Thinking about the Crisis

In this “bio-political”[2], deep, intimate interpretation, the crisis involves dimensions of analysis which traditionally lie outside of the world of political science and economic thinking: the “bodies”, fears, symbols, identities, expectations. The latter in particular is the explanatory key through which an economist like John Maynard Keynes, introducing a little bit of psychology into economics[3], could criticise certain fundamental axioms of neoclassical economics, axioms now completely falsified by the continuous succession of liquidity traps (the interest rate reduction to zero by central banks), the collapse of investments, consumption and confidence in the market (and institutions).

But the crisis we are living today is not only related to the “micro” dimension, that of the catastrophic expectations of individuals. At the “macro” level, there is no doubt that the economic and financial crisis is linked, on the one hand, to the ideological, “imperialist” and neoliberal choices pursued by the most powerful country in the world, while on the other it depends on the global imbalances, as well as on the extraordinary (and unexpected, according to the predictions of the standard models) development of part of the “periphery” of the planet; but in turn these factors influence (and depend on) the process of structural adjustment and evolution of the world-system, a process both extensive and qualitative. Using the historical and macro-sociological modeling of the book The Long Twentieth Century[4] and adopting the perspective of the Braudelian longue durée, the current crisis appears to be the last moment, in chronological order, of a long list of hegemony changes; the outgoing hegemony, with its probable “backlash”, makes the international context dangerous, while the new hegemony slowly begins to suggest and impose new ways of organizing the economy and society, new values, new discourses and ideas that will guide the new world-system configuration. The transition obviously brings with it problems, conflicts and big transformations in the social, productive, technological, cultural, artistic fields.

As happened on a smaller scale and over the past centuries with Genoa and Venice, Holland, Spain and Britain, a new changeover is now in preparation.

It’s important to stress again the fact that the transition to a new configuration of the world-system is a process both qualitative and extensive. We already mentioned the first point when speaking about the connection between the new hegemony and the new organisational and cultural logic (basically, new ideologies), while now we’ll try to go deep into the issue of the extension of hegemony, a variable which assumes particular importance in the context of the current crisis. Every “changeover” which occurred in the history of Western capitalism is in fact connected, in addition to a tendency to financialization and de-materialization of the economy, to an increase of the extension of the world “covered”, i.e. controlled, by the new “center”, the ruling and hegemonic power.

The peculiar feature of the current transition is that this time the dominium area has already reached its maximum extension, touching the physical limits of the planet and coming into contact with the collective imagination (often not only with the latter) of any existing population in the world.

Globalisation, the “ecologically and demographically full” planet and the nature of economic and financial transactions, communications and contemporary cultural contamination, make it difficult to predict the next evolution of the global scenario. The world has become an unpredictable singularity, and therefore every historicism is ineffective or reductive.

In this context of uncertainty, the possible ways out are basically four. In the first case, which retains the model used so far, we can identify a new dominant hegemony in Asia[5], with the current “rise of the East” that represents the rendering of accounts with the “rise of the West” during which, in the years 1700s, the power to determine the future of the entire world passed from the millennial East to a violent, barbaric West in the process of industrializing.

The other possibilities are tied instead to the singularity conditions mentioned above, and also to the awareness of the emergence of the concept of network as a new universal organisational paradigm, a paradigm that involves, once again, culture, transnational production, social organization, art and political participation. Some authors try to solve the puzzle of this crisis and hegemonic transition by imagining a multi-polar (or non-polar) world, an emerging and self-regulating global governance, an “age of non-sovereignty”; other scholars have developed new conceptual tools, like those of Empire and Multitude[6] to explain the new forms - dispersed and distributed, fluid, ignoring classes - which hegemonic power has poured in, or have shown the passage, through a neo-Marxist lens, to a new mode of production (informational[7], peer to peer[8]). Lastly, there is the federalist approach, which is not in contradiction with either the historicist model of transition of hegemonies, or the complex and special conditions of today’s globalization; this is possible because federalism suggests the overcoming of the nation-state’s limits through the adoption of a novel “political-rule”, the supranational federation (the World Federation, in perspective), which “plays” with the concepts of power, hierarchy and sovereignty, and in the meantime favours the horizontal relationships, being able to successfully make the “institutional bio-diversities”, that is, the various reticular, overlapping and often conflicting levels of government, work together on different political scales.

The crisis overwhelms the psychological sphere of individuals, but it is also a crisis of the collective dimension, with big uncertainties on the new phase of international relations that will follow the substitution of the current hegemony. Finally, the crisis is a crisis of symbolism too, because it questions, in addition to the very concept of capitalism, all the categories that have become common knowledge over the years: prosperity, social achievements and democracy, peaceful coexistence and integration, unbounded economic growth and the idea of positive and linear progress. The crisis is a crisis of civilization, of human society and its “uncontrolled experiment” of continuous creation and “creative destruction” (in the Schumpeterian sense) of institutions, products, goods, ideas, values and emotions. This is why the crisis is intimately bio-political.

The crisis which involves economies, bodies, values and ideas is basically a creeping crisis. Its multifaceted nature makes it difficult to understand it, and therefore extremely weak the will to solve it: in the complex network of relationships of a world in crisis, for every loser there’s a winner who emerges, but everything happens in the depressive path of a slow agony of civilization. If reasonably we can fight the crisis with more integration, “emotionally” we face the crisis with more enclosure, converting what is new into what is already known, fueling a conceptual and theoretical simplification. The “creative effort” that would be necessary to halt the decline, to awaken the expectations and reverse the cultural and civil decline must be, paraphrasing the Schuman Declaration, proportional to the dangers which threaten us. Just because the crisis is total and bio-political, not only in the field of institutions and policies has a solution to emerge; but is surely in that field that a new imagination, a will for creative recombination can grow and spread vigorously.

This is why Europe, the cradle of supranational integration, the “homeland” of the concept of Government meant – like James Madison did - as “the greatest reflection on human nature”, could play a role directly opposite to the dynamics of the crisis.

Limiting our analysis to a political-economy perspective, though unorthodox and partly Keynesian (because it raises the Keynesian perspective beyond the narrow bounds of “national gaze”), we can try to imagine a practical European response to the crisis. The prerequisite for the role of Europe we mentioned before, is the re-starting of the unification process. Our idea is to link the European unification process with the economic theory of public goods.

In short, every step forward in European integration was based on the creation of a supranational public good, such as the Single Market, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) or the Monetary Union. In order to be properly governed and regulated, every newborn European public good imposed a partial transfer of sovereignty from the member states to the Community, with the result of moving forward the integration and also setting the stage - political and legal - for the subsequent steps. Once that mechanism is understood, it could be sufficient to identify today, in the middle of the crisis, a new supranational public good useful and necessary for the European citizens and countries; taking advantage of this new European public good, the integration may “forcefully” start again.

The new continental public good should be the source of the vital resources necessary to avert the risk of another Great Depression (and, given the bio-political involution already mentioned, of a novel Great Repression of individual and collective rights and freedoms). More specifically, this new public good could be the EU’s capacity to create public debt (and, consequently, the capacity of the European community to ensure transnational economic and fiscal solidarity), by issuing a large amount of Union Bonds. These Union Bonds will be born with a great force, due notably to the emission in a currency, the euro, which is the most credible and stable in the world; the resources thus obtained could be used to finance radically innovative and transnational projects, both “material” (from big infrastructure plans to the production of renewable energy) and “intangible” (like the support to research projects of excellence and lifelong learning). In particular, the availability of new substantial European resources could afford to experiment on large-scale the adoption of a basic income for all European citizens – an idea anticipated during the 1930’s by the “Proudhonian” integral federalists -, and so begin a revolution of the social model and, more generally, of the theoretical and practical conception of Work.

The obvious potential of the new European public good would be 1) its relative ease of implementation, since it is possible to borrow the model adopted in the context of the European monetary integration (when a basket of European currencies, the ECU, preceded the real economic and monetary union) and 2) the push to convergence of the economic performance indicators in the different countries; the high profile of the projects funded with the new European resources will avoid a “race to the bottom” for what concerns the quality of the bonds, which will tend - as happened at the time of the EMU with the exchange rates - to fall into line with those of the most virtuous nation (Germany), rather than vice versa. Furthermore, to return to the field of economic psychology, we can reasonably assume that the effect of announcement linked with the Union Bonds emission might result in the revitalization of the pessimistic expectations of economic agents, one of the most important factors behind the crisis.

The real strength of the Union Bonds is their nature of supranational public good, and consequently their political role: a European Union capable of creating public debt needs new powers and new responsibilities - and thus new supplies of sovereignty -. The creation of the European Public Debt - and in perspective the federal reform of European taxation, which is necessary for the political legitimacy of the Union Bonds - in turn implies the creation of a federal power that can democratically deal with it; as in the case of the European Defence Community (failed) project in 1954, the new European public good (in that case it was Defence) could be the “pick” capable of opening the door to the European Federation.

What we said so far is only a brief thinking about the crisis and Europe. The crisis as an existential condition of the contemporary World can be investigated in an intimate and deep way, or more superficially, using the tools provided by the economic and the political theory. What remains is the certainty that any explanatory category of reality today is challenged, reshaped, used ideologically in the great game of the World’s “balance and hegemony”. The federalists have today more than ever the duty of reducing the contradiction between facts and values, fostering collective action and continuing to suggest the ways, although difficult to follow, to turn the crisis into a great opportunity, a “new beginning” for the whole humanity. Starting from Europe, not only a federal government, but also a forge and a laboratory of ideas of progress and human development, a “factory of alternatives”, could be shared with the entire World. So, from the singularity of our time could then emerge a new, equitable and sustainable Golden Age.