European integration as a moral economy: Greek technocrats amidst capitalism-in-crisis

Introduction

The recent manifestation of the capitalist crisis in Greece is largely intertwined with the country’s membership in the European Union (EU) and the European Monetary Union (EMU). Political management of the emergency has centered on Greece’s public debt and deficit, both of which proved in late 2009 to exceed EMU budgetary criteria. To a large extent, the dominant analytical model of the crisis, as witnessed in discourses of both northern and southern European officials, has been structured around the flawed actions of indebted states and individuals. Thus, a moral discourse has conveniently framed the political construction of the capitalist crisis. ¹

This moral discourse seems to build on a long-standing process through which the political economy of European capitalism had gradually become attributed to moral actions and obligations. Central to this process were a series of actions on the part of the European Union perceived as disinterested – notably, significant developmental funds directed to the European peripheries, from which Greeks and other Europeans allegedly benefited. To a large extent, these prior ‘beneficial actions’ and related dependency had defined a highly idealistic construction of the political economy of European Integration, which was presented as not being limited by strict interest-centered strategies, but built on inaugural acts of well-intended voluntarism. This memory was summarized in July 2012 by a high-ranking official of the Greek Social Democrat Party, M. Chrysochoidis, when he stated that ‘all these years the EU was distributing wealth and now that it’s distributing burdens it is not easy’. His statement referred to European developmental funds circulating since the mid-1980s, starting with the Integrated Mediterranean Programs and, most importantly, with the Community Support Frameworks in 1988. These funds were channeled towards the less developed, or ‘lagging’, regions, with a per capita GDP of less than 75% of the Community average (Hooghe and Keating, 1994: 377). All of Greece fell into this category and received a proportionally large share of the money. This transaction was widely regarded as a moral gesture on behalf of western Europeans. To the dominant political class in Greece, this instance of moral motivation in the process of European Integration appeared as an essential point of reference for action and discourse.

My ethnographic work over the last years has focused on retracing how different aspects of European Integration played out in this country. Most recently, from 2012 to 2014, I undertook research on networks of Greek EU specialists and technocrats. In this article I will elaborate on the complex intertwinement of the ‘political’ and ‘moral economy’ of European Integration, based on a series of observations and reflections from this recent research. This case study can prove timely and useful for deepening our knowledge of the social processes that have framed the ‘politics of the crisis’ in the southern European periphery. At the same time, it can enrich our theoretical and analytical perspectives on the concept of moral economy. Indeed, I believe this ethnographic material can help us reflect on the currency of ‘moral economy’ as a means for analyzing explicit ideologies of moral capitalism.

It is in this context that I eventually choose to situate my own understanding (and use) of ‘moral’ – as a term referring to an emic reading of social relations along codes of open-ended conduct and depoliticized horizontal dichotomies such as ‘good’/‘bad’, ‘right’/‘wrong’, ‘interested’/‘disinterested’, etc. (also see Fassin, 2012; Heintz, 2009). Such readings eventually attest to the possibility of mutually beneficial relations. Hence, when speaking of capitalist societies and class relations, I view moral discourses as having outright hegemonic implications. Social processes are not considered to be the dialectical outcome of antagonisms but, rather, dependent on the degree of mutual entente (and equilibrium). Therefore, while acknowledging the value of ‘moral economy’ in helping us map out actual fields of meanings and practices that frame economic processes (Palomera and Vetta, 413–432), I will also prioritize an analysis of perceptions of ‘moral economy’. I believe that my ethnographic case study is particularly conducive to such a dual perspective, since it addresses the class-specific moral economy of social agents who have been actively advocating the existence of a moral economy of European capitalism.

Thus, this endeavor requires acknowledging the analytical potential of Thompson’s seminal take on the moral economy (1971), while at the same time locating its eventual limitations and incorporating further constructive critiques. In introducing the concept of moral economy in regards to the 18th-century English crowd, E.P. Thompson highlighted a set of moral considerations on the economy particular to the English poor, and attempted to correlate them with specific forms of collective action in the face of novel economic conditions. In 18th-century England, the liberalization of pricing and commercial activities led to popular uprisings. As Thompson meant to prove, these addressed not only hunger and immediate material necessities, but also the abandonment of state paternalism and related market controls.

Nonetheless, frustration against this harsh new economic system built on a paternalist framework. In this sense, Thompson’s case study acknowledged the reliance of the dominated classes on external moral frameworks for justifying their political action. The moral economy that was particular to the ‘poor’ of pre-industrial capitalism was still defined by ideas and expectations of a morally proper capitalist economy (through the mediation of political power). Thus, in the end, Thompson’s study also offered an innovative insight into the moral dynamics of class accommodation within capitalism. In his follow-up text of 1991, Thompson stressed moral economy as a field of hegemony which successfully secured a class structure and a given mode of production. This meant that the moral economy did not only address the expectations of the poor but also referred to a broader value system that enhanced the dominant position of the ruling classes and enforced their long-term interests. In the paternalist conjuncture, this necessitated market regulations and occasional material concessions (e.g. through instances of benevolent patronage), which nonetheless bore a specific political and – in the long term – economic logic (1991: 293, 300, 301; Fox-Genovese, 1973; Palomera and Vetta, 413–432).

This broader approach allows for further directions in research, since the concept of moral economy seems suitable in order to grasp not only class-specific moral considerations on the economy, but also value systems that pervade larger settings. This also recalls Thompson’s broader definition of moral economy in the sense of ‘ideal model or ideology’ (1991: 340). In this article, I will use the concept of moral economy in its actual duality – as referring not only to class-specific norms of proper economic behavior, but also, equally importantly, to universalized moral precepts in regards to the economy. ² I also subscribe to Didier Fassin’s point that the expansion of particular moral economies as universalized frameworks defines, to a great extent, the dynamics of domination (2009: 1266) – a point very much in line with a Gramscian reading of hegemony as relying on the universalization of particular class worldviews. Thus, when speaking of universalized moral economies within capitalism, we can further address their interrelation with the ideology and the self-image of the dominant classes in accordance with the prevalent necessities of each economic conjuncture (e.g. growth and expansion, crisis and restructuring). In fact, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s incisive critique of Thompson’s work raised this issue early on, by emphasizing how both the paternalism of the pre-industrial period and the classical liberalism of industrial capitalism responded each time to the mundane logic of capital accumulation and the interests of the ruling classes (1973: 166). In treating both sets of economic precepts as ‘part of larger ruling class ideologies’ and in acknowledging the equally moral claims of classical liberalism, Fox-Genovese eventually pointed to the hegemonic potentiality of any ideology of morally governed capitalism. ³

This point can help us overcome the original limitation of the use of ‘moral economy’ to analyses pertaining to dominated classes, largely in the image of Thompson’s initial scope and predilections. Such a thematic focus also seems to reflect the assumption of a putative moral vacuum amidst dominant classes. On the contrary, the analytical reach of ‘morality’ and ‘moral economy’ extends beyond dominated classes. It also pertains to political mediators, intellectuals, or agents located at the avant-garde of capital accumulation. This has become most evident in recent ethnographies of financial agents, such as those by Horacio Ortiz and Karen Ho. The former’s work has addressed the internal logic of such moral constellations in terms of a ‘moral economy’ (Ortiz, 2012), while the latter has detailed the ‘actual discourse of morality … that imbues and rationalizes the ideologies and interests of Wall Street’ (Ho, 2012: 414). At the same time, it is probable that the crude justification of inequality, success, and failure that many of Ho’s informants performed in the quasi-Darwinian terms of physical and/or mental superiority would hardly be compatible with any political project of enduring class hegemony. This can be contrasted with other factions of the dominant classes, such as specialized political personnel and intellectuals who are structurally and professionally inclined to produce universalistic ideological constructs. I believe that it is through such ethnographic cases that we can best grasp the production of epistemological and normative models which are highly reminiscent of an ideology of ‘moral economy’. Therefore, when speaking of the moral economy of European Integration, I refer to moral considerations on the economy among social agents who are directly positioned within this project, as well as the overall moral economy that European Integration has come to constitute for a multitude of social groups, very much in the sense of an ideology of morally governed capitalism.

In the first part of the article, I briefly retrace the constitution of a class-specific moral economy among the first generation of Greek technocrats, who have been actively involved in the project of European Integration since the early 1980s. Furthermore, I argue that the moral rendering of European capitalism responded to larger political necessities, since it enhanced the ideological vindication of European Integration during its southward consolidation. In following E.P. Thompson’s astute commentary on the direct relevance of ideas of ‘disinterestedness’ and ‘reciprocity’ in the consolidation of moral economies (1991: 341–9), I stress the role of various forms of intra-European budget transfers, which have become major points of reference in European policies since the late 1980s. Hence, my take on the concept of moral economies intersects with a different – though extremely relevant – anthropological discussion on ideas and practices of ‘disinterested action’. In acknowledging the porous boundaries between ‘ideologies of reciprocity and non-reciprocity’ (Parry, 1986: 453; also Laidlaw, 2000), I analyze ideas of disinterested giving and indebtedness through their alternating political use in late capitalism. Following on this, I suggest that ideas of disinterested action can be seen to hold a moralizing function with clear performative usages, very much in agreement with Valerio Simoni’s view of the dynamic character of moralization and economization processes (454–475). I believe that this dynamic perspective on ideas of disinterested action dovetails with a similarly dynamic understanding of the constitution of universalized moral economies. ⁴

In the second part of the article, I stress the political implications of ideas of solidary capitalism. This refers not only to the legitimation of European Integration among various audiences, but also, more importantly, to the expansiveness of a liberal paradigm of reciprocity and indebtedness. My informants’ actions and discourse during the recent manifestation of the capitalist crisis help illustrate this. Within the same context, I further argue that discourses of universal solidarity and political voluntarism are both indicative and constitutive of an overall idealist (non-materialist) epistemology in which economic processes and the inevitable crises of capitalism are eventually attributed to the arbitrary distinction between ‘interested’ and ‘disinterested’ intentions.

In the last part of the article, I contextualize ideologies of moral economy in a wider perspective. In this way, we might view them as highly moralized, ideological responses to the structural crisis of capitalist profitability since the late 1970s, which have been enhanced by the retreat of class antagonism and materialist analyses since the 1990s. In fact, the all-encompassing moral frameworks through which the capitalist economy is addressed are not a perennial given, but rather, historically contingent. This has been poignantly attested to in cases of outspoken class struggles over political and economic power throughout the 20th century. On the contrary, the growing epistemological and political focus on morality is not devoid of a broader hegemonic logic, which I also attempt to outline in accordance with recent critical literature on the moralized features of economic and political debates in western politics and academia (Fassin, 2012; Friedman, 2015; Kalb, 2015; Lazzarato, 2011; Levitas, 2005; Robotham, 2011). Thus, in addressing the question, ‘why morals now?’, I suggest that we view recurring articulations of ‘morality’ as indicative of the form and reach of bourgeois hegemony amidst the long term crisis of Euroamerican capitalism.

Noble project, moral acts

Over the last years my ethnographic work has focused on Greek technocrats and acknowledged EU specialists, mostly in Athens. Within the context of my research, I sought to observe their actions and discourse through public events, technocratic conferences, and publications related to the management of the so-called ‘Greek debt’ crisis. I also conducted interviews with a number of them. Most of my informants hailed from the wealthy classes. They also bore increased cultural and educational capital: they had usually received private, bilingual secondary education, attended prestigious universities, and obtained doctorates abroad. Some of them did not hesitate to define themselves as part of a ‘Greek cosmopolitan elite’ and assumed a sense of (‘cultural’) distinctiveness with regards to the larger part of Greek society. More generally, they held significant positions within the nexus of power relations in the Greek capital. The settings of our meetings in downtown Athens (most often in their offices, in auditoriums, or in cafés close to the Greek Parliament and similar national institutions) demonstrated their professional routines, as well as their aesthetic and class references. ⁵

My research allowed me to retrace the consolidation of this field of action, which held a particular position between academia and political power. For the most part, these social agents were academics whose interests and action cast them in the broadly defined category of European Studies scholars. Additionally, they had held (or were still holding at the time of my research) advisory or more permanent positions in the Greek state, in the European Commission, or in pro-EU think tanks. Some of them had also been active politicians. Their political backgrounds ranged from the ‘left’ to the ‘right’ wing of the bourgeois political spectrum – from Eurocommunists to liberals – and they had been affiliated, to varying degrees, with the Greek Social-Democrat and Conservative parties (PASOK and Nea Dimokratia respectively). Their overall trajectory points to the consolidation of a social-liberal consensus in Greek and European politics since the 1980s (Sakellaropoulos and Sotiris, 2004; also Panayotopoulos, 2001; Shore, 2000). In any case, my key informants constituted the emblematic and still visible first generation of EU scholars and policy-makers, who had been professionally involved, from positions in Athens or Brussels, in the workings of European Integration since the 1980s.

Indeed, the inclusion of Greece in the then European Community in 1981 and, more generally, the events of the 1980s were significant for consolidating this particular field of action. Interest in European matters gradually rose to importance and European studies finally reached the status of a distinct academic field in the early 1990s. This reflected, among other things, the Greek state’s need for specialized personnel. As one of my informants put it, ‘it was the case of an academic community that was created with the support of the state’. Specialized academic departments were created, also in accordance with the overall prioritization of EU themes in politics and academia (Gefou-Madianou, 2000). The consolidation of this stratum of academics and political cadres went hand in hand with the increasing inclusion of the Greek state in the political, economic, and ideological framework of the European Union.

As I came to understand, these social agents shared a deep personal and ideological investment in European Integration. My informants would often recount their professional trajectory in terms of a vocation or a militant engagement that transcended national, partisan, or other partial affiliations, and placed the long-term universal goal of European Integration at the core of their preoccupations. ⁶ The latter process was largely conceptualized in terms of a benign political endeavor that aimed at procuring universal peace and material prosperity for the peoples of Europe. This reading of European Integration communicated with a wider view of capitalism and social processes, along the lines of a liberal idealist paradigm. Furthermore, the doxic acceptance of the beneficial premises of European capitalism was in accordance with the key theme of European paternalism – often termed ‘solidarity’ or ‘aid’ – and its subsequent conditionality. The growing inclusion of Greece in the framework of the European Union was accordingly viewed as the defining condition for any perspective of social progress, while any setbacks or mishaps were attributed to moral or cultural dysfunctionalities. Most often, this would refer to the supposed cultural and moral deficit of the larger part of Greek society; most notably, a significant lack of values proper to western capitalism, as well as a persisting prevalence of ‘oriental residues’. In this sense, the course of European Integration was thought of in terms of a morally-conditioned economic framework, from which most Greeks benefitted materially, though they were morally (or culturally) deficient members. Within this line of thinking, the degree to which each social agent (or national state) upheld the conditionality of European Integration largely defined further prospects for success or failure.

This particular understanding of economic processes seemed to reflect (and build on) a corresponding class experience. Insistence on the degree of conformity with the conditions of an external material and symbolic framework could be seen as typical of an intellectual field centered around ideas of individual excellence, self-improvement, and horizontal competition over access to limited positions and institutional resources (positions in academia and high echelons of Greek administration, concours of entrance in the European Commission, appointment by political authorities, grants, institutional benefactors, etc.). This entailed a particular formulation of professional activities based on personal achievement, self-adjustment, and reliance on the top-down distribution (or ‘awarding’) of material resources on behalf of public authorities, private institutions, etc. ⁷ Thus, the formulation of European Integration as a morally governed economy – detached from the actual goal of capital accumulation and more reliant on ideological, cultural, or moral motivations and performances – met the class-specific sensibilities and anxieties of a dominant, though heteronomous moral economy.

The consolidation of this particular field of action and the formation of its ‘internal’ moral economy took place within a particular historical conjuncture, namely the first years of Greek membership in the European Community in the 1980s. That period bore a set of features which, I believe, enhanced the construction of European Integration and its political economy in terms of European paternalism and moral functionality. More specifically, the presidency of Jacques Delors in the European Commission, from 1985 to 1994, was a crucial conjuncture that paved the way for the common market and the European currency union. Such strategies of capitalist restructuring and increased competitiveness were responses to western capitalism’s post-1970s crisis of profitability. At the same time, this process was complemented with cohesion policies and reinforcement of the Union’s budget in regards to the southward expansion of the European project and the inclusion of new, weaker economies (Greece, Spain, and Portugal). In this sense, the Delors conjuncture signaled the advancement of the capitalist integration of European space, but also entailed the consolidation of a complex mechanism of budget contributions and transfers, which more or less meant that wealthier ‘northern’ countries funded – through the mediation of European institutions and the common budget – various ‘developmental’ projects in poorer ‘southern’ countries. This mixed process of liberalization and ‘redistribution’ could be seen to have temporarily mediated ‘the impact of a purely neo-liberal globalism’ (Featherstone, 1998) in southern European countries in the 1980s and 1990s, and thus blurred the lines between different models of capitalist political economy. It signified a somewhat expansionary momentum amidst an increasingly contractionary global capitalist environment. Accordingly, it allowed for a peculiar rendering of capitalist restructuring in terms of benevolent paternalism. ⁸

Indeed, the formative experience of the 1980s was a key theme in my informants’ recollections. One of my informants, an academic who had worked in the Commission during that period, reminisced about how the conjuncture of the late 1980s had been crucial for the personal investment of various social agents in the workings of the European Union. It was an emotional investment that future colleagues from new member-states (mostly eastern European countries) did not experience and thus could not grasp. As he put it, ‘they had missed out on all that’ and this was probably reflected in their more utilitarian or realist approach to the workings of Europe. Frequent nostalgic recollections of the Delors period, with its emphasis on ideas of cohesion and solidarity, reflected a collective memory of this political and economic conjuncture as a hallmark of the project of European Integration. Not accidentally, the actions and the role of Jacques Delors himself have often been praised in Greece as crucial for the country’s European course and progress. As an informant put it quite graphically, Delors was a ‘blessing’ for Greece, and this led to unquestioned Greek devotion to his presidency.

A key theme that underlay and consolidated these recollections was the circulation of EU funds in the European South. Indeed, these funds had grown to bear a particular significance in the reinvigoration and expansion of the European project in the 1980s. In fact, I noted throughout my fieldwork that my informants perceived money that Greece and Greeks had received from the European Union as ‘free money’, which had helped Greece to achieve the status of a prosperous western-European country. My informants provided accounts with recurring mentions of money that was ‘given’ or ‘free’ («τζάμπα»), which pointed to a construction of EU funding as an instance of external benevolent voluntarism. In my informants’ eyes, those funds were not simple parts of an explicit material deal, but definitely bore the imprint of European solidarity and help. An informant who had worked as an EU official in the 1980s told me, ‘regardless of what we did, they [Europeans] helped us’. The notion of disinterested action was crucial for my informants to justify the project of European Integration as a non-economic project or, more accurately, a project in which the capitalist economy was conditioned by overarching moral, cultural, or political principles. It is in this sense that I see emic ideas of disinterestedness to be of particular relevance in the constitution and universalization of an ideology of morally conditioned capitalism.

Of course, I should point out that this money was certainly not ‘free’, but entailed political conditionality and costly consequences, such as the inclusion of Greece in the common market, neoliberal restructuring, and a specific productive model (Mavroudeas, 2013: 307; Streeck, 2013: 67–8; Sakellaropoulos and Sotiris, 2004: 138–42). More generally, these funds reflected a strategy for the inclusion of southern peripheral capitalism amidst Cold War antagonism and a new international division of roles. The process also included interstate demands and power plays between ‘southern’ and ‘northern’ states. All in all, these funds signified a peculiar and transitional moment for Greek capitalism and the Greek state. ⁹ In any case, EU funds were definitely not a ‘gift’, and this was often clearly stated by Greek communists. On the contrary, treating these funds in moral terms as gifts, aid, and solidarity reflected not only an explicitly pro-EU political positioning but also, more generally, a mystification of the functioning logic of the capitalist economy – that is, capital accumulation – in favor of cultural or moral analyses of its historical course. As will be argued in the second part of the article, this moralized framework would equally apply to the context of the full-on capitalist crisis in the following decades.

The capitalist crisis as moral entropy

The topic of EU funds is open to various analytical potentialities. Without necessarily discarding an analysis of EU ‘aid’ in terms of symbolic capital and symbolic inequality (Gkintidis, 2014; also Bourdieu, 1997; Stirrat and Henkel, 1997; Hattori, 2003), in this article, I choose to focus on the dynamic trajectory of perceptions of aid and their centrality in the dominant idealist and liberal paradigm in Greece.

Thus, I firstly locate the hegemonic function of ideas of disinterested action in that they enhanced a particular idealist understanding of the workings of European and Greek capitalism along the lines of morally (or culturally) conditioned actions. This was evident during my fieldwork, when my informants would use the memory of EU budget transfers to counter material and interest-centered analyses. These instances seemed to reflect a wider process, namely, the consolidation of a staunchly idealist epistemology among Greece’s dominant political class. In a diachronic perspective, the generalization of this narrative since the late 1980s can be seen in parallel with the decrease of structural and antagonistic readings of the economy and politics within the Greek state. Accounts of western voluntarism had never been absent in post-Second World War Greece among established liberal intellectuals and politicians. However, such readings were far from consensual till the 1980s, given that many political forces and a large part of Greek society were skeptical, if not overtly opposed, to the European project, which they considered to be an instance of further capitalist exploitation or western European imperialism (also Pagoulatos and Yataganas, 2010). Thus, inaugural acts of European ‘aid’ from the 1980s on seemingly reinforced a critique against structural (Marxist or realpolitik) readings of capitalism. In a sense, European Integration and the political economy of European capitalism were increasingly located in the realm of an arbitrary ‘moral meta-language’ (Keane, 2008) as to the intentions and actions of structurally asymmetrical parties, which transcended interest-centered analyses.

Secondly, the idea of ‘disinterested’ actions reinstated a liberal paradigm; one in which economic inequality (or equality) was not the outcome of conflictive relations, but rather the outcome of failed (or successful) contractual relations between accountable parties. More generally, ideas of aid can be located within a broader theory of exchange that posits material and symbolic exchanges as the core of social processes and organization (e.g. Graeber, 2014). Thus, ideas of disinterested giving and moral indebtedness can be viewed as a moral framework adjusted to (and complementing) the liberal bourgeois ideology of exchange and contractual rigor. This refers, first of all, to the normative precept of reciprocal exchange (in its ‘interested’ or ‘disinterested’ variations), but also to the ideal-type of the pure gift – the epitome of disinterested giving – which holds a crucial place within this line of thinking. ¹⁰ In this sense, the memory of EU budget transfers was instrumental for my informants to emphasize that Greeks had subscribed to a relation of benefits and obligations. This initially referred to the actual adherence of most political and administrative personnel to the European project, a process that went together with the overall pro-EU shift in bourgeois politics. An informant who had worked in the Greek ministry of foreign affairs throughout the 1980s termed this change a ‘sort of paradigm shift’ and attributed it to the inflow of European funding. Accordingly, one of my informants, who had spent his entire career in the Commission, recalled that, especially since the mid-1980s and following PASOK’s shift, he was often invited to give lectures at Greek universities or to train high-ranking civil servants on the legal and political workings of the European framework (e.g. ‘how to negotiate’), while making the point that ‘they’re not monsters over there’ («δɛν ɛίναι τέρατα ɛκɛί»).

My informants’ adherence to the moral economy of European Integration was contrasted even more with the larger part of Greek society, which supposedly exhibited a deeply-seated hesitance, unawareness, or simple distrust regarding the EU. Most of my informants affirmed their own sensibility towards the nature of the foreign money thus provided, in contrast with ‘Greeks’ who could grasp neither the benevolent nor the contractual nature of the European project. In fact, according to my informants, most Greeks ignored the particular moral codes of European Integration. In a sense, this moral economy was most obvious to those best suited to comprehend it – Greek politicians, business people, and academics.

Both idealist and liberal features of the idea of ‘European aid’ allow us to grasp its relevance in the constitution of the moral economy of European Integration. At the same time, my case study of these dominant social agents allows us to critically view ideas of aid and moral economy, as they are embedded in a coherent class self-image and a corresponding moral theorization of class dominance.

These features proved to be particularly topical and explicit in the recent manifestation of the capitalist crisis in Greece. For my informants, their colleagues, and political supervisors, most Greeks’ ambiguous Europeanism and one-sided dispositions became further accentuated with the outbreak of the crisis. The capitalist crisis was largely attributed to a latent moral dysfunctionality within the European project. In fact, one of my informants said that he regretted all the years he had worked in favor of budget transfers and cohesion policies within European institutions and think tanks. According to him, this free money might have led to further moral demise, whereas squandering it away definitely exasperated western European officials who, in the end, had just had enough. ¹¹ Along this line of thinking, the crisis itself was not so much a result of the inevitable impasses of the European framework (much less of capitalism …) as it was a result and an indicator of failed moralities and flawed dispositions. New forms of European solidarity had to address this problematic inclusion of Greek society in the moral economy of European Integration. ¹²

Notwithstanding institutional, partisan, or even generational differences, my informants and their colleagues would all eventually have recourse to a narrative of moral entropy in order to explain the structural crisis of European capitalism. This became evident in the case of one of my younger informants, a ministry cadre in his late 30s, who was completing a PhD under the supervision of a European Studies scholar. Interestingly, this young interlocutor differed from my older informants in that he openly assumed a neoliberal positioning and related theoretical references. Moreover, given his age, he did not have first-hand professional experience of the first years of the Greek membership in the European Community. Nonetheless, his narrative reflected the standardized collective memory of a ‘more disinterested’ period, as he put it. Given his specialization and experience in the management of EU funds from different positions in the Greek administration, he correlated the failure of Greek capitalism with the increasing native insensitivity towards the moral (and, thus, precarious) nature of European funds. As he put it, Greeks eventually tended to consider this money as a perennial given or a right to which they were entitled. In a way, lack of self-restraint and moral acumen among Greeks led to short-term thinking, as well as an obstinate demand for more funds without eventual repayment, either political or financial.

Without a doubt, such narratives can function as an ‘exercise in rhetoric … a post facto justification’ (Heintz, 2009: 10) or even as moral self-marketing (Ho, 2012: 415). Nonetheless, they are far from being a simple strategy of self-presentation. I believe they reflect a consistent epistemological and political positioning, one that has defined the action and worldview of these social agents throughout the last decades. For example, this is graphically reflected in the dominance of the neo-functionalist approach in the field of European Studies – a model of political voluntarism with strong federalist implications, which gained significant momentum in EU institutions and academia during the Delors period. Within this context, concepts with a strong Durkheimian resonance such as ‘solidarity’, ‘inclusion’, and ‘cohesion’ became nodal points during the 1980s (Cohen, 2000; Levitas, 1996; Robbins, 2011). The Greek field of European Studies and related areas of policy-making have been consistently adjusted to this dominant normative and analytical model, while more ‘disenchanted’ intergovernmentalist approaches have remained marginal, if not absent. My ethnographic observations helped me realize that this idealist understanding of European politics was far from an arbitrary naiveté or academic scholasticism. Rather, it was characterized by a specific practical and political logic through which it relegated history to the pendulum of generosity and austerity. In this way, it reified the arbitrary distinction between ‘interested’ and ‘disinterested’ acts and attributed the systemic impasses of capitalism to the open-ended conduct of involved parties. This became evident at many policy events, academic debates, and informal discussions that I had the chance to observe throughout my research. ¹³ The structural antinomies of Euroamerican capitalism were eventually attributed to the unrestrained greed and/or idleness of various individuals and populations. This was perhaps best encapsulated in terms such as ‘moral hazard’ and ‘free-riders’, which also reflected the traditional insistence of neoclassical economics on the supposed prerequisites of mutual trust, sincerity, and self-restraint. At the same time, such discussions coincided with the broader problematization of ‘welfare’ policies and central economic planning in Europe.

This coincidence became most evident during a conference which I observed in December 2014. The conference was held in the auditorium of the French Institute in Kolonaki. It was organized by one of the most vocally pro-EU think tanks in Greece and dealt with social repercussions of the economic crisis. The conference brought together an array of academics from both Greek and Western European universities. The topics of budget transfers and solidarity held prominent places in the discussions. They also revealed a discrepancy between different disciplines and national contexts, e.g. the presentation on ‘social transfers’ and sustainable growth, made by a German economist, brought forth a critical comment from a Greek ministry advisor (and occasional European Studies scholar). The latter problematized the general idea of transfers or even the actual material foundations of capitalist growth. He spoke of the weak conditionality of past EU funds, which he claimed were ‘low quality money’. What seemed to matter most to him were the actual moral dispositions of the people involved. In fact, as speakers succeeded one another, a certain division of epistemological sensibilities became obvious. The speakers or participants who hailed from European Studies and/or held expertise in European matters insisted on locating and analyzing the past problematic (or beneficial) conduct of various parties. On the other hand, economists or political scientists from outside the strict confines of EU affairs had a more structural approach. They correlated (to various extents) the ‘Greek crisis’ with the course and contradictions of the European economy, while distancing themselves from overtly culturalizing or moralizing discourses. It should be said that all participants were concerned with the question of a proper capitalist equilibrium. However, the general divergence of opinion and epistemological orientation did not go unnoticed, but led to a few moments of awkwardness and some occasional smirks. ¹⁴ This was also pointed out to me by a Greek economist after the conference. In an exhausted tone, he recollected that the unending scholasticism over ‘Greek’ past action and accountabilities, which we had witnessed for many hours during the conference, seemed to have reached the bizarre state of a ‘normative ethical theory’, denuded of any pretense of scientific analysis. According to him, this primarily revealed the weak methodological and theoretical foundations of the discipline of European Studies (and especially its dominant neo-functionalist paradigm). Nonetheless, I believe that this type of analysis was far from being a simple scholastic issue, but reflected broader processes and political necessities that exceeded the strict confines of academia.

European Integration, or the moral formulation of late capitalism in southern Europe

A critical perspective on the course of European Integration necessarily entails an assessment of the qualitative shifts of its moral economy. That is to say, the recent deepening of the crisis and its radically austere contours differ from the somewhat expansionary policies that Greece underwent in the 1980s and 1990s. Nonetheless, besides focusing on the internal transformations and different renderings (austere or generous) of this moral economy, we can further view it in its totality, as a universalized framework that gradually encompassed and framed Greek politics over the last three decades. Ideas of ‘austerity’ and ‘generosity’ were actually complementary parts in the overall delineation of neoliberal politics and labor-devaluation strategies. In fact, the formulation of the early period of Greek membership in the European Community as a case of generous, though failed, paternalism laid the groundwork for the formulation of the recent ‘politics of the crisis’ in terms of an austere paternalism – best encapsulated in the expression ‘tough love’ (Mazower, 2010). In this sense, different phases of capital accumulation, with their ensuing political necessities, have conditioned different moral renderings of European Integration. Alternating discourses of aid, reciprocity, and debt enhanced the adaptability of this particular moral economy to the structural evolution of European capitalism, as seen through the case of Greek technocrats specialized in EU policies. In fact, the particular saliency of these technocrats and their explicit interest in morality is not random but, instead, indicative of the hegemonic necessities of European capitalism in its long-term contractionary phase. The action and worldview of these social agents has been highly topical and much needed for the justification of European capitalism-in-crisis as an ailing moral economy. ¹⁵

The question of whether any class configuration within capitalism necessarily entails a universalized moral economy remains open and calls for further historical argumentation. Nonetheless, at this point I would like to suggest that a universalized moral economy in capitalism (and hence the emic understanding of the course of capitalism itself as a moral process) most likely points to an increased (though fragile) hegemony (also Friedman, 2015). More specifically, my reading of the hegemonic framework of European Integration as a moral economy builds on the widespread (emic) correlation between economic processes and moral values – a feature that was not necessarily present to the same extent in previous historical conjunctures. At the same time, the increased hegemonic reach of European Integration since the 1980s seems to have gone hand in hand with the dissemination of the project in diverse social settings and among different social agents, roughly ranging from farmers to state representatives. Such social agents came to recognize themselves as recipients of a morally induced external materiality and, thus, as participants in a universalized moral economy. The notions of a European moral community or of European solidarity have not only been located in settings of political power, but have also pervaded wider social dynamics in Greece over the last three decades. In fact, my more recent encounters with dominant social agents and networks in Athens did not differ drastically from my previous observations among local administrators and recipients of EU funds in Evros, a Greek border region (see Gkintidis, 2014).

Hence, the focus on emic understandings of the capitalist economy-as-morality among dominant social agents and classes may be constructively correlated with similar approaches to dominated settings and agents. For example, the moralized contours of class hegemony within neoliberalism are depicted in the case of Cuban migrants in Spain, which Valerio Simoni has studied over the last years (454–475). Simoni points out the narrowing down of his informants’ assessments, from wider structural and systemic critiques to an interest in individual conducts and personal interactions. I believe that such observations possibly attest to an overall process of moralization that has pervaded politics and class relations over the last decades. In fact, this may apply not only to cases of a relative class accommodation, as in Simoni’s or Kofti’s article (454; 433), but potentially also to cases of popular reactions in the face of the capitalist crisis and its harsh consequences. This point might help us address affinities between ‘elite’ perspectives and the equally moralized strategies of ‘anti-elitist’ newcomers to south European politics. The recourse of the ‘politics of resistance’ to a moral and idealist reading of European and Greek capitalism seems to lie near assumptions that had pervaded the action of established technocratic and political personnel over the last several years. Equally interesting, the spectrum of humanitarianism and solidarity in Greece has been fueled by memories of the Delors period and a nostalgic insistence on a benign capitalism. Nevertheless, demands for a ‘better’ or more ‘solidary’ capitalism (in its European variation) showed their hegemonic logic throughout the course of these political vicissitudes.

I believe that these conditions validate moral economy as a pertinent concept for grasping the dense interrelation of morality, economy, and hegemony, especially in the increasingly moralized contours of the neoliberal tournant de siècle. ¹⁶ In this sense, my discussion of the moral economy of European Integration coincides with a broader enquiry on the moralization of class relations in the Euroamerican world. The discussion on the ‘moralization’ of politics – as termed by Didier Fassin (2012) – dovetails with relevant reflections on the reformulation of class relations within capitalism in terms of mutually shared moral obligations and reciprocity (Lazzarato, 2011), or the gradual relocation of political and scholarly focus from the contradictions of capitalism to moral and cultural causalities (Frank, 1975; Kalb, 2015; Levitas, 2005; Robotham, 2011). This moralization process may be seen, first of all, as a response to the structural features of contemporary western capitalism, meaning its overall contractionary contours, its ensuing debt orientation, and the eventual necessity for capital destruction and devaluation of labor. Moral discourses of disinterestedness and reciprocity address these conditions in a succinct way, while also allowing for a rendering of capitalism as a failed, although attainable, symbiotic relation. On a second note, this moralization process communicates directly with the retreat (or scaling-down) of class antagonism and the ensuing moral and political heteronomy of the dominated classes throughout the last decades.

It is in this context that I chose to situate my own use of the term ‘moral economy’. I suggested a dual analytical perspective. On the one hand, I acknowledged the established use of the term that addresses norms of conduct and considerations on the economy particular to class-specific contexts. On the other hand, I used it in a more dynamic and reflexive manner, in regards to emic theories of moral economy. In accordance with this, I took moral economy to refer to an expansive and all-encompassing framework through which the capitalist economy is formulated as an open-ended process that relies on materially arbitrary moral intentions and, thus, is potentially subject to moral deliberation and conditioning. The perspective that I chose also reflected this particular ethnographic case of professional intellectuals situated in the broader field of policy-making and ideological production. Contrary to cases of dominated social agents with all their antinomies, my ethnographic case proved to be much simpler. The coherent moral ideology that my informants confidently proposed was completely in line with their moral sensibilities and class interests. Their enchanted understanding of capitalism was a necessary condition for the reproduction of their dominant position.

In following E.P. Thompson’s (1991) acknowledgment of the multiple analytical possibilities of the concept, I have attempted to bring out a broader and more flexible use that aspires to deal with explicit moral theorizations of the economy. This approach also builds on Didier Fassin’s (2009) proposal for a dynamic use of the concept in its interrelation with various forms of domination, which I think eventually meets his later interest in moralization processes (Fassin, 2012). However, in contrast to the broad thematic scope that Fassin has offered for using the concept (in regards to moral constellations and considerations that do not necessarily address the economy), I believe that the strength of the moral economy lies in its direct relevance and compatibility with debates and struggles that refer explicitly to the economy (in its strict sense). Thus, I concur with Jaime Palomera and Theodora Vetta’s call for maintaining the initial relevance of the concept to the economy (Palomera and Vetta, 413–432; also Simoni, 454–475). My own use of the concept, in its ideological dimension, remains aligned with a focus on emic notions, theorizations, and, eventually, mystifications of the economic.

Notwithstanding this acknowledgement, my article has advocated a primarily political scope of analysis in the anthropological use of the concept of moral economy. In particular, I have addressed the hegemonic function of universal ideas of moral economy in regards to explanations of capitalist growth or capitalist crisis. My article has also highlighted the impasses to which the concept might lead when used as an alternative to a structural understanding of the logic of capitalism (capital accumulation) and its inevitable entropic course. Thus, questions of varying applicability and scope in the use of the moral economy necessarily call for further debate. Neither is the political dimension, which I have put into relief, devoid of contrasts and divergences. Most importantly, these refer to whether we choose to view commonly shared moral systems (and their negotiation) as the defining condition for any form of political action, or whether, instead, we take into account disenchanted understandings of structural oppositions as an actual possibility, with political and moral implications of its own.

In any case, my article has pointed to the need for a larger theoretical discussion on the ways we understand the working logic of capitalism, in its synchronic features and diachronic course, as well as the ways we choose to analyze antagonism and equilibrium. While I am aware that this is an issue of broader theoretical and political positioning, ¹⁷ I have attempted to analyze the current delineation of neoliberal politics in terms of a theory of moral economy and, thus, to highlight its hegemonic implications. In this sense, my article has called for a critical distance from the endorsement of emic ideas of moral economy at their face value, while arguing for the urgent necessity to deal with these ideas in terms of hegemonic frameworks.