The Genesis of the Crisis
With the superior knowledge of a historian surveying the past, Wolfgang Streeck begins his account of the progress of the crisis with a sketch of the welfare state regime constructed in postwar Europe up to the beginning of the 1970s.[2] There followed the phases of the implementation of the neoliberal reforms that improved the conditions for the utilization of capital without regard for social costs and in the process tacitly inverted the meaning of the term “reform.” The reforms relaxed the corporatist negotiation constraints and deregulated the markets—not just the labor markets but also the markets for goods and services, and above all the capital markets: “The capital markets were simultaneously transformed into markets for corporate control that elevated the increase in shareholder value into the supreme maxim of good corporate governance” (57f.).
Wolfgang Streeck describes this turn, which began with Reagan and Thatcher, as the liberating blow of the owners of capital and their managers against a democratic state that restricted corporate profit margins in the name of social justice but, from the investors’ perspective, had strangled economic growth and thus had harmed the well-understood common good. The empirical substance of the study consists in a longitudinal comparison of relevant countries over the past four decades. For all of the differences between the national economies in detail, the picture that emerges is that the general progress of the crisis has been astoundingly uniform. The rising rates of inflation of the 1970s were replaced by an increase in public and private household debt. At the same time, there was an increase in unequal income distribution while public revenues decreased relative to public expenditures. With growing social inequality, this development led to a transformation of the tax-based state: “The democratic state that is governed by its citizens and, as a tax-based state, is funded by them becomes a democratic debtor state once its subsistence no longer depends exclusively on the contributions of its citizens but also to a considerable extent on its creditors” (119).
The constraints placed by “the markets” on the state’s political decision-making power can be observed in a perverse way in the European Monetary Union. Here the transformation of the tax-based state into a debtor state forms the backdrop for the vicious circle formed by the rescue of ailing banks by states, which are in turn being driven to ruin by these same banks—with the result that the reigning financial regime is subjecting their populations to supervision. What this means for democracy could be observed under a microscope during the summit in Cannes at which Prime Minister Papandreou of Greece was forced by his backslapping colleagues to call off a planned referendum.[3] Wolfgang Streeck is to be commended for demonstrating that the “debtor state policy” being pursued by the European Council since 2008 at the urging of the German government is essentially a continuation of the capital-friendly policy model that led to the crisis in the first place.
Under the special conditions of the European Monetary Union, the policy of budgetary consolidation subjects all member states, regardless of the differences in their levels of economic development, to the same rules and, in order to impose these rules, is concentrating rights of intervention and control at the European level. Without simultaneously strengthening the European Parliament, this concentration of competences in the Council and the Commission reinforces the uncoupling of the national public arenas and parliaments from the aloof, technocratically self-propelling concert of governments in bondage to the markets. Wolfgang Streeck fears that pushing through executive federalism in this way will lend the exercise of political authority in Europe an entirely new quality: “The consolidation of the European public finances being undertaken in response to the fiscal crisis amounts to a reorganization of the European state system by financial investors and the European Union—a reconstitution of capitalist democracy in Europe in the sense of a solidification of the results of three decades of economic liberalization” (164).
This pointed interpretation of the reforms currently being carried out captures an alarming trend that will probably even prevail even though it marks the end of the historical connection between democracy and capitalism. The gates of the European Monetary Union are being guarded by a British premier for whom the welfare state cannot be wound up fast enough through neoliberal policies and who, as the true heir of Margaret Thatcher, cheerfully goads a willing German Chancellor into wielding the whip within the circle of her colleagues: “We want a Europe that wakes up to this modern world of competition and flexibility.”[4]
There are two alternatives—at the negotiation table—to this crisis policy: either the defensive option of winding down of the euro, for which purpose a new party has just been founded in Germany (i.e. the “Alternative für Deutschland” or “Alternative for Germany”), or the offensive option of extending the monetary union into a supranational democracy. Given corresponding political majorities, the latter could provide the institutional platform for reversing the neoliberal trend.
The Nostalgic Option
Unsurprisingly, Wolfgang Streeck opts for reversing the trend toward de-democratization. This means “constructing institutions through which markets could once again be brought under control: markets for work that leave room for social life, markets for consumer goods that do not destroy nature, markets for credit that do not become the large-scale production of irredeemable promises” (237). But the concrete conclusion he draws from this diagnosis is all the more surprising. It is not that a Union stuck in midstream should be extended in a democratic way in order to bring the relationship between politics and the market that has been thrown out of joint back into an equilibrium that is compatible with democracy. Instead of expansion, Wolfgang Streeck recommends dismantling. He favors a return to the defensive constellation of nation states of the 1960s and 1970s in order “to defend and restore as far as possible what remains of those political institutions that could perhaps help up to modify and replace market justice with social justice” (236).
This nostalgic preference for sequestering ourselves within the sovereign but overwhelmed and impotent nation is surprising when we consider the epoque-making transformation undergone by nation states—namely, from states that still exercised control over their territorial markets into disempowered co-players who are themselves embedded in globalized markets. The need for political governance to which a highly interdependent world society is giving rise today is at best being cushioned by an increasingly dense network of international organizations. But the asymmetrical relations of the much-vaunted “governance beyond the nation state” are far from a match for this problem. In view of the pressure being generated by the problems of a world society that is growing together at the systemic level but is remaining anarchic at the political level, the initial reaction to the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2008 was understandable. The aghast G-8 states hastened to include the BRIC states and a couple of other countries in their round of consultations. On the other hand, the fact that the resolutions taken at the first G-20 conference in London remained without consequences documents the defect that would only be exacerbated by restoring the breached national bastions—the political fragmentation of a world society that is nevertheless economically integrated would undermine the ability to cooperate.
Evidently, the political decision-making power of nation states that continue to guard their sovereignty jealously even though it has long since been hollowed out is not sufficient to escape the grip of the imperatives of a colossally bloated and dysfunctional banking sector. States that fail to unite to form supranational units and have to rely on international treaties alone fail when confronted with the political challenge of reconnecting this sector with the needs of the real economy and reducing it to the functionally required scale. The member states of the European Monetary Union are confronted in a special way with the task of bringing irreversibly globalized markets back within the ambit of indirect but concerted political influence. Their crisis policy is in fact limited to extending an expertocracy for temporizing measures. Without the pressure exerted by the vital will-formation of a civil society mobilized across national borders, a self-propelling Brussels executive lacks the strength and the motivation to regulate untamed markets in socially sustainable ways.
Wolfgang Streeck is of course aware that “the power of the investors” is sustained “above all by the advanced stage reached by their international integration and by the existence of efficient global markets” (129). Looking back on the global victory march of deregulation policy, he emphasizes that he has to “leave it open whether and how nationally organized policy could even have succeeded in bringing developments such as these ones under control in an economy that has become increasingly international” (112). Because he repeatedly emphasizes the “organizational advance of globally integrated financial markets over nationally organized societies” (126), one might think that his own analysis forces one to conclude that the power of democratic legislation to regulate markets, which at one time was concentrated in the nation states, should be restored at the supranational level. In spite of this, he sounds the retreat behind the Maginot Line of national sovereignty.
However, at the end of the book he flirts with the aimless aggression of self-destructive forms of resistance that have abandoned all hope of a constructive solution.[5] This betrays a certain degree of skepticism concerning his own call to consolidate what remains of the national heritage. In the light of this resignation, his proposal for a “European Bretton Woods” looks like an afterthought. The profound pessimism in which the narrative ends raises the question of what his plausible diagnosis that capitalism and democracy are drifting apart means for the prospects of a change in policy. Does this betray a fundamental incompatibility of democracy and capitalism? In order to throw light on this question, we have to get clear on the theoretical background of the analysis.
Capitalism or Democracy?
The framework for the crisis narrative is an interaction involving three players: the state, which is funded by taxes and legitimized by votes; the economy, which has to cater for capitalist growth and a sufficient level of tax revenue; and, finally, the citizens who lend the state their political support only if it satisfies their interests in return. The theme is formed by the question of whether and, if so, how the state succeeds in striking a balance between the countervailing demands of the two sides along intelligent routes of crisis avoidance. On pain of suffering economic crises and crises of social cohesion, the state on the one hand has to satisfy profit expectations—hence it must fulfill the fiscal, legal, and infrastructural conditions for a profitable utilization of capital—and, on the other, it must ensure equal freedoms and redeem demands for social justice in the currency of fair income distribution and status security as well as of public services and the provision of collective goods. The content of the narrative is that the neoliberal strategy accords the satisfaction of the interest in utilizing capital priority in principle over demands for social justice and can “postpone” crises only at the cost of an increase in social unrest.[6]
Does the “postponement of the crisis of democratic capitalism” alluded to in the title of the book refer to whether the crisis occurs or only to the date of its occurrence? Because Wolfgang Streeck frames his scenario within a theory of action without relying on “laws” of the economic system (such as a “tendency of the rate of profit to fall”), the design of his account wisely does not imply any theoretically supported predictions. Within this framework, predictions about the further course that the crisis will take can follow only from assessments of historical conditions and contingent power constellations. Nevertheless, Wolfgang Streeck lends his account of the crisis tendencies a certain rhetorical air of inevitability by rejecting the conservative thesis of the “inflationary demands of mischievous masses” and situates the crisis dynamic exclusively on the side of capitalist commercial interests. Since the 1980s, the political initiative has in fact come from this side. But I cannot detect in this a sufficient reason for a defeatist abandonment of the European project.
I have more the impression that Wolfgang Streeck underestimates the ratchet effect not only of legally valid constitutional norms but also of the actually existing democratic complex—the persistence of the established institutions, rules, and practices embedded in political cultures. An example of this is provided by the mass protests in Lisbon and elsewhere that induced the Portuguese head of state to raise objections against the social scandal of the austerity policy of his fellow party members in government. As a result, the constitutional court declared parts of the corresponding international treaty between Portugal and the European Union and the International Monetary Fund to be invalid and led the government to reconsider implementing the “dictate of the markets” at least for a moment.
The Ackermannian shareholder expectations concerning returns on investments are no more facts of nature than the elitist notions nourished by an obliging press of a spoiled, internationally aloof managerial class who treat “their” politicians like incompetent servants. The handling of the Cyprus crisis when it was no longer a matter of rescuing each country’s own banks suddenly demonstrated that those who had caused the crisis could indeed be called to account instead of the taxpayers and that state budgets encumbered with debts could be brought back into line through increases in revenues just as much as through cuts in expenditures. However, only an institutional framework for joint European fiscal, economic, and social policy would realize a necessary presupposition for the possible elimination of the structural defect of a suboptimal monetary union. Only a common European effort, not the unreasonable abstract expectation that national competitiveness could be improved through each country’s own efforts, can promote progress toward the overdue modernization of outmoded economic structures and clientelistic administrative structures.
What would differentiate a democratic version of the European Union, which for obvious reasons would initially include only the members of the European Monetary Union, from a form of executive federalism in conformity with the markets are two innovations: first, joint political framework planning, corresponding transfer payments, and mutual liability of the member states; and, second, the revisions of the Lisbon treaties needed to democratically legitimize the corresponding competences, hence equal involvement by Parliament and Council in the lawmaking process and equal accountability of the Commission to both institutions. Then political decision-making would no longer depend only on dogged compromises between representatives of national interests who block each other but equally on majority decisions of the deputies elected according to party preferences. A generalization of interests across national borders can occur only in a European Parliament organized into parliamentary factions. Only in parliamentary procedures can a pan-European generalized We-perspective of the EU citizens solidify into institutionalized power. Such a change in perspective is necessary in order to replace the rule-bound coordination of pseudo-sovereign single state policies favored until now with common discretionary decision-making in the relevant policy fields. The unavoidable effects of short or medium-term redistribution can be legitimized only if national interests become aligned with the European general interest and also relativize themselves with respect to it.
Whether and how majorities can be achieved for a corresponding revision of primary law is a question, moreover a quite difficult one, to which I will return briefly later. But quite apart from whether a reform can be achieved under present-day circumstances, Wolfgang Streeck doubts whether the format of a supranational democracy even fits with the conditions in Europe. He doubts whether such a political system is viable and does not think that it is desirable either on account of its supposedly repressive character. But are the four reasons he cites in support of this also good reasons?[7]
Reasons against a Political Union
The first and comparatively strongest argument is directed against the effectiveness of regional economic programs given the historical heterogeneity of business cultures that must be taken as given even in core Europe. Policy within a monetary union must in fact be geared to balancing out, or at least containing, structural disparities in competitiveness between the national economies in the long run. As counter-examples, Wolfgang Streeck mentions the former GDR since the reunification and the Mezzogiorno. Without doubt, these two cases remind us of the chastening, medium-term timescale that always has to be reckoned with when it comes to promoting economic growth in backward regions through targeted programs. For the regulative problems that a European economic government will have to contend with, however, the two examples cited are too untypical to justify unreserved pessimism. The reconstruction of the East German economy involves the historically completely unprecedented problem of an “assimilating” system change, one not undertaken by the system itself but steered by West Germany elites, within a nation that was divided for four decades. The relatively large transfer payments seem to be having the desired success in the medium term.
The situation is different with the more stubborn problems posed by the economic stimulation of the economically and impoverished south of Italy, which exhibits socially and culturally premodern traits alien to the state and is politically debilitated by the Mafia. Because of its special historical background, this example is also not very informative for the anxious gaze being directed today by Northern Europe at certain southern European countries. For the problem of the division within Italy is interwoven with the long-term effects of the national unification of a country that had lived under alternating periods of foreign domination since the end of the Roman Empire. The historical roots of the present-day problem can be traced back to the failed Risorgimento that was conducted as a military campaign from Savoy and was experienced as usurpation by the South. The more or less unsuccessful efforts of postwar Italian governments were also situated within this context. As Streeck himself observes, these efforts became ensnared in the corrupt relations between the governing parties and local power structures. The political implementation of the development programs was thwarted by an administration susceptible to corruption and not by the resistance of a social and economic culture that derived its force from a form of life worthy of preservation. In the extensively legally codified European multilevel system, however, the bumpy administrative road from Rome to Calabria and Sicily can scarcely provide the pattern for the national implementation of programs originating in Brussels in whose realization sixteen other wary nations would be involved.
The second argument refers to the fragile social integration of “imperfect nation states” like Belgium and Spain. With his reference to the festering conflicts between Walloons and Flemings and between Catalonia and the central government in Madrid, Wolfgang Streeck draws attention to integration problems that, in view of regional diversity, are already difficult to master within a nation state—and how much more difficult would this be in a Greater Europe! Granted, the complex state-formation process did in fact leave behind lines of conflict between older and historically superseded formations. One need only think of the Bavarians who rejected the German Basic Law in 1949, of the peaceful separation of Slovakia from the Czech Republic, the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia, the separatism of the Basques, the Scots, the Northern League, and the like. But conflicts always arise along these historical fault lines when the most vulnerable sections of the population are caught up in economic crises or historical upheavals, become insecure, and process their fear of a loss of status by clinging to supposedly “natural” identities, whether it be “tribe,” region, language, or nation that promises to provide this supposedly natural basis of identity. The nationalism that was to be expected in the Central and Eastern European countries following the collapse of the Soviet Union is in this respect a social-psychological equivalent of the separatism observable in the “old” national states.
The supposedly “organic” character of these identities is equally fictive in both cases[8] and is not a historical fact from which an obstacle to integration could be deduced. Regression phenomena of this kind are symptoms of a failure of political and economic systems that no longer produce sufficient social security. The sociocultural diversity of the regions and nations is a valuable heritage that sets Europe apart from other continents, not a barrier that restricts Europe to a small-state mode of political integration.
The first two objections concern the viability and stability of a closer Political Union. With a third argument, Wolfgang Streeck also wants to question its desirability: A politically enforced assimilation of the economic cultures of the South to those of the North would also mean the leveling of the corresponding forms of life. One can indeed speak of an enforced homogenization of social conditions in the case of a “grafting on of a market liberal economic and social model” pushed through by technocrats. But in this regard in particular the difference between democratic decision-making processes and decision-making processes in conformity with the market must not be blurred. Democratically legitimized decisions at the European level concerning regional economic programs or country-specific measures to rationalize public administrations would also involve a standardization of social structures. But to expose all politically promoted modernization measures to the suspicion of enforced homogenization would be to turn family resemblances between economic systems and forms of life into a communitarian fetish. Besides, the diffusion of similar social infrastructures throughout the world that today is turning almost all societies into “modern” societies is triggering individualization processes and the replication of forms of life everywhere.[9]
No European “Volk”?
Finally, Wolfgang Streeck shares the assumption that the egalitarian ethos of constitutional democracy can be realized only on the basis of national solidarity, and thus within the territorial limits of a nation state, because otherwise minority cultures would inevitably be outvoted. Even aside from the extensive discussion of cultural rights, this assumption is arbitrary when viewed from a long-term perspective. Nation states already rest on the highly artificial form of solidarity among strangers that is generated by the legal status of citizen. Even in ethnically and linguistically homogeneous societies, national consciousness is not a natural phenomenon but an administratively promoted product of historiography, the media, universal conscription, and so forth. The national consciousness of heterogeneous immigrant societies demonstrates in an exemplary way that any population can assume the role of a “national state” capable of forming a common political will against the background of a shared political culture.
Because classical international law stands in a complementary relation to the modern state system, a similarly radical metamorphosis of the nation state is reflected in the decisive innovations in international law since the end of the Second World War. The room for maneuver of popular sovereignty has shrunk along with the actual substance of formally guaranteed state sovereignty. This is especially true of the European states that have transferred part of their sovereign rights to the European Union. Even though their governments still regard themselves as “sovereign subjects of treaties,” the qualification of the right to secede from the Union (introduced in the Lisbon Treaty) already betrays a restriction of their sovereignty. This is becoming a fiction in any case on account of the functionally grounded priority of European law, because the intermeshing of the national legal systems at the horizontal level is progressing ever further as legislation enacted at the European level is implemented. This makes the question of the sufficient democratic legitimization of this lawmaking all the more urgent.
Wolfgang Streeck is wary of the “unitarian-Jacobin” traits of a supranational democracy because it would inevitably lead to a leveling of the “economic and identity communities founded on geographical proximity” (243) through a permanent outvoting of minorities. In so arguing, he underestimates the innovative, creative legal imagination that has already found expression in the existing institutions and valid regulations. I have in mind the ingenious “double majority” decision-making procedure or the weighted composition of the European Parliament that makes allowances for the sharp differences in size of population between smaller and larger member states precisely under the aspect of fair representation.[10]
Above all, however, Streeck’s fear of a repressive centralization of competences is nourished by the false assumption that the institutional deepening of the European Union would inevitably lead to a kind of European federal republic. The federal state model is the wrong one. For a supranational, but trans-state democratic political community that permits shared governance also satisfies the conditions of democratic legitimation. In such a political community all political decisions are legitimized by the citizens in their double role as European citizens, on the one hand, and as citizens of their respective national member-states, on the other.[11] In such a Political Union, which must be clearly distinguished from a “superstate,” the member states, as the guarantors of the level of law and freedom that they embody, would retain their very strong status by comparison with the subnational components of a federal state.
What Now?
However, all that speaks for a well-founded political alternative, as long as it remains abstract, is its perspective-forming force—it indicates a political goal but not the path leading to it. The manifest obstacles along this path support a pessimistic assessment of the chances of survival of the European project.
It is the combination of two facts that must disturb the proponents of “More Europe.” On the one hand, the consolidation policy (modeled on “debt brakes”) aims to establish a European economic constitution that lays down “the same rules for all” and is supposed to remain beyond the reach of democratic will-formation. By uncoupling technocratic orientations with far-reaching implications for the European citizenry as a whole in this way from opinion- and will-formation in the national public arenas and parliaments, it devalues the political resources of these citizens who only have access to their national arenas. As a result European policy makes itself de facto increasingly invulnerable—and thus, from the perspective of democracy, increasingly vulnerable.
This trend toward self-immunization is being reinforced, on the other hand, by the disastrous fact that maintaining the fiction of the fiscal sovereignty of the member states is steering public perceptions of crisis in the wrong direction. The pressure exerted by the financial markets on the politically fragmented national budgets fosters a collectivizing self-perception of the populations affected by the crisis—the crisis is turning the “donor” and the “beneficiary countries” against each other and fomenting nationalism.
Wolfgang Streeck draws attention to this demagogic potential: “Nations conceived in monistic terms feature in the rhetoric of international debt policy as integral moral actors who bear collective liability. Internal class and power relations are not taken into consideration” (134). In this way, a crisis policy whose successes enable it to immunize itself against critical voices and the distorted mutual perceptions of the “peoples” in national public arenas reinforce each other.
This impasse can be overcome only if pro-European parties join together in transnational campaigns against this falsifying representation of social questions as national questions. Ralf Dahrendorf’s dictum that German questions were always in a fatal way national rather than social questions acquires unforeseen relevance here. The only explanation I can think of for the absence of conflicts of opinion triggered by properly-conceived political alternatives from all of our national public arenas is that the democratic parties are afraid of the potential of the political Right. Controversies over the course to be pursued within core Europe will have clarifying and not just inflammatory effects only if all sides concede that there are no alternatives without risks or costs.[12] Instead of opening up false fronts along national borders, the task of these parties would be to differentiate between the winners and the losers of the policies adopted to address the crisis according to more and less encumbered social groups independently of their nationality.
The European parties on the Left are in the process of repeating their historical error of 1914. They too are folding out of fear of a social mainstream susceptible to right-wing populism. Moreover, in Germany, a lamentable media landscape populated with Merkel devotees is reinforcing all involved in their resolve not to grasp the hot iron of European policy in the election campaign and to play along with Merkel’s cleverly malign game of suppressing the issue. This is why we should wish the “Alternative für Deutschland” success. I hope that it forces the other parties to show their hand when it comes to European policy. Then there might be a possibility of a “grand” coalition forming after the German general election in favor of taking the first overdue step. For, as things stand, Germany alone is in a position to initiate this difficult undertaking.
(Translated by Ciaran Cronin)
The original German version of this essay was published by the German magazine Blätter für Deutsche und Internationale Politik in May 2013 and can be purchased here.
The Italian translation of this essay can be read on Reset-DoC at this address. Copyright for the Italian version is owned by Reset.it.
Notes
[1]Wolfgang Streeck, Gekaufte Zeit (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013). Page numbers in the text refer to this edition. See also Streeck, “Auf den Ruinen der Alten Welt: Von der Demokratie zur Marktgesellschaft,” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 12 (2012): 61-72, and “Was nun, Europa? Kapitalismus ohne Demokratie oder Demokratie ohne Kapitalismus,” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 4 (2013): 57-68.
[2]Its characteristic features are full employment, comprehensive wage-setting, employee co-determination, state control over key industries, a broad-based public sector with secure employment, an income and taxation policy that prevents crass social inequalities, and, finally, public business cycle and industrial policy designed to prevent risks associated with growth.
[3]On this, see my commentary in the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung on the 5 November 2011.
[4]Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), 8 April 2013. See http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron-eu-must-wake-up-to-modern-world-8563860.html (accessed 8 May 2013).
[5]As a European citizen who follows the Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese protests (in comfort) in the newspaper, however, I can also share Streeck’s empathy for the “outbursts of rage in the street”: “When the only way democratically organized peoples can continue to act responsibly is by refraining from exercising their national sovereignty and restricting themselves for generations to ensuring that they remain solvent vis-à-vis their creditors, then it might seem more responsible to try acting irresponsibly for once” (218).
[6]In the meantime, however, the privatization of public services has gone so far that this systemic conflict can be mapped less and less clearly onto the interests of different social groups. The sets “people composed of national citizens” and “people composed of market players” no longer coincide. The interest conflict is increasingly giving rise to conflicts within one and the same person.
[7]In what follows, I prescind entirely from the economic consequences of winding up the euro; on this, see Elmar Altvater, “Der politische Euro: Eine Gemeinschaftswährung ohne Gemeinschaft hat keine Zukunft,” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 5 (2013): 71-9.
[8]Among the German “tribes,” the “sedentary” Bavarians count as the oldest. DNA analysis of bone findings from the late Migration Period when historical records of the Bavarians as such began have confirmed the so-called “Sauhaufen-Theorie” (motley-crowd theory), “which postulates that a late Roman core population combined with large droves of migrants from Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Northern Germany to form a Bavarian tribe” (see SZ, 8 April 2013).
[9]The growing pluralism of life forms, which confirms the increase in economic and cultural differentiation, contradicts the expectation of homogenized lifestyles. The process of corporatist forms of regulation being replaced by deregulated markets described by Streeck has led to an advance in individualization that has attracted the interest of sociologists. Incidentally, this advance also explains the peculiar phenomenon of the change in sides by those 1968 renegades who succumbed to the illusion that they could live out their libertarian urges under market liberal conditions of self-exploitation.
[10]The details are in need of further consideration but, in spite of the misgivings of the German Federal Constitutional Court, the general tendency is correct.
[11]I developed this idea of a constitution-building sovereignty that is shared between citizens and states “originally”—that is, already in the constitution-building process itself—in Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2012); see also Habermas, “Motive einer Theorie,” in Im technokratischen Sog (forthcoming).
[12]Among the “cheap” alternatives is, for example, the—in and of itself not at all incorrect—recommendation of Eurobonds currently being rehashed by George Soros, which is rejected with the likewise correct argument, popular in northern European countries, “that in the current political system Eurobonds have a legitimation problem, for then taxpayer money would be spent without consulting the voters” (SZ of 11 April 2013). This stalemate blocks the alternative of creating a basis for legitimizing a change in policy that would indeed include Eurobonds.