How helpful is the distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ political thought?
Barry Gilheany (c)
This essay engages with the debate between modern and postmodern political theory. At its very essence, the debate centres on the rejection of grand narratives which postmodern thinkers propound. Among these metanarratives are those of the Enlightenment which are associated with modernist thinkers; the belief in the onward march of human progress and in the soundness of rationality and pursuit of objective knowledge. Postmodernists with their beliefs in cultural relativism contest such linear accounts of history given by political thinkers such as Marx, Hegel and, latterly, Francis Fukuyama and seek to deconstruct them with the use of language and sophisticated word games. Contemporary defenders of the Enlightenment project such as Jürgen Habermas use some postmodern insights to develop an updated version of modernist political thought. Before going into greater depth on the distinction between modern and postmodern political thought, it is necessary to make brief reference to the movements which have spawned both.
Postmodernism emerged in the 20th century out of arenas such as avant-garde cultural movements, the humanities departments of certain US universities and the French linguistic movement known as post-structuralism. Postmodernists have a distinct way of seeing the world. They employ a set of philosophic ideas that analyse a ‘late capitalist’ cultural condition of ‘postmodernity’. This condition supposedly affects all of humanity through what Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s termed the ‘electronic village’, the exponential growth in electronic and digital communication. However in this ‘information society’, most information is to be distrusted, as it contributes more to the manipulative image-making of power elites than to the advancement of knowledge (Butler, 2002).
Postmodernist theory relies greatly on the maintenance of a sceptical attitude. In this vein the writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard are essential. He argued in his La condition postmoderne (published in French in 1979, in English in 1984) that we live in the era of the decline of legitimising ‘master narratives’. These narratives are embodied by major philosophies such as Kantianism, Hegelianism and Marxism, which argue that history is progressive, that knowledge is emancipatory and that all knowledge has a secret unity. Lyotard attacks two main narratives: the triumph of science and the progressive freeing of humanity – from Christian redemption to Marxist Utopia) - and argues that since the Second World War such doctrines have ‘lost their credibility’ (Butler: p.13).
An essential tool in the taking apart of grand narratives is that of ‘deconstruction’ developed by another French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The central argument for deconstruction depends on relativism, the view that truth itself is always relative to the differing standpoints and a priori intellectual frameworks of the judging subject. Deconstruction denies that ultimate definitions are possible, because the relationship of language to reality is not given, or even reliable, since all language systems are inherently unreliable cultural constructs (Butler: pp.16-17).
Another linguistic tool in the armory of postmodernists is discourse and its relationship to power. A ‘discourse’ here means a historically evolved set of relational statements which are used to define and describe a subject matter. The most influential analysis of this relationship between discourse and power is Michel Foucault’s studies of the history of practices in law, criminology and medicine. He describes how such powerful discourses are designed to exclude and control people, such as those diagnosed as criminally insane or ill. Medically trained ‘reasonable’ people define themselves against the ‘unreasonable’ and proceed to incarcerate them in asylums. Similarly, sexists, racists and imperialists all make their ‘normalising’ discourse prevail and, in the process, create the deviant or the other (Butler: pp.44-46).
Through their semiotics, postmodernists show the ways in which discourses of power are used in all societies to marginalise subordinate groups (Butler: p.56). They conceive of a self very different from the self at the centre of liberal, humanist and modern thought, which is taken to be capable of autonomy and rationality and free of particularisms such as gender and ethnicity. The postmodern self is constituted by linguistic systems which although they impact most severely on the female, non-white and colonized have practically everyone in their grip. Postmodernism’s suggestion of irreconcilable differences between individuals has, in the opinion of some, promoted a culture of victimhood among many (Butler: p.59).
Modernity is often defined in terms of the 18th century Enlightenment. This included a belief in the power of reason to solve problems, the importance of empirical methods, the secularization of knowledge and society and a faith in progress. In the eyes of many Enlightenment philosophes, it was the triumphant success of the natural sciences which provided the rationale for these interconnected features of that era. Standing squarely in this tradition in our era is Francis Fukuyama whose exposition of the role of science as one of the main engines of human progress is a central theme of his The End of History and the Last Man published in 1992 (Williams et al, 1997).
Writing in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama proclaimed that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and thus the “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992) Recalling the assertion of Alexandre Kojeve, Hegel’s interpreter, that history had ended because the “universal and homogenous state” had “definitely solved the question of recognition by replacing the relationship of lordship and bondage with universal and equal relationship”, Fukuyama identifies liberal democracy as this state (Fukuyama: p.xxi). Resting on its twin principles of liberty and equality, he asserts that “’liberal democracy remains the only coherent aspiration spanning different regions and cultures across the world.’ Furthermore, ‘liberal principles in economics – the “free market – had spread’ and had ‘succeeded in producing unprecedented levels of material prosperity’ in both the developed and developing worlds’ (Fukuyama: p.xiii).
As alluded to above, Fukuyama positions himself in the Kantian-Hegelian tradition and so can be seen to have given a new lease of life to the previously neglected philosophy of history (Williams et al: p.160). Not only is his argument universalist in the sense of arguing that there is one universally true set of moral and political principles, he also argues that there is one universally true form of rationality which underpins these principles, namely, the natural sciences (Williams et al: p.166) For the ‘success of modern natural science .. allowed Francis Bacon to assert the superiority of modernity to antiquity on the basis of inventions like the compass, printing press and gunpowder. ‘This concept of progress’ Fukuyama goes on, as ‘the cumulative and endless acquisition of knowledge was articulated most definitively by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle in 1688: “A good cultivated mind … is but a single identical mind which has been developing and improving itself all the time” (Fukuyama: p.57).
Of course post-modernists reject a Fukuyama type narrative on the basis that there is no privileged position in time and space from which to view and argument or a way of life (Williams et al: p.166). And it is not unreasonable to claim that Fukuyama’s status as a US citizen and State Department official and the less that beneficial effects of free market ideology on many parts of the Third World marks him down as coming from a culturally specific position. Also the emergence of populist, ethno-nationalist and Islamist movements post 9/11 and the 2008 crash has made the world a less propitious environment for liberal democratic and free market universalisms.
We have seen that the central themes of post-modern political theory are the end of macropolitics, opposition grand narratives and the acceptance of the plurality of cultures and discourses. As a consequence, postmodern politics are the politics of single-issue movements, single issue actions and that of cultural identity which reject any notion of “redemptive politics” (Bertens: 1995). They appear to stand in polar opposite to modernist politics. But are the differences between modernist and postmodernist conceptions of the political that fundamental?
One attempt to patch a progressive, emancipatory political programme out of postmodernist theory is the classic text by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democracy of 1985. In seeking to reformulate a socialist project that avoids the pitfalls of Marxist socialism and social democracy, it rejects the abstract Enlightenment universalism of an undifferentiated human nature and emphasise discourse and multiple, pluralist struggles. Radical democracy privileges difference. However in trying to undo the binary opposition between objectivism and relativism, Laclau and Mouffe optimistically state that one can distinguish between the just and the unjust only from within a given tradition. This begs the question of what the “given tradition” is in relation to issues like abortion and euthanasia (Bertens: pp.189-92).
Jürgen Habermas defends the episteme of the Enlightenment project by pointing out that part of it was the separating out the three main domains of human thinking – science, morality and art- which had previously been banded together as an entire dominant religious world-view. Experts in each sphere came to dominate access to it and in this sense Habermas does not dispute the assertions by post-modernists like Lyotard that knowledge has become fragmented and commodified. While Habermas admits that the Enlightenment was only ever an ideal and that the brutal history of the 20th century has largely nullified any optimism for its future prospects, he ask us to recall the backwardness of the pre-modern era and accuses the ‘radical critique of reason’ of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Through developing a theory of communicative action, Habermas shows that his defence of the Enlightenment project does not solely rely on the flaws in post-modernist arguments (McLennan, 1992).
In conclusion, it is important to appreciate the main fault lines between modern and postmodern political thought namely the latter’s rejection of grand narratives and relativism and the former’s defence of the Enlightenment project of the pursuit of reason, intellectual enquiry and universal emancipation. Postmodernist concerns help us to understand fragmentation and the renewed salience of identity politics in the world. But ultimately only updated modernist theory for the 21st century can enable an effective political praxis for our age.
Word Count - 1, 691 words (including biblio references)
Bibliography:
Bertens, H. (1995) The Idea of the Postmodern, A History London: Routledge
Butler, C. (2002) Postmodernism. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and The Last Man London: Penguin
McLennan, G. The Enlightenment Project Revisited in Hall, S., Held, D. and McGrew, T. (1999) Modernity and its Futures pp.327-78 Cambridge: Polity Press
Williams, H., Sullivan, D. and Matthews, G. (1997) Francis Fukuyama and the End of History Political Philosophy Now Cardiff: University of Wales Press
Monday 25 July 2016
The military and politics in Pakistan and Turkey
What can be
learned from comparing the political roles that the military played in Pakistan
and Turkey?
Barry
Gilheany ©
This essay in comparing the political roles that the
institution of the military has played in Pakistan and Turkey raises the possibility
that military interventions in politics are not always inimical to democracy
contrary to conventional wisdom. In
looking at these respective experiences, it examines how the military legitimates their interventions as guardians
of order and good governance in the state; the historic roles of the military in both countries; the
military as significant economic actors in both and the prospects for future
military interventions in both countries considering the changing geopolitical
climates affecting both. The essay
debates the apparent similarities in both case studies of the military as
political players: the Islamic heritage of both countries, the birth of both
modern nations in wars of independence and resultant ethnic conflict which
created imperatives for national territorial integrity and avoidance of
fragmentation; the self-image of both militaries as agents of modernization and
the strategic importance for both to Western security interests; Turkey as a
member of NATO and Pakistan as Cold War and post 9/11 ally of the United
States. There are important differences
though; most notably the formal circumscribing of the powers of the Turkish
military in the first decade of the 21st century. The essay
concludes by discussing the exceptionalism of both Pakistan and Turkey in
military interventions in politics.
To examine Pakistan at first, Pakistan’s armed forces
rank amongst the most modern, largest and well financed in the world. They are
also the only ones in the Islamic world to be endowed with nuclear weapons. By the 1980s, it had become entrenched in
crucial political decision-making and in the following decade its penetration
into the economy and society reached its nadir and has remained entrenched ever
since (Giunchi, 2014).
As of 2010, the military had 480,000 men (with another
304,000 serving in paramilitary units).
These are highly motivated volunteers and were Pakistan to collapse,
commentators fear, an inevitable result would be the flow of large numbers of
highly trained ex-soldiers, including explosive experts, to Islamist extremist
groups (Lieven, 2011).
Pakistan’s military spending in 2008 made up some 17.5
percent of the government’s budget.
However this expenditure was not remotely enough to compete with India,
whose expenditure on the military amounted to 14.1% in 2008 (Lieven:
p.166). And therein lays the rub. It is the widespread, almost primordial,
perception of India as an existential threat to its smaller neighbour that has been
a major, if not the major, driver of
the Pakistani military’s self-image of itself as national saviour.
After Pakistan came into existence after the Partition
settlement in the Indian sub-continent in 1947 and subsequent inter-communal bloodletting
following the secession of India from the British Empire, the military steadily
grew in strength due to several factors, some originating in colonial times.
From the end of the 19th century Punjab which was to become the
virtual epicentre of the new state had
become the major recruitment centre of the Indian Army as it extended
northwards after the 1857 Mutiny. The granting of land to servicemen
and retired soldiers by Britain created a
landowning class which became intimately related to bureaucratic and military
elites. (Giunchi: p.2).
Partition was to leave Pakistan with hardly any of the
military industries of British India, with an acute shortage of officers
(especially in the more technical services) and with a largely eviscerated
military infrastructure. This sense of
strategic disadvantage and embattlement has been with the Pakistani military
from the outset. However the
institutional and human framework inherited by Pakistan from the British proved
durable and effective. For the British
military system was able to implant itself effectively because it fused with
ancient local military traditions rather than sweeping them away as the British
did with education and law (Lieven: p.177).
The tens of thousands of men (and some women) in the
Pakistani officer corps make the armed forces Pakistan’s largest middle class
employer by far. In recent decades, it
has arguably become the greatest motor for social mobility in the country with
officers originally recruited from the .lower middle classes moving into the
educated middle class as a result of their service with the military. By contrast, political parties continue to be
dominated by ‘feudal’ landowners and urban bosses, many of whom are corrupt and
poorly educated. This increases the
sense of superiority to the politicians in the officer corps (Javid: 2014).
Defenders of Pakistan’s military’s role in politics
such as Aqil Shah in The Army and Democracy:
Military Politics in Pakistan expound a narrative of Pakistan always being saved
‘from
perdition by the intervention of the military the only institution with the
competence to tackle the ‘complex problems’ of war, systemic crises, ‘the
machinations of hostile external powers, and the deficiencies of civilian administrations(Javid, p.1). On this account, as Pakistan goes through yet
another concatenation of crises, might
the military have to step in again?(Javid: pp.1-2) . So do these claims stack up?
The armed forces took power on several occasions
invoking the need to reform the governance of the country for almost half of
Pakistan’s history(1958-70; 1977-88; 1999-2008), legitimised by the judiciary
and by the acquiescence of the civilian population. Party
factionalism and frequent changes of government (elections were first held in
1970) hardly boosted the image of politicians.
In contrast, the military projected an image of corporate pride and
appeared as a disciplined organised institution. Politicians contributed to the politicization
of the military by asking it to quell ethnic revolts in what is now Bangladesh
in 1971 and in Baluchistan in 1973-77.
While military repression was unsurprisingly unpopular in areas that
were targeted for intervention, the capacity of the military to deal with
natural disasters such as the 2010 floods greatly boosted its image as its
performance contrasted starkly with the inefficiencies of the state apparatus.(Giunchi: pp.3-4).
A crucial watershed in the history of the armed forces
in Pakistan was the development of the ‘military-mullah nexus’ in the 1980s and
onwards as a result of the President Zia’s “Islamification” policy; the rewards
he accrued from Washington for his participation in the anti-Soviet jihad
in Afghanistan and the taking control of Afghan policy entailing
building up the Afghan Taliban as a bulwark against Indian “expansionism” in
the region and the nuclear sector by the military high commands and the secret
service agency the ISI. Now the military
could declare itself the custodian of Pakistan’s Islamic credos (Giunchi: pp.5-6).
Despite the compliance of wide sectors of Pakistan’s
civil society with General Musharraf’s coup in 1999 (Giunchi: p.7), I would
agree with the contention that the military has inflicted serious damage on
democratic culture in Pakistan through proscription of political parties, the
initiation of presidential styles of government and the removal through dubious
constitutional amendments of
democratically elected leaders such as Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif when
they tried to reassert civilian control over areas such as regional policy and
army perks and privileges and the suppression of alternative, radical
viewpoints all represent the military’s systematic undermining of democracy in Pakistan. The military’s mission to take over
responsibility for dealing with the external and, critically, internal threats
faced by Pakistan deliberately cultivated contempt for civilian politics and
politicians (Javid: p.3) and, even more disastrously, a dangerous and
double-edged relationship with jihadists inside and outside the country.
Of import as well have been the military’s economic
interests. In addition to receiving
large plots of land, senior officers were rewarded with key public sector and
state corporation posts. Its network of welfare organisations are among the
largest business conglomerates in Pakistan.
During the eras of the Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif administrations, the
military diversified into new areas of activity such as broadcasting and
energy,serving and retired personnel became increasingly involved in public
universities and think tanks as civilian governments provided these economic
opportunities while attempting to reduce their political influence (Giunchi:
p.8). In these ways the military has become a huge family concern drawing
privileges from the state and disbursing them to its members(Lieven: p.167). As such, I would argue
that Pakistan’s military-business complex has been a retardant for economic
growth.
The notion of the military as “ultimate arbitrator
above the constitution and eventual saviour of the nation-state” which I have
discussed in relation to Pakistan originated with Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937)
(Aziz, 2008) is a useful template to analyse the role of the military in that country.
The experience of Turkey under its
founder Kemal Ataturk ‘imbued the corporate military identity with an explicit
mission extending far beyond the ideal-type role of the armed forces to
militarily defend the country’. Far
beyond its role as a ‘modernising agent’, the Turkish military, like its
Pakistani counterpart, sought to extend and formalise its role as the most
powerful actor in the state. (Aziz: p.42).
I now look at the trajectory of the Turkish military’s role as national
saviour and moderniser.
Defenders of the influence of the military in modern
Turkey argue that it helps
to maintain” the checks and balances that protect Turkish society” and caution
“well meaning reformers” seeing a road map for Turkish accession to the EU could undermine Turkey as a democracy” if
they insist on the removal of the military from Turkish society without coming
up with new means of protecting the constitution
(Capezza, 2009). To what extent is this claim true?
From the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1924, the
military assumed responsibility for guaranteeing its constitution. Article 35 of the Turkish Armed Services
Internal Service Code of 1961 declared that “the duty of the armed forces is to
protect and safeguard Turkish territory as stipulated by the military responsibility for the internal
and external protection of the Turkish state econstitution”. Each of the country’s four constitutions –
1921, 1924, 1961 and 1982 – gave this leading role to the military; a situation
changed by the constitutional amendments of 2001. Now, prior court review is required
before the military acts upon supposed unconstitutional acts.(Capezza: pp.13-14).
Since the country’s transition to a multi-party system
in the mid-1940s, the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) have complicated democratic
processes by outright interventions in 1960, 1971 and 1980; by forcing the
government to resign in 1997 and by restricting the authority of civilian
governments (Karoasmanoglu, 2012).
Civil-military relations became an international issue
with Turkey’s candidacy to the EU. From
2002 to 2006, in order to fulfill the Copenhagen criteria for accession to the
EU, the parliament revised the Constitution several times and adopted new
legislation curbing the power and prerogatives of the military in political
matters including the oversight of control of all military resources and
spending, the abolition of State Security Courts and the civilianization of the
National Security Council. However it
may be too soon to speak of a complete withdrawal by the military from politics
(Karoasmanoglu: pp.149-50).
As in Pakistan, the ‘national saviour’ role of the
military has deep historical roots in the Ottoman military tradition, the
“Young Turk” revolutionary movement of the early 20th century and
the circumstances of the birth of the modern Turkish nation after the defeat of
the Ottoman Empire in World War I, division of Anatolia among the Allied
powers, international control of Istanbul and subsequent successful War of
Independence (and accompanying brutal ethnic conflict with Greece) waged by the
founder of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Ataturk (Capezza: p.17).
The military founded the Republic with popular
support. Ataturk took a pragmatic
approach to politics, imposing checks on his own power and the ideology of
Kemalism evolved into an amalgam of nationalism, populism, etatisme, secularism and reformism.
The military was formally
separated from politics through Article 148 of the Penal Code which
prohibited serving officers from party political membership or activity but
also simultaneously granted the military as “the vanguard of the revolution” to
make political interventions where the survival of the state was in question”
(Capezza: p.17).
However Ataturk did not foresee military involvement
in daily politics. However the growing volatility of the Turkish political
scene from the late 1950s necessitated (from their vantage points) army
intervention in 1960 in response to the protests against the authoritarianism
of the (elected) government of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes; the street
violence between left wing and right wing factions in the 1960s and the
devaluation crisis in 1970 led to the March 1971 coup by ‘memorandum’ in which
the military took a
tutelage role in restoring the political system after the chronic instability
of the 1970s (eleven successive governments between 1971 and 1980) and the
murderous conflicts between left wing and right wing armed groups led to the
military coup of September 1980 and the enforcement of martial law to ensure
public safety (Capezza: pp.16-18).
After this latest intervention, the military opted out
of politics and lost some of its autonomy under President Ozal
(1983-1993). It only reasserted its
political role after the economic and social crisis of 1994 (during which
inflation reached 100%) After the government of Necmettin Erbakan adopted
noticeably pro-Islamist policies, the military enforced his resignation in
1997. It has been during the current
reign of the Islamist AKP party headed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan (which came to
power in 2002) that the military has really struggled to reassert its guiding
role. As the AKP attempted to roll back
the separation between the mosque and state, the touchstones being the granting
of the right of Turkish women to wear Islamic headdressin schools and public
institutions and the equation between religious school degrees and those of
public high schools, a call by the chief of the Turkish General Staff in April
2007 for the next President to uphold the original principles of the Republic
was decisively rebuffed by the AKP who reminded the military that in
“democracies”, the military does not intervene in the political process
(Capezza: pp.19-22).
Since winning second and third terms in office, the
AKP has gone on the offensive pushing forward with the “Ergenokan” prosecutions concerning an alleged nationalist and Kemalist plot to
cause chaos in order to provide an excuse for military intervention, detaining
hundreds of journalists, academics, political rivals and retired military
officers. Thes “prosecutions
show how diminished the influence of the military has become. Should they represent an internal putsch by
the Erdogan government against their opponents, they illustrate how unbalanced
Turkish democracy could become without the military being able to act as a
countervailing force for checks and balances (Capezza: pp.22-23). The growing authoritarianism and arbitrary
behaviour exhibited by the Erdogan government currently suggests that such a
prophecy may be coming to fruition.
Worse still, the ambiguity (at the very least) of Erdogan in relation to
the conflagration in neighbouring Syria could ultimately negate the entire
Kemalist legitimacy basis for the Turkish state with grave consequences in an
increasingly unstable corner of the globe.
In conclusion, traditional custodians of democratic
values such as Freedom House, view greater military involvement in government
as detrimental to civil liberties, political rights and democratic governance
in any given country (Capezza: p.13).
This essay has evidenced the argument that Turkey may be an exception to
this rule, not least because the military has always returned power to civilian
authorities within relatively short periods of time in contrast to their
counterparts in Egypt, Syria, Libya; much of Latin America and even in
neighbouring Greece where the Colonels ruled with brutality for seven
years. Despite their surface
similarities, the political role of the Pakistani army has been far more
problematic and, just as inaction by the Turkish military may help to corrode
Turkish democracy and affect regional stability in the long run so the
coincidence of interests between the Pakistani military and certain Islamist
groups could have similar outcomes in South Asia.
Bibliography
Aziz, M. (2008). Military
Control in Pakistan. The Parallel State.
Routledge Advances in South Asian Studies.
Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge
Capezza, D. (Summer 2009). Turkey’s Military is a Catalyst for Reform. The Military in Politics. Middle
East Quarterly pp. 13-23
Giunchi, E. A. (July 2014) The Political and Economic Role of the Pakistani Military. Analysis
ISPI No. 269 pp. 1-10
Javid, H. (November 2014) COVER STORY: The Army & Democracy: Military: Politics in Pakistan https:
//www.dawn.com/news/1146181
International Relations Theory and the Cold War
How
can International Relations Theory help us to understand the Cold War
© Barry
Gilheany
This
essay explores the course of the Cold War from its origins in the years in the immediately
after the end of World War II in 1945 to its endgame in the collapse of the
Soviet Union and its communist satellite states in the largely peaceful
revolutions which spread across East-Central Europe in 1989-1991. It tries to explain these events through an
exploration of the main theories of International Realism; namely realism and liberalism. It looks at why none of them anticipated how
the Cold War would end in the manner that it did. It then examines alternative approaches to
studying International Relations such as constructivism and critical theory. It
concludes by validating much of the methodology of those latter approaches in
that they take on board the lived experience of people and nations as opposed
to the reductionist study of states as actors that Realism especially has
engaged in.
Writing
about the course of the Cold War, Joseph S Nye, Jr asserts that the absence of
World War III in the second half of the twentieth century was a remarkable
phenomenon bearing in mind its violent first half. The Cold War was a period of intense
hostility between the two superpowers that emerged from World War II, the
United States and the former Soviet Union, without actual war between the two. Armed conflict did occur on the peripheries
of their respective spheres of influence but it never developed into direct
fighting between the two (Nye Jr, 2005).
It was overtly an ideological struggle between liberal capitalism and
Marxism-Leninism but as it progresses through its various stages it became as
much a struggle for spheres of influence and resources between the two
superpowers.
The
Cold War lasted four decades, from 1947 to 1989. The height of the Cold War was from 1947 to
1963, when there were few serious negotiations between the United States and
the Soviet Union. By contrast, in the
later phases of the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s there were many contacts
between the two superpowers and there were constant negotiations on arms
control treaties. The accession of power
by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union heralded the end of the Cold War as
Soviet foreign policy underwent a fundamental transformation leading to the
collapse of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe in 1989 and the eventual
breakup of the Soviet Union itself in 1991 (Nye Jr, 2005 pp112-113).
The
early stages of the Cold War can be divided into three phases: the gradual
onset from 1945 to 1947; the declaration of the Cold War 1947-1949 and its
height from 1950 to 1962 (Nye Jr, 2005 p.118)
It
must be stated that neither the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, nor the US
President Harry S. Truman (nor his predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt who had
died in 1945) sought a Cold War. Six
issues contributed to its onset: Stalin’s refusal to hold free elections in
Poland and his creation of puppet communist governments in other parts of
liberated Eastern Europe according to his interpretation of the Yalta agreement
in February 1945 ; the termination by the US of its lend-lease aid programme in
May 1945 to its wartime allies and later refusal of Soviet requests for loans
in February 1946; the divisions in
Germany over the establishment by the US, UK and France in the western zone and the consequent tightening of
Soviet control in the eastern zone; the Soviet declaration of war on Japan and
its seizure of Manchuria and four islands in the north of Japan; the refusal by
the Americans to share atomic secrets with the Soviets and subsequent rejection
by Stalin in 1946 of the proposed Baruch Plan for United Nations control of
nuclear weapons and finally events in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean
including Soviet refusal to withdraw troops from Northern Iran and its exertion of pressure on Turkey plus
the civil war in Greece where communist forces appeared to be winning. The latter developments contributed to
Western beliefs in Soviet expansionism which were given full expression by
Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri in February 1946
and warnings by George Kennan, the US Embassy in Moscow charge d’affaires, about Stalin’s true intentions (Nye Jr, 2005
pp.118-120).
The
conflicts in Greece and Turkey led to the second phase, the declaration of the
Cold War from 1947-1949 as the US deliberated whether to take over Britain’s
traditional security role in the Eastern Mediterranean; a role it felt it could
no longer fulfil due to its weakening by World War II. The proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in
1947 in which President Truman talked about the need to protect free people
everywhere from subjugation by armed minorities and external powers was the
justification for US help for Greece and Turkey and represented a sharp break
from the isolationism of US foreign policy prior to World War II. The policy of containment that flowed from
the Truman Doctrine had within it significant ambiguities vis-a-viz whether the
US needed to contain Soviet power or communist ideology which were to become
salient with the later split in the global communist movement (Nye Jr, 2005
pp.120-121).
Mistrust
between the West and the Soviet Union heightened with the rejection by Stalin
of the Marshall Aid economic recovery programme for Europe on the grounds that
that he saw it as an economic assault on his security cordon in Eastern Europe;
when Czechoslovakia showed an interest in accepting Marshall Aid a communist
coup followed in 1948. The blockade of
Berlin imposed by Stalin in response to US plans for West German currency
reform led to an airlift of supplies by the Western powers and US began to
plans for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) which was established
in 1949 (the Soviet response was the Warsaw Pact) (Nye Jr, 2005 pp.122).
The
explosion by the Soviet Union of the atomic bomb in 1949 and the victory of the
Chinese Communist Party in China’s civil war the same year engendered alarm in
Washington which was expressed by the secret National Security Council Document
68 (NSC-68) which forecast a Soviet attack in four to five years as part of a
plan for global domination. NSC-68 called
for a massive increase in the US defence budget, a call which President Truman
resisted until the invasion of South Korea by the communist North in June 1950
at the prompting of Stalin. Three years
of war followed between United Nations forces commanded by the US and North
Korea and its Chinese Communist allies (who had intervened after the UN forces
who had pushed the retreating North Korean forces above the 38th
parallel which divided the Korean peninsula and approached the Yalu river which
divides Korea from China) before a truce was signed in 1953. With the emergence of a seeming communist
monolith, the Cold War blocs solidified and communication between the two sides
almost ended.
Throughout
the 1950s US policy under President Eisenhower vacillated between rolling back
and containing communism and after the death of Stalin in 1953 his successors
in the Soviet Union; most notably Nikita Khrushchev did try to thaw Cold War
relations. Khrushchev sought a final
settlement of World War II so he could copper-fasten the Soviet hold over Eastern
Europe and exploit the opportunities presented by decolonisation in the Third
World. However his aggressive negotiating style failed to bring any
reconciliation with the Americans. The
Cold War then entered its most dangerous phase ever with the building of the
Berlin Wall in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis which brought the world to the
verge of all-out nuclear war (Nye Jr, 2005 pp.129-130)
Post
the Cuban missile crisis there was a gradual relaxation of tensions of détente
between 1963 and 1978. There was a
Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and a Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968. There
was a growth in trade. The Vietnam War
led to a growing public disillusionment with interventions in the USA. President Nixon engaged in rapprochement with
China in 1972 in order to create a three-way balance of power in Asia (Nye Jr,
2005 p.130)
However
hostility returned in the late 1970s due to the nearly four percent annual
increase in the Soviet defence budget including new heavy missiles, Soviet
interventions in Angola, Ethiopia and Afghanistan and the rightward drift in
American politics leading to the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980
who talked about the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire” (Nye Jr, 2005
pp.130-131). In response to the Soviet
SS-20s, Cruise and Pershing II missiles were deployed by NATO in Western Europe
and the Reagan administration developed its “Star Wars” or Strategic Defence
Initiative (SDI) to develop weapons in space.
However
the reincarnation of the Cold War of the late 1970s and early 1980s was a
shadow of its earlier self in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. Ostpolitik relations between West Germany and
Eastern Europe and the Helsinki Accords of 1975 ensured that Central Europe was
free of confrontation, while strategic parity of nuclear weapons prevented
another Cuba. According to Lebow and
Risse-Kappen, this Second Cold War was a search for strategic advantage and a
limited competition for influence in the Third World (Lebow and Risse-Kappen in
Lebow, end, 1995). They claim that by
the time of Gorbachev, East-West relations were fundamentally stable. The superpowers took each other’s commitment
to avoid war for granted and had created a matrix of arms control and “rules of
the road” agreements that supervised their strategic competition and
interaction. These accords were
sufficiently robust to survive the shocks of Afghanistan and Star Wars. Gorbachev’s initiatives to free Eastern
Europe and to withdraw from Afghanistan were built, they argue, on this
pre-existing foundation and his policies represented the final stage of a
reconciliation that had been proceeding unevenly since the death of Stalin
(Lebow and Risse-Kappen, 1995 pp.7-8).
The
Cold War period was exceptional in that it was one of protracted tension that did
not end in a war between the two rival states (Nye Jr, 2005 p.113). Because of its unusual trajectory, the Cold
War offers, in the words of Nye, a unique perspective on International
Relations and illustrates the dynamics of two possible foreign policy choices:
the choice to deter and the choice to
contain (Nye Jr, 2005 p.113) Before
assessing the role of International Relations theories in the understanding of
the Cold War, a brief discussion of the nature of International Politics is in
order.
Nye
defines international politics as
politics in the absence of a common sovereign, politics among entities with no
ruler above them. Consequently
international politics is often called anarchic in the sense that there is no
higher government unlike domestic politics where the government has a monopoly
on the legitimate use of force. Since
international politics is the realm of self-help, and some states are stronger
than others, there is always the danger of them resorting to force (Nye Jr,
2005 np.5)
There
are two main approaches to International Politics: the realist and liberal. Realism has been the dominant tradition in
thinking about International Relations and can
trace its intellectual ancestry to the “state of nature” that Thomas
Hobbes wrote about in the seventeenth century where, in the absence of an
absolute sovereign or Leviathan, life was nasty, brutish and short. For the realist therefore the central problem
of international politics is war and the use of force, the central actors are
states and the beginning and end of the international system is the individual
state in interaction with other states.
Realism has been most prominently associated with the writings and
policies of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and was comprehensively
theorised by Hans J Morgenthau in his book Politics
among Nations[1]
originally published in 1948.
The
other dominant tradition is called liberalism
which can be traced back to the nineteenth-century philosophies of Jeremy
Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Liberals
envisage a global society that functions alongside the states. Trade crosses border, people interact with
each other across frontiers and international institutions such as the United
Nations perform some international governance functions. Liberals argue that because the scenario of
Hobbesian anarchy often evoked by realists focuses on extreme situations, it
discounts the growth of economic interdependence and the evolution of a
transnational global society (Nye 2005, p.5).
In
the 1980s, scholars on both sides of the realist-liberal divide attempted to
construct more deductive theories similar to those of microeconomics. “Neorealists” such as Kenneth Waltz and “Neoliberals”
such as Robert Keohane developed structural models of states as rational actors constrained by the
international system. The increasingly reductionist and state-centric nature of
both major approaches was, in the eyes of new and diverse group of theorists
known as “constructivists”, were proving insufficient tools in the
understanding of long-term changes in global politics (Nye 2005, p.7)
On
realists and neo-realists’ accounts then, the Cold War developed out of a loose
bipolar international system consisting of the US and USSR who had emerged as
the dominant superpowers after World War II.
Peace was maintained through containment, a specific American policy of
containing Soviet communism so as to promote a liberal economic and political
order (Nye Jr, 2005 p.113), and a balance of terror created by both sides’
possession of nuclear weapons. Classic
realism took it as axiomatic that all states would define their interests in
terms of power. Neo-realists substituted
a universal desire for security for the traditional focus on power but within a
self-help system that they assumed was anarchic (Herrmann, 1995) Security typically depended on the
acquisition of power, whether military or alliance based pace NATO and the Warsaw Pact and the arms races which both
superpowers engaged in.
The
Cold War ended because one superpower, the Soviet Union, voluntary relinquished
its strategic role and ambitions due to its chronic economic difficulties. The opening of Soviet archives revealed huge
disparities between the Soviets and the US in respect of military and economic
resources; this asymmetry of power seriously undermines balance of power
accounts of the Cold War. In the words
of John Gaddis, International Relations specialists failed to see the end of
the Cold War coming (Gaddis, 1993). With
their emphasis on states and international systems, they relegated the domestic
and human dimension of decision-making.
Abstract reasoning and hard facts counted more for them than the
understanding of foreign languages and culture and the uniqueness of particular
personalities and moments (Roberts A, 2008).
The
subsequent soul-searching among International Relations scholars contributed to
the emergence of the ‘constructivist’ school,
referred to above, which took proper account of human consciousness and
how lived experience shapes each individual’s and country’s perception of the
world (Roberts A, 2008 p.339).
Constructivists
have argued that realism and liberalism fail to adequately explain long-term
change in world politics. They emphasise
the importance of ideas and culture in shaping both the reality and discourse
of international politics. They draw
upon different disciplines to examine the processes by which leaders, people
and cultures develop their identities and learn new behaviour. For example they will ask why practices which
are now universally abhorred such as slavery and apartheid used to be
acceptable. Constructivists point out
that concepts such as nation and sovereignty are socially constructed, not just
“out there” as permanent reality (Nye, Jr, 1995 pp.7-8).
Closely
related to constructivist approaches is critical theory in International
Relations which in its analysis of subjects such as the role of women, gender,
ethnicity and religion can provide the necessary links between International
Relations and International History (Kennedy-Pipe C, 2000).
In
particular, feminist theories of International Relations raise a very different
set of questions to those posed in mainstream International Relations. They critique notions of power and what
constituted the public sphere of the Cold War. In the context of the Cold War,
Cynthia Enloe describes a new picture of diplomacy in her book Bananas, beaches and bases: making feminist
sense of international politics.[2]
She argues that the skills of the unpaid diplomatic wives were as important
to the smooth running of diplomatic activity as those of civil servants in
foreign embassies. Her feminist story of
international politics encompasses not just the diplomat’s wife but also the
prostitute servicing military bases and the low-grade workers in Third World
economies.[3]
(Kennedy-Pipe C, 2000, p.753).
In
conclusion, I concur with Richard Herrmann’s contention that abstract models of
the international system such as those provided by realist and liberal
theorists are not true or false. They
are more or less accurate representations of some part of world politics
(Herrmann, 1995 p.263). Regarding the Cold War, the major defect with realist
theories in particular was their tendency to make predictive claims; their
failure to foresee the collapse of the Soviet bloc and consequent end of the
conflict and to recognise the power asymmetry between the US and the Soviet
Union hoisted them on their own forecasting petards. The lessons for International Relations
theory in the future is that it must make greater use of narrative and the
lived experience of a wider set of actors than bureaucratic and ruling elites
as analytic tools if it is to make sense of International Politics in the 21st
century.
Bibliography:
Gaddis,
J., Winter1992-93: International
Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War International Security 17(3), pp. 5-58
Hermann,
R. (1995)Conclusions: The End of the Cold
War – What Have We Learned in Lebow, R. and Risse-Kappen (eds.), International
Relations Theory and the end of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University
Press
Kennedy-Pipe,
C., (2000) International History and
International Relations Theory: A Dialogue beyond the Cold War. International
Affairs, 76(4), pp.741-754
Lebow,
R. and Risse-Kappen, T. (1995) Introduction:
International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War in Lebow, R. and
Risse-Kappen, T (eds.), International
Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University
Press
Lebow,
R. (1995) The Long Peace, the End of the
Cold War, and the Failure of Realism in Lebow, R. and Risse-Kappen, T
(Eds,), International Relations Theory
and the End of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press
Nye,
J, Jr. (2005) Understanding International
Conflicts. An Introduction to Theory and History. Fifth Edition. Longman Classics in Political Science: London: Pearson
Roberts,
A. (2008) International Relations after
the Cold War. International Affairs 84(2), pp.335-350
©
Barry Gilheany 2015
[1] Morgenthau, H, 1973. Politics
Among Nations. Fifth Edition New York: Knopf
[2] Enloe C, 1989 Bananas,
beaches and bases; making feminist sense of international politics. London:Pandora
[3] Enloe C, 1993 The morning
after: sexual politics at the end of the Cold War Berkeley, CA: University
of California Pres
The Eurozone Crisis and Politics
To what Extent
has the Recent Economic Crisis Influenced Political Change? Use the Example of
at least two European Democracies
Barry
Gilheany ©
This essay assesses the impact on the economic crisis
that arose from the global financial collapse in 2007-08 and the sovereign debt
crisis in the Eurozone in 2010 on politics in Europe. It looks at how the Euro crisis in particular
has exposed the limitations of EU institutions, how it has posed existential
questions about the future of the European integration project, how it has
weakened the legitimacy of the EU amongst the citizenry of its member states
and, more worryingly, how it has damaged the strength of the democratic process
across Europe as evidenced by the decline in trust in governance and the
electoral rise of populist political parties on the far right and far left.
This essay
takes a pan-European approach but does focus on the democracies in the Southern
Europe periphery – Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. First, it is necessary to briefly outline the
economic crisis which enveloped the developed world from 2007 onwards.
The crisis began with the collapse of in April 2007 of
the major US mortgage provider, New Century Financial Corporation which
triggered the end of the housing boom of the previous decade fuelled by low
interest rates, an expanding economy and more lax credit rules including the
notorious subprime mortgages, which allowed low-income households to buy homes
worth many multiples of their income. The resultant slump in in house prices in the
US made horribly clear the exposure of so many banks to volumes of worthless
debts. In the wake of the collapse of
Lehman Brothers in 2008, governments in the US and the EU bailed out and nationalised
banks to the tune of jaw-dropping sums (e.g. 6.5 percent of GDP in the UK by
2009) and fiscal stimulus programmes followed which stabilised the European and
American economies somewhat by the end of 2009 (Hansen, R. & Gordon, J.G,
2014).
However the banking crisis was to become a public debt
crisis in Southern Europe and Ireland.
In December 2009 Greece admitted that that it massively underreported
the true extent of its total debt - 300 billion euro, or 113 per cent of its
GDP – and a month later it revised its deficit levels up from 3.7 per cent of
GDP to 12.7 per cent, which was still three percentage points below the
eventual official estimate. Debts were
increasing exponentially across Ireland and Southern Europe due to a perfect
storm of sharp economic contraction, increased welfare spending, stimulus
programmes and the need to bail out domestic banks which in the cases of
Ireland and Spain had recklessly financed property splurges. A contagion scenario loomed with Greece
defaulting on its debts leading to forced defaults by Ireland, Spain, Portugal
and Italy as holders of loans in these countries would seek to all call them in
and France following Italy into default mode leading to the demise of the Euro
(Hansen & Gordon 2014, p.1203).
To avert the oncoming apocalypse, Europe’s leaders
responded albeit rather tardily. In May 2010 the European Financial Stability
Facility (EFSF) was set up as a temporary arrangement outside the Treaties
establishing the European Union to provide billions of loans of finance from EU
states and the IMF to countries unable to raise it sufficiently cheaply via
bonds supplied by Eurozone members. This
was followed in March 2011 by a supposedly permanent European Stability
Mechanism (ESM). Next came a Fiscal
Compact in December 2011 establishing greater supervision of members’ budgetary
plans. The ECB began, in effect, to provide a degree of so-called quantitative
easing to provide liquidity. The EU also
took significant steps towards a banking union by declaring that the ECB become
the single supervisor of banks across the 17 member states in the
Eurozone. A pan-European architecture of
sorts of financial market regulation was quietly set up with an overarching
European Systemic Risk Board, chaired by the ECB. Finally, the Commission and the European
Council produced a new growth strategy ‘EU2020’ which lays emphasis on the need
for coordinated supply side reforms in national economies (Bale, 2013).
The agreement by Eurozone’s supposedly sovereign nations,
albeit an incremental ad hoc one, to permanent surveillance (and potential sanctioning)
of their governments’ spending and borrowing by a supranational institution
marks an important milestone in the political economy of Europe and European
integration (Bale, 2013: p.329). To appreciate the significance of this moment
it is necessary to look back at how the common currency zone came into being.
The European Monetary Union (EMU) and the euro came
into legal existence in February 1992 with the signing by twelve countries of
the Maastricht Treaty of European Union. The rationale behind the creation of a
common European currency was that through the further convergence of their
economies, EU member states would better align their core economic interests
and create a greater politically integrated liberal democratic zone of
stability that would be the EU’s response to the emerging post-Berlin Wall
landscape in Europe. It was particularly
important that the emerging democracies of the Mediterranean, Spain, Portugal
and Greece, having joined the European Community (EC) in the 1980s, be anchored
to this new order as well as Italy with its post-1945 experiences of democratic
volatility (61 changes in government in less than 50 years). (Matthias, M.
2014).
However the global financial crisis has exposed the
economic contradictions and democratic deficits within the zone. The Eurozone encompassed two essentially
different models of economic developments and ideological constructs; the
economies of industrial Northern Europe were export-oriented and governments
tended to be committed to fiscal policies of flexible labour markets,
deregulations and supply-side reforms, the relatively more subsistence Southern
European countries tended to follow statist development strategies of
anti-competitive regulation, relatively cheap labour and stable product
demand. The most striking example of
this model is Greece (Featherstone, 2011: p.197). The effects of the unclear entry criteria
into EMU and the inconsistent application of its regulatory mechanisms came into
sharp relief as the crisis developed after 2010. Under the terms of the EU’s
Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), the Eurozone countries are prohibited from
running budget deficits of more than three per cent of GDP. But although the resultant fines would be
payable to the European Commission they are decided upon by other members acting
through the Council of Ministers. The
SGP was suspended in 2003 after repeated breaches by Germany and France. The irony of such offending behaviour was not
lost on the supposedly errant Eurozone states in the period after 2010. (Bale,
2013: p.328).
So the Eurozone encompassed virtually incompatible
models of political economy. For
countries affected by the implosion of the Eurozone; the loss of economic
autonomy in the areas of currency devaluation and the setting of interest rates
was compounded by the democratic deficits.
External actors were defining the scope for movement by national
governments to a degree unprecedented since the Second World War as bail out
deals for Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece came with stipulations for
rationalization of public services, reduction in public spending including
pension reforms and the implementation of structural reform, including the
easier hiring and firing of workers, more part-time employment and the
liberalization of competition in certain sectors. These attempts by the Troika to leverage
wealth transfer to press policy reforms in order to achieve non-inflationary
and non-debt-driven economic growth in Southern Europe was doomed to fail as
austerity led to a vicious circle of less economic growth, lower tax revenues
and higher deficits (Hanson & Gordon, 2014: pp.1205-09) creating
catastrophic high levels of youth unemployment in Spain, Portugal and Greece
and the near bankruptcy of Greece before its third bail out in July 2015.
The imposition of such harsh budgetary programmes on
national parliaments by external actors eroded support for national
democracy. While national legislatures
were being coerced into accepting the deals with the Troika, citizens were
voiceless in the matter. The monetary
and social policies agreed upon between the Troika and national governments had
to be accepted by the citizenry of each indebted country regardless of whether
they had voted the previous government out of power (as in Greece in 2012),
demonstrated (as the ‘Indigado’ movements did across Southern Europe) or stayed
at home or waged general strikes (as in Portugal in 2012) or cooperated. Democratic discourse was thus perceived to be
ineffective. Having given into the
pressures exerted by the capital markets and the Troika, national governments
were viewed very negatively by their citizens for this perceived surrender of
economic autonomy as well as for their incompetent handing of their economies
in the first place (Armingeon & Guthmann, 2014: pp.423-424).
In no country were the internal contradictions of the
Eurozone brought into such sharp relief as Greece. Successive governments in Athens had failed
to resolve endemic problems of low competitiveness, trade and investment
imbalances and fiscal mismanagement which exposed the economy to the
vicissitudes of changing international
climates (Featherstone, 2011: p.193).
The most notorious example of Greek fiscal incompetence was widespread
tax evasion. The European Commission
estimated that uncollected tax revenue in 2006 amounted to 30 per cent (or 3.4
per cent of GDP) in 2006. Allied to this
was inefficient budget management. As of
2009, the government budget was based on some 14,000 separate ‘budget lines’
where each ‘line’ represents grouped items of expenditure within part of the
public administration. The accumulation
of such lines disabled government capacity to track spending and therefore
assert effective accounting control (Featherstone, 2011: p.196). Reform efforts were further incapacitated by
high levels of structural unemployment caused by rigid employment laws allied
to an under-developed welfare system and a large informal economy plus
dysfunctional governance and a corrupt rent-seeking political culture in which
the two main parties – PASOK and New Democracy- had become non-ideological,
clientilist, favour dispensing machines(Featherstone, 2011:pp.195-97).
The lack of reform capacity within Greece and the
centrality of the demand from Germany (the biggest power in the Eurozone) that
there be no rescue of states with excess deficits laid bare the extent to which
the Eurozone was ill-equipped to deal with the crisis like that of 2010. For Chancellor
Angela Merkel of Germany looked to be baulking at support for any Greek bail
out. After all, no bail-out of states
with excessive deficits had been fundamental to German negotiators at
Maastricht and accepted without question by its partners. However there was no legal basis for the
expulsion of errant states and so the unenforceability of rules without prior
integration was laid bare. The
preservation of the integrity of the Euro became intertwined with German national
interests which Chancellor Merkel asserted to an extent never before by any of
her predecessors since 1945 arguably to the detriment of the wider European
integration project.
This projection of German national interests has also
arguably had detrimental effects on the health of democracy throughout Europe. To test this proposition, Armingeon and
Guthmann assess support for national democracy in EU member states through an
analysis of 78 national Eurobarometer (EB) surveys conducted between 2007 and
2011 and various country-level statistics using two key indicators:
satisfaction with the way democracy works and trust in the national
parliament. They theorise that citizens
evaluate their national democracy within both international and national frames
and that the effect of international actors and markets interfering with
national democracy is to reveal the limited room for manoevre for national
politics (Armingeon and Guthmann, 2014: pp.424-25).
On average and across all 26 countries in their
sample, satisfaction with democracy reduced by seven percentage points between
Autumn 2007 and 2011, while trust in national parliaments plummeted by eight
percentage points. In Autumn 2011, 30
per cent of Europeans trusted their parliament and about 50 per cent were
satisfied with the workings of democracy in their country. However their data
encompasses considerable variations across individual countries. While satisfaction and trust effectively
collapsed in some (e.g. Greece -45.5% percentage points, Satisfaction; -39.8%
Trust and Spain -32.1% and -29.3 respectively);
other countries actually saw an increase (e.g. Poland +11.7% and +15.3%
respectively and Sweden +6.4% and 13.1%).
These figures need to be taken in association with the
opinions of European citizens about the performance of their national economies
and their expectations for the future. A
Eurobarometer survey in the spring of 2013 found that 72% of EU citizens regarded
their overall situation to be “bad”.
Within this finding stark regional differences emerge. In Spain, 99% considered their country’s
economy to be “bad”; in Greece the figure was 98% and 96% and 93% in Portugal
and Italy respectively. By contrast respondents
in the North judged their countries overall situations to be “good” – 77% in
Germany, 75% in Luxembourg, 63% in Austria and 53% in Finland (Matthijs, 2014: pp.108-09).
This divide between the Eurozone’s northern core and
southern periphery arising from the economic hardship caused by the imposition
of austerity policies by the Troika raises questions for democratic government
in Southern Europe. Although a return to
the era of dictatorships is unlikely, there is already ample evidence that the
strength of liberal democracy in southern Europe has weakened since 2010, as
indicated in a weakening of civil and political rights, the rule of law and the
functioning of government (Matthijs, 2014: p.109).
Citing an “erosion of sovereignty and democratic accountability
associated with the effects of and responses to the euro zone crisis”, the
Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded Greece, Portugal and Italy, from “full
democracies” (those with a score above 8 on a scale from 0 to 10) in 2010 to
“flawed democracies” (those with scores of 6 to 7.9) in 2012. Spain remained a “full democracy”, but with
the lowest score of all full democracies.
Uruguay, Botswana and South Korea are now ranked higher than Greece and
Italy (Matthijs, 2014: p.109).
Freedom House has similarly lowered its ratings for
both Greece and Italy. In 2012, Greece’s aggregate score went from 1.5 to 2 on
Freedom House’s scale of 1 to 7 (with 1 representing the most free and 7 the
least) due to declining political rights, while Italy’s deteriorating civil
liberties led its aggregate rating to go from 1 in 2012 to 1.5 in 2013 (Matthijs,
2014: p.109),
Since the onset of the euro crisis all governing
parties in Southern Europe and in Ireland have been voted out of power. Both Greece (under Lucas Papademos former ECB
Vice-President in November 2011) and Italy (under Mario Monti former European
Commissioner in the same month) have experimented with unelected government by
technocrats because of the inability of the political elites to form administrations
that could deal with the deflationary demands of the euro crisis. In both countries, the electorates responded
with wholescale rejection of the old party order. In Greece the radical left anti-austerity
Syriza party came to power in 2015 (although it too had to acquiesce in the
deflationary agenda of the Troika to secure Greece’s third bail out). PASOK saw its share of the vote collapse from
43.9% in 2009 to just 12.3% in 2012. On
the far right, the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn has emerged from nowhere to score
just before 7%. In Italy’s February 2013
elections Monti’s technocrats received just 10% of the vote while the anti-euro
and anti-establishment Five Star movement led by the comedian Beppe Grillo
attained 25% of the vote (Matthijs, 2014: pp.110-11).
Thus Southern European electorates are turning to
populist movements and extremists in part because of the perception that
national elites have become puppets of unelected EU technocrats. Growing awareness of the democratic deficit
inherent in the Troika’s choice to opt for an austerity agenda and the
perceived violation of national sovereignty has fuelled Euroscepticism not just
in the southern periphery that has emerged out of EMU but also in its northern
core with trust in the EU falling from 57 percent in May 2007 to 31 percent of
respondents polled by Eurobarometer (Matthijs, 2014: pp111-12).
To conclude, continent – widespread instability and
hostility to the European project has been fuelled by the economic,
institutional and demographic feedback from the Eurozone crisis. The Euro
allowed peripheral economies in Europe to ignore long-term structural problems
and to use the sudden stimulus of lower interest rates and easy credit to power
consumer-driven booms and chronic imbalances in tax collection and public
spending. Under any conditions the
sudden collapse in demand and increase in members’ budgets would have caused
serious financial disequilibrium in member states but the need to bail out
domestic banks contributed enormously to sovereign debt. The response of the EU bureaucracy to the
threat of default by member states has been fitful and has generated Eurosceptic
sentiment across the continent which far right parties are tapping into. This toxic climate is worsened by the
experience of high unemployment amongst young people from Southern peripheral
countries which have low birth rates and expensive pension systems who then
migrate along with other immigrant groups to Northern Europe which poorly integrates
migrants into the labour market (Hansen & Gordon, 2014: pp.1217-1218). The interaction of the economic crisis with
immigration poses fundamental questions for the future of the EU as a
supranational political entity as well as the democratic health of its member
states.
Bibliography:
Armingeon, K, and Guthmann, K. (2014) Democracy in Crisis? The Declining Support for
National Democracy in European Countries, 2007 -2011 European Journal of
Political Research 53: 423-442
Bale, T (2013) European
Politics; A Comparative Introduction Third Edition. Basingstoke: Pelgrave
Macmillan
Featherstone, K. (2011) The Greek Sovereign Debt Crisis and EMU; A Failing State in a Skewed
Regime Journal of Common Market Studies 49(2): 193-217
Hansen, R. and Gordon, J. (2014) Deficits, Democracy and Demographics: Europe’s Three Crises West
European Politics 37(6) 1199-1222
Matthijs, M. (2014) Mediterranean Blues: The Crisis in Southern Europe Journal of
Democracy 25 (1) 101-115
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