Abstract
This is quite a remarkable book, a product of years of careful and original research into the question of uneven and combined development in southern Europe (SE), informed by a sophisticated Marxian political economy perspective – one in which the influence of Antonio Gramsci and an emphasis on the cultural and political constitution and consequences of the capitalist economy is always prominent. Hadjimichalis combines a breadth and depth of evidence from a wide variety of primary and secondary sources drawn from across Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain with a rare political and theoretical sophistication, drawing on a deep knowledge of cross-disciplinary and multi-lingual literatures. I find it difficult to imagine anyone else being able to do this, and certainly not with the depth of scholarship and political insight that he reveals. The book is a rare achievement, one that should be widely read, both by academics interested in questions of uneven development and the future of Europe and by European Union (EU) politicians and policy-makers as they grapple with the task of finding a way forward out of post-austerity Europe and onto a socially more progressive development trajectory.
As Hadjimichalis explains, there are good, sound reasons for focusing upon SE. Greece, Portugal and Spain all made the transition from dictatorships to democracy in the 1970s and became members of the European Community (EC, as it was then) in the 1980s. Italy was in a sense the ‘odd one out’ of the original six member states of the EC, although like its southern European neighbours it also had its own earlier history of profoundly uneven development and a transition from dictatorship to democracy. Furthermore, by the 1980s all four had broadly similar economic and social structures – certainly not identical and with differences among them but with enough commonality to distinguish them from the other member states of the EU. In addition, by 2009/2010 all four were in the grip of severe economic and financial crises.
While these are issues on which he had been working for many years (for example, see Hadjimichalis, 1987), as Hadjimichalis explains the immediate stimulus for writing this book was an encounter in Brussels in October 2013. It is worth saying a little about this. He was invited by the EU Directorate General for Regional Development to give a talk in a session on ‘Spatial Justice in Future European Regional Development’ organised by the Regional Studies Association Open Universities Sessions. In this, he argued that the cause of the crisis, which by then was rampant in the economies of the southern European states, was not, as was commonly assumed, debt. In fact, Hadjimichalis argued, debt was one its effects rather than its cause. In contrast, he argued that the causes of the crisis lay in a combination of the longue durée of uneven geographical development in Europe and the uneven and undemocratic structure of the Eurozone, which was ‘the fragile and explosive background upon which the global financial crisis was grounded and hit its first weak link, Greece’ (p. 1). While his presentation was received in stony silence, in the subsequent coffee break he found himself assailed by participants from northern Europe who, in a nutshell, asserted that the root of the problem was the irresponsible behaviour of southern Europeans and, as a result, they should repay their debts to the north European banks who had lent money to the Greek government. This book is a powerful demolition of the arguments of those critics. I can only hope they read it.
The book is structured as follows. After the introductory chapter, Chapter 2 analyses uneven development in the 1980s and 1990s prior to the introduction of the euro, but is always sensitive to the longue durée of uneven and combined development at multiple spatial scales. Hadjimichalis emphasises a number of features that the four economies shared in common: the dominance of medium-sized and small, especially micro-scale, enterprises; the varied significance of the informal sector, both in underpinning the competitiveness of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and providing ways of ‘getting by’ for those excluded from the market for waged labour; the significance of the family as a unit of both production and social reproduction; and the role of the weak, clientelistic and familistic state. The combination of these characteristics enabled the emergence of economically dynamic ‘intermediate’ regions in these countries in the 1970s and 1980s. While the paradigmatic examples were the industrial districts of the ‘Third Italy’, there were similar regional economic ‘success stories’ in the other three countries. However, these then faced severe economic problems following crucial changes in the European and global spatial divisions of labour in the 1990s as former ‘‘success stories’ became problematic places (ironically just at the time that they were becoming models for development strategies in deindustrialised regions in the north of Europe). The Maastricht Treaty was a major turning point, institutionalising neoliberalism and transferring major regulatory powers to unelected EU organisations, with serious consequences for the economies of the southern European states in the run up to the introduction of the euro. This leads into Chapter 3, which focuses on the building of the Eurozone in the context of capitalist transformations towards financialisation and the switch to rent-seeking activities, particularly speculative real estate, in the context of a shift from the primary to secondary circuits of capital as the focus of accumulation strategies. Hadjimichalis emphasises the absence of any geographical or regional perspective in the Eurozone proposals, with their exclusive focus on ‘national convergence criteria’. In a multi-scalar world, the policy-makers responsible for the Eurozone saw only the national scale. Consequently, in coming to terms with the crisis, this mono-scalar view of the world was very soon revealed as inadequate. In understanding why the crisis came about – and so in principle how it needs to be tackled – Hadjimichalis argues that this sole pre-occupation with the national needs to be challenged and attention given to spatially uneven development and uneven trade flows and trade imbalances, as well as national debt. Furthermore, he argues that the undemocratic character of multi-scale governance in the EU and the Eurozone exacerbated the effects of the crisis and precluded any effective measures to deal with the resultant problems. In brief, in these two chapters he firmly locates the causes of the crisis in the political economy of uneven development in the EU, processes that are inherent to capitalist development and that had been in place for decades but that were given a savage added twist by the introduction of the euro and new forms of regulation in the Eurozone, while uneven development was to be further intensified by the austerity policies imposed directly or indirectly by the Troika in response to the crisis.
In Chapter 4, Hadjimichalis turns his attention to ‘ideological wars’, to the imagining and discursive construction of the ‘New Southern Question’. This is important in emphasising the relationships between culture and economy, that the economy is always a cultural as well as an economic construction. Drawing on Gramsci’s earlier analysis of the ‘southern question’ in Italy, he argues convincingly that from the outset of the crisis dominant elites in Europe, along with the mainstream media, constructed a narrative that placed the blame for the crisis wholly on southerners who ‘lived beyond their means’ and on ‘their’ governments who cheated EU institutions. In this chapter he uses material drawn from newspaper articles and cartoons to excellent effect in illustrating the stereotypical images used to portray people and governments in SE. In many ways these visual images convey the prejudices exhibited by political elites and the mainstream media more powerfully than the written word.
Chapter 5 shifts the register to ‘the problem of the de-politicisation of regional development’, to relationships between theory and practice, focusing particularly on regional and urban planning and their links to economic geography. Reflecting on the changes that took place in theoretical approaches in these disciplinary domains in the latter years of the 20th century, Hadjimichalis argues that the gradual shift towards ‘Third Way’ thinking (he points to the developments in the (so-called) ‘New Economic Geography/Geographical Economics’ (NEG/GE) and ‘New Regionalism’ (NR), and while there are differences between the NEG/GE and NR they are much less significant that what they share in common) became a new de-politicised orthodoxy precisely ‘at the same time as neoliberalism making a frontal attack in the field’ (p. 114). The ‘Third Way’ suggested that the solution to the problems of economically lagging regions lay in a combination of institutional change and changed attitudes and behaviours by the people who lived there – in essence, it blamed the victims for their plight. Any suggestion that the problems experienced in these areas were a consequence of the processes of uneven and combined development that are integral to capitalism was effectively written out of the narrative. As a result, this made it easy to absorb ‘Third Way’ views into neoliberal policies so that when the crisis began there was no alternative to neoliberalism and its policy prescriptions – TINA (There Is No Alternative) was back in town and would have no truck with older social democratic redistributive socio-spatial welfare policies. As a result, other than the gestural rhetoric of ‘territorial and social cohesion’, EU policies to address issues of uneven regional and urban development were notable by their absence at a time when national governments in SE had virtually no room for manoeuvre, even if they had had a serious commitment to tackle socio-spatial inequalities. Consequently, and predictably, these inequalities burgeoned yet further as the crisis and the austerity policies that became the response to it bit deeply into the social and economic fabric of SE.
However, as Hadjimichalis demonstrates in Chapter 6, people in SE did not necessarily accept that they were powerless in this situation. He shows how – via demonstrations, square occupations and solidarity social movements in urban areas – people in SE created a terrain of resistance and solidarity. In spatialising democratic practices in these ways, these movements challenged the de-politicisation that was characteristic of neoliberal austerity. He also shows how there were links between older leftist traditions in SE and these new initiatives, helping in the creation of the new political subjectivities that came out of the mass demonstrations and square occupations. There is a fascinating discussion of the emergence of the extensive network of bottom-up self-organised solidarity movements that spread across SE, focusing on three paradigmatic Greek examples around food distribution, health care and the accommodation of migrants. The emergence of these initiatives raises a whole series of both theoretical and political questions, not least the possibilities for new forms of both participatory and representative democracy.
It is the questions of politics and the future of the EU and Eurozone that are the focus of the final chapter. What of the future for the EU and those who live there? As Hadjimichalis puts it, drawing again on Gramsci and his reflections on the crises of the interwar years, ‘Are there any politics of hope, or do we face the time of monsters?’ Reflecting on the aftermath of the 60th ‘birthday’ celebration for the EU in Rome in 2017, Hadjimichalis is severely critical of the proposals for a ‘multi-speed’ EU, seeing in this the institutionalisation and legitimation of a future of continuing socio-spatial uneven development. I agree with him on this. So, recognising the problematic nature of the EU as currently constituted, he poses the question: ‘should the European Union even be saved?’ (p. 182). This is a hard question. His answer, balancing the tensions between the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ and the ‘optimism of the will’, is ‘yes, it is worth an effort’ because, as he says, while recognising all the risks ‘at least it gives a chance that I personally would not like to miss, since at this juncture, the destruction of the EU would leave free space for monsters to roam in’ (p. 182).
Is he right in this view? I think he is and that the EU, warts and all, is the least bad option on offer in the foreseeable future. In the UK Brexit referendum in 2016 I voted to remain in the EU, not because I had any wish to preserve it simply as it was then and still is now – quite the contrary, for reasons that are very clearly set out by Hadjimichalis. I voted to remain on the grounds that the only way to try and change the EU (and so the UK, then and for now at least, a constituent member state) to something more socially progressive – recognising that given the recent past and the present conjuncture, the best that could be hoped for was a revived and revised social democracy – was to be fighting on the inside, not gazing in from the outside. Given that such change remains at best a distant prospect, I still think he is right to argue for the continuation of the EU, warts and all, because, like him, I have no wish to open a space in which monsters can once again roam across Europe.