There have always been dark forces in Europe (as there are here). When the Berlin Wall fell, a political scientist I know joked, “Now that Eastern Europe is free from the alien ideology of Communism, it can return to its true path: fascism.” We both knew he had a point. (1)Krugman was thinking in particular of the authoritarian developments in Hungary and Poland and the uncertain politics of that moment in Italy, as well as a disturbing development in the US, i.e., the Presidency of the man we know call convicted felon Donald Trump:
And here, it seems to me, is where we see parallels with developments in America.The state of the economy at a given moment is not determinative of political developments, either in the US or in Europe. But I share what I take to Krugman’s general view that economic well-being provides a fundamental context for political developments.
True, we [in the US] didn’t suffer a euro-style disaster. (Yes, we have a continentwide currency, but we have the federalized fiscal and banking institutions that make such a currency workable.) But the bad judgment of our “centrist” elites has rivaled that of their European counterparts. Remember that in 2010-11, with America still suffering from mass unemployment, most of the Very Serious People in Washington were obsessed with … entitlement reform [i.e., cutting Social Security and Medicare].
Meanwhile our centrists, along with much of the news media, spent years in denial about the radicalization of the G.O.P., engaging in almost pathological false equivalence. And now America finds itself governed by a party with as little respect for democratic norms or rule of law as Hungary’s Fidesz.
The point is that what’s wrong with Europe is, in a deep sense, the same thing that’s wrong with America. And in both cases, the path to redemption will be very, very hard. [my emphasis]
But obviously not everything is about GDP levels or income distribution. The fact that the two issues that currently look like the most decisive ones for the US Presidential election in November are a war (US support of Israel’s war on civilians in Gaza) and a “culture war” issue (abortion rights) is a good indication of that.
Scholars, commentators, and politicians are currently struggling to understand what is widely perceived to be a shift in Europe toward the far-right parties whose politics tend toward the authoritarian, xenophobic, and culturally reactionary. The EU Parliament elections this week (June 6-9) will be an important measure of that trend.
Is there something to Krugman’s historical joke?
Was Krugman’s indication of a dark historical trend from the heyday of European fascism more than a superficial stereotype?
It’s true that in the Cold War, US and European politics were heavily defined by the confrontation between what were grandly called the Free World and the Communist Bloc, more mundanely known as the US-led NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. In a recent book, Thomas Biebricher looks at the political developments in Italy since the 1990s and argues that the East-West tension with its highly ideological component did provide a strong incentive for Italian left-center and right-center parties to stay on the democratic path. The Communist Party of Italy (PCI) had been a strong party for decades, and he argues the need to distinguish themselves politically from the PCI, which was perceived as hostile to liberal democracy, considerably mitigated any temptation to embrace policies or political practices that were too reminiscent of the days of Il Duce. (2) The common opposition to Communist ideology acted as a moderating factor against far-right tendencies.
But the re-emergence of parties and political trends in Italy that did hark back to the authoritarian days of old was already obvious in the 1990s, before the particular problems related to the poor construction of the eurozone and the ridiculously and arbitrarily restrictive fiscal policies of the EU in the 2000s and 2010s to which Krugman refers. Media oligarch Silvio Berlusconi first became Italian Prime Minister in 1994, and he was seen as a disturbing sign of a more authoritarian trend. In the US, Berlusconi would be compared as a politician to the weirdly-populist billionaire crank Ross Perot, and later to convicted felon Donald Trump.
On 1 August 2013, Berlusconi was convicted of tax fraud by the Supreme Court of Cassation. His four-year prison sentence was confirmed, and he was banned from holding public office for two years. Aged 76, he was exempted from direct imprisonment, and instead served his sentence by doing unpaid community service. (3)A new Deutsche Welle analysis takes up the question, “Does the economy matter to the far right? (4)
Just after 8:00 in the video, the discussion turns to the “refugee crisis” of 2015-16, during which “crisis” the EU absorbed around 1.1 million refugees within the space of a year. That was one-fifth of the number of Ukrainian refugees taken into EU countries in the year after the beginning of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of their country, which has yet to result in a garment-rending political freakout remotely comparable to that of 2015-16.
The commentary discusses the significance of “cultural” issues, and uses 2015 as an important turning point in which what they call “the lower middle class and working class” were attracted more strongly to far right groupings like the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) in Germany.
Because prior to 1990 or so, issues like women’s rights, immigration, racial discrimination, laws on sex and marriage, regulation of recreational drugs, and so forth had never really been issues in Western countries before … Wait, say what?!?
Yes, those were issues before, and rightwing demagogues always used them. Like mining companies hiring only white workers but bringing in black workers as strike-breakers. The decade of the 1920s was the high point of the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan in America, and they were heavily focused on preserving racial discrimination, promoting nativist legislation (which was not original to the 1920s but would become blueprints for the Nuremberg Race Laws in Nazi Germany), and enforcing so-called traditional family values.
And, yes, how much opportunity for education and income is available to women, how marriage laws work, how pensions work for women and men, childcare – all of those factors are very much economic as well as “cultural” matters.
Do we really need to be having conversations in the 2020s about whether “cultural” issues are related to “economic” ones? Or pretending that no one in Europe and America was concerned with “cultural” issues before the 1980s?
The narrator draws the conclusion that “it is culture rather than economics which motivates voters to support” far-right parties.
All of which raises the question: did the Deutsche Welle producers putting this program together all spend their lives before now lying by the pool at a country club?
To be fair, they do get around to admitting that maybe, sorta, somehow, that economics may have something to do with the political trend of supporting far right parties. Rathgeb has figured out that in affluent northern European countries, far right parties pitch “welfare chauvinism.” Wow, imagine that! Politicians telling people their problems are all because of poor people mooching off the “gubmint” and riding around in “welfare Cadillacs” and being too lazy to work. Gosh, why hadn’t anyone tried that before the likes of the AfD came along a few years ago?
Does all this head-scratching tell us anything real about antidemocratic trends?
Pushing back against far-right antidemocratic parties isn’t about navel-gazing over the particulars of the current manifestations of old problems like fascist authoritarianism. It’s about democratic parties and groups understanding what is moving voters and effectively pushing back against authoritarian demagoguery and manipulation.
Getting back to Krugman’s 2018 analysis, the year 2015 was not only notable for the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe. It was also the culminating year of the euro crisis that dragged on for years, coming as it did in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. And, as Krugman was explaining in his piece, the crisis was made much worse by the flaws in the construction of the euro, which led to scornful antagonisms by wealthier EU nations against the so-called PIGS countries (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) and a response headed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel that treated the countries most affected by the debt crisis as losers who brought on their problems themselves.
Ironically, after causing so much damage economically and promoting intense resentments within the EU, the debt crisis was eventually stabilized by the European Central Bank finding a way to address by an informal means one of the worst problems of the currency union, which was that there was no ability for countries borrow money via common EU debt instruments.
The 2015 refugee “crisis” was something for which the EU was poorly prepared to handle, just as the eurozone design was poorly prepared for an economic crisis like 2008. Germany basically agreed to take the bulk of the refugees, but it was also a policy that Germany essentially shoved down the EU’s throats, further provoking nationalist resentments. And, of course, the cascading series of crises led to Britain leaving the Union.
Politics is about more than economics – but economics matter very, very much
The Deutsche Welle report essentially makes a version of the neoliberal TINA argument, i.e., There Is No Alternative to the economic policies favored by the wealthy elite. So the problems must be something else, like some exotic sense of frustration or primitive tribalism disconnected from the functioning of the economic system.
And when serious problems of a drastic concentration of wealth at the top of the income pyramid can’t be addressed through the political system, it causes plenty of dislocations. And that very concentration of wealth itself erodes democracy by giving the wealthiest people radically disproportionate influence over public policy.
As commentators like to mention periodically, in one sense all politics is tribal. People pick sides with political parties as their “tribes,” which also becomes part of their social “identity.” And societies are complicated, with different classes and religious and diverse regions and changing perceptions of what is desirable and acceptable in social conduct.
But when it comes to preserving democratic government, that has to be done through a clear commitment to democracy which also means using democratic politics to produced substantive solutions to real problems – yes, including economic ones, whoever unsettling that may sound to the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world.
Notes:
(1) Krugman, Paul (2018): Notes: What’s the Matter With Europe? New York Times 05/21/2018. <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/opinion/europe-euro-democracy-wrong.html> (Accessed: 2024-02-06).
(2) Biebricher, Thomas (2023): Mitte/Rechts. Die internationale Krise des Konservatismus. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
(3) Silvio Berlusconi. Wikipedia 06/01/2024. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Silvio_Berlusconi&oldid=1226671577> (Accessed: 2024-02-06).
(4) Does the economy matter to the far right? Business Beyond. DW News YouTubew channel 05/31/2024. <https://youtu.be/9PqfU_HcUJo?si=tasgcsry0mVqnqOa> (Accessed: 2024-02-06).
The commentary discusses the significance of “cultural” issues, and uses 2015 as an important turning point in which what they call “the lower middle class and working class” were attracted more strongly to far right groupings like the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) in Germany.
While many far-right parties grew in the decade which followed the global financial crisis, those we spoke to believe it was the refugee crisis [sic] of 2015 which ultimately drove them to their current positions of prominence, in Europe at least. “I mean, it was after that in 2015 that we could see an electoral breakthrough of the AfD in Germany, of the Sweden Democrats [in] Sweden, of Vox in Spain, of Chega in Portugal.” (Philip Rathgeb)Rathgeb argues that the Reagan-Thatcher era, in which neoliberal economic policies became dominant, led to a depoliticization of the economy in which a “market-conforming consensus” became dominant and therefore “opened the door for the politicization of other issues, that is, immigration, asylum, gender, identify,” and therefore opened new opportunities for far-right parties.
Because prior to 1990 or so, issues like women’s rights, immigration, racial discrimination, laws on sex and marriage, regulation of recreational drugs, and so forth had never really been issues in Western countries before … Wait, say what?!?
Yes, those were issues before, and rightwing demagogues always used them. Like mining companies hiring only white workers but bringing in black workers as strike-breakers. The decade of the 1920s was the high point of the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan in America, and they were heavily focused on preserving racial discrimination, promoting nativist legislation (which was not original to the 1920s but would become blueprints for the Nuremberg Race Laws in Nazi Germany), and enforcing so-called traditional family values.
And, yes, how much opportunity for education and income is available to women, how marriage laws work, how pensions work for women and men, childcare – all of those factors are very much economic as well as “cultural” matters.
Do we really need to be having conversations in the 2020s about whether “cultural” issues are related to “economic” ones? Or pretending that no one in Europe and America was concerned with “cultural” issues before the 1980s?
The narrator draws the conclusion that “it is culture rather than economics which motivates voters to support” far-right parties.
All of which raises the question: did the Deutsche Welle producers putting this program together all spend their lives before now lying by the pool at a country club?
To be fair, they do get around to admitting that maybe, sorta, somehow, that economics may have something to do with the political trend of supporting far right parties. Rathgeb has figured out that in affluent northern European countries, far right parties pitch “welfare chauvinism.” Wow, imagine that! Politicians telling people their problems are all because of poor people mooching off the “gubmint” and riding around in “welfare Cadillacs” and being too lazy to work. Gosh, why hadn’t anyone tried that before the likes of the AfD came along a few years ago?
Does all this head-scratching tell us anything real about antidemocratic trends?
Pushing back against far-right antidemocratic parties isn’t about navel-gazing over the particulars of the current manifestations of old problems like fascist authoritarianism. It’s about democratic parties and groups understanding what is moving voters and effectively pushing back against authoritarian demagoguery and manipulation.
Getting back to Krugman’s 2018 analysis, the year 2015 was not only notable for the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe. It was also the culminating year of the euro crisis that dragged on for years, coming as it did in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. And, as Krugman was explaining in his piece, the crisis was made much worse by the flaws in the construction of the euro, which led to scornful antagonisms by wealthier EU nations against the so-called PIGS countries (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) and a response headed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel that treated the countries most affected by the debt crisis as losers who brought on their problems themselves.
Ironically, after causing so much damage economically and promoting intense resentments within the EU, the debt crisis was eventually stabilized by the European Central Bank finding a way to address by an informal means one of the worst problems of the currency union, which was that there was no ability for countries borrow money via common EU debt instruments.
The 2015 refugee “crisis” was something for which the EU was poorly prepared to handle, just as the eurozone design was poorly prepared for an economic crisis like 2008. Germany basically agreed to take the bulk of the refugees, but it was also a policy that Germany essentially shoved down the EU’s throats, further provoking nationalist resentments. And, of course, the cascading series of crises led to Britain leaving the Union.
Politics is about more than economics – but economics matter very, very much
The Deutsche Welle report essentially makes a version of the neoliberal TINA argument, i.e., There Is No Alternative to the economic policies favored by the wealthy elite. So the problems must be something else, like some exotic sense of frustration or primitive tribalism disconnected from the functioning of the economic system.
And when serious problems of a drastic concentration of wealth at the top of the income pyramid can’t be addressed through the political system, it causes plenty of dislocations. And that very concentration of wealth itself erodes democracy by giving the wealthiest people radically disproportionate influence over public policy.
As commentators like to mention periodically, in one sense all politics is tribal. People pick sides with political parties as their “tribes,” which also becomes part of their social “identity.” And societies are complicated, with different classes and religious and diverse regions and changing perceptions of what is desirable and acceptable in social conduct.
But when it comes to preserving democratic government, that has to be done through a clear commitment to democracy which also means using democratic politics to produced substantive solutions to real problems – yes, including economic ones, whoever unsettling that may sound to the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world.
Notes:
(1) Krugman, Paul (2018): Notes: What’s the Matter With Europe? New York Times 05/21/2018. <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/opinion/europe-euro-democracy-wrong.html> (Accessed: 2024-02-06).
(2) Biebricher, Thomas (2023): Mitte/Rechts. Die internationale Krise des Konservatismus. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
(3) Silvio Berlusconi. Wikipedia 06/01/2024. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Silvio_Berlusconi&oldid=1226671577> (Accessed: 2024-02-06).
(4) Does the economy matter to the far right? Business Beyond. DW News YouTubew channel 05/31/2024. <https://youtu.be/9PqfU_HcUJo?si=tasgcsry0mVqnqOa> (Accessed: 2024-02-06).
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