The Disintegration of Euro-Atlanticism and New Authoritarianism

This introduction lays out the theoretical concepts and postulates upon which the arguments developed in this book rest, and vice versa: historical and empirical evidence backing up this Introduction can be found in the chapters that follow. Thus, these postulates are neither arbitrary nor they constitute an imposition upon reality and history. In addition, they draw from findings included in our previous work, namely The New American Imperialism (2005) and The Fall of the US Empire (2012). Having said this, this introductory chapter aims to accomplish two tasks: first, to set out our approach to international relations, modern history and political economy, looking at structural/constant features while exemplifying the notion of global fault-lines (GF) and assessing critically some other approaches; second, to introduce the framework in which the notion of (global) power-shift should be placed and understood.

In this chapter, we look at how, why and with what consequences the current global power-shift is taking place. We identify the visible shifts and less visible fault-lines that underlie the global political economy in this period of structural crisis and hegemonic transition. We follow a non-Eurocentric view of global political economy, which distinguishes our work from contributions that follow, whether intentionally or not, Euro/Western-centric liberal, realist, mainstream Marxist and constructivist narratives. We argue that US-led Western world has been in a period of long and protracted decline since the late 1960s due basically to economic competition faced by West Germany and Japan during the Cold War and, after that, due to the rise of Asia. Despite the decline of the Western economic core, Germany has continued to be a major export and manufacturing power, occupying a leading position in the EU. We explain that this situation is due to the fact that Germany has been in such a powerful monetary-imperial position within the EU-Eurozone so as to create political conditions of exception across Europe and neighbouring countries, such as the Balkans. In conditions of economic decline and harsh austerity policies following the 2007–2008 global financial crisis and economic downturn, there has emerged a right-wing authoritarian shift in global politics pioneered by the USA and Germany. In our interpretation, this new authoritarianism that finds expression in the public policies of new constitutionalism/neoliberalism and ordoliberalism is the direct result of this global disorder and permanent crisis turned into permanent exception. The causes of the current turmoil lie not only with the relative weakness of the USA and its Western allies, but also with the fact that the transforming emerging powers have only partly been able to consistently operate and coordinate both globally and regionally.

This chapter provides a critique of neoliberal, supply-side austerity policies as they unfold asymmetrically in the EU/Eurozone and beyond. These policies are an outgrowth of the public policy of ordoliberalism emanating from the EU Treaties, especially from 1992 onwards. The main argument advanced is that, contrary to claims by the European Commission and Germany’s ordoliberal elite, sustainable development and austerity are incompatible policy magnitudes. The Eurozone constitutes the worst form of Gold Standard from which countries are impossible to escape and advance the imperative of domestic development as external devaluation and import substitution are no options. The chapter shows that ordoliberal austerity is currently being implemented across the EU and beyond via authoritarian forms of governance from above—the essence of ordoliberalism and neoliberalism—while unintentionally cultivating racist and xenophobic movements from below. Thus, Germany is superintending the process of European disintegration, rather than integration, making a state of exception an enduring feature of the European continent, the overarching aim being to withstand global competitive pressures from both Asia/China and the USA.

The aim of this chapter is to place Brexit in context. We chart the underlying reasons leading to the Brexit vote of June 2016 and discuss conditions, both political and socio-economic, upon which the Brexit debate was based. Although the Euroscepticism of English elites goes back many decades if not centuries, we argue that the political fault-lines created within the British establishment, coupled with the plight of the Eurozone and the global financial crisis, led the British PM, David Cameron, to take the most fallacious political decision ever, namely to call for a referendum on Britain’s EU membership. But this decision was taken against a background of severe austerity policies deemed to be good enough to heal the crisis of neoliberal financialisation in the UK and, importantly, against the background of a continuing Eurozone crisis. Thus, the perfect social conditions were created in which the morbid symptoms of xenophobia and racism triumphed, with the majority of the British backing the “Leave” campaign, against the Tory party that called the referendum and the opposition Labour Party that had also urged people to vote “Remain”. Harsh conditions of austerity fed with massive anti-migration rhetoric have shaped the context for the EU Referendum campaign. Both sides shared the goal of shutting the doors of “Fortress Europe” to desperate refugees, the victims of the Western powers’ imperial designs in the Middle East and North Africa. The most toxic discourse on citizenship and belonging was unleashed so that the politics of difference and social inequality could be reinvigorated around the Brexit debate.

This chapter shows how and why Greece has become the testing ground for the EU’s and Germany’s ordoliberal austerity policy in the management of the Eurozone crisis, and what are the social and political consequences for such type of austerity. In this respect, it provides a political analysis of the way in which the managers of the Eurozone crisis engineered and implemented ordoliberal austerity in Greece. Having shed light on the country’s modern history as a dependent and subaltern social formation, this chapter moves on to show how key political and business elites of the Greek state have been recruited to the cause of a German-dominated Euroland in an apparent fusion between the structural interests of the Eurozone elites and the subaltern interests of key departments of the Greek state, what we call imperial symphysis. This analysis will also help us identify the conflict between the EU and Germany, on the one hand, and the IMF and USA, on the other, a conflict in which the former prevailed when Greece was negotiating with them all during the first half of 2015, a culmination of a six-year negotiation battle. This is another indication of the terminal economic decline of the USA and the existing disintegrative tendencies within the intra-imperialist assemblage of the West. In addition, to become fully aware of the implications of the ordoliberal bondage imposed on Greece, we shall deal in some detail with the social impact of austerity, which has in effect pulverised the country’s civic tissue and dislocated social mores, further fragmenting key institutions of social solidarity, such as working-class and lower-middle-class families and communities.

This chapter provides a qualitative analysis of the disintegrative tendencies of the Euro-Atlantic core and of the new authoritarian polities that underpin it, as they are trying, unsuccessfully, to contain those tendencies. The focus will be the fracturing of the EU/Eurozone caused by the failure of Germany’s and the EU’s ordoliberalism to shield Europe’s economies and banking system from the global financial crisis that emanated from the Wall Street and the City of London. The current crisis in the Eurozone drew our attention to two separable, but not separate, public policy projects: the Anglo-American-led neo-liberal financialisation/globalisation, which is truly global in scope, and the German-led project of ordoliberalism, which is more territorial and is mostly confined to the EU/Eurozone and its immediate peripheries, such as East-Central Europe, the Balkans and the MENA region. The crisis has exacerbated the friction between these two stylised and distinct projects. As we shall see, in this constellation of the Euro-Atlantic fracturing, China figures prominently: it tries to drive a wedge and assume leadership of the globalisation project per se.