From the Sovereign Debt Crisis to Authoritarian Statism: Contradictions of the European State Project

Abstract

The recent sovereign debt crisis in Europe appears to have consolidated the ideological and the historical actuality of the European state project, but not in the manner that many of its advocates would have hoped. Far from deepening democratisation, what has emerged instead is a political terrain increasingly reminiscent of what Nicos Poulantzas termed ‘authoritarian statism'. The present article aims to illuminate this phenomenon in relation to the institutional shifts within the EU that both preceded and followed the debt crisis, as well as in relation to the historical processes of uneven and combined development that form the ground upon which the European state project has been erected. Our overarching goal is to theorise the EU as a manifestation of contradictory tendencies towards transnationalisation within which elements of nation-states play a constitutive role, but one that simultaneously exacerbates Europe's crisis tendencies. It is this intractable tension within the internal structure of the EU that has given rise to a transnational authoritarian statism across Europe expressed in a ‘strengthening–weakening’ of state power, i.e. a reinforcement of state authority that simultaneously expresses and exacerbates the political crisis to which it seeks to respond.

Keywords:

• European Union
• debt crisis
• authoritarian statism
• Poulantzas
• strategic selectivity
• uneven development

Notes on contributors

Sune Sandbeck is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at York University, Toronto, and a member of the York Institute for Political Economy Initiative. His research examines the political economy and history of offshore finance from a historical materialist perspective.

Etienne Schneider is studying Political Science at the University of Vienna and has been working with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation on researching the crisis in the EU. He is a member of the editorial board of Prokla, Zeitschrift f¨r kritische Sozialwissenschaft. His academic interests lie in the political economy of the European Union, Marxist theories of the state and materialist approaches to intersectionality.

Notes

We wish to thank Greg Albo and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and challenging comments, as well as Joseph Baines and Donya Ziaee for their invaluable assistance in preparing this manuscript. We are also grateful to all the members of the Rethinking Poulantzas panel at the 2012 Historical Materialism conference at York University for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

1. Rather than adopt the descriptor ‘transversal’ in reference to these multiscalar contradictions, we prefer to evoke the act of traversing a terrain, i.e. a movement that has the potential to forge both new paths and barriers in the act of crossing spatial boundaries, regions and scales.

2. See the memorandum on the so-called ‘Six-Pack’ economic and fiscal surveillance measures: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/11/898

3. A survey undertaken by the EC's polling division, the Eurobarometer, shows that Euroskepticism has reached a fever pitch, with public confidence in the EU falling to record lows in the six largest members of the EU (Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland and Britain). See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/24/trust-eu-falls-record-low