Euro Trash

EVEN THOUGH WE’RE ALL INTERNATIONALISTS, FOR NOW THE BOOK WILL ONLY BE AVAILABLE IN GERMAN. With contributions from Damir Arsenijevic, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Gracie Mae Bradley, Cédric Durand, the European Space Agency (sort of), Sara Farris, Alexandre Kojève, Maurizio Lazzarato, Sandro Mezzadra, Toni Negri, Thomas Piketty, Beatriz Preciado, Bernard Stiegler, Martin Wolf, Slavoj Žižek. And to top it all off, check out our exclusive “Europe from Detroit” mix that comes courtesy of acid legend Carlos Souffront. No, not another debate on Europe, not just the usual policy proposals, no moralising appeals. We simply want to take stock of our ignorance in order to turn it into something more productive. Call it recycling if you will. The contributions in the volume do not reflect anything like a unity of vision. Often, they agree on very little. But that doesn’t mean the texts assembled here do not resonate with one another. Philosophers, economists, journalists and activists comment on past and present manifestations of Europe. Taken together, these essays are exercises in defamiliarisation. Sure, we don’t fully understand what is going on. Then again, experts didn’t fare too well either, as a quick glance at the pre-2008 forecasts of economists, the analyses of geopolitical pundits or the trajectories of the expert-led transitional governments in Europe’s South reveals. That’s why we have no desire to wallow in passivity and fatalism. On the contrary, creating a sense of distance between Europe and ourselves will perhaps enable us to relate to it in new ways. Ever since the postwar reconstruction, Europe vacillated between grand political designs and economic expediency. The introduction of the Euro in 2002 and the ongoing crisis of 2008 have accelerated a shift in the balance of power. Nation-states lost some of their prerogatives and now have to accommodate the demands of unelected supranational entities in charge of implementing the precepts of economic rationality. A sense of powerlessness has become widespread. It has given a new lease of life to nationalism and xenophobia across Europe. Young people in particular wonder what could possibly be the point of having democracy conform to markets if capitalism cannot even make good on its one spellbinding historical promise: to enable wealth creation for the masses through individual effort and hard work? As is stands in 2014, giving up democratic principles in order to purify the operations of the markets seems like the surest way to the worst of both worlds: a technocratic caesarism. Economists tentatively hail Greece’s return to the capital markets, they rejoice at the first signs of positive growth rates and welcome, give or take some accounting tricks, the sound budgets in member-states that are testament to the efficacy of the austerity measures. Meanwhile, unemployment in many parts of the EU remains stubbornly high. And let’s not even talk about wage levels. Far from marking the end of history and the triumph of liberal market societies, 1989 could have turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for capitalism, a possibility for which even François Furet allowed in his very last essays. Before its long overdue collapse, ‘real existing socialism’ - imperialist, authoritarian, unjust, inefficient, and downright depressing as it was - nonetheless inspired a fear among the governments of the so-called Western world that tamed capitalism in ways not seen before or after. Did bureaucratic state capitalism in the East protect the liberal capitalism of the West from what it wanted? Even when the latter seemed to be on excellent form after 1989, it often turned out to be pumped up on a diet of monetary steroids: soaring private and company debt sustained the boom times. Capitalism’s hold over the planet is neither uniform nor exclusively imposed by force. It emerged out of a contingent history of the “universalisation of a tendency”; as Deleuze and Guattari put it. However, a European left that has yet to come to terms with the full extent of its political insignificance seeks solace in the idea of an economic matrix that structures every fold of the social fabric: it is plausible, inescapable and terrifyingly good at harnessing even the forces of resistance to its own purposes. While the therapeutic aspect of this sort of thinking cannot be dismissed, its analytical virtues are more questionable. Still, as we survey the political landscape in 2014, no serious – and politically desirable – alternative exists. And yet liberal market societies struggle with ever more intense degrees of disaffection among their supposedly blessed populations. We observe the striking comeback of inequalities of wealth reminiscent of the Belle Époque. If current trends continue we could soon live in societies so unequal one would have to go back to the pre-industrial age to find anything comparable. This is certainly not a process of differentiation that is synonymous with modernity,