And War Gave Birth to the American Leviathan

by Stephen W. Sawyer [27-03-2012]

World War Two marked the beginning of a new relationship between state and society in America. Turning away from a focus on regulation and welfare, the new state based its vastly extended authority on warfare. A study by James Sparrow points to an unexpected explanation for this sea change in traditionally anti-statist America: mass compliance.

Reviewed: James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Philip Roth hinted at a sustained disquiet in American political history when he invited us to “remember the energy” in 1945. Capturing this atmosphere, he wrote: “playing Sunday morning softball on the Chancellor Avenue field and pickup basketball on the asphalt courts behind the school were all the boys who came back alive, neighbors, cousins, older brothers, their pockets full of separation pay, the GI Bill inviting them to break out in ways they could not have imagined possible before the war.” [1] Indeed, before the war, it was impossible to imagine the national community that had supported the war effort and would be, until the 1970s, at the heart of the American warfare state studied by James Sparrow. For, it was precisely these neighbors, cousins, older brothers and other GI’s that were the co-signers and unrelenting force behind a new “wartime social compact,” a new American Magna Carta. [2] The pockets of pay coming from the state, the asphalt courts of public schools around the country, and the GI Bill described by Roth, may then be understood as a prolonged attempt to “buy back our boys,” make “citizen-soldiers,” and redefine “social citizenship through work” (Warfare State, chapters 4, 5 and 6). Just as the banality and Americanness echoed in all things government issued was captured through the extensions of the state into everyday life in the cultural forms of Sunday morning softball and pickup basketball. The state, Sparrow argues, was even behind the scenes forging a new American self—one that might indeed have “invited them to break out.”

Transposing “Welfare to Warfare”

In the years immediately following 1940 “war displaced its analogue,” welfare, marking a massive sea-change in state power as well as the cultural, social and political forms that produced and apprehended it (chapter 1). The technologies of this new Leviathan, the techniques of state-building as well as the theory, culture, practices and the opportunities to build a modern state had been developing at an unprecedented rate since the late nineteenth century as a response to American urbanization, modernization, a growing polity and the U.S.’ increasingly prominent, though reluctant, place in the international scene. For as Sparrow points out, Wilson remained one of FDR’s great mentors and heroes as well as his inspiration in attempting “to transform the nature of popular sovereignty by creating a pipeline between himself and the people” (32). Moreover, many of the fundamental tools such as the income tax were not new in WWII nor were the key figures that had been present throughout the New Deal in the 1930s. However, as the massive resistance to the New Deal demonstrated, the cultural, social and political forms necessary for apprehending this development of the state were perceived by many as a process of cooptation, corruption, and a challenge to fundamental American liberties: “the U.S. government had to secure mass compliance with a vast extension of state power, and it had to do so not long after political opposition to the Roosevelt administration’s domestic and foreign policies in the late 1930s had brought it to a near standstill” (49).
The impressive development of the modern U.S. state in the first half of the twentieth century consistently confronted a cultural, political and social field that continued to apprehend the modern expansion of the state as a pathology in a democratic context. While figures like Wilson, Dewey, Goodnow and Beard (to name but a few) recognized the fiscal demands of a modern state power and the fundamental role of the state in shaping a democratic American society in response to global transformations, for many in Washington and across the nation such a state was no more than democracy’s perversion. In this sense, the New Deal was the height of a paroxysm of state/culture confrontation that had been in the making for 50 years, based on the massive development of state technologies and the lack of the social and cultural forms that were necessary to support it. The development of American democracy and the state in the period 1940-1945 was therefore only possible through what Sparrow titles the transposition “of ideology from welfare to warfare” (41).

Establishing the New State

The new wave of warfare statecraft that followed, which is the focus of Sparrow’s book, is a story about how the state was able to overcome the tremendous resistance to the new American leviathan whose outlines had emerged in previous decades, bolstered by an ideology and political culture that pushed it into the everyday lives of Americans. This new state was able to redefine the foundations of democratic legitimacy, sovereignty and citizenship by weaving itself into the very social and cultural fabric of American society. In so doing, it not only made and even naturalized an unprecedented development of the state, but allowed the state to achieve a new level of infrastructural power with relatively little resistance.
The originality of Sparrow’s book resides in the emphasis he places on where and when this state was constructed. First, while his book is decidedly focused on state power, it is not limited to an examination of bureaucracy, elections or some of the staples of the school of American Political Development. Rather, his approach follows the manifestations of the state into everyday cultural forms. Thus, in spite of the focus on the war, his is a history that explains how the state came to structure the cultural and the social, stretching far beyond a Weberian conception of an autonomous state that operates through coercion and a monopoly on legitimate violence. The key to Sparrow’s story is compliance, and this required deep cultural change, which he follows through music, media, clothing, eating habits and other key features of the American quotidian.
Second, where the focus on American state power in the twentieth century has been blinded by an almost obsessive focus on welfare and the New Deal, Sparrow has revealed that the lasting impact of the interwar period welfare state paled in comparison to the lasting and profound impact of the “warfare” state. It is of course noteworthy that Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Age of Roosevelt stopped with volume 3 in 1936, never completing the volume on the war years. Moreover, in more recent years the work of William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1932-1940) (1963), Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal liberalism in Recession and War (1996), and Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (1990) have shared this overwhelming emphasis on welfare as the key force in structuring American politics in the twentieth century. And yet, paradoxically enough, as Sparrow convincingly argues in Chapter 3, the ability to pinpoint welfare as the key site and even problem of American state building was precisely one of the most effective means of “scapegoating the state”— that is, reinforcing the state’s capacity to inspire national unity by arguing that those in power were using it to the wrong ends. In other words, as Sparrow shows, placing welfare as well as its critique at the center of the history of the American state has, in fact, been one of the most effective means of reinforcing state power, not dismantling it.
Sparrow traces this process of building the warfare state through what he calls “four departures from the U.S. longest held political traditions.” First, peacetime draft, he argued, re-forged citizenship marking the emergence of the citizen soldier, which is the focus of chapter 6. As he points out, the ease with which this new recruitment was accepted was remarkable considering its shaky past, revealing “a strikingly high degree of legitimacy.” This new policy reconfigured definitions of masculinity and citizenship, tying one to the other through propaganda and physical experience. Surprisingly (and convincingly) it is the zoot-suit riots that provide insight into this new model citizen. The zoot-suiters, who wore elaborate suits with a wealth of bright and rich fabrics, became the object of derision for soldiers in Los Angeles because their clothes were perceived as “an antiuniform that expressed a young man’s individuality, flair, and freedom at a time when young men were expected to be serving their country through conformity to military political culture” (234). In Sparrow’s account, the riots, which have traditionally been read along racial lines, were in fact part of a cultural battle over a new masculinity bolstered by the moral economy of a new citizen soldier.
The second great departure was that of the war-time alliance, and the end of the isolationism that had hitherto marked much of American politics. This shift designated the opening of a new American state that would ultimately, as Philip Roth also suggested, govern “not only themselves but some two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan,” crystallizing a new wave of American statecraft that stretched far beyond its North American boundaries throughout the Cold War and beyond. The support for this war-time alliance was provided by a new mass compliance that was in large part engineered by “military authorities, social scientists, experts drawn from the worlds of journalism, advertising, public relations, radio, and film—who had their own ideas about how to monitor and manage mass compliance with the war effort” (49). This mix of public and private “experts” produced “an imaginary whose institutional and ideological contours would prove durable” and “make ‘freedom’ and the ‘American way of life’ ideological calling cards for the United States in the Cold War” (49).

The Redefinition of the State-Society Relationship

The third departure, “war finance,” required the reconstitution of the very fiscal foundations of the American state. Through the emergence of war bonds and stamps, a dramatic increase in income tax and price controls, the state embarked on a new notion of fiscal citizenship that Sparrow explores in Chapter 4. Here, he traces the process whereby “patriotism was fused with a sense of entitlement to an American standard of living—underwritten by government-managed economic growth” (121), which proved durable even beyond the decline in bond purchases and growing taxpayer resentment following the war. Similarly, the concretization of a mixed economy meant a new public-private partnership that sustained the economic foundations of the American leviathan. By 1945, these departures quite simply marked the redefinition of the state-society relationship, a shift from regulation (existent since the eighteenth century, as recent scholarship shows) and welfare (championed by the New Deal) to a warfare state in which “the scope and nature” of the state’s authority was vastly extended.
Through these techniques the state was able to redefine its relationship to almost all sectors of society and rebuild a social and cultural polity. In this sense, Sparrow’s argument is penetrating and original precisely because it does not oppose the state and statecraft, including bureaucracy and a vastly expanded administrative power, to democracy. If anything, Sparrow places the development of a deep tentacular state at the heart of the history of American democracy. For this state was profoundly democratic. Sparrow’s surprising and well-documented role of figures like Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax (great authorities of American folk music) who were essential to staging “a broader ‘cultural strategy,’… that would democratize the nation’s wartime morale”(39), is some of the strongest evidence of this democratizing tendency within the new leviathan.
In the construction of this massive democratic leviathan, the essential question became: how was the relationship between a government that was expanding in nature and scope and its citizens recast such that it remained a legitimate democratic bond—and not a pathological process of either social alienation (in which society would be too divorced from a despotic authoritarian state, which in turn would have to rely largely on coercion) or political slavery (in which the state were only a simple vessel for communicating dominant social interests). Sparrow demonstrates that the construction of the post-war democratic society captured by Roth was the product of the massive development of state power through compliance and not the state’s dismissal. In so doing, he explores a key moment in the history of one of the most potent examples of modern statecraft: the American state.
These fundamental transformations of the American state served not only to redefine American politics, but they also provide us with an extremely convincing story on the construction of the state more broadly. In an Op-ed column of the Herald Tribune, David Brooks recently wrote an article entitled “America is Europe.” He opened the article stating: “We Americans cherish our myths. One myth is that there is more social mobility in the United States than in Europe. That’s false. Another myth is that the government is smaller here than in Europe. That’s largely false too.” [3] Apparently, the idea that the American state is a powerful robust state model, and not simply a shadow of its older Jacobin or Prussian brother, has hit the mainstream. With this book, Sparrow has provided an important step in moving beyond this assertion. Moreover, the originality and depth of Sparrow’s approach suggests that in spite of those who have followed the call to “bring the state back in” and American Political Development, we still have miles to go before we may truly appreciate the various paths of the history of the American democratic state and generate an accurate understanding of its place in the process of modern state-building.

by Stephen W. Sawyer [27-03-2012]

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Further reading

Further Reading Thomas Grillot & Pauline Peretz, « The American State: Power Obscured. An Interview with William Novak & James Sparrow », Books & Ideas, 15 November 2011.

To quote this article :
Stephen W. Sawyer, « And War Gave Birth to the American Leviathan », Books & Ideas, 27 March 2012. ISSN : 2114-074X. URL : http://www.booksandideas.net/How-War-Gave-Birth-to-the-American.html

Footnotes

[1] Philip Roth, American Pastoral (New York: Vintage, 1998), p 40.
[2] Not so coincidentally, just as the original was being hidden under lock and key in Fort Knox, in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
[3] Herald Tribune—The Global Edition of the New York Times, Saturday-Sunday, February 25-26, 2012, p 9. For a scholarly, historical statement of this thesis, see William Novak, “The Myth of the Weak American State.” The American Historical Review, 113: 752–772, June 2008.

For a Social Investment Pact in Europe

by Bruno Palier & Frank Vanderbroucke & Anton Hemerijck [15-06-2011]

Three researchers react against the perspective for European countries of drastic austerity and emphasize the need, central to the Lisbon Agenda, for social investment. Investing in the skills of individuals from their early age, in adapting and securing changing professional trajectories and reconciling professional and family life is crucial for the renewal of solidarity in Europe.

The Social Investment Imperative

Social investment is not a new idea. It emerged gradually as a social policy perspective in the 1990s, in response to fundamental changes in our societies. The social investment perspective was developed with the dual ambition of i) modernizing the welfare state, so that it would better address the new social risks and needs structure of contemporary societies, and ii) ensuring the financial and political sustainability of the welfare state, while upholding a different, knowledge-based, economy. Central to the social investment perspective is the attempt to reconcile social and economic goals. In policy terms, the focus is on public policies that ‘prepare’ individuals, families and societies to adapt to various transformations, such as changing career patterns and working conditions, the emergence of new social risks, population ageing and climate change, rather than to simply generate responses aimed at ‘repairing’ any damage caused by market failure, social misfortune, poor health or prevailing policy inadequacies. By addressing problems in their infancy, the social investment paradigm stands to reduce human suffering, economic instability and environmental degradation, while enhancing social resilience.
In 2000, the Portuguese presidency of the EU raised the social and economic policy ambitions of the EU by putting forward an integrated agenda of economic, employment and social objectives, thereby committing the Union to becoming the ‘most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’. The so-called Lisbon Strategy was strongly influenced by the social investment paradigm, although the political translation of the concept may have been more ambiguous than one might have wished. Lisbon certainly represented an attempt to re-launch the idea of the positive complementarities between equity and efficiency in the knowledge-based economy by way of “investing in people and developing an active and dynamic welfare state”. In addition to the objective of raising employment rates throughout Europe, the Lisbon Agenda placed human capital, research, innovation and development explicitly at the centre of European social and economic policy. This broadened the notion of social policy as a productive factor beyond its traditional emphasis on social protection, extending it to social promotion by improving quality of training and education. The Lisbon Strategy also prefigured a re-focusing of equal opportunity policies with an explicit view to raising employment rates among women and elderly workers.The philosophy underpinning the social dimension of the Lisbon Strategy was given further substance by the publication in 2002 of a book entitled Why We Need a New Welfare State under the editorship of Esping-Andersen. [1] At the core of this publication lies the argument that the prevailing inertia in male-breadwinner welfare provision fosters increasingly sub-optimal life chances in labour market opportunities, income, educational attainment, and intra and intergenerational fairness, for large shares of the population. Esping-Andersen and his co-authors put it that the staying power of “passive” male breadwinner policies is frustrating more adequate responses to “new” social risks in the post-industrial economy, including rapid skill depletion, reconciling work and family life, caring for frail relatives, and inadequacy of social security coverage. These “new” social risks adversely affect low-skilled workers, youngsters, working women, immigrants, and families with small children. Most troublesome is the polarization between work-rich and work-poor families. Top-income households are increasingly distancing themselves from the middle as a result of rising returns to skills, exacerbated by marital homogamy, i.e. family formation by spouses with similar educational backgrounds. At the bottom of the pyramid, less educated couples and especially lone-mother families face (child) poverty and long-term joblessness. And as inequality widens, households’ capacity to invest in their children’s future will grow, consequently, increasingly unequal.
As the new social risks weigh most heavily on the younger cohorts, Esping-Andersen et al. explicitly advocate a reallocation of social expenditures towards family services, active labour market policy, early childhood education and vocational training, so as to ensure productivity improvement and high employment for both men and women in the knowledge-based economy. There is, however, no contradiction per se between an explicit welfare effort towards privileging the active phases of life and sustainable pensions: “good pension policies – like good health policies – begin at birth”. It should also be noted that Esping-Andersen et al. emphasize – contra the Third Way – that social investment is no substitute for social protection. Adequate minimum income protection is a critical precondition for an effective social investment strategy. In other words, “social protection” and “social promotion” should be understood as the indispensable complementary twin pillars of the new social investment welfare edifice.
The social investment paradigm makes a virtue of the argument that a strong economy requires a strong welfare state. In terms of substance, three areas of public policy stand out in the social investment perspective, bearing on human capital improvement, the family’s relation to the economy, and employment relations. In an ageing economy with widening inequalities, raising the quality and quantity of human capital is imperative to sustain generous and effective welfare states, beginning in early childhood. One period of education at the beginning of one’s life is no longer a good enough basis for a successful career. In economics, the case for human capital enhancement goes back to endogenous growth theory of the 1980s, suggesting that long-term growth is determined more by human capital investment decision than by external shocks and demographic change. The case of high-quality early childhood intervention is most powerfully argued by the economic Nobel laureate James Heckman. Since cognitive and non-cognitive abilities influence school success and, subsequently, adult chances in working life, the policy imperative is to ensure a “strong start”, i.e. investment in the training of young children). [2]
As female participation is paramount to sustainable welfare states, and parenting is crucial to child development, and thus to the shape of future life chances, policy makers have many reasons to want to support robust families, which under post-industrial economic conditions implies helping parents find a better balance between work and family life. The economic reasoning of the OECD in their 2007 Babies and Bosses studies is that when parents cannot realise their aspiration in work and family life, including the number of children they aspire to, not only is their wellbeing impaired, but also economic progress is curtailed through reduced labour supply and lower productivity, which ultimately undermine the long-term fiscal sustainability of universal welfare systems. [3] To the extent that low levels of education in less well-off groups depress productivity, underinvestment in education will engender stunted economic growth and decreased tax revenue. Overinvestment by work-rich families in their offspring offers little compensation for this fundamental market failure.
In the post-industrial context of new social risks, flexible careers and life expectancy gains, the goal of full employment has come to require far more differentiated employment patterns over the life course. In the aggregate, maximising employment, rather than fighting formal unemployment, should be the prime policy objective. A new model of employment relations is in the making whereby both men and women share working time, which enable them to keep enough time for catering to their families. Higher employment of women typically raises the demand for regular jobs in the areas of care for children and other dependants as well as for consumer-oriented services in general. If part-time work is recognized as a normal job, supported by access to basic social security and allows for normal career development and basic economic independence, part-time jobs can generate gender equality and active security of working families. Accommodating critical life course transitions thus reduces the probability of being trapped into inactivity and welfare dependency and thus harbours both individual and economic gains. [4] The issue is not maximum labour market flexibility or “making work pay”. Instead, the policy imperative is for “making transitions pay” over the life cycle through the provision of ‘active securities’ or ‘social bridges’, ensuring that non-standardised employment relations become ‘stepping stones’ to sustainable careers.
We believe that the fundamental societal trends that necessitated a social investment perspective, so conceived, are as relevant and important today as they were ten years ago. Perhaps even more so because of adverse demography. With fewer active persons supporting ever more dependents, low labour market participation is simply no longer affordable with the demographic changes now taking effect across the EU. Social investments especially in older workers, that allow for combinations of flexible retirement while continuing to work, together with investments in life-long learning and continuous training, incur positive macroeconomic effects far beyond the current crisis. There is great potential for employment growth, if people are skilled for the new jobs and families can get the quality child service they need. This cannot be overstated.
What can be learned from past social investment experience? Between 2000 and 2010, the Lisbon Strategy was highly instrumental in enhancing the social dimension of EU policy and in promoting greater social and economic policy coordination. Below we examine a number of substantive issues concerning the social investment turn, followed by a short reflection on aspects of EU governance.

Substantive Policy Issues

Since the 1990s, the majority of European welfare states have – with varying success – pushed through reforms in macroeconomic policy, industrial relations, taxation, social security, labour market policy, employment protection legislation, pensions schemes, social services, welfare financing and social policy administration. Even if public social spending has been consolidated, practically all advanced European welfare states have been reconfiguring the basic policy mixes upon which they were built after 1945. It is also fair to say that, in hindsight, European welfare reforms over the past two decades have not singularly followed the social retrenchment and labour market deregulation recipes of the 1980s, but that they have also embraced notions such as competitive social pacts, activation, active ageing/avoidance of early retirement, part-time work, lifelong learning, parental leave, gender mainstreaming, labour market ‘flexicurity’, and the reconciliation of work and family life. In the process, innovations and additions in some policy areas have been accompanied by subtractions in others. The novelty of the recent epoch lies in the simultaneous and complementary application of both positive incentives of active and investment-oriented labour market policies, including employment subsidies, training measures, individualized counselling, and childcare provision, and the negative incentives of retrenched welfare benefits of shorter duration, increased targeting and sanctioning.
As the jury is still out, judgments on the extent to which the social investment paradigm has been put into practice diverge. The countries that display the strongest social investment profile are the Nordic countries, but we can also observe changes towards a more active welfare state in countries like the Netherlands, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain in the period leading up the current crisis. [5] The Southern European countries (Italy, Greece, Portugal, but not Spain), together with the East European New Member States seem to have shied away from making social investments.
With regard to the substantive issues raised by the social investment experience, we think there may nevertheless be agreement on the following points:
1) Creating virtuous circles of inclusion and emancipation presupposes that policies are sufficiently ambitious and mutually consistent. The social investment perspective is a ‘package’, and partial implementation may at best deliver partial success. The social investment perspective is based on a life-chance/life-course perspective, and this suggests that policies can be effective only if the whole chain is maintained, from early childhood education and care to lifelong training and active ageing.
2) Although the social investment paradigm has not “crowded out” traditional welfare programmes over the past two decades, a social investment strategy is not a cheap option that allows substantial budgetary savings, especially not in the short run. Simultaneously responding to rising needs in healthcare (and pensions) and implementing a successful transition to fully-fledged social investment strategies will require additional resources. The erosion of the tax base and the imperative of budgetary austerity in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008-2010 is a dangerous threat to the social investment strategy. Budgetary discipline must not destroy the social investment perspective: additional tax revenues may be a necessity for overcoming the current crisis without destroying social investment. Simultaneously, and for the same reason, we will have to convince public opinion that the budgetary cost of ageing must be contained, in order to retain leeway for investment in youth: working longer (combined with labour market reform) is imperative.
3) Equality and Quality. The quality of social services is part and parcel of the social investment strategy. In order for social investment to be a driver in virtuous circles of inclusion, the investment function itself should be egalitarian: rather than to exacerbate background inequalities, the impact of childcare and education should be to reduce inequality in society. Social services should be genuinely capacitating. Only high-quality childcare can produce a long-term impact on children’s capacities and successes, and help reduce social inequalities. Quality of childcare is essential to making a difference and reaching the goals of social investment perspective. By the same token, activation that aims merely at driving people back to the labour market to accept ‘any job’ is not producing good results. Active labour market policies can be seen as elements of social investment only if conceived as an instrument of social promotion. Poor-quality activation services produce poor results. Education reform, with a view to enhancing real equality of opportunity, ought to be on the agenda in many a European Member State.
In other words, equality is both a precondition for a successful social investment welfare state and an important outcome of social investment policies. We know that egalitarian societies are more successful in implementing social investment policies. The fact that it is a precondition urges us to remember the merits of traditional social protection and anti-poverty programmes, and suggests that reducing income inequality should remain high on the social investment agenda. Hence, the need for a balanced approach, with an “investment strategy” and a “protection strategy” as complementary pillars of an active welfare state. Half-baked social investments will make it impossible to turn vicious intergenerational circles of disadvantage into virtuous circles of capacitation, inclusion and emancipation.
4) Finally – and very importantly – a social investment strategy is a (necessary) supply side strategy; it cannot be a substitute for macroeconomic governance and sound financial regulation. Considerable progress in EU employment rates has been wiped out by the crisis occasioned by financial deregulation and economic mismanagement. The social investment strategy must be embedded in macroeconomic governance and financial regulation that support durable and balanced growth in the real economy.
There is no denying that a social investment strategy generates tensions and trade-offs between various social policy goals in the short term, but most important to emphasize is that social investment is a packaged long-term strategy par excellence with high rates of economic returns and social rewards. This, especially in an era where human capital is swiftly becoming a scarce resource.

Governance Issues

At EU level, the social investment perspective was associated with a specific policy methodology, known as the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). The merits and weaknesses of this approach have been the subject of debate in a vast literature, which we will not discuss further at the present moment. [6] Very succinctly put, our viewpoint may be summarized as follows: open coordination is no doubt as weak as it is “soft”, and one should not entertain too rosy a picture of its effectiveness. On the other hand, it has been instrumental in reorienting employment policies and – albeit to a lesser extent – social policies in Europe. When it comes to steering the overall orientation of social policy in the Member States, we see no alternative to “governance by objectives”; no alternative, that is, to setting common goals and leaving the precise implementation of social and employment policy to the Member States. Hence, the crucial question that presents itself is how to make “governance by objectives” deliver more consistently in the new era of Europe 2020, as the latter was sketched in June 2010.
Addressing some of these issues will take us beyond (soft) governance by objectives (without abandoning soft governance on the overall orientation of social policies proper), as will become clear below. But before we turn to solutions, we want to highlight the risks the EU is confronted with.

Social Investment in Jeopardy?

Will the social investment paradigm, which gained credit before the onslaught of the 2007 economic crisis, carry the day, or will it revert to marginality and be left orphaned in the new epoch of austerity? While public support for the welfare state remains high across Europe, and has even grown somewhat in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, the repercussions of the financial downturn are not benign for the politics of the welfare state. Inevitably, demographic headwind and drained public finance will bring social contracts under duress, especially in countries facing high unemployment and immediate budgetary pressures, where long-run population ageing and the feminization of the work force were not adequately dealt with in the era prior to the crisis.
The associated political problem is that while confidence in free markets is at an all-time low, scepticism about the ability of governments to manage economies, let alone help to foster social progress, is at its peak. In many countries, the middle classes are increasingly fearful their offspring will be affected by downward mobility. At the same time, the economic position of the very rich has improved over the past two decades. Middle-class fears of falling behind have gone hand in hand with stronger electoral abstention and growing support for populist parties, particularly of the right. The overall political sentiment across Europe is conservative and creates a “double bind”: national welfare chauvinism and a belief in one-sided, short-term austerity. The internal contradictions in this double bind risk paralysing both the EU and much needed domestic social reform.
Politically, even before the 2008 financial meltdown, the EU became the scapegoat of choice for anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic voices. Although populist anti-EU as well as anti-immigrant parties may not muster the strength to take office in most countries, their growing support will put pressure on existing governments to protect national welfare programmes and limit their commitments to European integration. Mario Monti aptly speaks of “single market fatigue” in his important report on the future of European economic integration in the wake of the crisis. While populism surely fails to offer credible – future-proof – social policy alternatives, it is becoming increasingly difficult for pro-European mainstream social democratic, Christian democratic and green-left parties to support, defend and claim credit for much needed domestic welfare recalibration based on social investment alternatives, which are to be consistently anchored in pan-European macroeconomic solutions to the crisis.
Concurrently in EU economic policy circles, technocratic fiscal orthodoxy reigns supreme. Between 2008 and 2010, many European countries implemented short-term work or temporary lay-off schemes, combined with existing programmes of unemployment compensation alongside further training initiatives. The aim was to enhance the resilience and adaptability of workers and hence the competitiveness of enterprises through skills development, often based on tripartite agreements with the social partners at regional, sector or company level. It is fair to say that many of these preventive measures were consistent with both demand stabilization and new social investment priorities. Some of the most generous welfare states, with large public sectors devoted to human capital formation and family services, have outperformed many of the most liberal political economies in the wake of the crisis. In other words, an ambitious, generous and active welfare state, with a strong social investment impetus, has proved to be an asset rather than a liability after the onslaught of the Great Recession of the early 21st century.
Notwithstanding significant social investment policy successes over the past decade, the “double bind” of welfare chauvinism and EU austerity could easily nip the social investment imperative in the bud, fuelling nationalism in macro-economic policy and xenophobia and welfare chauvinism in social policy in the coming years.

Taking EU2020 Seriously

There are grounds for scepticism towards EU2020, the successor to the Lisbon Strategy. The policy methodology may be considered as intrinsically weak, given its reliance on “governance by objectives” (or, as some would point out, given its reliance on intergovernmental management by objectives, rather than a more traditional “community” approach). Like its predecessor, Europe 2020 remains at the level of ‘headline targets’ with not much in the way of a policy theory underlining the importance of these targets for economic stability and social progress and the measures and policy instruments to realistically achieve them. The five headline targets are: 1) an employment rate of 75%; 2) spending on R&D amounting to 3% of GDP; 3) the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 20%; 4) the reduction of secondary-school drop-out rate by 10% and to achieve 40% of graduates from higher education. The fifth target, on social inclusion, is based on a combination of three indicators: the number of people at risk of financial poverty, the number suffering from severe material deprivation and the number living in jobless households. The ambition is to reduce the total living in one or more of these conditions by 20 million by 2020.
While certainly not perfect, the social objectives of EU2020 translate a social investment ambition which merits full support. For that reason, they should be taken very seriously. The question then becomes whether the National Reform Programmes of the Member States will credibly pursue all the integrated guidelines and headline targets of EU2020, and whether or not the European Council will be as strict in assessing the National Reform Programmes and in monitoring sustainability, education and social targets as it promises to be strict on budgetary and competitiveness indicators. The June European Council will provide a first testing ground in this respect.
In the coming years, the credibility of the EU2020 targets and guidelines will depend on the credibility of the link between the latter and the macroeconomic and fiscal surveillance which the EU is due to launch. The quality of spending under constrained public budgets will be crucial in this respect. We believe that the objectives formulated under the EU2020 strategy can provide a framework for reconciling those short-term and long-term considerations, if the social investment strategy is embedded in budgetary policy and financial regulation, i.e. if short-term macroeconomic governance serves long-term social investment. The crucial question is how long-term and short-term policy considerations will interact, both at EU level and in individual Member States. The policy conundrum is complex. On the one hand, short-term austerity pressure is intensified by the extent to which long-run societal change, ranging from population ageing, the feminization of the work force, immigration, and shifts in labour supply and demand, was not adequately dealt with in the era prior to the crisis in a number of Member States. One cannot simply wish short-term budgetary pressures away. On the other hand, the continuing pressures of those societal changes in the aftermath of the current crisis will only strengthen both the need for human capital investment and the importance of poverty relief and social insurance.
In June 2010, the EU launched its EU2020 strategy, and today it is in the process of establishing a new system of macroeconomic and budgetary surveillance. Meanwhile, the political momentum and the substantive orientation have been dominated by the so-called “Europact” or “competitiveness pact”. Wrong-headed austerity policies and a one-sided emphasis on wage-cost competitiveness (important though it is) will jeopardize the social investment perspective. In order to guide the budgetary austerity policies towards long-term ends and to frame wage-cost considerations in a broader perspective on competitiveness, the EU needs a true “Social Investment Pact”. Such a pact should, moreover, have as much bite and clout as the forthcoming macroeconomic and budgetary surveillance.

Substantiating the EU2020 Social Investment Pact

Macroeconomic growth and stability needs to be supported by productive social investments. One of the key merits of Van Rompuy’s Task Force on economic governance has been to reconnect real economy competitiveness, including issues of trade imbalances, asset bubbles, oversized banks, and macroeconomic surveillance. As such, Van Rompuy’s wider interpretation of macroeconomic performance creates an important window of opportunity to take real economy social investment efficiency gains seriously more than ever before.
It is crucial to articulate a political perspective on the interdependent roles that the EU and the Member States should play, combining short-term fiscal crisis management with room for domestic reform to pave the way for the longer-term social investment priorities. This should be accompanied by a strong social narrative of a ‘caring Europe’ as one of the founding principles of European cooperation.
The social and economic challenges out of which the social investment perspective emerged in the first place remain as relevant and important today as they were ten years ago. The aftermath of the current crisis and adverse demography can only underline the need for human capital enhancement and employment growth, as well as the importance of poverty relief and social insurance. On the other hand, short-term budgetary pressures cannot be wished away. Although the social investment paradigm promises high rates of return on investment, in terms of higher employment, rising productivity and more robust families, social investment does not come cheap. Additional tax revenues may be a necessity to overcome the current crisis without destroying long-term labour productivity and participation in ageing societies. In order to guide the budgetary austerity policies towards long-term ends and to frame wage-cost considerations in a broader perspective on competitiveness, the EU needs to supplement its strengthened budgetary and macroeconomic surveillance with an effective “Social Investment Pact”. Using a life-course perspective on social progress, we can best substantiate what this means.

Child-Centred Social Investment Strategy

Since life chances are so over-determined by what happens in childhood, a comprehensive child investment strategy with a strong emphasis on early childhood development is imperative. Access to affordable quality childcare is a sine qua non for any workable future equilibrium. The emphasis on early-childhood education and development goes beyond the idea that childcare is necessary to allow mothers and fathers to reconcile work and family life. A ‘child-centred social investment strategy’ is needed to ensure that children become lifelong learners and strong contributors to their societies. More children, educated to perform in a knowledge economy, are required in order to keep that economy going, given the demands of a retiring baby boom generation with substantial care needs. As underlined, only high quality early childhood education and care services are performing. Hence we propose to go further than the only quantitative targets of Barcelona 2002 (90 percent of children between 3 and the mandatory school age and at least 33 percent of children under 3) to add figures such as number of adult per children. Considering the return on such investments for societies, we propose that investment in early childhood education and care should not be counted as public expenditure but rather be seen as public investment, and that the overall economic governance of the EU should stimulate member states to pursue such investment.

Human Capital Investment Push

If Europe wishes to be competitive in the new, knowledge-based society, there is an urgent need for investment in human capital throughout the life course. Considering the looming demographic imbalances, we surely cannot afford large skill deficits and high educational dropout rates. As inequalities are widening in the knowledge economy, parents’ ability to invest in their children’s futures is also becoming more unequal. If social and employment policies are increasingly aimed at developing the quality of human resources for a high-skill equilibrium, surely they assume the role of a ‘productive factor’. Increased investment in education, preventing early exit from formal education and training, and facilitating the transition from school to work, in particular for school leavers with low qualifications, are imperative. Hence the crucial importance of the early school drop-out target set in the EU2020 agenda. But as important would be a focus on life-long training. A more streamlined cooperation between education and training institutions and the professional world is called for as the worlds of learning, work and leisure are increasingly overlapping and becoming much more closely integrated. Lifelong education and training are in the process of becoming regular components of gainful employment.
Reconciling work and family life The interaction between economic performance and the welfare state is largely mediated by the labour market. Quality employment is the best guarantee against poverty and inequality. This presupposes: enhancing the labour force participation of women and assuring enduring employment for various disadvantaged groups, including the disabled, the under skilled and the long-term unemployed; making employment attractive by fighting poverty traps; activating benefit recipients; subsidizing decent low-skilled and low-productive work; implementing active labour market policies as well as labour market reform. The majority of Europe’s mature welfare states are confronted with the phenomenon of labour market segmentation between “insiders” and “outsiders”. Most likely, labour markets will become ever more flexible. While the boundaries between being “in” and “out” of work have been blurred by growth in atypical work, low-wages, subsidized jobs, and training programmes, one job is no longer enough to keep low-income families out of poverty. Post-industrial job growth is highly biased in favour of high-skilled jobs. Additionally, however, increased labour market flexibility, together with the continuous rise in female employment, will also encourage sizeable growth of low-skilled and semi-skilled jobs in the social sector and in personal services. The policy challenge that presents itself is how to mitigate the emergence of new forms of labour market segmentation through what might be referred to as “preventive employability”, combining increases in flexibility in labour relations by way of relaxing dismissal protection, while generating a higher level of security for employees in flexible jobs, including (un)paid (parental) leave, life-course policies, childcare, care for the frail elderly, and gender equality. Flexible working conditions are often part and parcel of family-friendly employment policy provisions. There is a clear relation between the ratio of part-time jobs and female employment growth. But the ability of part-time employment to harmonize careers with family life depends very much on employment regulation, on whether part-time work is recognized as a regular job with basic social insurance participation, and on whether it offers prospects of career mobility.

Later and Flexible Retirement

Many of the so-called ‘new social risks’, such as family formation, divorce, old-age care dependency, declining fertility rates, and accelerating population ageing, bear primarily on young people and young families, signifying a shift in social risks from the elderly to the young. Late entry into the labour market by youngster, early exit by older workers, combined with higher life expectancy, confronts the welfare state with a looming financing deficit. Two trends justify a change in our thinking about retirement: a) the health status of each elderly cohort is better than that of the last. And, b) the gap between old age and education is rapidly narrowing, so that, in the future, old people will be much better placed than they are today to adapt through retraining and lifelong learning. The education gap between the old and the young will begin to close as the baby-boomers approach retirement.
In the area of pensions policy, the challenge lies in how to allocate the additional expenditures that inevitably accompany population ageing. Delaying retirement is necessary. This is both effective and equitable. It is effective because it impacts simultaneously on the nominator and the denominator by combining more revenue with lower spending. It is inter-generationally equitable because retirees and workers both sacrifice in equal proportions. People are getting healthier and more educated with each age cohort. Flexible retirement and the introduction of incentives to postpone retirement could greatly alleviate the old-age pensions burden. If older workers remain employed longer than they typically do today, then household incomes will increase substantially and the pensions system will be better preserved.
In order to reach this goal, one needs to go beyond changing pension calculation rules (the so-called parametric reforms) and also aim at improving working conditions and implementing lifelong training schemes for all workers. Social investment policy in this respect goes beyond capacitating public services and leave provisions. With a more active older work force and work-life reconciliation problems for younger two-job couples with children, employment relations based on dignity at work principles, fostering new combinations of security and flexibility that allow workers from all age-cohorts to make the best of their abilities and talents, recalibrated employment relations are part and parcel of the new social investment imperative.Migration and Integration Through Education and Participation More than before, priority should be given to the issues of participation and integration on the part of migrants and non-EU nationals, whose rates of unemployment are on average twice that of EU nationals. Integration and immigration policy should occupy a central place in the debate on the future of the welfare state, something we have failed to acknowledge in the past. In our ethnically and culturally diversified societies, the welfare state faces the major challenge of ensuring that immigrants and their children do not fall behind. Specific effort in education, training and labour market integration should be targeted towards migrants and their children in order to narrow the gaps between them and the rest of society.

Minimum Income Support and Service Provision

Social insurance guarantees are increasingly connected to capacitating social services, customized to individual needs caused by the new life-course contingencies of skill depletion, family breakdown, career and caring contingencies. We cannot assume that early childhood development, human capital push, together with high-quality training and activation measures will remedy current and future welfare deficiencies. Hence, in the medium term, it is impossible to avoid any form of passive minimum income support unless we are willing to accept rising household welfare inequalities. An unchecked rise in income inequality will worsen citizens’ life chances and opportunities. Greater flexibility and widespread low-wage employment suggests a scenario of overall insecurity for a sizeable group. It is therefore necessary to have an even more tightly woven safety net for the truly needy.
*****
We know that the current situations in the EU Member States, from which we have to start, are very diverse, with some Member States already experiencing dramatic budgetary pressures. Priorities may therefore diverge among Member States, and – as already mentioned – a European-wide Social Investment Pact should support Member States that wish to pursue social investment, despite their budgetary difficulties. Without being naïve, and taking into account the existing diversity, we are convinced that a Social Investment Pact will in the longer term impact positively on public finances, on the basis of the employment and productivity growth that social investment induces. Without a Social Investment Pact of growth in fairness, fiscal consolidation is unlikely, due to both wrongheaded economics and the political conflict it is bound to ultimately unleash. Let us hope that, sooner rather than later, more policy creativity and political imagination will encourage EU and national policymakers to turn the current tide of inward-looking pessimism about the EU’s future and the sustainability of European welfare states into a renewed and much needed political effort at forward-looking ‘social pragmatism’. Social investment means reform, and the political question finally is how the public opinion and social actors can be convinced of the necessity to reform. In order to convince, social investment strategies should not only be embedded in sound macroeconomic and budgetary policies, but also embedded in an attractive perspective of social progress, based on a shared notion of fairness and the political willingness to fight growing inequalities in our societies.

by Anton Hemerijck & Bruno Palier & Frank Vanderbroucke [15-06-2011]

Is There a Dictatorship in the E.U.? - by Andrew Arato

by Andrew Arato [11-05-2012]

Field(s) : Politics
Dossier(s) : Europe: the Meaning of a Crisis
Tags : democracy | conservatism | Constitution | Hungary

The Orban government has enacted sweeping changes that have raised the specter of autocracy in Hungary: is the European Union about to have a dictatorship among its member states? For Andrew Arato, even enemies of the new regime should recognize that it is still only a demokradura, a hard democracy: only then will they be able to go back on the current reforms.

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  Is There a Dictatorship in the E.U.? (PDF - 160.6 kb)

  by Andrew Arato

It may seem like a scholastic question: is the current Hungarian regime a dictatorship (or an autocracy) in light of the changes made by the Constitution of 2012, the so-called Basic Law? Does answering this question make a difference for those seeking to reverse or replace the regime? My answers are no to the first, and yes to the second.

The Rise of FIDESZ

First a little history. FIDESZ, the right-wing, leadership-oriented, in part anti-European, current governing party led by Viktor Orban, has received over two thirds of the parliamentary seats with 52.7% of the vote in the elections of 2010. Since 1990, no party has received as high a percentage in the first electoral round, but the gap between votes and seats was still a function of the mixed electoral system’s disproportionality that, in each election so far (except one), has rewarded a much larger number of seats to the winning party than their portion of the vote. Most obviously the electoral result happened because the previous governing party, the Hungarian Socialist Party (or MSZP, the successor of the earlier monopolistic state party) and its former leader Ferenc Gyurcsany were totally discredited during the previous cycle. The outcome is connected with several, deeper factors, but especially, in my view, with the failure of the new parties which came out of the regime change of 1989-1990 to stabilize: most notably, the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) that won the first free elections, and Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) which was the inheritor of the great democratic opposition of the 1980s— FIDESZ (Alliance of Young Democrats) being here the exception.
On the center left, I attribute the failure to consolidate a new party to the attachment of the liberal SZDSZ to a largely European conception of liberalism: it remained, for too long, too closely identified with a primarily economic form, de-emphasizing if not entirely excluding social liberal and civil society-oriented options. In its overall ideological posture the emphasis on human rights, though important, had little effect on the economic policy options supported. The earlier stress on worker’s self management, the multiplicity of viable forms of property and civil society inputs fell by the way-side. A coalition with the post communist MSZP between 1994 and 1998 (which I then supported) was probably, in retrospect, a poor decision, especially because the liberals turned out to be unable to renounce this alliance even when that would have been the right course strategically and on the level of principles. The party’s political posture became self-destructive, especially after 2002, when the SZDSZ took an even more determined economic liberal turn. Its brand of liberalism, while valuable to hasten the transition from state socialism, never stood chance in a period of severe economic strains and impoverishment of the poorer sectors of the population, both in the industrial and agricultural sectors, especially in rural areas. It was FIDESZ (along with originally liberal parties in Poland and the Czech Republic) that recognized the unviability of originally rather Thatcherite forms of liberalism and abandoned its own ultra liberal posture by the mid-1990s.
So-called nostalgia parties, inspired by pre-Communist era politics, developed on the right, most notably the Independent Small Holders (FKGP) and the group of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) identified with Istvan Csurka, which sought to define themselves in terms of ideologies inherited from the interwar period—ideologies by then obsolete and even comical. FIDESZ in time recognized that while some of the grievances these groups put forward found a response in Hungarian society, only a new, dynamic, and forward-looking party led by young or fairly “new” people could successfully channel them. FIDESZ did this with great success in the parliamentary elections of 1998 when it first formed a government. Since most Hungarians do not and never have voted mainly on the basis of ideology, FIDESZ could not rely on the most extreme irredentist, xenophobic, anti-European and anti-Semitic slogans of this nostalgic, right-wing authoritarian and exclusionary milieu. That is why its success in reconstructing the right had an unintended side effect: the formation and strengthening of Jobbik, a party of even younger people who have no problem adopting the most reprehensible slogans and ideologies. Together with Jobbik, the right in 2010 received 69% of the votes and 80% of the seats. This is what Orban refers to as “the revolution of the voting booth.”
Parts of the Hungarian right always considered the round table negotiated transformation of 1989 a form of conversion of Communist power. As in Poland, Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, even Czechoslovakia, and later South Africa, the round table in Hungary was the body that negotiated the peaceful regime change, within continuous legality. In 1989, through a process of comprehensive amendment, this body produced the first new, supposedly interim constitution of the country. While, at the time, members of the right attempted but failed to realize secret deals with the outgoing Communist power (one of which concerned the presidency of the country), they very soon denounced the round table process as a way to preserve older powers. It was a deal between reds and pinks, they claimed, suppressing their own actual role in the process, and denying the obvious, namely that there was indeed a full change of regime in 1989. Thus, many of the spokesmen of the right called for a revolution, or a “second revolution—” at least after this became safe in 1990.
In Hungary, party alternation is however neither new, nor revolutionary: it has happened in the elections of 1990, 1994, 1998, 2002 as well; 2006 was the exception. Moreover, in 2010 the voters were not told that a replacement or dramatic alteration of the regime of 1989-1990 was at stake in the election. If there was a revolution, it was engineered by the two-thirds of the Parliament, manufactured in part by the electoral rule, rather than by the voters themselves. Under Hungary’s old amendment rule, a qualified majority was legally able to alter all features of the political system. No feature of the Constitution was formally unamendable, as is the case for the famous French republican clause (Fifth republic: last sentence of Art.89), or the several elements of the German Grundgesetz that are themselves not open to amendment (Art 79-3). Such limits when they formally exist are always capable of expansion by courts, as this has been confirmed by German and Turkish Constitutional Court decisions. Even when there is no formal limit on the amending power, a tribunal like the Indian Supreme Court with its basic structure doctrine can declare and enforce an informal limit. Unfortunately, the Hungarian Constitutional Court has repeatedly denied that it could review amendments for anything other than purely procedural reasons (i.e. that the sufficient majority was not attained) and this possibility was affirmed too recently to interfere with FIDESZ’ project.
Under the amendment rule, then, as in 1989, the whole constitution could in principle be replaced thanks to a single amendment or a document called a new “constitution” or basic law. While a complete replacement was by no means accomplished by the Basic Law of 2012 and the accompanying legislation, enough features of the 1989-1990 regime were altered or replaced to raise the question whether a second regime change has occurred in Hungary—legally but with revolutionary results.

Incumbent-protecting Measures

This is where the question of dictatorship becomes relevant, first because of the nature of the process of change. [1] Unlike the changes that took place in 1989 and 1990, and the failed attempt to draft a new constitution in 1994-1996, the effort of 2010 was entirely unilateral: the new constitution was imposed by the governing party without input from any opposition or minority. If we define (as we should) modern dictatorship by the rule of arbitrary will that is unable, like kingship, to rely on sacred, dynastic or any other form of inherited authority, implying also the absence of any separation of powers, the 2010 process was dictatorial, even if it stopped short of the sovereign dictatorship of Carl Schmitt (see Die Diktatur [2]) and a clear legal break. Not only was it unilateral and arbitrary, but all other institutions like the Constitutional Court were excluded, and even confirmation in a referendum was studiously avoided. While not de facto illegal under the existing amendment rule and Court precedents, a different and stronger Constitutional Court could and should have declared the method of change illegal. [3] Short of that, we are left with the unusual British solution: the concept of legal but unconstitutional, or legal but illegitimate change.
But is the result a dictatorship? Did it step over the threshold, wherever that is, from the previous system into an entirely new one? The main changes so far are, first: the packing of the constitutional court in a process controlled by FIDESZ, with the addition of five new justices to the original ten. The jurisdiction of this Court was significantly reduced, by excluding financial, tax and pension matters from review (unless human dignity is involved!) The extraordinarily wide rules of standing the Court had in the past were slightly reduced, or rather altered—in practice, the exact nature of the change is still unclear. Through manipulation of retirement rules in the new constitution itself, a large number of ordinary judges are being replaced. This process will be controlled by a new board under a political appointee. Second: there has been an attempt to cement the incumbent power by giving several important policy areas a new status, including taxation, financial management, pensions. It will require two thirds of the parliamentary votes to regulate these issues and make appointments not only in these areas but for all the boards and bodies in charge of media regulation. FIDESZ has a two-thirds majority now, but new governments after 2014 are less likely to do so. A series of appointments to bodies supervising the judiciary and economy should go into effect for periods well beyond the current parliamentary period (mostly 9 year terms). By naming these “bionic” officials now, Pinochet-style, under the new constitution, FIDESZ will be able to preserve some important powers beyond its current tenure. Third: the electronic media have been recentralized under a new board, and possibilities of sanctioning organs and journalists in the print media for “unfair” practices and reporting have been put on the books. Fourth: a new electoral rule has been enacted, more disproportional even than its predecessor, which on the basis of computerized surveys would give FIDESZ an even greater majority under the voting pattern of 2010, and could give this party a majority even with a vote far less than before.
All in all this is a series of strong incumbent-protecting measures. There is some plausibility in understanding dictatorship as a modern system in which incumbents cannot lose power, at least without a new change of regime. Is that the case under the new system? Note first that in terms of my previous definition, focusing on constitutionalism and separation of powers, even if the process of establishing it was dictatorial, the system FIDESZ established is not a dictatorship. There is still a Constitutional Court with important powers, that were used in several cases even after its packing. There are still elections, whose outcome will still depend on popular support. Striking democratic alliances before the one and only round of the next election would be a possible way to frustrate the intentions of the new electoral rule. For these reasons, the idea, propagated by some of the most fearful commentators, that FIDESZ cannot be replaced because of this rule is absurd. The independence of the Central Bank is likely to be preserved under European pressure. The likelihood that the media laws will or can be used to completely suppress free press and internet communications is small, especially because of, again, likely European pressure and possible recourse to the European courts. Civil society groups and parties can still demonstrate and mobilize, and show it almost every week. With all these channels open, the incumbent-protecting rules of the new arrangements cannot guarantee that FIDESZ will remain the governing party. It is true that two-thirds rules protect many of FIDESZ bionic appointments, but these do not last forever, and two thirds is not 100%. Indeed, with the self same amendment rule in place, a new re-alignment can result in a change or replacement of the Basic Law even if a new government does not have the necessary two thirds of the seats in Parliament.

Why Hungary Should Not Be Called a Dictatorship

The new FIDESZ regime, then, is a hard democracy, a demokradura in the words of Guillermo O’Donnell and Phillippe Schmitter [4], not a dictabalanda, a soft dictatorship. It is still based on parliamentary sovereignty like its predecessor (and unlike the regime before 1989, which was based on the sovereignty of the Political Bureau of the Hungarian Communist Party). More accurately, it has shifted the balance between parliamentary sovereignty (the power of the two thirds) and constitutionalism to the benefit of the former. Thus, rather than a constitutional revolution, it is more accurate to call the changes FIDESZ made a sweeping reform, legal even if politically illegitimate, that hardened the existing democracy by weakening checks and balances and constitutionalism.
Calling Hungary a dictatorship serves the purpose of at the very least inviting outsiders to help reverse the changes. Neither the EU nor the Council of Europe have a republican guarantee clause like the U.S. constitution’s Article IV.4, which allows the federal government to intervene in states that have abolished this form (however Congress chose to define it). Other federal states like India have such provision, and have used it perhaps all too frequently. Yet, as the difficulties of Turkey’s entry into the EU indicate, it is important that all of its members have at least minimum political homogeneity in terms of constitutionalism, fundamental rights protection and free elections. One would think that it would be at the very least politically if not legally impermissible to allow a dictatorship to remain a member of the federation. There is little question that details of important European and international agreements and conventions are at stake as well. The legal and political pressure to enforcing these would however only require FIDESZ, as it has already, to make very partial changes. It would be different if Hungary were a dictatorship, which, fortunately or unfortunately, is a very tough case to make today. If it is tough to convince me, it will be even tougher to convince the right-wing European sister parties of FIDESZ who have at the moment the majority in the European Parliament, and have admittedly shielded the Orban government in undesirable ways.
Moreover, those who try to make the case for dictatorship or autocracy within Hungary itself can easily be accused of trying to destroy the country’s reputation and bring in foreign allies to “colonize” a sovereign country. In this context, it is best to apply the pressure of European institutions only where there are clear legal grounds to do so, both in terms of the substantive issue involved and the existence of a relevant jurisdiction. To its credit, the European Commission has insisted on Hungary having a system of financial and monetary regulation compatible with the Union, and media laws that do not interfere with the freedom of communications not only of Hungarian institutions and persons, but also of transnational organizations. It has already taken some important steps in areas clearly in its jurisdiction and forced the FIDESZ government to make changes, hopefully not merely cosmetic. Another step has been the defense of the judicial system and the tenure of judges, as related to the legal security that European institutions and economic actors have a right to require. The role of the European Parliament has been even more spectacular: it has explored in great detail the violations, actual or potential, of fundamental democratic and liberal principles in Hungary. Of course, the protests of the EP do not have any immediate effect. The role of the courts, both the European Court of Justice and the European European Court of Human Rights is likely to be much more effective, when individuals and organizations begin legal suits against the Hungarian government on the basis of their violation of European treaties and court precedents.
There is another political reason, besides the risk of being called enemies of the Hungarian “sovereignty,” not to call the Orban regime a dictatorship. Except for the unlikely case that under FIDESZ’ new electoral rule, left-of-center parties will gain a two-thirds majority, there is little chance that the new constitutional arrangements will be reversed by these parties alone. A color revolution is not likely either, nor is it unambiguously desirable. It could lead to the new winners imitating FIDESZ’ imposed process of change, creating yet another poorly legitimated constitution. To do it better, consensually and legitimately, legal continuity is preferable. In that case, a most likely right-wing ally will be needed to enact a new, consensual constitutionalist constitution (one that cannot be suspended) beyond parliamentary sovereignty. Such ally or allies will have to come from among the members and supporters of FIDESZ. Denouncing their system in terms they cannot condone can only lead to continued polarization and questionable legitimacy. And part of the right is indeed detachable from Orban and FIDESZ: right-wing press and individuals were part of the movement that led to the resignation of the state president Pal Schmitt at the beginning of April 2012 after it was discovered that he had plagiarized most of his doctoral dissertation.
Yet other conditions are needed to make the required changes after the next elections in 2014. Center-left forces are always tempted to treat the FIDESZ regime as either a conspiracy, or a populist deformation of democracy. What they are not so willing to recognize is their own role in the current outcome. There is indeed a new and very disturbing populism in Hungary, represented by Jobbik and a part of FIDESZ’ support. But why did this happen? And why do many voters, not open to xenophobic, anti-European, and traditional right-wing ideologies, also vote for FIDESZ? The fact that the place of the Left is occupied by the former state party cannot be left out of consideration, nor the demobilizing effects of the market oriented-version of liberalism offered by the SZDSZ when they were still relevant. Neither of these forces has done much to alleviate the growing poverty and inequality in the country. I note also that it was the MSZP leadership that shipwrecked the constitution-making effort of 1994-1996; the liberals allowed this to happen without leaving the coalition of that time. Thus the important legitimacy deficit of the 1989-1990 system was not reduced, and the destructive combination of a disproportional electoral rule and a purely parliamentary rule of constitutional change was left in place. These provided the open door through which FIDESZ marched in 2010. There are indeed many grounds for self-criticism on the part of most of the forces currently arrayed against FIDESZ in Hungary.
More than self-criticism is required, however. The Left and liberalism must be entirely renewed if elections are to be won. For the former, this would require the daunting task of making sense of social democratic protections in an era of economic globalization. For the latter, the task will be to generate a form of social liberalism that focuses not only on macro-performance, and the conditions of the least well off, but also on the conditions of declining middle strata. The orientation to civil society, so important in the beginning of the transition process, should be renewed. For all these projects, the new ecological party LMP should be an important ally. The Left and liberals must also address the terrible problems of impoverishment in the country, made only worse by FIDESZ’s actions. They must be ready to ally not only with each other for electoral purposes, but also to make genuine agreements with at least some forces on the right. This is what European partners and sympathizers should push for, even more than direct intervention, when necessary.
Finally, a new slogan is required. Attacks on “dictatorship” are implausible in the present circumstances. The call to create a new, consensual constitution that includes the whole country and embodies its genuinely common aspirations is a much better candidate.

by Andrew Arato [11-05-2012]

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Dossier(s) :
Europe: the Meaning of a Crisis

To quote this article :
Andrew Arato, « Is There a Dictatorship in the E.U.? », Books & Ideas, 11 May 2012. ISSN : 2114-074X. URL : http://www.booksandideas.net/Is-Hungary-a-Dictatorship.html

Footnotes

[1] I leave out of consideration of the term “autocracy” recently used by the famous economist Janos Kornai to describe Orban’s system. This term, first used by Hans Kelsen in a twentieth-century context, expands the modern concept of dictatorship by including absolute monarchies, classical tyrannies and despotisms as well. For Hungary, the two terms, dictatorship and autocracy, have the same meaning. Thus, what I say about the concept of dictatorship’s inapplicability applies to autocracy as well.
[2] Carl Schmitt-Dorotić, Die Diktatur, von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf, München und Leipzig, Duncker & Humblot, 1921.
[3] There were technical grounds for this. One constitutional amendment opened the door to majoritarian constitution-making by replacing a 4/5 clause of the constitution, pertaining to parliamentary agreement concerning the making of a new constitution, by a vote of 2/3. It is strongly arguable, in my view entirely correctly, that rules of qualified majorities in constitutional change are implicitly self-entrenching. To remove a 4/5 rule by 2/3 implies that the original rule left open a two step-change by-passing it, and this would make the rule non-sensical (i.e. you must do this by 4/5… unless you choose to do it by 2/3!) If a court chose to follow my interpretation, this would be consistent with the idea of merely procedural or formal review.
[4] Guillermo O’Donnell and Phillippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

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Owen Hatherley · · · · ·

08/07/12

Si hay algo en lo que prácticamente coincidían antaño todos los futurólogos, es que en el siglo XXI habría muchísimo menos trabajo. ¿Qué habrían pensado, de haber sabido que en 2012 la jornada laboral de 9 a 5 se ha convertido en algo más parecido a de 7 de la mañana a 7 de la tarde? Seguramente habrían echado un vistazo en torno suyo y habrían visto cómo la tecnología tomaba el control en muchas profesiones en las que anteriormente se necesitaba una ingente mano de obra, habrían contemplado el aumento de la automatización y la producción en masa, y se habrían preguntado, ¿por qué pasan doce horas al día en tareas de poca filfa? Se trata de una cuestión a la que no responden adecuadamente la derecha o la izquierda oficial. A los conservadores siempre les ha gustado pontificar acerca de la virtud moral del trabajo duro y buena parte de la izquierda, concentrada en los terribles efectos del desempleo masivo, ofrece comprensiblemente "más empleos" como solución principal a la crisis. Anteriores generaciones habrían encontrado esto perdidamente decepcionante. En casi todos los casos, los utopistas, socialistas y demás futurólogos creían que el trabajo acabaría por quedar casi abolido sobre todo por una razón: podríamos dejar que lo hicieran las máquinas. El pensador socialista Paul Lafargue escribió en su breve tratado mordazmente titulado El derecho a la pereza (1883): "Nuestras máquinas, con aliento de fuego, con brazos de incombustible acero, con maravillosa fecundidad inagotable, ejecutan con docilidad por sí mismas su sagrada labor. Y no obstante, el genio de los grandes filósofos del capitalismo sigue estando dominado por los prejuicios del sistema salarial, la peor de las esclavitudes. No comprenden todavía que la máquina es la salvadora de la humanidad, el dios que redimirá al hombre de alquilarse para trabajar, la divinidad que le otorgará ocio y libertad". Oscar Wilde estuvo evidentemente de acuerdo: en su ensayo de 1891, El alma del hombre bajo el socialismo, desdeña "el disparate de lo que hoy se escribe y dice acerca de la dignidad del trabajo manual", e insiste en que "el hombre está hecho para algo mejor que repartir mugre. Todo el trabajo de esa laya debería realizarlo una máquina". Deja bien claro lo que quiere decir: "La maquinaria debe trabajar para nosotros en las minas de carbón, y ocuparse de todos los servicios sanitarios, y ser fogonero de los vapores, y limpiar las calles y llevar mensajes los días de lluvia y realizar todo lo que sea tedioso o penoso". Tanto Lafargue como Wilde se hubieran sentido horrorizados de haberse dado cuenta que, sólo veinte años después, el trabajo manual mismo se convertiría en ideología de los partidos laboristas y comunistas, que se dedicaron a glorificarlo en lugar de a abolirlo. En esto también, sin embargo, la idea consistía en que finalmente quedaría substituido. Tras la Revolución Rusa, uno de los grandes defensores del culto al trabajo fue Aleksei Gastev, un antiguo metalúrgico y dirigente sindical que se convirtió en poeta, publicando antologías de títulos como Poesía de la planta de producción. Se convirtió en el entusiasta principal del taylorismo, la técnica norteamericana de gestión habitualmente criticada por la izquierda por reducir al trabajador a una simple pieza de la máquina, dirigiendo el Instituto Central del Trabajo, con patrocinio del Estado. Cuando le preguntó por ello el izquierdista alemán Ernst Toller, Gastev contestó: "Tenemos la esperanza de que gracias a nuestros descubrimientos lleguemos a un estadio en el que un trabajador que antes trabajaba ocho horas en determinado empleo sólo tenga que trabajar dos o tres". En algún momento de la cadena esto quedó olvidado en beneficio de los supermusculosos estajanovistas que ejecutaban proezas sobrehumanas de extracción de carbón. Los teóricos industriales norteamericanos, por raro que parezca, parecían compartir la visión socialista. Buckminster Fuller, el diseñador, ingeniero y polifacético sabio norteamericano, declaró que la "ecuación industrial", es decir, el hecho de que la tecnología faculta a la humanidad para hacer "más con menos", pronto eliminaría la noción misma de trabajo por completo. En 1963 escribió: "[D]entro de un siglo, la palabra 'trabajador' no tendrá ningún significado actual. Será algo que haya que mirar en un diccionario de principios del siglo XX". Si eso ha resultado cierto de los últimos diez años, lo ha sido sólo en el sentido de "hoy en día somos todos de clase media" del Nuevo Laborismo, no en el sentido de eliminar de veras el trabajo de poca monta, o la división entre trabajadores y propietarios. Los sondeos llevan mostrando desde hace mucho que la mayoría de los trabajadores piensan que sus empleos son irrelevantes, y echando un vistazo a las disputadas vacantes de la oficina de empleo media – personal de oficinas de atención telefónica al cliente, archivista y, sobre todo, las diversas tareas de la industria de servicios– es difícil no estar de acuerdo. Sin embargo, la visión utópica de la eliminación del trabajo industrial ha pasado de muy diversos modos a mejor vida. En la última década, las acerías de Sheffield producían más acero que nunca con una mínima fracción de su antigua mano de obra; y los puertos de contenedores de Avonmouth, Tilbury, Teesport y Southampton se deshicieron de la mayoría de los estibadores, pero no del tonelaje. El resultado no fue que los estibadores o trabajadores siderúrgicos se vieran libres, tal como dijera una vez Marx, para "cazar por la mañana, pescar por la tarde y dedicarse a la crítica después de cenar". Por el contrario, se vieron sometidos al oprobio, la pobreza, y la incesante preocupación de buscar otro empleo que, caso de conseguirse, podía ser inseguro, mal pagado, no sindicalizado, en el sector servicios. En la presente era del trabajo eventual, esta es prácticamente la norma, de modo que la idea del empleo seguro, cualificado y el orgullo en el trabajo no parecen tan horribles. No obstante, el movimiento obrero se consagró en otro tiempo a la abolición última de todo trabajo de poca entidad, tedioso, agotador. Disponemos de las máquinas para convertirlo hoy en realidad, pero carecemos de la voluntad. Owen Hatherley, afilado crítico de arquitectura y urbanismo, es autor de Militant Modernism (Zero Books, 2009); A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, Londres, 2010) y Uncommon (Zero Books, 2011) sobre el grupo "pop" británico Pulp. Traducción para www.sinpermiso.info: Lucas Antón sinpermiso electrónico se ofrece semanalmente de forma gratuita. No recibe ningún tipo de subvención pública ni privada, y su existencia sólo es posible gracias al trabajo voluntario de sus colaboradores y a las donaciones altruistas de sus lectores. Si le ha interesado este artículo, considere la posibilidad de contribuir al desarrollo de este proyecto político-cultural realizando una DONACIÓN o haciendo una SUSCRIPCIÓNa la REVISTA SEMESTRAL impresa.

Onfray: a investida do ressentimento. A que vem ele?

Du ressentiment à l’effondrement de la pensée : le symptôme Onfray

3 juillet 2012 à 19:06 Abonnez-vous à partir de 1€

Par Gérard Bensussan , Alain David, Michel Deguy et Jean-Luc Nancy Philosophes

Le texte ci-dessous et la réponse de Michel Onfray font référence à une polémique dont le point de départ est un article de Michel Onfray paru dans le Point du 7 juin dernier sur Qui est Dieu?, un livre de de Jean Soler (éd. de Fallois). Le 28 juin, le Point a publié sur le même sujet un dossier dans lequel on trouve, notamment, des articles du rabbin Yeshaya Dalsace, de Marek Halter, et, à nouveau, de Michel Onfray.
L’article publié par Michel Onfray dans un récent numéro du Point (le 7 juin) pose un problème très grave. Prétendant rendre compte d’une étude de Jean Soler sur la Bible, il donne à l’esprit de vengeance sa plus redoutable expression en l’appliquant à ce qui focalise le ressentiment contemporain, le judaïsme, autant qu’à l'ensemble monothéiste qui en est issu.
Laissons à d’autres le soin de discuter (s’il peut être discutable) le livre de Jean Soler et ne retenons ici que ce qu’en présente Onfray, qui est atterrant : le judaïsme, loin de supprimer le polythéisme, est «monolâtrique». Loin d’avoir inventé une morale universelle, il ne sert que des intérêts tribaux et égoïstes d’un peuple qui autrefois comme aujourd’hui se donne pour seule ambition de dominer les autres. Il faut citer cette phrase stupéfiante : «Le monothéisme devient une arme de guerre forgée tardivement pour permettre au peuple juif d’être et de durer, fût-ce au détriment des autres peuples. Il suppose une violence intrinsèque exterminatrice, intolérante, qui dure jusqu’aujourd’hui.» Et pour faire bon poids, Onfray ajoute que les Juifs sont le premier peuple à avoir perpétré des génocides (le génocide hitlérien étant lui-même d’ailleurs d’inspiration et de facture juives) et que la Shoah n’a pas l’importance exceptionnelle qu’on lui attribue habituellement.
Michel Onfray se réclame, depuis qu’il publie, de Nietzsche. Or il pratique en permanence l’esprit de vengeance, il est le prototype de ce que l’auteur du Zarathoustra identifiait comme «l’homme de ressentiment». Il fait profession de dénoncer l’establishment, et en particulier les gloires philosophiques, les religions ou Freud, mais cette dénonciation n’est que la constante et obstinée dénégation de la pensée. Baptisant hédonisme ce qui n’est qu’une complaisance démagogique pour la bassesse, quêtant auprès de l’opinion une reconnaissance que ses pairs en philosophie lui ont globalement refusée, il s’est acquis, ces dernières années, une notoriété exceptionnelle fondée tout ensemble sur l’intimidation et sur cette vague fascination que les sociétés entretiennent pour les démarches vulgaires.
On aurait pu en rester là, au malentendu, en haussant les épaules et rangeant par profits et pertes les bénéfices liés à l’imposture, mais Onfray, selon une trajectoire qui, après-coup, ne surprend pas franchit aujourd’hui un certain Rubicon.
Inutile de s’étendre sur les propos écoeurants contenus dans son texte du Point. Il n’y a guère de sens, jusqu’à nouvel ordre, à argumenter contre une idéologie qui désigne les Juifs comme les éternels porteurs d’une pulsion de mort dont notre époque continuerait à être victime. La vraie question est celle de la nature de l’audience d’une idéologie qui plaît à notre temps. En atteste, hélas, au-delà de l’article que nous évoquons, le dossier qui est paru dans la dernière livraison du Point (le numéro paru le 28 juin). Sous le titre «La polémique Michel Onfray-Jean Soler», cet hebdomadaire a construit un «débat» dans lequel Onfray, occupant en surplomb la place du philosophe non conformiste et politiquement incorrect, ferraille dédaigneusement en répondant à quelques objecteurs qui ont pourtant en commun de lui avoir concédé ce qui est pour cet homme si avide de revanche l’essentiel, sa légitimité de philosophe. Or ce n’est que par une imposture dont il faudrait prendre le temps de décrypter la portée qu’Onfray a pu s’acquérir la réputation d’être philosophe. Faire l’hypothèse de sa non-légitimité (ce qui nous paraît le minimum) serait rendre vain tout débat et transformer le Point, de journal courageux qu’il se voudrait, ayant accepté le risque de l’anticonformisme, en un support médiatique réductible à n’importe quel tabloïd soucieux d’audience, hors d’état de séparer le bon grain de la pensée de l’ivraie de la niaiserie idéologique ; qui plus est, dans le cas présent, se faisant le complice de propos dangereusement irresponsables.
En d’autres termes, il ne s’agit pas, par-delà cet article du Point, de débattre avec Onfray, ou contre lui, mais de s’interroger sur les raisons de la notoriété dont il jouit. Pourquoi cette audience, de quoi est-elle le symptôme ? Faut-il évoquer l’antisémitisme ?
On ne pourra éviter en tout état de cause de faire ici l’hypothèse d’une étrange maladie, qui n’a peut-être pas encore de nom, mélange de fascination obsessionnelle pour le judaïsme, d’incompréhension et de ressentiment pour l’histoire et le destin que ce dernier signifie pour l’humanité. Certains des plus grands penseurs du XX^e siècle ont donné à entendre cela, Levinas, Derrida, Blanchot, d’autres encore, lesquels ont vu dans le judaïsme non la religion particulière d’une communauté (ce qu’il est évidemment aussi) mais une catégorie universelle de la pensée.
La position d’Onfray correspond à un certain effondrement de la pensée, à cette équivoque contemporaine qui voudrait que le judaïsme soit à la fois porteur d’une signification historiale et objet d’une récurrente dénégation et rivalité mimétique. Cette équivoque est plus lourde de conséquences que le personnage inconsistant qui s’en est fait aujourd’hui le héraut. Néanmoins la position de philosophe médiatique que par son talent très particulier il s’est acquise, aussi bien que l’incroyable violence des propos qu’il tient, propos de nature à légitimer une autre violence, celle qui règne sur des scènes qui ne sont pas qu’intellectuelles, nous incitent, comme philosophes, à réagir, à inviter la communauté des philosophes à réagir également, à demander enfin quelle sorte de place occupe aujourd’hui Michel Onfray parmi les voix de la philosophie.
Car si lui-même n’est pas le philosophe qu’il dit, qu’est-il et de quoi est-il le symptôme ? N’est-ce pas à dresser des barrières contre la force proprement philosophique du «judaïsme» que s’emploie Michel Onfray dans son article, et n’est-ce pas cette dernière version du ressentiment, confronté à la signification historiale de l’extermination et de la «question juive», qui explique l’étonnante faveur qui entoure ses écrits ?

A lire, la réponse de Michel Onfray : «Sale temps pour la pensée debout»