Flying the flag for neoliberalism

Post-communism and failed transition

In EU post-communist states, neoliberal market reforms were imposed in the name of democratisation. Here, authoritarian right parties are advancing, taking advantage of a ‘broader rebellion against the outcomes of the “transition process” that was implemented after the collapse of Communist Party rule’. ² The Hungarian Civic Union (Fidesz) was elected for a second term in Hungary in 2014, while in Poland, in 2015, the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) swept away Civic Platform (PO), the party previously headed by Donald Tusk (now president of the European Council). The Polish general election also saw gains for a new movement, Kukiz’ 15, an electoral alliance between the populist rock musician Pawel Kukiz and the far-right National Movement. In Slovakia, fourteen neo-fascists from People’s Party-Our Slovakia (L’SNS), headed by Marián Kotleba, governor of the Banská Bystrica region, entered parliament for the first time in May 2016, a fact that owed a great deal to the space opened up by the divisive politics of the (nominally) social democratic Smer-SD (Direction-Social Democracy), under the leadership of Robert Fico. ³ Having lost its majority in the 2016 general election, Smer-SD currently now heads a weak four-party coalition government.

Integration into the EU came in 2004 for the Visegrád countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia, 2007 for Bulgaria and Romania, and 2013 for Croatia. But the transition from a command economy to a market economy failed by any criteria. At first governing elites embraced neoliberalism wholeheartedly: the pursuit of wealth, which would trickle down as long as everyone embraced capitalism and acted out of self-interest, was invested with a particular kind of religiosity. But since the financial crash, it has become blindingly obvious that wealth, far from trickling down, is cascading upwards. Research into male mortality rates in the post-communist countries of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, published in the Lancet in 2009, found that the social stress engendered by mass privatisation led to a 12.8 per cent increase in male deaths from 1989 to 2002. ⁴ Furthermore, a 2012 study by Harvard and Cambridge economists found a direct link between the mass fiscal shock caused by privatisation programmes in many former communist countries and the economic failure and corruption that followed. ⁵ The mandatory privatisation of public pension schemes proved another comprehensive disaster for the countries involved, leading to extremes of pensioner poverty. ⁶

Neoliberalism and the promise of abundant riches and freedom no longer provide a plausible script, particularly as systemic corruption is becoming institutionalised within the political process. Hence the comfort of the sticking-plaster of nationalism and the narrative of anti-multiculturalism and anti-immigration. Mainstream politicians in Hungary, Poland and Slovakia speak the tired old language of authoritarianism, ethnic nationalism and the nation state, with nineteenth-century style Social Darwinism and racism providing pitch and tenor. The disciplinary power of the Church – Catholic or Calvinist – is also invoked to maintain social control in the face of the narcissistic lifestyles of the super-rich.

But old-style authoritarianism is hitched to modern forms of mass surveillance, exemplified by the detailed system of media content regulation (including internet and social media-delivered content) introduced in Hungary. And there is still good old-fashioned state control of the media (as well as censorship) to rely on. In Hungary, a proposed amendment to the National Security Act, which would have allowed state intelligence agents to be stationed inside newsrooms, was narrowly avoided in June 2015 after protests forced its withdrawal. ⁷ In Poland, a new law allowing government control of state media was justified on grounds that ‘public media are ignoring their mission towards the nation’. ⁸

Rightwing Poland, like Hungary and Spain (see below) is also engaging in ‘memory wars’, ⁹ attempting to establish a puerile reading of history that highlights Polish heroism and sacrifice throughout history, ¹⁰ while criminalising any attempt to explore collaboration with the Holocaust following the German invasion in 1939. The state took particular exception to Pawel Pawilikowski’s 2014 Oscar-winning film Ida, which tells the story of a young novitiate nun who, on learning that she was born Jewish, returns to the grave of her murdered parents. Law and Justice has drafted a law that seeks to punish, with a fine or imprisonment, anyone who, intentionally or inadvertently, ascribes responsibility to the Polish nation or state ‘for crimes committed by the German Third Reich’.

Today’s post-communist nationalist leaders launch witch-hunts for internal and external enemies, conjuring up new threats in the face of every attempt to expose their corruption and perversion of power. The war on terror and the EU’s disastrous handling of the refugee crisis have provided ammunition for the likes of Viktor Orbán (Fidesz), Jaroslaw Kaczyński (Law and Justice) and Robert Fico (Smer-SD) to attack the EU and the US, which are said to be imposing immigration, multiculturalism, gender and gay rights, on culturally homogenous and socially conservative societies. Orbán and Kaczyński, as well as the Czech president Milos Zeman, all openly speak in crude terms about racial and cultural survival, ‘vital instincts’ and ‘everyday patriotism’. Like Robert Fico, Zeman, who has addressed anti-Islam rallies organised by the far Right, ¹¹ is nominally a Social Democrat. None of these parties is averse to stoking anti-German sentiment. Merkel, for instance, is portrayed in the Polish state-controlled media either in Nazi uniform or as a nineteenth-century style imperialist dismembering the nation, and Orbán has raged against Germany’s ‘moral imperialism’. ¹²

These new (and sometimes not so new) corrupt elites in countries with little experience of modern immigration are manipulating a victim narrative, issuing dire warnings about foreign domination while covering up their own failure to protect their people from the ravages of neoliberalism. Entry into the EU meant that manufacturing industries, once the pride of the Soviet bloc, were now deemed uncompetitive and forced to wither on the vine. State assets, including the banks, were privatised, with banks today nearly 80 per cent foreign-owned and Austrian, German and Swedish banks being the biggest winners. The 2008 economic crisis provided another blow. Foreign banks threatened to pull out or scale back to maintain liquidity in home countries, leading to EU- and IMF-imposed austerity in Hungary, Romania and Latvia.

First in Hungary and now in Poland, the ingredients of a liberal democracy which were necessary for EU entry, such as independent media and judiciary and adherence to the constitution, have been or are being dismantled, to the embarrassment of the European Commission. (Once in the EU it is legally impossible to be kicked out, though, in theory, a state may be stripped of voting rights.) Hungary – once the ‘happiest barracks in the Soviet camp’ – provides one of the most dramatic examples of a ‘post-Communist mafia state’. ¹³ Meanwhile Poland, the post-communist capitalist poster child, attempts to fast-track the implementation of the constitutional and administrative changes already made in Hungary. The financialised corruption in the wealthier core EU countries, which enriches multinationals and turns a blind eye to tax evasion, has its counterpart in Hungary in bribe-taking and systematic corruption within the political class.

The immiseration of these countries is evidenced by the fact that today the most active and skilled members of their labour forces work abroad, ¹⁴ mostly in western Europe where, despite EU membership, they are afforded second-class status. Former Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron’s poisonous language about EU migrant workers ‘demanding something for nothing’ and his pre-Brexit negotiations to secure an ‘emergency brake’ mechanism to make payment of in-work benefits to Europeans conditional on their having worked in Britain for at least eighteen months, cements and legitimates this status. ¹⁵

National elites challenged in Austria and Germany

There is always the worry that this eastern European mix of autarky, nationalism, corruption and racism will contaminate neighbours. There are certain cities and regions at the EU’s core, in Austria and eastern Germany that are experiencing a mix of economic stagnation, low birth rates and depopulation. Much of the former GDR, particularly Thuringia and Saxony, where the Islamophobic street movement Pegida is rooted and the influence of the Alternative for Germany party (AfD) is spreading, is nostalgic for the certainties of the communist era. (There is even a name for it, Ostalgie.) Meanwhile, in Austria, the dominance of the two centre-right and centre-left parties within a social partnership governance framework is no longer guaranteed. For the first time since 1945, the candidates of the Social Democrat and centre-right People’s Party failed to make it to the second round of the 2016 presidential elections. More shockingly, the extreme-right Freedom Party (FPÖ)’s Norbert Hofer (who claims to carry a gun to ‘protect himself from refugees’) ¹⁶ won the first round with 35 per cent of the vote. Hofer was narrowly defeated in the second round by the independent candidate Alexander van der Bellen, but a rerun has been called due to alleged electoral irregularities. Whatever the result, the FPÖ has shifted the debate on immigration even further to the right, as evidenced in the passage of a new asylum law (mirroring a law already passed in Hungary) that allows the government to introduce a state of emergency at a time of migration crisis. ¹⁷

The FPÖ, the roots of which lie in Austria’s fascist past, has extended its power base from the deep rural southern state of Carinthia to working-class, former Social Democrat strongholds in Vienna and Lower Austria as well as, crucially, the eastern border states of Styria and Burgenland, where in 2015 the local branch of the Social Democrats, to its everlasting shame, formed a coalition government with the FPÖ. ¹⁸ But the resignation of the Social Democrat Chancellor Werner Faymann (who lost the support of his party after hardening his anti-refugee stance) suggests that the Social Democrats do not think as one on the question of future co-operation with the extreme Right.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel, facing strong pressure from within the Christian Democrats, has imposed her will, ruling out accommodation with far-right nationalists. What particularly concerns Merkel, who grew up in the GDR, is the extreme Right’s flirtation with Russia as the leader of an alternative pole of globalisation. In fact, the extreme Right across Europe admire the strong leadership of Putin, notably his devil-may-care approach to human rights.

Back in 2013, Germany’s Christian Democrats faced a rebellion from within, primarily over questions of the country’s future in the eurozone. This was the context for the formation of Germany’s first mainstream Eurosceptic party, Alternative for Germany (AfD). In the postwar period, Germany gained a reputation as the European country least prone to nationalist rhetoric and one that consciously sought to refashion its identity within Europe. Until 2013, europhilia and support for globalisation held the line, reflecting, too, the importance of the EU and global markets (most recently Latin America and Asia) to Germany’s export-oriented economy and its successful multinationals. Now Merkel is faced with a Eurosceptic party exploiting discontent about Germany’s future role in the eurozone. And the discontent comes from within centre-right circles, where a major argument had been brewing over supposed economic laxity in the context of the global financial crisis and in particular the debt crisis in Greece.

In this way, the global banking crisis of 2008 threw up contradictions within the centre Right over ordoliberalism, the German economic orthodoxy which holds that government actions should be subordinated to the strict observance of an established order, with the function of a strong state being to ‘consciously shape the structures, the institutional framework, the order, in which the economy functions’. ¹⁹ Germany’s ‘social market economy’ (the state regulates, but does not stimulate) has always rejected Keynesian solutions in a recession, as has the European Central Bank, which Germany has fashioned in its own image.

At first, there was no open rift between political parties about Germany’s future in the eurozone. But German and French banks had lent billions to Greece (and more to Spain), which put them at risk – and this exposure was represented in the media not as a crisis of the banks, but as a crisis of debt in the southern European periphery caused by an excess of public spending.

Germany, with its strong export-oriented specialist manufacturing and high corporate profits, is the powerhouse of the EU. Political dominance within the EU is assured not just by its economic prowess, but by the decline of French, Spanish and Italian economic power, as well as the isolationist path pursued by British Conservatives, which ultimately led to Brexit. ²⁰ The German perception that it foots the bills and assumes the burdens of leadership is true, to a certain extent. Yet to take this a step further, and claim Germany is a benevolent force within the EU, is to enter the distorted world of the ordoliberals. There is no one European capitalism, and the political economies and the monetary systems of the various EU member states differ enormously, a fact that those who make the rules in the eurozone wilfully ignore. ²¹ Germany’s attempt to impose its model on the whole of Europe has been a major cause of the fractures that threaten the EU. For the EU’s macroeconomic policy works primarily in Germany’s interests, as does the common currency, with the EU providing the largest market for the export of German goods. In fact, the European Monetary System, as Perry Anderson points out, ‘is a zone pivoting around the Deutschmark, the only currency never to be devalued within it’. ²²

Germany had cemented its hegemony (and its export capacity within the EU) by pursuing a deflationary wages policy in order to suppress internal consumption and manage the costs of reunification. This has had a knock-on effect in other EU economies, but the links between German economic dominance and a distressed and indebted periphery are obscured by the xenophobic media. During the Greek debt crisis, the tabloid newspaper Bild did more than most to promote a narrative that relied on xenophobia, running headlines like ‘Stop! No more billions for greedy Greeks’, ‘The Greeks are begging for our billions’ and ‘Sell off your islands, you bankrupt Greeks, and the Acropolis too’. ²³ Suddenly, the consensus that Germany’s future lay in ever-closer European integration began to fall apart.

The metamorphosis of Alternative for Germany

It was thus in 2013 that Eurosceptism finally broke out in Germany in the form of the AfD. The party can now legitimately be described as far right, but it was initially formed as a national conservative party by economists, academics, publicists and captains of industry disaffected with Merkel’s approach to the eurocrisis. ²⁴ The original intention of its technocratic leaders (the AfD was known then as the party of the professors) was to build a right-of-centre broad church that would afford Germany – a country which had shaken off its fascist past – a greater role globally as a geopolitical power. Central to this vision was an ‘orderly dissolution of the eurozone’ and the creation of smaller, more stable monetary unions. Citing the martyrdom of the Social Democrat banker Thilo Sarrazin ²⁵ on the altar of political correctness and using slogans such as ‘courage for the Truth’ and ‘courage to stand up for Germany’, the AfD, backed by Bild and Frankfurter Allgemeine, claimed that cosmopolitan elites ruling Germany were preventing a proper debate on the single currency. ²⁶ But those who purported to speak for the ‘German taxpayer’ and argued that the restoration of the Deutschmark must not be ‘taboo’ soon saw themselves swept aside by a xenophobic current they had unleashed. By 2015, a younger, populist, less technocratic leadership, many associated with the Christian Right, had gained control of the party, buttressed by an influx of new members – many of whom were sympathetic to the Islamophobic and anti-immigration movement Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident). At its 2016 annual meeting, the AfD stipulated in its new manifesto that Islam has no place in Germany. Under the leadership of the Saxon entrepreneur Frauke Petry, it called for Swiss-style plebiscites on asylum seekers, mosques and minarets, attacked the burden that single mothers and the ‘mentally handicapped’ place on the economy and challenged adoption rights for homosexuals – and its leader had suggested that the police should have the power to shoot refugees at the border.

Southern Europe: the legacy of dictatorship

In southern Europe, grassroots movements organising around different aspects of the social crisis provided the groundswell for the electoral breakthrough of radical parties such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. While the traditional centre ground of Spanish and Greek politics shows signs of stress, an examination of how the recent past impacts on the present suggests that in both countries national elites may adopt underhand, undemocratic methods to keep power.

After the second world war, a nexus of police, military and oligarchs ushered in the southern European dictatorships that only came to an end in Greece and Spain (as well as Portugal) in the 1970s. There are suspicions that the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, which still has eighteen MPs in the Hellenic parliament (despite the mass arrest of its leadership on criminal charges), enjoys the patronage of Greece’s powerful shipbuilders. The party’s penetration of the police and the military is one sign that in Greece the diaplekomenoi (the entangled ones) are pushing through again. Spain does not have the electoral equivalent of Golden Dawn, but the 2015 Citizens’ Security Law (popularly known as the gagging law or citizens’ repression law), massively strengthened the powers of the police, who can now disband virtually any form of public protest as well as fine those who afford them ‘a lack of respect’. ²⁷ Those drafting the legislation, the Popular Party (PP), with support in traditional ultra-Catholic national elites, have been accused of taking Spain a step back towards dictatorship.

The context of German hegemony, again, is the key to understanding the defensive nationalism of old elites in Spain and Greece. Wolfgang Streeck has described how the Mediterranean countries developed a model of capitalism in which growth was driven not by exports and international competitiveness (as in Germany and much of northern Europe) but mainly by domestic demand, with borrowing and public expenditure used to stimulate growth. ²⁸ The rigorous monetary policy of Germany does not suit the economies of southern Europe, which require monetary flexibility. But having joined the eurozone and accepted the convergence criteria, one model had to yield to another. The poorly regulated Spanish financial sector, which recklessly financed the rapid expansion of the banking sector through international borrowing, has been in deep trouble since the collapse of the property market and the bankruptcies of major companies in 2008. But Spain, the fifth-largest EU economy, was spared the gruelling treatment meted out to Greece, receiving a €41 billion bailout under generous terms via the European Stability Mechanism. The terms of Greece’s third bailout (which came without any debt relief), laid out in The Third Memorandum, were, in contrast, draconian. Stigmatised, punished and reduced to penury, the Greek people woke up to the nightmare of a sovereign parliament dispossessed of power within a debtors’ prison.

‘Greece is now a semi-protectorate: a bigger Kosovo’, argues Stathis Kouvelakis of the Left Platform, ²⁹ pointing to the loss of legislative power (all bills have to be approved by the Quartet ³⁰ before being submitted to parliament), as well as fiscal control. As the economy shrinks, and the debt burden increases, the Greek people face a bleak future of mass unemployment, home repossessions, shrinking pensions and collapsing public services. The most severe austerity programme ever imposed on a European country was accompanied by the largest privatisation programme since the absorption of the GDR into West Germany, ³¹ with an estimated 71,500 pieces of prime public property being sold to pay off Greek debts. ³² Syriza has hung on to power. But how it can survive as a progressive party when it has been forced to introduce ever more rounds of austerity is by no means clear. And its previous principled humanitarian stance towards refugees is undermined by the key role it must play in implementing the EU-Turkey migration deal. A new law has been passed authorising the military to run closed detention and deportation camps at border entry points (most often in derelict warehouses on the Greek islands). This expansion of the military into the civilian field, alongside the growth of immigration policing, is cause for concern, not least because Golden Dawn had previously infiltrated the poorly trained border guard (as well as the riot police and sections of the military). Indeed, former Syriza finance minister Yanis Varoufakis warned that a ‘combination of authoritarianism, permanent recession, deflation and racism’ could embolden the ‘dark forces’ within. ³³

Spain: migration, precarity and immigration policing

In Spain, from 2014 until the rerun of the general election in June 2016, Podemos, which has always taken a positive stance on immigration, ³⁴ looked as if it could only grow as an electoral force, gathering in disgruntled voters from the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE). At the same time, the rightwing PP’s share of the vote also declined dramatically in the 2014 general election. With the most fragmented parliament in Spain’s history, another general election was called during which time the country was left without effective government. In the June 2016 election, the PP leader Mariano Rajoy projected himself as a defender of Spanish unity and continuity and opposed to a secessionist challenge in Catalonia. The strategy secured the PP the greatest share of votes, but still not enough to form a majority government.

To many it now seems that Spain’s electoral system which promotes bipartisanship is collapsing – with the threat coming not just from the radical Left. Since 2011, the PP, which traditionally absorbed voters from across the right spectrum, has faced mounting challenges from the seventeen regional governments, particularly from rightwing separatist movements in Catalonia, pursuing nakedly anti-immigration, anti-Muslim agendas. In 2011, the conservative Convergence and Union (CiU) and the far-right Platform for Catalonia (PxC), founded by former supporters of Franco, made electoral gains on the back of extremist campaigns that blamed immigrants and Gypsies for crime. In a region where you would be hard pressed to find a woman wearing the full veil, the Right promised to ban the burqa and niqab as a preventive measure ‘in case they come’. ³⁵ (PSOE politicians, too, supported the ban, but in the name of gender equality.)

Spain is experiencing a declining birth rate, ageing population, and emigration of the highly educated (due to austerity-driven cuts in universities and research institutions). Over the last twenty years, it has relied on its migrant and foreign-born workforce to drive up growth. Migration from countries such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Romania and Morocco was positively encouraged from 1999 onwards, with the new workers heavily overrepresented in the construction, agriculture and care sectors. But in the wake of the collapse of the housing market following 2008, the PP began to scapegoat migrant workers, at the same time as substantially weakening their position in the labour market.

Disillusionment with the Socialist government’s handling of the economic crisis was growing (it was the first to implement austerity) and in the 2011 general election, the PP was the main beneficiary, sweeping to power with a strengthened majority. The PP not only deepened austerity but introduced deeply unpopular labour laws aimed at creating a more flexible (i.e., precarious) workforce, prompting a general strike. Facing growing unpopularity, the PP turned to blaming migrants for the crisis, attacking the principle of universal health care at the point of need. An April 2012 law excluded undocumented workers (except, in theory at least, children and pregnant women) from access to all but emergency health care, with the government of Mariano Rajoy claiming that cancelling the health cards of 873,000 undocumented immigrants would save the country €500 million. ³⁶ This was immediately challenged. Six of the autonomous regions refused to implement the law and Doctors of the World launched the campaign, ‘Right to Care’, mobilising health care professionals, doctors and ordinary citizens. When it became clear that emergency services (far more expensive than a visit to a GP) could not cope with the extra demand, the prime minister announced a U-turn in April 2015 to reinstate the right to primary care. But in August 2016, the Constitutional Court upheld the 2012 law, ruling that it was justified by the ‘grave economic difficulty unprecedented since the creation of the National Health System’ and undocumented migrants’ rights to human dignity and health were adequately protected by access to emergency care.

Migrants’ sense of belonging had been seriously eroded. The attack on migrants’ access to the welfare state was accompanied by an accelerated removals programme and an increase in immigration policing. This had the effect of terrifying migrant workers and forcing them into a more clandestine mode of existence. As in the UK, the Spanish government sought to use immigration policy as a way to revitalise ‘the boundaries between the citizen-worker and the abject migrant’, ‘defining inside and outside, included and excluded’, paving the way for the ‘creation and enforcement of internal bordering within the nation’. ³⁷ These are all processes vital to the neoliberal plan to shrink the welfare state. At the same time, they expand the powers of the immigration police, the least accountable policing body.

The Spanish model of governance is unique in Europe. During an incomplete transition from dictatorship, political stability was prioritised over democratic governance as part of the ‘Pact of Forgetting’. Spain, with its weak system of checks and balances within a diminished parliamentary democracy, has often been described as a ‘particracy’, meaning that the two largest centre-right and centre-left parties dominate the state apparatus, carving out appointments to official bodies and to the judiciary. As a result, cronyism and corruption are endemic in public life, particularly in the parcelling out of public tenders at a local and national level. ³⁸

Los Indignados (The Indignant Ones) burst onto the political scene in 2011, focusing not just on austerity but the need to end widespread political corruption. Organising against foreclosures and evictions, it was just one of many vibrant movements challenging Spain’s national elites which have prospered under neoliberalism. But inequality has now become so vast (Spain has the fourth-highest rate of childhood inequality in the EU after Romania, Bulgaria and Greece), that it constitutes a threat to public order, and elites now feel that the ‘particracy’ is threatened. Historian Helen Graham fears that Spain will resolve its continuity problem through a revival of authoritarianism. She draws attention to the way the Right resorts to the politicisation of historical discussion and its launch of memory wars which, she says, have a vehemence unsurpassed in Europe. ³⁹ Ultra-conservatives within the PP have an overweening sense of their quasi-hereditary right to rule, she warns; they are responding to a loss of power by abandoning any lingering shame about their roots in dictatorship. Just as in Poland, any progressive reclaiming of history is challenged.

From Brexit to Frexit?

It is in the old colonial powers of France and the UK that the populist, anti-elitist idiom of the Front National (FN) and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), and their calls for ‘national preference’ in employment and public services, have caused most damage to the progressive cause. Since 2012, both extreme-right parties have aggressively targeted leftwing voters, to some effect. UKIP emerged essentially due to a schism within conservatism over Europe. Nigel Farage, UKIP’s leader in the run-up to the referendum, as well as the party’s erstwhile main donor, the multimillionaire insurance businessman Arron Banks, are both former Conservatives. Until 2015, UKIP had enjoyed mixed electoral fortunes. But four million people voted for UKIP in the May 2015 general election, when its share of the vote increased from 3.1 per cent to 12.6 per cent – more than that of any other party, expanding its base, according to Richard Seymour, ‘beyond its typical conservative southern England strongholds to the Labour-voting northeast, northwest and South Wales’. ⁴⁰ In the May 2016 local elections, UKIP again scored well, breaking into the former mining valleys of Wales. Only in Scotland and Northern Ireland does it have no presence.

Across France, since Marine Le Pen took over the FN in 2011, it has implanted itself nationwide, with twelve mayors elected and more than 1,500 council seats gained. Holding an annual May Day rally, the FN describes itself as France’s leading working-class party, going out of its way to target public workers and pensioners, ‘sensitive to a message emphasising the role of the state’. ⁴¹ (Needless to say, neither UKIP nor the FN could have made such inroads into socialist and communist heartlands, if the Left had not abandoned them.)

It was only after the British referendum on EU membership (in June 2016) that the extent of working-class discontent in what is now routinely referred to as ‘left behind Britain’ could be openly acknowledged. Former Prime Minister David Cameron’s miscalculation in calling the referendum (so sure was he that his ‘remain’ position would prevail) was only matched by the miscalculations of the official Britain Stronger in Europe campaign. Led by David Cameron, and shored up by Labour party grandees, its pitch to voters was made on the basis of financial fear: corporate flight, declining house prices, and further austerity budgets were all promised, should a leave vote prevail. But the threat of another economic recession had little purchase in the former industrial heartlands which were still deeply mired in the last one. What did resonate here (and equally well, it should be said, in middle-class constituencies) was the anti-immigration vitriol of the rightwing Eurosceptic-owned and controlled press. Adding a touch of glamour to the official Vote Leave cause were three high-profile Conservative politicians, Boris Johnson (a former London mayor and populist Euro-bashing journalist), Iain Duncan Smith (founder of the Centre for Social Justice, a New Right think-tank) and Michael Gove (another former journalist and friend of Rupert Murdoch). Through exaggerations, half-truths and downright lies, the official Vote Leave campaign lent intellectual respectability to the anti-EU, anti-migrant cause, claiming, for instance, that hordes of Turkish migrants would enter Britain if it stayed in the EU and foreign rapists and criminals could not be deported because of EU legislation. It was left to UKIP, heading the unofficial Leave.EU campaign, to push the argument into explicit far-right territory. ‘Islamist extremism is a real threat to our life’ read a billboard after the Pulse gay nightclub massacre in June 2016 in the US; another showed a long snaking queue of migrants ‘Breaking Point: the EU has failed us’ and ‘we must take back control of our borders’.

A debate which could have been about how best to ensure economic justice and political accountability descended into xenophobia and curdled nationalism. The fallout was immediately felt on the ground in a huge increase in xenophobic and racist incidents, not to mention the murder, at the height of the campaign (in fact a day after the Breaking Point billboard) of Joanna Cox, a Labour MP in West Yorkshire, by a white supremacist with connections to Britain First and the National Alliance in the US. Cox was killed in a region where seven far-right parties have been actively terrorising Muslim communities for at least a decade, though, of course, analysis of the impact of the far Right on the lives of ordinary Muslims was largely left out of the reckoning during public grief over Cox’s murder.

Colonial continuities in the UK and France

Even so, racism, nationalist populism and authoritarian attitudes in both France and the UK cannot be divorced from questions of the economy, or the changing nature of the state itself. Former industrial heartlands are decaying, manufacture is in decline and business investment has dropped sharply, as trade deficits mount. Both these former colonial powers have an unrealistic sense of their continued importance in the world. Any possibility of coming to terms with the loss of global superpower status is undermined by the chauvinism and hubris that followed participation in wars in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Syria. And in both countries, participation in foreign wars, coupled with structural discrimination and erosion of Muslim communities’ sense of belonging, adds to a vicious cycle of reaction. A number of alienated Muslims, having been exposed to the warped millenarian ideology of Islamic State, are at war with society, seeking catharsis in acts of apocalyptic violence.

Not surprisingly, repression has been ratcheted up, primarily through the imposition of emergency measures once practised in the colonies (house arrest, detention without trial, special courts, exclusion orders, deportation, suspension of civil liberties, and so on). Meanwhile, an all-pervasive narrative of national security serves to isolate critical voices, with a state-compliant ‘third sector’ willing to preserve the status quo.

The threat posed by ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), tragically played out first on the streets of London, then, at the time of writing, Paris, Brussels and Nice, provides the excuse to lock down society still further. To date, most analysis of counter-extremism has focused, understandably, on its impact on Muslim communities. But counter-extremism as an ideology has far deeper roots in Europe, going back first to colonialism, where it was used to justify the use of emergency measures against the ‘unenlightened’, and then to the Cold War. ⁴² Counter-extremism has thus been a way of dividing the savages from the civilised, the enlightened from the benighted – a way of preventing groups from seeing and connecting, thereby preserving the centre ground from true democratisation.

Today, the fear of extremist violence acts as a powerful persuader, convincing the public that security can only be fixed through relying on the machine politicians of traditional political parties to ensure the security of the majority by locking out the minority. It is in France and the UK, the countries in which the lobbying power of the military and private security companies is at its strongest, where the counter-extremism security industry can be mobilised to isolate and marginalise autonomous social movements calling for more democratic participation. The UK’s counter-extremism policies, based to a large extent on the co-option of teachers, doctors and social workers into surveillance functions, are seen as a model for other European countries to follow.

This change in governance, described by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben as a state of exception, is becoming a normal system of government. Governments no longer attempt to prevent problems but to steer through them, not addressing, for instance, the causes of terrorism, or migration, but its effects, since ‘causes demand to be known’ but ‘effects can only be checked and controlled’. ⁴³ This new mode of governance obliges states to treat each citizen as a potential terrorist or illegal immigrant, extending and multiplying controls and governing through digital and biometrical technology (ID cards, optical scanners, electronic passports, smart border control systems, full body scanners, Automated Facial Identification Software, CCTV cameras, the list is endless). In this way citizens (a political identity) become data (a biological identity), leading to a situation where power has at its disposal unlimited biometric and other information on all its population. ⁴⁴

A formal state of exception does not have to be openly declared, but a creeping and all-embracing securitisation – government by and through technology – takes place behind the scenes, with vague non-juridical notions, like ‘security reasons’, used to ensure the fictitious notion of an ongoing chronic crisis (as opposed to a single event demanding an emergency response). And it is out of ongoing national crises that those wielding state power can develop the idea of the state as the victim of the destabilising actions of the people, with its authoritarian reaction merely a rational form of self-defence.

Nowhere is this clearer than in France. Following the massacre in Paris of 130 people by Islamic State sympathisers, the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls rounded on all those who ‘seek excuses or cultural or sociological explanations for what has happened’. ⁴⁵ Laxisme is the accusation now levelled by the state against those French men and women who believe that to overcome terrorism, you must study its causes. Nationalism in France is hardwired into a new rhetoric of national self-defence, a mainstream discourse around loyalty, treachery and the belief that the ends justify the means.

At first glance, the French government’s use of the state of emergency feels more like a reworking of colonial rule within the metropole. But, as if to prove Agamben’s point about normalisation, in February 2016, not only did parliament vote to extend the state of emergency for a further three months, but the lower house also agreed a proposal to enshrine powers to declare a state of emergency into the constitution. ⁴⁶ Popular opinion is behind the state of emergency, just as it was at the time of colonial rule, precisely because it is applied selectively and overwhelmingly (although not exclusively) against the indigènes, i.e., communities of sub-Saharan African and North African descent. A combination of Enlightenment fundamentalism (a totalitarian mindset against any expression of the Islamic faith), and the historic legacy of cultural assimilation and racial discrimination, have proved fatal to democracy in a country that never came to terms with its colonial past and now treats ethnic minorities not as equal citizens, but as colonial subjects. They experience a colonial low-intensity conflict style of policing, in which a kind of military force is applied selectively, if with restraint, not to fight crime so much as to enforce compliance with the policies and objectives of the state.

In this way, a Socialist government has created an authoritarian climate that gives the green light for the Brigades Anti-Criminalité (BAC), Brigade de Recherche et d’Intervention (BRI, sometimes referred to as the ‘anti-gangs brigade’) and the Gendarmerie Nationale (a national police force which is a military corps given special powers to use guns without the restrictions imposed on other police officers), to act with impunity, terrorising and humiliating Muslims through raiding homes, meeting places and religious centres without judicial oversight. Power in France is increasingly arbitrary and authoritarian, as evidenced by bans on demonstrations, the use of assigned residency, calls for greater protection to police who shoot to kill (as in the UK) and, finally, the detested El Khomri law, introduced by government decree, to ‘make flexible’ the labour market.

Emergency laws include colonial-style house arrest, under which those who are suspected (but not formally accused) of radicalisation face a twelve-hour curfew, a ban on travel outside their municipality and a duty to report up to three times a day to the police. ⁴⁷ All this constitutes a form of collective punishment based on what a former president of the Lawyers’ Union of France, Jean-Jacques Gandini, describes as ‘prediction-based suspicion’. For such orders are based on behaviour or associations, not known criminal activities. ⁴⁸ Gandini alerts us to the hybrid nature of the French state of emergency – looking back to colonial rule and forward to biometric rule (literally ‘life measurement’), as the state of emergency allows the state to control and collect biometric and behavioural data on individuals whose identity traits have already assigned them to the category of security risk.

Neoliberalism and authoritarianism: local and global

The memory wars and narratives of national victimhood and ‘enemies within’ across Europe might suggest that national elites are holding on to the past and simply drawing on old rightwing authoritarian traditions. But, significantly, there are also signs that the hard Right, in speaking very much to the economic present, far from wanting to undo globalisation, embraces it and dresses it up in a more patriotic and authoritarian wrapper. Authoritarian solutions are also hardwired into neoliberalism and there is much in its practice (as opposed to its superficial ideology) that nationalists can build on. Power over and punishment of the weak and vulnerable are as intrinsic to neoliberalism as they are to authoritarian nationalism. Witness the neoliberal abandonment of people with mental health or addiction problems to incarceration within an ever-expanding penal state, from the 1990s onwards. Neoliberalism and authoritarianism have been wedded, too, in the workplace. Workfare, labour deregulation, zero-hour contracts, unwillingness to enforce the minimum wage, all these forms of autocratic management are based on a tyrannical disciplinary power. They have given rise to insecure working conditions (with the most exploited group being migrant agency workers, a modern form of indentured labour), as seen in a number of cases in the UK, involving household-name retailers like Boots, ⁴⁹ BHS ⁵⁰ and Sports Direct, ⁵¹ manufacturing companies such as Hawkeswood Metal Recycling, ⁵² as well as agricultural gangmasters like DJ Houghton Chicken Catching Services. ⁵³ The nationalist parties in Europe certainly don’t want to break with this authoritarian attitude to labour; on the contrary they want to enhance it – more discipline of labour, more workfare, more power to the police and military, more punishment of ‘delinquents’, including the constant insinuation that what is really needed is the return of the death penalty. Above all, it means a boundary-making national political culture where troublesome minorities know their place and the differences between the citizen-worker and the abject migrant are clearly delineated.

Neoliberalism is not just an economic project. It is also deeply political, an attempt to transform the state from within, merging nation states into interconnecting market states. To date, the EU supranational entity, with its weak parliament and unaccountable European Commission, has been central to that process. Through subordinating ‘social Europe’ (social protection and equality) to the interests of global corporations and global finance (competition law and market efficiencies), those who drive the European Commission may have created the conditions for the EU’s nemesis – nationalism and, following Brexit, potential dissolution.

For, paradoxically, nationalism may yet prove highly advantageous to neoliberal transnational forces as, in grossly unequal and socially volatile societies that are increasingly rejecting austerity in favour of protectionism, only a more commanding and authoritarian mode of governance can finalise the transition from nation state to market state, enabling neoliberalism. ⁵⁴ If nationalism can be tamed, its merit for supranational elites is that it could well deliver a more regimented national community. For if the market state is to continue to advance the interests of global finance in an economically diminished and socially divided Europe, then national elites, whose responsibility it is to ensure a stable environment for global capital, must set clear limits. Inequality, in the final analysis, demands to be policed. The neoliberal enabler state may still be necessary in terms of the economy. But in terms of political stability, the state must turn enforcer, guaranteeing that social disorder does not threaten the political order. Nationalism could well provide the route into the ‘strong state’, albeit that the stability that transnational capitalism seeks to create differs from its nineteenth-century variety. A modern ‘strong state’ does not need state terror when it has in its arsenal the total control brought about by the revolution in biometric and digital technologies. A shrinking state in terms of welfare, but an expanded, centralised and total state in terms of social control, discipline and power.

Nationalism, nativism, the setting of boundaries between the citizen-worker and the abject migrant, the promise of national security in the face of the Muslim enemy within, are all means to an end, ensuring the public colludes in policing itself within the technological security apparatus that has grown up alongside the market state. In this sense, nationalism, far from representing a break with neoliberalism, provides the climate that allows for its break from democracy.