Die Renaissance des autoritären Liberalismus?

Abstract

The unfolding crisis of capitalism – the most severe since the 1930s – is taking the shine off those neoliberal projects that were implemented in the context of the European Union. As a result, the present, competition-state mode of integration, which is based on consensus, is sliding into an ever deeper crisis of hegemony. To maintain the status quo, coercion is, if necessary, substituted for the disappearing consensus. That the central EU crisis initiatives (Economic Governance and the Fiscal Compact) are eroding formal democracy and the rule of law in particular heralds the beginning of an authoritarian turn in Europe. Drawing on the theory of Nicos Poulantzas this turn can be described as authoritarian competitive statism. In a – to a certain extent – comparable crisis of hegemony in the 1930s Carl Schmitt and German neoliberal intellectuals developed a strategy of dominance which can be described as authoritarian liberalism. In comparing this discourse with the present crisis mode of the European Union I try to sensitize the analytical framework for a counter-hegemonic strategy.