Uneven development and 'European crisis constitutionalism', or: the reasons and conditions of a 'passive revolution in trouble'

Abstract

The academic debate on European integration was structured by the specific, often much too narrow focus of involved disciplines: economists were mainly concerned about the welfare effects of ever closer market integration; lawyers studied the stepwise gaining of independence of European law; sociologists developed some interest in transnational social stratification patterns and cross-border communication, that is, in the forms of an emerging European civil society and public sphere; and political scientists were busy analysing the making of national and supranational institutional settings and their impact on political decision-making. Occasionally, the narrow confines of disciplinary investigation and reasoning have been transcended. Nevertheless, it would be much too soon to speak of a vivid and productive interdisciplinary debate on the dynamics of European integration. On the contrary, precisely in times of severe crisis the participating academic disciplines have tended to relapse into old patterns of narrow-minded analysis, as they are particularly receptive to methodological conceptualizations along the national-supranational continuum. In consequence, this means that important dimensions of transnational capitalist accumulation and power relations, above all the complex processes of transnationally mediated uneven development, are ignored. The aim of this chapter is to bring these processes into the debate bydrawing on critical approaches which systematically transcend disciplinary boundaries in order to develop a political economy based, power and authority sensitive, framework of analysis. In this context, neo-Gramscian International Political Economy (IPE) is instructive in various regards. It explicitly investigates the particular articulation of economic, socio-cultural, and discursive processes; and it has developed useful theoretical concepts to analyse and interpret more recent European crisis dynamics, including the political initiatives of (non-)hegemonic European crisis management and regulation. Within the scope of this paper two concepts are particularly promising: first, the concept of ‘European crisis constitutionalism’, which specifies the older concept of ‘new constitutionalism’ (Gill 2003: 132) by highlighting the crisis and emergency driven, and somewhat ambiguous European adjustment measures; and second, the concept of ‘passive revolution’, which generally refers to the incremental, but in the context of the ongoing crisiscontradictory, troublesome, and therefore precarious authority-stabilizing transformation of European financial capitalism from above. The precarious nature of recent, crisis-induced adjustments of Europeanmodes of economic and financial regulation basically results from the stilllingering contradictions and unresolved crisis processes of European financial capitalism. The following section therefore outlines how this particular transnational type of capitalist development has come about and inasmuch it is characterized by particular features of ‘uneven’ and ‘combined’ development (Trotsky 1977: 26-27)2 which in turn have generated or at least facilitated diverging and rival discursive constructions of the European crisis. While the first phase of the crisis was marked by a stepwise adoption of Keynesianinspired views, the transition towards the so-called ‘sovereign debt crisis’ marked a shift towards the establishment of a European austerity agenda. Both phases, and that is the main argument of the second section, show specific features of a ‘passive revolution’, primarily promoted and organized by transnational capital and wealthier social classes, for example, owners of monetary and financial assets, mainly based in current account surplus and therefore creditor economies. The passive revolution strategy was implemented in the form of manifold − contradictory and complementary − measures of a ‘European crisis constitutionalism’ which, irrespective of their farreaching societal impact, are still insufficient to politically balance and smoothly regulate the European economy and society. Moreover, the third section highlights that the political sociology of European integration is characterized by new socioeconomic and socio-cultural conflicts and tendencies of societal disintegration. The chapter concludes by outlining the changed patterns of cooperation and conflict between capitalist elites, capital and labour, and also the role of right-wing populist movements; or in short, the changing patterns of domestic and transnational power relations.