historical materialism

BRILL Historical MateriaUsm 21.1 (2013)159-176 brill.aim/hima

Perry Anderson on Europe

Alex Callinicos
King's College, University of London
alex.callinicos@kcl,ac,uk

Abstract
This intervention discusses Perry Anderson's 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 coflection of essays written by Perry Anderson between
the mid-1990s and the late 2000s, most of them published in the London Review
ofBooks, 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.'
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. A n d e r s o n 2012b, 2012c, 2 o i 2 d ,

Kdninklijki; Brill NV, Leiden, mvi OOI: 10.116;-i/l,%a2()HX-12:i4l28,';

i6o A. Callinicos / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013)159-176

'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 Anderson's 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).^
The various national surveys, like all the essays, display the qualities for
which Anderson's 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'.^ (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 Gaulle's 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
Badiou's stand against France's dominant liberal consensus was less visible in
2004, when Anderson's essay first appeared. But the 2009 update extensively
discusses the presidency of the wretched Nicolas Sarkozy, the target of Badiou's
great philippic, which was first excerpted in English in New Lefi Review and
then published in translation by Verso, the two institutions over which
Anderson has presided since the 1960s." 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 neoliberaiism and the feebleness of challenges from
the Left - though Anderson concedes that 'the dual voltage of France's deep

2. Anderson 2009, pp. xii, xii-iii; Anderson 1992, p. 5.

3. Anderson 2009, p. 425.
4. Badiou 2008.
 A. CaUinicos / Historical MateriaUsm 21.1 (2013) 159-176 161

political culture, with its characteristically sudden switches from conformity

to insurgency and back again, is not yet over'.^

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'.^ He is contemptuous of Brussels's complacent self-image
as a 'normative power', the pleasant and acceptable face of liberal capitalism
in contrast to America's 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 ofthe 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 today's
world - superior to the US, Japan, Russia or China - among the three
fundamental elements of modern democracy: market economics, social
democracy and multilateral institutions.''^ Anderson excoriates 'an apparently
iflimitable narcissism, in which the reflection in the water transfigures the
future of the planet into the image of the beholder'.^ To one professionally
involved in European Studies, the disdain that he displays towards the EU's
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 intefligible. :
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 Anderson's more recent demolition ofJrgen Habermas, responsible for 'a new paroxysm' of
this narcissism: Anderson 2012e (heavily overlapping vrith Anderson 2012a).
i62 A CaUinicos / Historical MateriaUsm 21.1 (2013) 159-176

of American scholars in the field, and gratefully hafling 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 Moravcsik's 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 EU's 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 mis-
reckonings?'^
As Anderson also notes, 'most of history is a web of unintended effects'.'"
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 Milward's The European
Rescue ofthe Nation State. Anderson rightly praises this 'great study', which,
together with its predecessor The Reconstruction of Westem Europe, 1945-51,
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."
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 1914-18 and 1939-45. 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 ofthe 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 CaUinicos / Historical MateriaUsm 27.7 (2013) 159-176 163

German concern was to retum 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.'^

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
Milward's own accounts (perhaps particularly that of the formation of the
European Coal and Steel Community [ECSC] in 1950-1) supports such an
interpretation.'^ But what is most distinctive to Anderson's 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 twenty-
first century is not the Community of thefiftiesor 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."'* ,

Theoretical elisions
It is worth pausing to situate this appraisal in Anderson's own intellectual and
political development. New Lefi Reviewlong 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 rank-
and-file dockers' leaders ftom 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 Britain's 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. 20-1.

13. Milward 1984, Chapters IV and XII. For my ovm brief account, see CaUinicos 2009,
pp. 170-4.
14. Anderson 2009, p. xv.
164 A. CaUinicos / Historiccd MateriaUsm 21.1 (2013)159-176

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,'^

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 wifl remain of key importance to the ruling classes
and in which political and social struggles will by and large remain nationally
based.''^ Over the long term, Harman's 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. NLR's analysis failed to engage with this
reality.'^ After Heath's humiliating failure, Margaret Thatcher returned to the
offensive a decade later, and succeeded in decisively crushing this militancy.

15, Anonymous 1972, pp, 2, 3, Nairn's much more differentiated analysis of the attitude of
British capital towards entry into the EEC makes some shrewd points about the City's ability to
benefit from membership that have been amply confirmed by Britain's 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, 13-28.
16, Harman 1971,
17, Nairn's extensive critique of the British revolutionary Left, which generally opposed EEC
entry, is unusual fox 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, 94-114. 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,
 A. Callinicos /HistoricalMaterialism 21.1 (2013) 159-176 165

In the resulting climate of defeat, the mainstream Left gravitated towards the
EU as a bulwark against the fuU blast of neoliberaiism. In effect, they moved
towards Anderson (the continuity in his stance is signalled when he writes that
his admiration for the Community's 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 Left's hopes in the EU's progressive potential.
Only what he called in a 1991 essay 'The Light of Europe' illuminated a British
landscape darkened by Tbatcherism, where economic, social, and political
reforms had to be pursued at a Community-wide level.'^
But, whereas NLR!s original support for British entry into the EEC was
couched in strenuously Marxist language, Anderson's 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 Anderson's tendency to keep
the Marxism that continues to dominate his intellectual horizons at arm's
length. Thus, in his survey of theories of European integration, aside ftom 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. Thefirstis the general

implosion of the fictive capital with which markets throughout the developed
world were kept going in the long cycle offinancializationthat 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 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.
i66 A. CaUinicos /HistoricalMateriaUsm 21.1 (2013) 159-176

current EU debacle within the wider framework of Marxist political economy.

But this takes a peculiar form, since Anderson's endorsement of Brenner's
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, Marx's enterprise has found a
successor' - seems to be taken as a licence to ignore all other Marxist writing
on contemporary capitalism.^" This is doubly problematic: in the first place,
Brenner's 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 smafl journals ofthe Left'
(notably this one), but, had he paid more attention, he might have avoided
committing the howler that '[m]oney was essentially ignored... in Marx's
system'.^'
Not only does this sail past Marx's 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 aU about money. The
main variables which are determined in Volume I are monetary variables.'^^
Anderson's solecism is more than formal: the relationship between the long-
term tendencies of capital accumulation (among which Marx placed the fafling
rate of profit) and the process of financialisation in the neoliberal era is at the
centre of contemporary Marxist discussion ofthe present crisis. Brenner's 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

20. Anderson 2005, p. 258; see Chapter 12 for Anderson's appraisal of Brenner as historian and
political economist.
21. Anderson 2005, pp. 272, 261. The main debate on Brenner's original statement of his
interpretation of postwar capitalist development - Brenner 1998 - appeared in Historical
MateriaUsm, 4 and 5.
22. Moseley 2004, pp. 147, 154. The scale of Anderson's error about Marx and money can
be elicited from de Brunboff 1976, Itoh and Lapavitsas 1999, and Moseley (ed.) 2005. Thus, for
example, Riccardo Bellofiore, while differing with the detail of Moseley's argument, agrees that
'Marx's originality lies in his "monetary labour theory of value" ': Bellofiore 2004, p. 174.
23. Among the very first, and perhaps the most powerful ofthe Marxist critiques of Brenner's
explanation of the 'long downturn' homes in on his avoidance of value theory and neglect
 A CaUinicos /Historical MateriaUsm 27.7 (2013) 159-176 167

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.2''
European integration as portrayed by Carchedi is very different from the
process of international levelling up implied by NLR's 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 Marx's 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.^^

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 CaUinicos 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 CaUinicos 1997 and Bonefeld (ed.) 2001.
25. Carchedi 1991, p. 288.
i68 A CaUinicos /Historical MateriaUsm 27.7 (2013) 159-176

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.^^
Some of Carchedi's 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 capitalflowswithin the eurozone. This has
contributed directly to the current crisis.^'

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 Harman's 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 regulatinginter-capitalist competition that benefits thestrongeststate.^^
Anderson, as we shafl 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
James's 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 1992-3, converged on a single currency dominated by
a European Central Bank modelled on the Bundesbank as the politically independent guarantor
of Germany's strong currency/high export regime: James 2012, Chapters 7-9.
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 CaUinicos 2007.
 A. CaUinicos /Historical MateriaUsm 21.1 (2013) 159-176 169

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 Anderson's most recent texts on Europe
target Habermas and the like; the effect is to ignore, not merely the Marxiist
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 pubhc
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 Coafltion of the Radical
Left in Greece, but any diagnosis of the EU's condition that does not at least
consider what alternative the Left should offer to the current debacle is thereby
weakened.^^

The fading light of Europe

In the absence of a more robust theoretical framework, we are left to trace
Anderson's 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 ftontiers', politically
indifferent and thus 'fi-eed... to act so inventively beyond the assumptions
of the inter-state system'. Anderson acknowledges that Monnet's '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'.^"
Let us accept that Monnet was a sincere European federalist who played
the hand history had dealt him very well. But what does this tefl us about the
structural logic and political meaning of European construction? In a key
passage in his critique of Moravscik's 'liberal inter-governmentalism' Anderson
writes:

29, Anderson's most recent texts on Europe are Anderson 2012a and 2012e; RMF's 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-
170 A. CaUinicos / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 159-176

What such a conception ignores, of course, is the critical fact that the institutional
origins of the European Community were deliberately framed in dynamic, open-
ended 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-govemmentalist - vision of Jean Monnet and
his contemporaries. The history of the EC is inexplicable without the impetus to
instability genetically engineered into itfromthe start^'

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.^^

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 practico-
inert 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, Ahderson was ambivalent about
this. He excavated an old essay of Hayek's 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.^^ Harold James's

31. Anderson 2009, p. 86.

32. George W. Ball, Foreword to Duchne 1994, pp. 10-11. See also Duchne 1994, pp. 373-8,
on Monnet's political method.
33. Hayek 1949, p. 269; see Anderson 1996b, reprinted in Anderson 2009.
 A CaUinicos / Historical MateriaUsm 21.1 (2013) 159-176 171

new history ofthe origins of EMU, drawing heavily on the archives ofthe ECB
and its forerunners, has confirmed the project's Hayekian inspiration as an
attempt to wrest the creation of money away from the control of nation states
liable to tack with the v^dnds of popular opinion. As Otmar Issing, the ECB's
first chief economist put it 'many strands in Hayek's thinking... may have
influenced the course ofthe events leading to Monetary Union in subtle ways.
What has happened with the introduction ofthe euro has indeed achieved the
denationalisation of money, as advocated by Hayek.'^"
But Anderson also expressed the hope that 'Monnet's 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 ofthe 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?'^

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 ofthe mid-2ooos. 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
significandy, from the original article: Anderson 1996b. Anderson's 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 presidency's neoliberal tum in 1983, Anderson's interpretation of his motives
receives some corroboration fi'om an anecdote of Samir Amin's (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.
172 A. CaUinicos / Historical MateriaUsm 21.1 (2013) 159-176

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 ofthe eurozone.^^
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.'^'' In fact, what has caught the eurozone's 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 ofthe 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 imposefiscaldiscipline 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 Monnet's dreams (a step
in any case forbidden by the German Constitutional Court, which ruled that
the Lishon Treaty marked the nee 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.'^* The views of any other national parliament than

36. See CaUinicos 2010a, pp. 96-104, on the EU's 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.
 A CaUinicos /Historical MateriaUsm 21.1 (2013) 159-176 173

Berlin's 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.33 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? Anderson's 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."*" Interestingly it is his condemnation of the EU's
profoundly undemocratic character that arouses the ire of Moravcsik, who
accuses him of "naive populism" (surely the first time that such a charge has
been laid at Anderson"s door)."*'
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... Monnet's 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.*^

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:
174 A. CaUinicos / Historical MateriaUsm 21.1 (2013) 159-176

Anderson argues that Monnet's 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'.''^
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 Monnet's 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. WTiile dismissing
the American neoconservative Christopher Caldwell's wilder fantasies about
the supposed menace represented by Europe's Muslims, he agrees with
him that 'postwar immigration was the counter-finality of the years that saw
the buflding of the Union, a process not of integration, but of disintegration."*''
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 Austro-
Hungarian statesman Count Eduard Taaffe,
44, Anderson 2009, p. 534; compare Caldwell 2009,
 A CaUinicos / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 159-176 175

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.

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