historical thinking and open up new methodological avenues of inquiry. Against this background, the debates being held in Spain highlight the methodological and philosophical issues pertaining to the historiographical production and use of the past, and the points at which there is a fundamental historiographical disagreement in connection with antagonistic political projects in the present. The conflict taking place in Spain must be read against the background of the recent experiences within Europe and between Europe and the rest of the globe. From such a perspective, the Brexit vote and the Greek crisis are not too far away from the sets of 297

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questions that are being addressed in Catalonia. True, it is difficult to identify the constellation of the present that conditions how the past is written, and hence much of the reasoning presented in this chapter cannot circumvent the hypothetical and speculative dimension. This is due to the fact that any discourse about the present cannot elude its own intrinsically contingent nature and necessary incompleteness without the risk of becoming dogmatic. Hence, writing about the present is also a public intervention in order to endorse, among the different and opposed courses of action competing for the structuring of the present, the one that is considered to be the most ‘convenient’ in political, social and epistemic terms.

Excursus: a debt to the past? This chapter has sought to make evident that the historical war over the past produced by the revolt of the Catalans, to paraphrase the famous title of the book by J. H. Elliot, demonstrates that the incommensurability of historiographies depends not only on a shared understanding of the past, but also on the epistemic frameworks used to interpret it against the background of an antagonistic use of the present in view of conflicting political projects. This conjuncture represents a crossroads: it does not imply that historians do not play a local epistemic role in political conflicts in democracies, but it is far from clear just what this role consists of. Moreover, if historians do not privilege the comparative method at the European level of analysis for understanding how local and global conditions presently interact to shape their own societal and historical self-understanding, then the most likely outcomes of the public intervention will be based on parochialism and short-sightedness. In situations where the contours of the present are clearly identifiable and the possibilities for socio-political transformation are well defined institutionally, historiographical approaches to the past that ‘match the spirit of the times’ can become hegemonic. In contrast, in situations of instability, uncertainty and disorientation, rival historiographical methodologies and philosophies of history can no longer claim completeness and coherence, and struggle to define the present through the political use of the past. Historians find it difficult to engage with other social actors in democratic and supra-state contexts because the basic assumption that any use of the past needs to privilege the epistemological conditions for gaining access to the past is no longer sustainable. As this chapter has tried to show, it is precisely 298

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the epistemic frameworks that are being transformed by the new conditions of the present. The local crystallisation of this ‘epistemic instability’ within Spain is quite specific and somewhat different from other European contexts, but the epistemic and methodological challenges imposed by our present cannot be circumvented in other societies with similar conflicts. Otherwise, there is a risk of indirectly negating the socio-political progress represented by the democratically performed reconstitution of political collectivities and by the European project. The political stalemate occurring in Spain signals the fact that the public use of the past is an inescapable and unavoidable dimension of social life, but it demands from historians a special duty that is not primarily related to the respect of academic standards. Historians have a responsibility to the past that contradicts any instrumental use of it from the moment when they are dealing with past actions of human beings that cannot raise a voice to justify why they did what they did: historians interact with dead people. Paul Ricoeur’s work on time and narrative highlights the singular relation of indebtedness arising between the historian and the dead, but it is a debt that can never be repaid.60 The historian is committed to rendering its due to what once was, but what once was can never be reconstructed as it was: first, because the archives or the traces always mediate the reconstruction, and second, because the historian cannot step out from history itself: the temporal gap cannot be overcome. To do justice to the past, from this perspective, is to recognise oneself as insolvent but, notwithstanding, to keep trying to honour the debt. Indeed, this relation of debt is what constitutes the historian as historian. Otherwise, he or she would do injustice to the past and act at best as a novelist, at worst as a manipulator. Ricoeur tries to widen this relation of indebtedness between the historian and the past to the constitution of society, ‘which assigns to the people of the present the task of repaying their due to people of the past­– t­ o the dead’.61 According to this logic, the people of the present are heirs of the past in two senses. First, as Hannah Arendt always underlined, when we come into the world as newly born, we enter into a web of sedimented institutions and relations that pre-date our existence and whose function is both to ‘host’ us and to make the world safe for human life. Second, the past that precedes us not only works to enable our living in the world as our own heritage, but is also a constraint on our capacity to act freely. As Karl Marx famously put it, human beings are free, but they do not choose the conditions under which they exercise this freedom. The conditions are given: they 299

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are the result of past actions and events. Hence, a tension emerges in our relation with the past. On the one hand, the past as heritage is the legacy of historical traditions that shape our world. We owe to the past generations their collective effort in sustaining a world in common and their striving to improve it. On the other, the past becomes a burden that hampers our capacity to initiate new courses of action and new beginnings to overcome the problems of the present. It narrows our horizon of expectations. From this line of reasoning, an ambivalent understanding of our debt to the past follows. The past is a gift:62 we did not ask for it, but without this donation, no meaningful life is possible. Our duty of reciprocity is to do our best for future generations, as our ancestors did for us, without requesting anything in exchange. The connection between generations of this relation of reciprocity is what we call a tradition. It is the cumulative addition of each generation’s testament addressed to unknown heirs. However, the past is a debt that has to be cleared in order to initiate a new course of action. Not only is there no freedom if we are burdened with debts that limit the range of our decisions and opportunities, but also we do not actually live in the present: we are fastened with shackles to the day we incurred the debt. If we, as moderns, want to act freely, we cannot accept a priori conditions that externally determine our actions in the present: we cannot be slaves of the past. Besides, as moderns, we are supposed to live in our own times; we are not supposed to live in the past, otherwise we act as backward people. This is the central tension of our debt to the past. It simultaneously enables and constrains. It pushes forward but binds you to the past. However, things become more complicated when we look at social-historical experiences that resist being interpreted so transparently within this conceptual framework. In the context of the Spanish state, this occurs when the present is structured partly as a contest over the meaning of the past and the ongoing effects of historical injustice. Even though it may be true that existing institutions are the result of past actions and sedimented practices which are best represented by the 1978 transition, it is by no means self-evident whether or not they emerged out of a collective agreement on the meaning of the past, and did not perpetuate key structures of domination that were fundamental to the Franco regime. Indeed, the institutions created during the transition were agreed upon once the democratic elites accepted that the legitimacy of the Francoist regime would not be put into question and that no claims to restorative justice would be raised.63 The tran300

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sition was based not so much on the idea that the past was settled as on the belief that a tabula rasa was needed for any reconciliation to happen. The past had to be erased if democracy were to be institutionalised. The legitimacy of the authoritarian regime was established by the 1976 Political Reform Act and by the tabula rasa approach of the Amnesty Law of 1977 to injustices committed in the past, with that law’s entrenchment in the 1978 constitution: institutions and laws had to become not only deaf to the claims from the past, but also immune to them, irrespective of the many voices raised to demand that justice be done. In this context, any essentialising of the past may work if it is enforced through law and considers the past as, overwhelmingly, a burden, as a debt that has to be cleared for a society to progress and to escape from the vicious circle of retaliation. Nevertheless, this understanding of the debt as burden and the institutional clearing of the past by absolving all debts obscures the fact that we are not all equal debtors. Indeed, on some it imposes a double burden: the enforcement of institutional oblivion and the suffering of historical injustice. On the other side, others are still beneficiaries of the interest from a debt that is supposed to be cancelled. How can we say that, for those who endure the effects of historical injustice in the present, the past is a gift? What is the tradition they inherit? For whom is the past a gift? These are vexing problems, showing both that the past is not built by common or equal traditions and that the heirs that receive its testament are not as anonymous as we tend to believe. Faced with these problems, the historian is constantly distressed by a responsibility that may severely undermine respect for the academic standards of the time. The strong claim that Walter Benjamin made at the beginning of the Second World War regarding the work of the historian is somehow still valid for societies where past conflicts were solved through violent means and no justice was ever done to the victims, for ‘the only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.’64

Notes   1. Naming a group of individuals, that is, classifying, has been always a contested issue, even in set theory. Not all readers will be happy with the way I use the terms ‘Spanish’ and ‘Catalan’ here, but I do not see how these terms could be used in non-problematic epistemic or normative ways. I address this issue in detail in

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Gerard Rosich a forthcoming paper in Gerard Rosich, Democracy and Self-Determination: The Revolt of the Catalans from a Global Perspective (London: Routledge).   2. Jaume Sobrequés, Espanya contra Catalunya: crònica negra d’un simposi d’història (Barcelona: Editorial Base, 2014).   3. An ‘engaged professional historian’ means here a historian who is employed by an academic institution due to his or her expertise in ‘history’ and who participates actively in debates addressed to a general audience, with a view to defending a political position using justifications derived from his or her knowledge of history.   4. Ramón Cotarelo, La desnacionalización de España: de la nación posible al estado fallido (València: Ediciones Tirant Lo Blanch, 2016).  5. See, for example, Josep Fontana, La formacio d’una identitat: una historia de Catalunya (Barcelona: Eumo, 2014); Santos Juliá, Joseph Pérez and Julio Valdéon, Historia de España (Barcelona: Austral, 2011).   6. Jaime Pastor, Cataluña quiere decidir: ¿Se rompe España? (Barcelona: Icària, 2014).   7. For a multifactorial explanation of the state recentralisation in Spain, see Diego Muro, ‘When Do Countries Recentralize? Ideology and Party Politics in the Age of Austerity’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 21(1), 2015, pp. 24–43. Available at (last accessed 20 August 2019).  8. See the Preamble of the resolution on ‘Declaration of Sovereignty and of the Right to Decide of the Catalan Nation’ enacted by the Catalan Parliament on 23 January 2013. English version available at (last accessed 11 March 2020).   9. See, for example, Antoni Simon, L’autogovern de Catalunya i la classe dirigent catalana en el joc de la política internacional europea (València: PUV, 2011). For the theoretical work on how the ‘uses of Europe’ by different actors become a political repertoire for multi-level strategic action, see Cornelia Woll and Sophie Jacquot, ‘Using Europe: Strategic Action in Multi-Level Politics’, Comparative European Politics, 8, 2010, pp. 110–26. 10. Angela K. Bourne, ‘Europeanization and Secession: The Cases of Catalonia and Scotland’, Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe, 13(3), 2014, pp. 94–120. 11. Peter Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), pp. 191–229. 12. Gerard Rosich, ‘Autonomy In and Between Polities: Democracy and the Need for Collective Political Selves’, in Gerard Rosich and Peter Wagner (eds), The Trouble with Democracy: Political Modernity in the 21st Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 19–50. 13. Antoni Castells, ‘Catalonia and Spain at the Crossroads: Financial and Economic Aspects’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 30(2), 2014, pp. 277–96. 14. See, for example, Cesar Molina, ‘Lo que no se quiere oír sobre Cataluña’, El País, 18 January 2014. Available at (last accessed 2 May 2017).

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The Use of the Past 15. See articles 2 and 138 of the Spanish Constitution enacted in 1978. 16. See, for example, Elisenda Paluzie, ‘Premeditated Asphyxia’, in Liz Castro (ed.), What’s Up with Catalonia? (Ashfield, MA: Catalonia Press, 2012), pp. 23–31. 17. See, for example, Francesc Cabana, Espanya: un pes feixuc (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2012). 18. For contrasting views on the economic dimension of the conflict, see Oriol Amat, Núria Bosch, Antoni Castells, Xavier Cuadras, Marta Espasa, Roger Fatjó, Jordi Galí, Anton Gasol, Francesc Granell, Modest Guinjoan, Àngel Hermosilla, Oriol Martínez, Vicent Pastor, Josep Pedrol, Miquel Puig, Francesc Raventós, David Ros and Xavier Segura, Economía de Cataluña: preguntas y respuestas sobre el impacto económico de la independencia (Barcelona: Profit Editorial, 2014). 19. See, for example, Kenneth Dyson, States, Debt, and Power: ‘Saints’ and ‘Sinners’ in European History and Integration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 20. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, ad 990–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 21. For a discussion on this tension, see Gerard Rosich, The Contested History of Autonomy: Interpreting European Modernity (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 22. Peter Wagner, Progress: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Polity, 2015); Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 23. See, for example, Jan Zielonka, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Giandomenico Majone, Europe as the Would-Be World Power: The EU at Fifty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 24. A view recently expressed by, among others, the historian José Álvarez Junco. See (last accessed 11 March 2020). 25. The recent debate between Jürgen Habermas and Wolfgang Streeck concerning Streeck’s book Buying Time revolves around this problem. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Demokratie oder Kapitalismus? Vom Elend der nationalstaatlichen Fragmentierung in einer kapitalistisch integrierten Weltgesellschaft’, Blätter für Deutsche und Internationale Politik, 5, 2013, pp. 59–70; Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Vom DM-Nationalismus zum Euro-Patriotismus?’, Blätter für Deutsche und Internationale Politik, 9, 2013, pp. 75–92. While the former attributes the political capacity to end the economic austerity measures to the EU and blames it for its democratic deficit, the latter sees the EU as the economic actor that enhances the measures designed to weaken the political capacity of nation-states. 26. Àngela Lorena Fuster Peiró, ‘The Concept of Societal Self-Understanding’, 7th TRAMOD Working Paper, Universitat de Barcelona, June 2012. 27. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime’, Constellations, 4(1), 1997, pp. 1–18. 28. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity, 1988). 29. For a similar analysis in relation to the Catalan conflict, see Ignacio­

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Gerard Rosich Sanchez-Cuenca, La confusión nacional: la democracia española ante la crisis catalana (Madrid: Catarata, 2018). 30. See, for example, Alberto G. Ibañez (ed.), A favor de España (Madrid: La esfera de los libros, 2014), for the former and José Álvarez Junco, Dioses útiles: naciones y nacionalismos (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2016), for the latter. 31. For this particular interpretation of the constitutional history of Spain, see the manifesto signed by Spanish intellectuals who belong to the association ‘Libres e Iguales’, available at (last accessed 11 March 2020). 32. See, for example, Álvarez Junco, ‘Otro día para la Constitución’, El País, 5 December 2015. Available at (last accessed 8 May 2017). 33. Joan Lluís Marfany, Nacionalisme espanyol i catalanitat: cap a una revisió de la Renaixença (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2017). 34. See, for example, Luis Suárez Fernández, Lo que España le debe a Cataluña: (732– 1516) (Barcelona: Ariel, 2016). 35. Luc Boltanski, De la critique (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). 36. The Spanish transition to a constitutional monarchy in 1978 was based not on a constituent moment, but on a legal reform established by the former regime. 37. The most influential works are Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006), and Eric W. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 38. Gerard Rosich and Peter Wagner, ‘Epilogue: Democracy as Capacity for SelfTransformation’, in Rosich and Wagner, Trouble with Democracy, pp. 268–80. 39. The claim made by the Catalan government that a referendum would be the democratic way to overcome the conflict may run the risk of fusing a procedural instrument with the substance of democracy. However, this is because a referendum is the accepted and legitimised mechanism in the international arena for recognising new states when they are not the product of violence or imperial disintegration. The absence of a referendum either perpetuates the conflict and practices of domination or indirectly validates violence as a political tool. 40. Bo Stråth and Peter Wagner, European Modernity: A Global Approach (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 41. See, for example, Angel Viñas (ed.), En el combate por la historia: la República, la Guerra civil, el Franquismo (Barcelona: Pasado Presente, 2012). 42. Luisa Elena Delgado, La nación singular: fantasías de la normalidad democrática española (Madrid: Siglo XX, 2014). The enactment of the Historical Memory Law by the Spanish parliament in 2007 challenged this tacit consensus between historians and led to disrespectful debate both in the media and in academic journals. For an analysis of this debate from a similar perspective to that adopted here, see Sebastiaan Faber, Pablo Sánchez León and Jesús Izquierdo Martín, ‘El poder de contar y el paraíso perdido: polémicas públicas y construcción colectiva de la memoria en España’, Política y Sociedad, 48(3), 2011, pp. 463–80.

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The Use of the Past 43. The role of the Spanish Communist Party during the late Francoist period and the transition was of paramount importance in accepting the reformist paradigm with a view to promoting national reconciliation. See Carmen Molinero, ‘La política de reconciliación nacional: su contenido durante el franquismo, su lectura en la Transición’, Ayer, 66, 2007, pp. 201–25. 44. The calls for a ‘second transition’, expressed by the leftist party Podemos, were based on this latter assumption. 45. Ignacio Sanchez-Cuenca, La desfachatez intelectual: escritores e intelectuales ante la política (Madrid: Catarata, 2016). 46. Svjetlana Nedimović, ‘An Unsettled Past as a Political Resource’, in Peter Wagner (ed.), African American and European Trajectories of Modernity: Past Oppression, Future Justice? (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 197–218. 47. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). 48. See, for example, Gabriel Tortella, José Luis García Ruiz, Clara Eugenia Núñez and Gloria Quiroga, Cataluña en España: historia y mito (Madrid: Editorial Gadir/ Fundación Alfonso Martín Escudero, 2016); Jesus Laínz, España contra Cataluña: historia de un fraude (Madrid: Encuentro, 2014). 49. It is very indicative of the current mood to read in the preface to a history volume written in Spanish and edited in 2014 by Ignacio Ruiz Rodríguez, whose title translates as Catalonia in Spain, Spain in Catalonia: Thirteen Academic Insights into One Single Truth, the following sentence: ‘One Spanish nation that does not only vibrate when the national football team wins World Cups or European Cups, but also does so proudly in the minor successes because we all share them. We are granted endless successes when we all act together in a joint endeavour’ (my translation). Ignacio Ruiz Rodríguez (ed.), Cataluña en España, España en Cataluña: trece visiones académicas sobre una verdad única (Madrid: LibreríaEditorial Dykinson, 2014). 50. Hilda Kean and Paul Ashton (eds), People and their Pasts: Public History Today (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 51. Hayden White, ‘The Practical Past’, Historein, 10, 2010, pp. 10–19. . 52. Spanish newspapers such as El País, El Mundo and ABC are the public platforms most opposed to the independence of Catalonia, and it is here that Spanish engaged historians publish their pamphlets. It is almost impossible to find replies or contributions from alternative viewpoints. Catalan newspapers such as Diari Ara, Vilaweb or El Punt Avui are the platforms in which Catalan historians react to the hegemonic discourse mobilised by the Spanish institutions. See Borja De Riquer, ‘The outrageous Bashing of Catalan Historians,’ Diari Ara, 16 September 2017, Available at (last accessed 2 May 2017) 53. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1958] 1998). 54. For a discussion on the current trends in the field of historical theory, see

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Gerard Rosich Hermann Paul, Key Issues in Historical Theory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015); JouniMatti Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 55. Wagner, Progress. 56. In contrast to François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003), our temporal experience of presentism is here related to a sociological interpretation of our time. It is the endurance of the lack of a clear understanding of the ongoing world transformation that gives no orientation on the future to come. 57. William H. Sewell Jr, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 58. Comer Vann Woodward, The Future of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 59. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 267–77. 60. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 147: ‘Through documents and their critical examination of documents, historians are subject to what once was. They owe a debt to the past, a debt of recognition to the dead, that makes them insolvent debtors.’ 61. Ibid., p. 157. 62. For the understanding of the past as gift see, for instance, Patrick Joyce, ‘The Gift of the Past: Towards a Critical History’, in Susan Morgan (ed.), Manifestos for History (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 100–9. 63. For an explanation of how the Spanish Constitution of 1978 legally entrenched historical injustice, see Bartolomé Clavero, España, 1978: la amnesia constituyente (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2015). 64. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938– 1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1940] 2003), pp. 389–400: 391.

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Index

Algeria, 168, 169, 181n.38 Amari, M., 194–5 apartheid ‘global apartheid’, 173 in South Africa, 169, 172–3 Arendt, H., 299 Balibar, E., 267, 268 Bauer, P., 12 Benjamin, W., 6, 7–8, 268, 301 Brandt Commission, 225–7, 240; see also Brandt, W. Brandt, W., 225, 226, 227; see also Brandt Commission Brexit see United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK): exit from European Union Buck-Morss, S., 247–8, 256 Castoriadis, C., 121–2, 130–3 capitalism, 96 crises of, 97–8, 223 relationship to democracy, 96–7, 100–1 see also Keynesianism; neoliberalism Catalonia independence movement, 279, 282, 284–5 relationship to European Union, 282–5, 286 Spanish histories of, 279, 280–1, 286, 289–90, 292–3, 295–6, 300–1 Statute of Autonomy, 278–9, 282 Clauss, L. F., 143–5 colonialism, 170–1, 190–2 commerce and social relationships, 4, 26, 39 expansion of, 24–5 see also money

credit, 51, 196 creditworthiness, 21, 48, 197 semantic associations with, 10, 195 see also debt debt and domination, 1, 4, 21, 28, 35, 48–9 and developmental aid, 11–12, 221 and North–South relationships, 8–9, 10, 11–13, 224 and reciprocity, 2, 3, 5, 13, 46, 135 as historical obligation, 6, 8, 59, 299, 300 economic approaches, 24–7 environmental approaches, 178–9 ethical underpinnings, 1, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 29–32, 61–3, 220–1, 240 financial, 1, 10–11 fiscal, 232–4, 235–6 religious approaches, 4 resistance to, 1, 8, 27, 30–1, 63 semantic associations with, 6, 7, 11, 14, 119, 220–1 see also credit democracy, 96, 239, 287–9, 290–2 development, 174, 207–8 and decolonisation, 171–2, 173, 222, 223–4, 229–30 see also debt: and developmental aid; Global South Derrida, J., 44–5, 47, 153 Dillon, W., 2–3 Dimou, N., 81, 89, 91–5, 107, 109, 110–11 discourse analysis, 2, 4, 81–2 Durkheim, E., 176 Earth Summit, 178 Europe, 60, 285–6 assimilation of East Bloc, 247, 262–4, 265, 266

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Index Europe (cont.) euro, 99–100, 109, 234–5, 236 European Economic Community (EEC), 171–2 European Monetary Union (EMU), 230–2, 234 European Union (EU), 98, 230 eurozone crisis, 10, 22, 36, 80–1, 101, 103–6, 237, 238 Islamic influence on, 194–5 refugee and migrant ‘crisis’, 59–60, 66, 239–40 relationship to Southern societies, 174–5, 181 see also Germany; Greece; Ireland; Italy; United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK); Yugoslavia Fanon, F., 11 Foucault, M., 148–9, 151, 176n.26, 177n.27 Friedman, M., 227–8 Germany appropriation of Greek culture, 89, 140–7 attitudes towards migration, 65, 72–6 gift-giving, 45, 46–8 ambivalence of, 48–50 compared with market exchange, 46, 48 semantic associations with, 48 global financial crisis, 10 Global North, 10, 180 Global South, 14, 163, 166; see also debt: and developmental aid; development Graeber, D., 2, 4 Gramsci, A., 83–4, 204n.62, 208–9 Greece attitudes towards migration, 69–71 disputes with Germany, 22–3, 64–5, 91, 92–3, 240 Günther, H., 141–3, 146–7 Habermas, J., 26, 236, 256 Hayek, F., 227, 228 Hegel, G. W. F., 121, 122–6 Heidegger, M., 126–30, 133, 134, 155 historiography, 169, 190–1, 279, 281, 283–4, 294–5, 298–300; see also Ricoeur, P. International Monetary Fund (IMF), 9–10, 228 International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), 178

Ireland as ‘Southern’ society, 166, 168, 181n.38 colonial features, 168 see also United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) Italy ‘Southern question’, 10, 187, 189, 202, 203–4 credit systems, 195–8 regional interdependence, 190–5, 199–200 justice, 96, 142, 145 and historical injustice, 9, 12, 13–14, 23, 135, 175–9, 180, 226, 238, 262, 265, 289, 290, 299, 300 Keynes, J. M., 216, 218; see also Keynesianism Keynesianism, 216, 219–20, 224, 227, 232–3; see also capitalism; Keynes, J. M. Laclau, E., 83–4, 94 Lombroso, C., 205–6 Lumumba, P., 11 Marx, K., 4, 25, 40–2, 44, 51, 132, 180, 218, 299–300 Mauss, M., 5–6, 45, 49 Milanovic, B., 177–8 modernisation, 92, 94, 120, 191, 195, 196, 207, 223–4 modernity, 10, 87, 88–9, 94, 107, 109, 110–11, 176, 181n.38, 186, 188, 191, 192, 193, 195, 205, 206, 256 money alternative currencies, 52–3 institutional nature of, 44, 50, 51–2 Marx’s account of, 40–2 myth of neutrality, 38 myth of origins, 37–9, 40 Simmel’s account of, 42–3 see also commerce Mouffe, C., 83 National Socialism, 141n.2, 145, 262, 265, 267; see also Clauss, L. F.; Günther, H.; Plato: in National Socialist thought Nazism see National Socialism neoliberalism, 227–30, 239; see also capitalism; Hayek, F.; Friedman, M. New International Economic Order (NIEO), 8–9, 224 Nonhoff, M., 81–2, 84

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The Use of the Past orientalism, 87, 88, 93, 103, 111, 188, 191, 192, 202, 254n.28 Parsons, T., 26, 177 Pateman, C., 253–4 Patočka, J., 140, 148–56 ‘negative Platonism’, 153–4, 155–6 Plato in National Socialist thought, 141–2, 143, 146, 147 on debt, 6–7 on writing, 44–5 Polanyi, K., 25–6, 39, 41, 51 Ramfos, S., 81, 84–9, 90, 107, 109, 110–11 Ricoeur, P., 299 Roosevelt, F. D., 10 Rosenberg, A., 141, 144, 145 Sahlins, M., 5, 46 Sankara, T., 9 Simmel, G., 40, 42–4, 50 Sismondi, S., 192–3, 218–19 Smith, A., 24, 37–8, 39, 217 socialism, 201–2, 247–8, 249, 251–2, 255, 256, 257, 258, 260, 261, 263, 266–7 South Africa, 169, 172–3, 181n.38; see also apartheid: in South Africa Stalinism, 262–3, 265 Stiegler, B., 45

Streeck, W., 11n.27, 26–7, 81, 96–101, 102, 109–10, 111–12, 238 SYRIZA, 22, 35, 265 trade see commerce tragedy, 119, 122–6 and eurozone crisis, 118–19, 134–5 and politics, 120, 121–2, 130–3 and recognition, 121 and techne, 126–7, 129 United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) exit from European Union, 164 Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement), 164–6 see also Ireland Varoufakis, Y., 81, 101, 103–7, 108, 109–10, 111–12 Villari, P., 193, 194, 201–2, 203–4 Yugoslavia, 248–9 Cold War experience, 221–2 nationalism in, 249 relationship with Europe, 254–9, 261 relationship with Soviet Union, 251–2 self-management, 249–50, 251, 252–4 Žižek, S., 256

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