[Peace-discuss] Wolfgang Streeck response re globalization, anti-Semitism, etc.

[David Green]

In a letter responding to a critical review:

"

So much for the politics. On political economy, ‘Europe’ – that’s to say,
the European Union and, in particular, its monetary union – has become a
formidable neoliberal rationalisation machine. I saw this coming, and said
so, beginning in the 1990s with the turn of the second Delors Commission to
a supply-side economic policy. Forgotten was the ‘social dimension’, not
least because of British influence – and I don’t remember today’s Remainers
having had a word with their governments, Conservative or New Labour, on
the need to build into a ‘united Europe’ effective capabilities to defend
the European welfare state, at national or supranational level. That train
has long left the station. One might think historians like Tooze should
have a sense of what social scientists call ‘path dependency’. Democracy,
defined as the institutionalised possibility of the unwashed reminding the
washed of their existence, is to some residual extent still present at
national level – see the Brexit vote – with no prospect of expansion to the
elevated circles of the Junckers and Draghis, for institutional,
organisational, linguistic or whatever reasons. I argue that democracy is
more important than globalisation, and since global democracy is no more
than a pipe dream, a little less globalisation is quite all right if it
gets us a little more democracy. But perhaps that battle has already been
lost.

Liberals like Mario Monti, a seasoned functionary of both haute finance and
haute Europe, who promised the cosmopolitans of Europe he would turn
Italians into Germans (in a newspaper interview shortly before an election
that sealed his political fate), may see this differently, and Tooze is of
course free to do so as well. Where it gets really dirty, however, is where
he blows up my innocent analytical distinction between ‘the people of the
state’ and ‘the people of the market’ into an essentialist, racist,
implicitly anti-Semitic conceptualisation of politics and political
economy. The relevant passages in my book are devoted to explicating two
competing pressures on democratic politics in an age of high debt:
pressures from the owners of passports commanding a right to vote
(Staatsvolk), and from the owners of bonds and movable capital commanding a
right to sell (Marktvolk). I say nothing about how the two are constituted,
except to mention that voting rights are national and selling rights
international (which is so). Nothing in particular on ethnicity, nowhere.
Are there personal overlaps between the two ‘peoples’? Sure, and I
explicitly mention them, among the rich (who are, however, today more
internationally mobile than ever before in the modern era) and the less
rich (those who have money in private pension funds). Tooze implies, let’s
be clear about this, that my Staatsvolk is a Volksgemeinschaft and my
Marktvolk is an international, probably Jewish conspiracy; this is beyond
the pale, and leaves me speechless."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n01/adam-tooze/a-general-logic-of-crisis
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