Historical Materialism 21.

1 (2013) 159176

brill.com/hima

Perry Anderson on Europe

Alex Callinicos

Kings College, University of London alex.callinicos@kcl.ac.uk

Abstract This intervention discusses Perry Andersons treatment of the European Union in The New Old World, tracing its origins in his intellectual and political history, and the ambivalences it reveals in his relationship to Marxism and to left politics. It identifies some of the key themes in a specifically Marxist analysis of the EU and explores the political possibilities implied by the present crisis. Keywords European Union, eurozone, capitalism, political economy, British Marxism

The New Old World is a collection of essays written by Perry Anderson between the mid-1990s and the late 2000s, most of them published in the London Review of Books, a few updated, and some not previously published. Inevitably, given the diverse occasions of their writing, the question of thematic unity obtrudes. The problem is reinforced by the subject matter of some pieces. Thus Anderson reconnoitres the eastern Mediterranean in two fine essays devoted to Cyprus and Turkey. Now these are subjects certainly related to the European Union and its future, particularly since southern Cyprus has exploited its accession to the EU in 2004 to impede Turkish entry. But the intertwined histories of the island of Cyprus and its great Anatolian neighbour are explored in a depth and detail that exceeds any narrowly EU-focused agenda. It seems that a preoccupation with Europe intersects here with a broader interest in in-depth national explorations for example, more recently of colonial and postcolonial India.1 Nevertheless, when an author has the opportunity to collect her essays into a book, she can cast them into a specific shape, and the one Anderson has chosen is that of the history and trajectory of the European Union the
1.Anderson 2012b, 2012c, 2012d.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/1569206X-12341285

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New Old World of the title, a continent remade by its political and economic integration, by the socio-political triumph of neoliberal capitalism, and by geopolitical subordination to the United States. But Andersons analysis does not operate simply at the level of the EU. Aside from those on Cyprus and Turkey, three long essays are devoted to the core lands of the integration process, France, Germany, and Italy (Britain is dismissed in a crushing aside: its history since the fall of Thatcher has been of little moment; plainly Anderson has yet to shed the national nihilism with which, he reports, Isaac Deutscher long ago taxed him).2 The various national surveys, like all the essays, display the qualities for which Andersons writing has rightly been praised over the decades elegance of style, lucidity of exposition, penetration of analysis, and quite astonishing erudition. The essay on Turkey contains perhaps the finest piece of writing in the book, a vignette of Kemal Atatrk during his final years, grappling with an underlying boredom with government.3 (Kemal is not the only authoritarian lawgiver with whom Anderson shows sympathy: apart from Jean Monnet, of whom much more below, he ungrudgingly acknowledges De Gaulles claim to the grandeur he sought for France.) The very scale of the scholarship Anderson deploys leaves the reader intimidated, but also wondering how well these panoramas would survive scrutiny by a more expert eye. To take the case of the country surveyed that I know best (though not well), namely France it is very surprising that Anderson, in a detailed discussion of French political and intellectual culture, should barely mention Alain Badiou. One might stretch a point and say (though not very plausibly) that Badious stand against Frances dominant liberal consensus was less visible in 2004, when Andersons essay first appeared. But the 2009 update extensively discusses the presidency of the wretched Nicolas Sarkozy, the target of Badious great philippic, which was first excerpted in English in New Left Review and then published in translation by Verso, the two institutions over which Anderson has presided since the 1960s.4 Of course, any conceptualisation is necessarily selective, but the arbitrariness of this omission should alert one to the particular subjectivity involved in these surveys. The effect is to reinforce one of the political judgements informing the book, the political and ideological dominance of neoliberalism and the feebleness of challenges from the Left though Anderson concedes that the dual voltage of Frances deep

2.Anderson 2009, pp. xii, xiiiii; Anderson 1992, p. 5. 3.Anderson 2009, p. 425. 4.Badiou 2008.

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political culture, with its characteristically sudden switches from conformity to insurgency and back again, is not yet over.5 The driving forces of European construction But what of Europe itself? In a telling phrase Anderson describes the EU as [l]arger now than the Roman Empire of two thousand years ago, more opaque than the Byzantine.6 He is contemptuous of Brusselss complacent self-image as a normative power, the pleasant and acceptable face of liberal capitalism in contrast to Americas arrogance of hard power. An essay first published in 2007 represents an intervention in that short-lived conjuncture between the invasion of Iraq and the outbreak of the global economic and financial crisis when this rhetoric seemed less implausible than it does now. A good sample is provided in a response by the Princeton academic Andrew Moravcsik: the old continent strikes the most admirable balance to be found in todays world superior to the US, Japan, Russia or China among the three fundamental elements of modern democracy: market economics, social democracy and multilateral institutions.7 Anderson excoriates an apparently illimitable narcissism, in which the reflection in the water transfigures the future of the planet into the image of the beholder.8 To one professionally involved in European Studies, the disdain that he displays towards the EUs nauseating self-flattery is very refreshing. (At a panel at the London School of Economics not long ago, I was surprised to find myself being denounced by two well-known intellectuals, one of Blairite, the other of Marxist provenance, for having made what I thought was the uncontroversial factual observation that the EU was having a bad crisis.) But demolishing the European ideology does not render the EU intelligible. Anderson takes two lines of attack, tracing the history of European integration and scrutinising the theories that have been offered to explain it. Reading the essay devoted to the latter (first published in this book), one feels some sympathy for Anderson. After exploring the intellectual refinements offered by Antonio Gramsci, Edward Thompson, and Fredric Jameson, it is a bit of a comedown to have to wade through the thoughts of Moravcsik and the like. Anderson nevertheless dutifully soldiers on, noting the predominance
5.Anderson 2009, p. 213. 6.Anderson 2009, p. 79. 7.Moravcsik 2007. 8.Anderson 2009, p. 49. Narcissus also decorates the dust jacket of The New Old World. See also Andersons more recent demolition of Jrgen Habermas, responsible for a new paroxysm of this narcissism: Anderson 2012e (heavily overlapping with Anderson 2012a).

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of American scholars in the field, and gratefully hailing those works that in style or content rise above the longeurs of anglophone political science. But it is hard not to feel that there is less here than meets the eye, in part at least for principled reasons. Challenging Moravcsiks repeated assertion that the primary motivation in the construction of todays Union has been just the commercial interests of the contracting partners, Anderson does not simply insist on the role played by geopolitics and ideology in the process of European integration (a point to which I return below), but stresses the contribution by unintended consequences to explaining the EUs extraordinary institutional complexity: the edifice was entirely unprecedented, the architects never at one, the design ever more complex, the process extended far beyond the span of any government. How could it be otherwise than a minefield of misreckonings?9 As Anderson also notes, most of history is a web of unintended effects.10 This suggests that the more fruitful path towards understanding the EU is the historical one. The earliest essay in the book takes this approach, a masterly analysis of the origins of the EU starting from Alan Milwards The European Rescue of the Nation State. Anderson rightly praises this great study, which, together with its predecessor The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 194551, portrays the process of European integration as driven by national interests and in particular by the efforts of the six founding states to re-establish their sovereignty on a more secure basis by building an institutional framework for the growing manufacturing trade between them, thereby allowing Keynesian demand management and comprehensive welfare provision to flourish.11 But, despite his admiration for Milward (to whom The New Old World is dedicated), Anderson criticises his tendency to discount the role of traditional geopolitical motivations. He offers this pellucid synopsis of the formation of the European Economic Community (EEC):
There were at least four principal forces behind the process of integration. Although these overlapped, their core concerns were quite distinct. The central aim of the federalist circle round Monnet was to create a European order that would be immune to the catastrophic nationalist wars that had twice devastated the Continent, in 191418 and 193945. The basic objective of the United States was to create a strong West European bulwark against the Soviet Union, as a means to victory in the Cold War. The key French goal was to tie Germany down in a strategic compact leaving Paris primus inter pares west of the Elbe. The major

9.Anderson 2009, pp. 85, 88. 10.Anderson 2009, p. 88. 11. Anderson 2009, p. 5. See Milward 1984 and 1992.

A. Callinicos / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 159176 German concern was to return to the rank of an established power and keep open the prospect of reunification. What held these different programmes together was here Milward is, of course, entirely right the common interest of all parties in securing the economic stability and prosperity of Western Europe, as a condition of achieving each of these goals.12

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Anderson too is right about the specific state interests of the US, France, and Germany in European construction indeed, as he concedes, the detail of Milwards own accounts (perhaps particularly that of the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community [ECSC] in 19501) supports such an interpretation.13 But what is most distinctive to Andersons version is the emphasis he places on the role played by Jean Monnet. Here I think we find the key to an enigmatic passage in the Foreword to The Old New World, where he rejects Euroscepticism, even from the Left: The Union of the early twentyfirst century is not the Community of the fifties or sixties, but my admiration for its original architects remains undiminished. Their enterprise had no historical precedent, and its grandeur continues to haunt what it has since become.14 Theoretical elisions It is worth pausing to situate this appraisal in Andersons own intellectual and political development. New Left Review long stood out from the rest of the British Left in its sympathy for the European project. In the autumn of 1972, soon after the government of Edward Heath had been defeated by the National Union of Mineworkers and forced by a wave of unofficial strikes to release five rankand-file dockers leaders from prison, NLR (then edited by Anderson) devoted an entire issue to The Left against Europe?, a polemic by Tom Nairn directed at the opposition by the bulk of the British Left to Britains then-imminent entry to the EEC. This combined a justified critique of the dominant forces the Communist Party and the Labour Left for conducting what the editorial Themes called a social patriotic crusade to defend the sovereignty of the Great British nation state against the Brussels bureaucrats with a theoretical argument for the historically progressive character of European integration. To quote from Themes again,

12.Anderson 2009, pp. 201. 13.Milward 1984, Chapters IV and XII. For my own brief account, see Callinicos 2009, pp. 1704. 14.Anderson 2009, p. xv.

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A. Callinicos / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 159176 the development of capitalism in Europe is leaving behind the political form of the nation state with its accompanying ideology and is creating a situation in which proletarian internationalism defined, of course, by no means of course exclusively in European terms can and must become an integral part of the class struggle in a new and immediate sense. To ignore this development is not only to become the prisoner of the most backward and reactionary bourgeois traditions but is also to miss the tremendous opportunities which capitalist development opens up for the revolutionary movement. The emergence of the multinational state is an even more momentous occurrence than the rise of the multinational corporation...Seen in this light the question of British membership of the EEC ceases to be either an isolated issue which does not pose problems of a general theoretical-political nature, or a simple distraction from the eternal verities of an abstract Marxism.15

Writing the year before, another British Marxist, Chris Harman, argued that the EEC did not represent the transcendence of national antagonisms: We face a long period of hard bargaining between rival, national capitalisms, in which national ideologies will remain of key importance to the ruling classes and in which political and social struggles will by and large remain nationally based.16 Over the long term, Harmans judgement has proved much more accurate than that of the NLR team: I explore some of the reasons shortly. More immediately, the problem with their position at the time was political: despite the nationalism of the reformist Left, entry into the EEC formed part of a political project of reorienting and modernising British capitalism that required breaking the robust rank-and-file militancy represented by groups such as the miners and the dockers. NLRs analysis failed to engage with this reality.17 After Heaths humiliating failure, Margaret Thatcher returned to the offensive a decade later, and succeeded in decisively crushing this militancy.
15.Anonymous 1972, pp. 2, 3. Nairns much more differentiated analysis of the attitude of British capital towards entry into the EEC makes some shrewd points about the Citys ability to benefit from membership that have been amply confirmed by Britains scooping up of around 40 per cent of euro trading despite staying out of Economic and Monetary Union (a success that is now a matter of some dispute between Britain and France as the eurozone pursues a much higher degree of integration): Nairn 1972, pp. 1328. 16.Harman 1971. 17.Nairns extensive critique of the British revolutionary Left, which generally opposed EEC entry, is unusual for NLR even then in the attention it devotes to the opinions of the organised Left, but it completely fails to confront this problem: Nairn 1972, pp. 94114. His main theoretical argument ironically, in the light of his later development seems to be that nationalism is a Bad Thing, and, moreover, a declining asset: Nairn 1972, p. 118. One can, however, see the kernel of his subsequent espousal of (some) nationalisms when he writes that in the nineteenth century marxism, as a truly and concretely inter-national set of ideas, was gradually forced to adapt to the world of nations and nationalisms: Nairn 1972, p. 105. This thought is greatly developed in Nairn 1975.

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In the resulting climate of defeat, the mainstream Left gravitated towards the EU as a bulwark against the full blast of neoliberalism. In effect, they moved towards Anderson (the continuity in his stance is signalled when he writes that his admiration for the Communitys founding fathers remains undiminished); at the same time, whatever (probably never very robust) hopes he might have had in the combativity of the British working class dashed, Anderson came to share some of the reformist Lefts hopes in the EUs progressive potential. Only what he called in a 1991 essay The Light of Europe illuminated a British landscape darkened by Thatcherism, where economic, social, and political reforms had to be pursued at a Community-wide level.18 But, whereas NLRs original support for British entry into the EEC was couched in strenuously Marxist language, Andersons theoretical and political commitments are now expressed far more elliptically. To some degree this is a consequence of his preference in the past couple of decades for the essay form. Where once Anderson wrote broad theoretical and historical surveys, anatomised the work of major Marxist figures such as Gramsci and Thompson, or attempted a multi-volume genealogy of the capitalist state, now he prefers to focus on a particular book, sometimes an author, occasionally a specific national episode or theme. The results are often superb, as I have noted in the case of this collection. But, of its nature, the essay is less suited to stating and defending the theoretical assumptions that inform its writing. The problem is compounded in this case by Andersons tendency to keep the Marxism that continues to dominate his intellectual horizons at arms length. Thus, in his survey of theories of European integration, aside from a brief nod to the Amsterdam school, he largely ignores Marxist scholarship. In a much more recent text on the eurozone crisis he does partially correct this, declaring that
it is a result of the intersection of two independent fatalities. The first is the general implosion of the fictive capital with which markets throughout the developed world were kept going in the long cycle of financialization that began in the 1980s, as profitability in the real economy contracted under the pressure of international competition, and rates of growth fell decade by decade. The mechanisms of this deceleration, internal to the workings of capital itself, have been set out in detail by the historian Robert Brenner in his history of advanced capitalism since the war.19

The other fatality is the evolution of European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) itself, of which more below. In invoking Brenner, Anderson situates the
18.Anderson 1992, Chapter 6. 19.Anderson 2012e. See Brenner 2006.

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current EU debacle within the wider framework of Marxist political economy. But this takes a peculiar form, since Andersons endorsement of Brenners analysis of the long downturn of advanced capitalism since the 1970s not uncritical, but sometimes extravagant, as when he declares: it is plain that here, as in no other body of work today, Marxs enterprise has found a successor seems to be taken as a licence to ignore all other Marxist writing on contemporary capitalism.20 This is doubly problematic: in the first place, Brenners analysis rests on an idiosyncratic version of Marxist crisis theory that proved highly controversial. Anderson grandly dismisses the debate Brenner provoked as a mere bombardment of rejoinders in small journals of the Left (notably this one), but, had he paid more attention, he might have avoided committing the howler that [m]oney was essentially ignored...in Marxs system.21 Not only does this sail past Marxs evident and continuous preoccupation with theories of money and banking in all his successive economic manuscripts, but it goes against the main direction of contemporary scholarship on Capital, summed up by Fred Moseley thus: Volume I presents mainly a macroeconomic theory, and the main macroeconomic variable determined is the total money profit for the economy as a whole; Volume I is all about money. The main variables which are determined in Volume I are monetary variables.22 Andersons solecism is more than formal: the relationship between the longterm tendencies of capital accumulation (among which Marx placed the falling rate of profit) and the process of financialisation in the neoliberal era is at the centre of contemporary Marxist discussion of the present crisis. Brenners take on this relationship in The Boom and the Bubble is one of the most important contributions to this debate, and is indeed (in my view) broadly correct, but his initial neglect of finance, for which Anderson (like many of the Marxist political economists he ignores) taxes Brenner, is most likely a consequence of his misguided attempt to formulate an analysis of capital accumulation that does not rely on Marxian value theory.23
20.Anderson 2005, p. 258; see Chapter 12 for Andersons appraisal of Brenner as historian and political economist. 21. Anderson 2005, pp. 272, 261. The main debate on Brenners original statement of his interpretation of postwar capitalist development Brenner 1998 appeared in Historical Materialism, 4 and 5. 22.Moseley 2004, pp. 147, 154. The scale of Andersons error about Marx and money can be elicited from de Brunhoff 1976, Itoh and Lapavitsas 1999, and Moseley (ed.) 2005. Thus, for example, Riccardo Bellofiore, while differing with the detail of Moseleys argument, agrees that Marxs originality lies in his monetary labour theory of value: Bellofiore 2004, p. 174. 23.Among the very first, and perhaps the most powerful of the Marxist critiques of Brenners explanation of the long downturn homes in on his avoidance of value theory and neglect

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Secondly, Marxist political economy has directed its gaze towards the dynamics of European integration. Guglielmo Carchedi in particular has developed a rigorously value-theoretical analysis of EMU that builds on his own attempt to develop the analytical foundations of Marxist political economy.24 European integration as portrayed by Carchedi is very different from the process of international levelling up implied by NLRs optimistic projection of the emergence of a multinational state. International competition in advanced capitalism tends to take the form of a struggle between oligopolistic companies to keep ahead of one another through technological innovation. Those capitals that are successful in technological competition appropriate value from their weaker rivals, thereby helping to provide themselves with the resources to maintain their advantage:
in Marxs theory the exchange of unequal quantities of labour is related to the innermost dynamics of the capitalist system; it is the reward for the capitalists (and branches) which increase the productivity by introducing the more efficient (and capital-intensive) techniques. Unequal exchange is inherent in the formation of the price of production and is a redistribution of value at the moment of exchange according to the differences in organic composition of capitals and thus to the constant technological revolutions undergone by the capitalist production processes.25

Translated into the realm of nation states, this implies a polarisation between imperialist countries that are able to compete technologically and dominated countries that must strive to maintain their position by minimising labour costs and thereby forcing up the rate of exploitation. The EU collectively occupies an imperialist position with respect to the rest of the world, but is internally bisected by a similar tension between dominant and dominated. First the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) introduced in 1979 and then the full-scale EMU that followed twenty years later served the interests of the strongest national capitalism, Germany, whose superiority in technological competition was favoured directly by fixed exchange rates and indirectly by the inability of the weaker economies under these regimes to improve their competitiveness through devaluation and inflation; their only way of maintaining their position, by cutting labour costs, facilitated attacks on wages in Germany itself. Finally,
of finance: Fine, Lapavitsas and Milonakis 1999. For my own overview of the debate about accumulation and finance, with many references, see Callinicos 2010a, Chapter 1. See also Brenner 2002 and Harman 2009. 24.Carchedi 2001, building on the theoretical foundations laid in Carchedi 1991. Other Marxist critiques of EMU include Callinicos 1997 and Bonefeld (ed.) 2001. 25.Carchedi 1991, p. 288.

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the euro offered German capitalism a much more plausible candidate than the Deutsche Mark for a form of world money capable of challenging the dollar as a reserve currency.26 Some of Carchedis predictions require closer scrutiny. Costas Lapavitsas and his collaborators in Research on Money and Finance (RMF) sum up the impact on relative competitiveness of the first decade of the euro thus:
In peripheral countries real compensation has increased in some countries, though productivity has increased even faster. Nonetheless, productivity did not rise fast enough to ensure catching up with the more advanced economies of the core. In Germany, on the other hand, productivity, real compensation, and nominal unit labour costs have increased very slowly. It cannot be overstressed that gains in German competitiveness have nothing to do with investment, technology, and efficiency. The competitive advantage of German exporters has derived from the high exchange rates at which peripheral countries entered the eurozone and, more significantly, from the harsh squeeze on German workers. Hence Germany has been able to dominate trade and capital flows within the eurozone. This has contributed directly to the current crisis.27

This is a somewhat different picture from the relentless technological advantage of the leading countries portrayed by Carchedi: it is Germany rather than the southern European countries that has kept ahead by squeezing labour. Nevertheless, one of his most important themes (which dovetails with Harmans earlier predictions) that international integration under capitalism perpetuates rather than undermines uneven development is strongly confirmed by the outcome, as is his insistence on seeing EMU as a regime regulating inter-capitalist competition that benefits the strongest state.28 Anderson, as we shall see, has empirically reached a similar conclusion to Carchedi, but his analysis would have been strengthened by a more consistent engagement with Marxist political economy.

26.Carchedi 2001, especially Chapters 3 and 4; see also Carchedi 1991, Chapter 7. Harold Jamess history of the origins of EMU is deeply impregnated with neoclassical orthodoxy and tends to discount the role of geopolitics, but he documents how the negotiations leading up to EMU, reinforced by the crisis of the ERM in 19923, converged on a single currency dominated by a European Central Bank modelled on the Bundesbank as the politically independent guarantor of Germanys strong currency/high export regime: James 2012, Chapters 79. 27.Lapavitsas, Kaltenbrunner, Lambrinidis, Lindo, Meadway, Michell, Painceira, Pires, Powell, Stenfors, Teles and Vakiotis 2012, p. 28. 28.For an argument that uneven development plays a constitutive role in maintaining a system of plural nation-states, see Callinicos 2007.

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The problem may partly be that he believes that his arguments should be directed rightwards, towards the defenders of neoliberal orthodoxy and its centre-left shadows. Thus Andersons most recent texts on Europe target Habermas and the like; the effect is to ignore, not merely the Marxist analyses of EMU and the eurozone crisis offered by, respectively, Carchedi and RMF, but also the programmatic alternative to austerity debt default, exit from the euro, nationalisation of the banks, capital controls, and public investment powerfully advocated by Lapavitsas and his colleagues. Rightly or wrongly, these measures have attracted much criticism from elsewhere on the radical Left, and have been shunned by Syriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left in Greece, but any diagnosis of the EUs condition that does not atleast consider what alternative the Left should offer to the current debacle is thereby weakened.29 The fading light of Europe In the absence of a more robust theoretical framework, we are left to trace Andersons views through the particularities of his analysis. Take, then, his portrait of Monnet the third of an elitist legislator, alongside those of De Gaulle and Kemal, that punctuates The New Old World. The picture Anderson paints is indeed fascinating of a Malrauxian figure, a deracinated financial projector, adrift from any stable social forces or national frontiers, politically indifferent and thus freed...to act so inventively beyond the assumptions of the inter-state system. Anderson acknowledges that Monnets decisive advantage, as a political operator across national boundaries in Europe, was the closeness of the association he formed with the US political lite...during his years in New York and Washington in the 1930s and 1940s. But he insists that Monnet had an original agenda of his own, which was diagonal to US intentions.30 Let us accept that Monnet was a sincere European federalist who played the hand history had dealt him very well. But what does this tell us about the structural logic and political meaning of European construction? In a key passage in his critique of Moravsciks liberal inter-governmentalism Anderson writes:
29.Andersons most recent texts on Europe are Anderson 2012a and 2012e; RMFs alternative programme can be found in Lapavitsas, Kaltenbrunner, Lambrinidis, Lindo, Meadway, Michell, Painceira, Pires, Powell, Stenfors, Teles and Vakiotis 2012. It is discussed sympathetically in Callinicos 2010b and Kouvelakis 2011. 30.Anderson 2009, pp. 15, 14, 15. Anderson draws here on Duchne 1994.

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A. Callinicos / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 159176 What such a conception ignores, of course, is the critical fact that the institutional origins of the European Community were deliberately framed in dynamic, openended terms that is, unlike other forms of international agreement, they were declared to be stepping stones in view of an ultimate objective whose exact shape was left unspecified. In the famous formula which has haunted Eurosceptics ever since, the first words of the Treaty of Rome spoke of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe...No stable equilibrium was aimed at by the first Coal and Steel Community, or the Common Market that followed it. On the contrary, what they set in motion was an unstable process, potentially concatenating towards a long-term end. This structure was inconceivable without the shaping role of the federalist not inter-governmentalist vision of Jean Monnet and his contemporaries. The history of the EC is inexplicable without the impetus to instability genetically engineered into it from the start.31

George Ball, a pillar of the East Coast establishment who worked for Monnet in the 1940s and early 1950s, describes this logic at work in the foundation of the ECSC:
All of us working with Monnet well understood how irrational it was to carve a limited economic sector out of the jurisdiction of national governments and subject that sector to the sovereign control of supranational institutions. Yet, with his usual perspicacity, Monnet recognized that the very irrationality of this scheme might provide the pressure to achieve exactly what he wanted the triggering of a chain reaction. The awkwardness and complexity resulting from the singling out of coal and steel would drive member governments to accept the idea of pooling other production as well.32

This returns us to the problem of unintended consequences. Granted that the foundation of the European Community involved a federalist political project crafted by Monnet and his allies, has what Sartre would call the practicoinert of the actually-existing EU fulfilled or foiled that project? Here surely the crucial development has been the Treaty of Maastricht of 1991, which created an Economic and Monetary Union combining a single currency and a democratically unaccountable European Central Bank (ECB) but excluding political union. Writing in the mid-1990s, Anderson was ambivalent about this. He excavated an old essay of Hayeks arguing that an essentially liberal economic regime is a necessary condition for the success of any interstate federation because the peoples included in such a federation would lack the coherence required to impose their control on the economy.33 Harold Jamess
31. Anderson 2009, p. 86. 32.George W. Ball, Foreword to Duchne 1994, pp. 1011. See also Duchne 1994, pp. 3738, on Monnets political method. 33.Hayek 1949, p. 269; see Anderson 1996b, reprinted in Anderson 2009.

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new history of the origins of EMU, drawing heavily on the archives of the ECB and its forerunners, has confirmed the projects Hayekian inspiration as an attempt to wrest the creation of money away from the control of nation states liable to tack with the winds of popular opinion. As Otmar Issing, the ECBs first chief economist put it, many strands in Hayeks thinking...may have influenced the course of the events leading to Monetary Union in subtle ways. What has happened with the introduction of the euro has indeed achieved the denationalisation of money, as advocated by Hayek.34 But Anderson also expressed the hope that Monnets strategy [of]... incremental totalization, en route to a hitherto unexampled objective a democratic supranational federation might still be at work:
Confronted with the drastic consequences of dismantling previous social controls on economic transactions at the national level, would there not soon or even beforehand be overwhelming pressure to reinstitute them at supranational level to avoid an otherwise seemingly inevitable polarization of regions and classes within the Union? That is, to create a European political authority capable of re-regulating what the single currency and single-minded bank have deregulated? Could this have been the hidden gamble of Jacques Delors, author of the Plan for monetary union, yet a politician whose whole previous career suggests commitment to a Catholic version of social-democratic values, and suspicion of economic liberalism?35

In the event, there certainly was no shift to Keynesian federalism. But, since the outbreak of the crisis in 2007, there have been some further moves in a more Hayekian direction. The financial crash of 2008 and its aftermath exposed the extent to which national governments continue to direct economic policy. In Autumn 2008 they rushed chaotically to prop up their individual banking systems, often in the process covering up the massive losses the banks had made on their speculative bets during the bubble of the mid-2000s. The subsequent detonation of some (though by no means all) of these mines substantially
34.James 2012, p. 6. 35.Anderson 2009, pp. 24, 31. The wording of the last passage differs slightly, but not significantly, from the original article: Anderson 1996b. Andersons prognosis corresponds to the expectations of Monnet, who wrote in 1958: the current Communities should be completed by a Finance Common Market which would lead us to European economic unity. Only then would...the mutual Communities make it fairly easy to produce the political union which is the goal; quoted in Duchne 1994, p. 312. Though as French Minister of Finance Delors orchestrated the Mitterrand presidencys neoliberal turn in 1983, Andersons interpretation of his motives receives some corroboration from an anecdote of Samir Amins (told during a talk at Marxism 2012 in London, 6 July 2012). When Amin said to Delors that you did not have to be a Marxist to see that a monetary union could not work without a state, he replied that this very weakness would push the EU onto the path of greater political integration.

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contributed to the present eurozone crisis. This in turn revealed the structural flaws of EMU. First, as many critics noted at the time of Maastricht, this was a monetary union that lacked the underpinning of the fiscal powers of a state, and the capabilities for economic extraction and redistribution that these imply: it was the ability of nation states to spend, borrow, and tax that became of central importance in the response to the crash, explaining why Berlin, London, and Paris, and not Brussels, called the shots at this decisive juncture. Secondly, a decade of monetary union had, as we have already seen, merely accentuated the divergences between the participating economies, and in particular between Germany, which succeeded through brutally squeezing labour costs in maintaining its position as a world leader in exports despite the growing challenge from China, and all the other members of the eurozone.36 Writing in 2007, Anderson was prescient about the vulnerability of EMU to a collapse of the American housing bubble, and noted the remarkable wage repression on which German recovery has been based. He registered the exposed position of the Mediterranean economies, locked into a currency union with the German colossus, and perceptively warned: Harsher forms of German power, pulsing through the market, rather than through the high command or the central bank, may lie in store. It is too soon to write off a regional Grossmacht.37 In fact, what has caught the eurozones peripheral economies more directly in a vice has been the combination of financial markets seeking out and targeting the vulnerable and the dubious mercies of rescues mounted by the troika of the European Commission, the ECB, and the IMF, an eminently Hayekian trio but governed by an agenda drafted in Berlin. The institutional changes sought by Germany to impose fiscal discipline on the weaker states (and force bondholders to share in the costs of future rescues) represent precisely an attempt to remedy the defects of EMU without moving towards the democratic supranational federation of Monnets dreams (a step in any case forbidden by the German Constitutional Court, which ruled that the Lisbon Treaty marked the nec plus ultra of European integration). The realities of power in the contemporary EU were summed up by the conclusion to a recent report in the Financial Times of a tortuously negotiated agreement on European banking supervision: The package will still require approval from the EU parliament and the German Bundestag, a process that could take several months.38 The views of any other national parliament than
36.See Callinicos 2010a, pp. 96104, on the EUs chaotic response to the crash, and, on the eurozone crisis, Georgiou 2010 and Lapavitsas, Kaltenbrunner, Lambrinidis, Lindo, Meadway, Michell, Painceira, Pires, Powell, Stenfors, Teles and Vakiotis 2012. 37.Anderson 2009, p. 52. 38.Barker 2012.

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Berlins apparently do not count. Anderson himself suggests that the hour of a new European hegemon has arrived, in the shape of Germany under Angela Merkel.39 The multinational state envisaged by NLR in 1972 seems as distant as ever. What is it, beyond the diverging national interests that have been so strongly asserted in the eurozone crisis and that, if Harman and Carchedi are right, are built into the European project, that keeps the EU marooned as a bastard hybrid of federalism and inter-governmentalism? Andersons explanation is essentially that the process of European construction was ambushed by the advent of neoliberalism, which has blocked the extension of national economic regulation to the supranational level and drained popular participation out of the already limited form of democracy compatible with capitalism. There is undoubtedly something to this. The key moves towards greater integration in recent decades the Single European Act of 1985 and EMU have acted as motors of deregulation, privatisation, and retrenchment. But there is surely a more fundamental problem, namely that any decisive move towards a federal Europe would require a significant degree of democratic consent. Anderson is scathing about [t]he contempt for elementary principles of democracy shown by the elites of the Council and Commission, and their subordinates, not to speak of an army of obedient publicists in the media, that was expressed most notably in their refusal to accept negative referendum results in France, the Netherlands, and Ireland.40 Interestingly it is his condemnation of the EUs profoundly undemocratic character that arouses the ire of Moravcsik, who accuses him of nave populism (surely the first time that such a charge has been laid at Andersons door).41 But, as Anderson himself notes, contempt for democracy has been inherent in the European project from the start:
Monnet was a stranger to the democratic process, as conventionally understood. He never faced a crowd or ran for office. Shunning any direct contact with electorates, he worked among lites only...Monnets career was emblematic, in a particularly pure way, of the predominant character of the process that has led to the Union we have today. At no point until ostensibly the British referendum of 1976 [sic] was there any real popular participation in the movement towards European unity.42

39.Anderson 2012a, p. 58. 40.Anderson 2009, p. 540. 41. Moravcsik 2007. 42.Anderson 2009, p. 16. Oddly, while other minor errors have been left standing (thus the great Genoa protests against the G8 summit were in July, and not, as Anderson says, May 2001:

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Anderson argues that Monnets idiosyncratic conception of political advance as if the ambitions of Napoleon were married to the methods of Taaffe was peculiarly vulnerable to the fatality of unintended consequences.43 But the problem lies deeper. Milward is right that the formation of the EEC reinvigorated European nation-states through the economic and social benefits that it helped secure, benefits that have (thus far) more or less survived into the neoliberal era. This has reinforced the status of the nation-state as the main bearer of democratic legitimacy in capitalist society. Hence any definitive supplanting of the nation-state as the chief centre of political power in Europe which the crisis demonstrates has yet to take place cannot be achieved behind the backs of the peoples of the Europe. The extension of Monnets process of incremental totalisation has no doubt helped to habituate Europeans to the idea of belonging to the same political entity (ease of travel to and of work and study in other EU member states is probably the most important factor here). But it is hard to see how the move to a genuinely federal union could take place without the emergence of some kind of European constituent power with sufficient democratic authority to inaugurate a new state. The main obstacle to this happening is less the lack of a European demos lamented in the academic and official literatures (the boundaries between the two are blurred) than that the very character of the actually-existing EU opaque, neoliberal, elitist encourages popular rebounds back to the nation-state that remains the main centre of both power and authority in Europe. The European ruling classes seem structurally incapable of escaping from this bind. Any way out is therefore likely to depend on the future of genuine popular movements in Europe. Anderson is characteristically pessimistic here, believing that the decline of working-class politics has left the door open to regressive anti-immigrant populism fuelled by Islamophobia. While dismissing the American neoconservative Christopher Caldwells wilder fantasies about the supposed menace represented by Europes Muslims, he agrees with him that postwar immigration was the counter-finality of the years that saw the building of the Union, a process not of integration, but of disintegration.44 The implication is that a fragmented, disaffiliated population is most likely to provide reactionary rather than progressive projects with their base. The counter-examples to this prognosis mainly consist in the very uneven social resistance to the Europe-wide drive to austerity, with an as yet indeterminate
Anderson 2009, p. 307), the original version of this essay (Anderson 1996a) correctly places the British referendum in 1975. 43.Anderson 2009, p. 25. For aficionados of far left micro-politics, Anderson refers here not to the main leader of the Socialist Party of England and Wales, but to the nineteenth century AustroHungarian statesman Count Eduard Taaffe. 44.Anderson 2009, p. 534; compare Caldwell 2009.

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outcome. The intense and polarised character of the struggle in Greece, in agony thanks to the cruelty of the measures imposed by the troika, are beginning to find echoes at the other end of the Mediterranean, in Portugal and Spain, as the southern European general strike of 14 November 2012 bore witness. In any case, without a decisive intervention from below, a paralysed Europe is likely to drift on amid increasingly stormy seas. References
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