On the 19th of May, professor Wolfgang Streeck (Emeritus Director at the Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung) was one of the guests at the “Sovereignty and State Systems after Globalism” together with professor Beverly Silver (Ciampi Visiting Scholar from Johns Hopkins University). Two different views and diagnoses of the deep crisis the international world order going through.
Professor Streeck was interviewed by Lucy sulla cultura, originally in Italian.
The world order that emerged from the crisis of the 1970s, what we conventionally call neoliberal globalisation, of which the United States was both a promoter and a hegemonic power, is falling apart. The disastrous military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial crisis of 2008, the handling of Covid, political and social polarisation are all symptoms of an existential crisis in the US and the world that they have shaped since the Cold War. But this “disorder” – which President Donald Trump seems to encourage, if not actually pursue – did not begin in 2020, nor even in 2016, when the tycoon was first elected. That is the conviction of Wolfgang Streeck, German sociologist and director emeritus of the prestigious Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung in Cologne, who for years has described this crisis as a marital issue, namely the divorce between democracy and capitalism after the social democratic (or New Deal) prosperity that followed the 1929 crisis and the turbulent decades between the First World War and the end of the Second.
After two decades of crisis, revolutions, dictatorships, and wars, the compromise was to extend the sphere of social rights (and the costs associated with them) to the masses of workers who had in one way or another been protagonists (and victims) of that period. Today, that wave of hope (and that illusion) is far away. The promise of constant progress no longer holds; in the West, incomes are shrinking, poverty and social unrest are growing. These are therefore enormous and epochal issues that we asked Wolfgang Streeck to address when we met him at the end of a seminar at the Ciampi Institute of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence entitled “Sovereignty and State Systems after Globalism”, in which the sociologist spoke with Beverly Silver, a scholar of capitalism as a world system (i.e., capitalism as a single global system in which one power exercises its hegemony over the peripheries), who also agrees with the idea that this phase of capitalism has come to an end and that the balance guaranteed in some form by US hegemony has given way to a phase of “systemic chaos”.
In his latest book, Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism (Verso, 2024), Streeck continues the argument put forward in previous works on what he defines as a system in crisis after deregulation and financialisation have made the world an interconnected market and consequently contributed to separating democratic government, which remains national, from capitalism. This split has given rise to a centralised and technocratic order that has emerged, incapable of providing answers to the major issues it faces and tending to be unpopular among those who see solutions and transformations imposed on them from above. This argument applies to Europe but also, for example, to the environmental rules enforced by Biden in the United States, which are seen by businesses, farmers and even many citizens as constraints. Streeck sees Brussels-governed Europe as the prime example – or perhaps the one that affects him most – of this centralised bureaucratic order. The alternative to this order, which he discusses at the end of this interview, is the possibility for states and the societies they govern to regain control over their collective destiny. The idea is to renew the theory of the state, drawing inspiration from the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes.
Due to his support for the political project of Sahra Wagenknecht, the former leader of Germany’s Left Party who founded her own party with some red-brown overtones, Streeck has had to defend himself here and there against accusations of wanting a return to nation states of a very different nature from those we live in today. In this interview and elsewhere, the German sociologist presents his ideas by imagining a state system that allows for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between sovereign nation states. The point, in short, for Streeck, is the lack of democracy in the decisions made in Brussels or other non-elected supranational bodies, which generates discontent and does not seem capable of overcoming the crisis we find ourselves in. Here and there in his discourse, there are hints of conservatism, or rather nostalgia for the social democratic decades, for a more orderly and reassuring world.
In your books, you describe a collapse of the global order. What are its characteristics? What are the symptoms of this collapse?
To answer properly, we would have to talk about it for days. I would say there are two levels: one superficial and one structural. On the surface, we see unlikely and sometimes inconsistent phenomena, such as Donald Trump or neo-fascist parties suddenly becoming champions of Europe; and then, of course, the wave of right-wing populism. But, in my opinion, these are only symptoms, not “the” crisis itself. The real problem is much deeper. The crucial point, I would say, is that capitalism is no longer able to keep its promises in a broad sense. The promise of ever-increasing wealth in the world, social security that acted as a buffer against inequality, and the idea that a job is enough to live on. Even the promise that things will be better, if not for you, then at least for your children. We no longer believe in this either.
Why? Because there is a fundamental problem in an economic system that depends on permanent growth, on the continuous accumulation of capital: it needs people willing to work to enrich others, who in turn will invest that capital to hire even more people. The implicit promise was that in this system, even if you do not own capital, you don’t make profits, you will still live better. This argument is no longer credible. No one believes it anymore, even if it is promised by the richest man in the world. This broken promise translates into a series of structural crises. One of these is that institutions are no longer able to compensate in any way for the promises not kept by capital. I call this the “fiscal crisis of the state”. In the past, the state was able to use fiscal leverage or print money to give the impression that things were improving. Now there is no more money. They have to “invent” money, i.e. by getting deeper and deeper into debt. The system that you describe as being in structural and critical crisis is a nominally multilateral system, based on global institutions, shared rules, global governance…
A governance that does not work, that cannot keep its promises, that cannot provide answers to global questions.
Find here the second part of the interview (in Italian)