(continued)
Jürgen Habermas
Learning from Catastrophe?
A Look Back at the Short Twentieth Century
III
At the End of the Welfare-State Compromise
Ironically, developed societies in the twenty-first century
are faced with the reappearance of a problem that they seemd to
have only recently solved under the pressure of systemic competition.
The problem is as old as capitalism itself: how to make
the most effective use of the allocative and innovative functions
of self-regulating markets, while simultaneously avoiding
unequal patterns of distribution and other social costs that are
incompatible with the conditions for social integration in
liberal democratic states. In the mixed economies of the
West, states had a considerable portion of the domestic product
at their disposal, and could therefore use transfer payments,
subsidies, and effective policies in the areas of infrastructure,
employment, and social security. They were able to exert a
definite influence on the overall conditions of production and
distribution with the goal of maintaining growth, stable prices,
and full employment. In other words, by applying growth-
stimulating measures on the one side, and social policies on
the other, the regulatory state could simultaneously stimulate
the economy and guarantee social integration.
Notwithstanding the considerable differences between them,
the social-political spheres in countries like the United States,
Japan, and the Federal Republic of Germany saw continued
expansion until the 1980s. Since then, this trend has been
reversed in all OECD countries: benefits have been reduced,
while at the same time access to social security has been
tightened and the pressure on the unemployed has increased.
The transformation and reduction of the social welfare state
is the direct consequence of supply-side economic policies —
anti-inflationary monetary and fiscal policies, the reduction of
direct taxation, the transfer of state-owned enterprises into the
private sector, and so on — aimed at deregulating markets,
reducing subsidies, and creating a more favorable investment
climate.
Of course, the consequence of the revocation of the welfare-state
compromise is that the crisis tendencies it had previously
counteracted now break out into open view. Emerging social
costs threaten to over burden the integration capacities of liberal
societies. The indicators of a rise in poverty and income disparities
are unmistakable, as are the tendencies toward social disintegration.3
The gap between the standard of living of the employed, the
underemployed, and the unemployed is widening.
“Underclasses” arise wherever exclusions — from the
employment system, from higher education, from the benefits
of transfer payments, from housing markets, from family
resources, and so on — are compounded. Impoverished social
groups, largely cordoned off from the broader society, can no
longer improve their social position through their own efforts.4
In the long run, a loss of solidarity such as this will inevitably
destroy a liberal political culture whose universalistic self-understanding
democratic societies depend on. Procedurally
correct majority decisions that merely reflect the fears and self-
defensive reactions of social classes threatened with downward
mobility — decisions that reflect the sentiments of right-wing
populism, in other words — will end up eroding the legitimacy of
democratic procedures and institutions themselves.
Neoliberals, who are prepared to accept a higher level of
social inequities, who even believe in the inherent fairness of
“position valuations” via globalized financial markets, will naturally
differ in their appraisal of this situation from those who
recognize that equal social rights are the mainstays of democratic
citizenship, and who thus still adhere to the “social-democratic
age.” But both sides describe the dilemma similarly.
The gist of their diagnoses is that national governments have
been forced into a zero-sum game where necessary economic
objectives can be reached only at the expense of social and
political objectives. In the context of a global economy,
nation-states can only increase the international competitiveness
of their “position” by imposing self-restrictions on the
formative powers of the state itself. And this justifies the sort
of “dismantling” policies that end up damaging social cohesion
and social stability as such.5 I cannot go into a full description of
this dilemma here.6 But it boils down to two theses: First, the
economic problems besetting affluent societies can be explained
by a structural transformation of the world economic system, a
transformation characterized by the term “globalization.” Second,
this transformation so radically reduces nation-states’ capacity
for action that the options remaining open to them are not
sufficient to shield their populations from the undesired social
and political consequences of a transnational economy.7
The nation-state has fewer and fewer options open to it. Two
of these options are now completely ruled out: protectionism,
and the return to a demand-oriented economic policy. Insofar
as the movement of capital can be controlled at all, the costs of
a protectionist closure of domestic economies would quickly
become intolerably high under the conditions of a global economy.
And the failure of state employment programs today is
not just due to limits on national domestic budgets; these
programs are also simply no longer effective within the national
framework. In a globalized economy, “Keynsianism in one’s
own country” just won’t work any more. Policies that promote
a proactive, intelligent, and sustainable adaptation of national
conditions to global competition are much more promising.
Such policies include familiar measures for a long-range industrial
policy, support for research and development, improving
the competitiveness of the workforce through retraining and
continuing education, and a reasonable degree of “flexibility”
for the labor market. For the middle term, measures such as
these would produce locational advantages but would not fundamentally
alter the pattern of international competition as
such. No matter how one looks at it, the globalization of the
economy destroys a historical constellation that made the welfare
state compromise temporarily possible. Even if this compromise
was never the ideal solution for a problem inherent
within capitalism itself, it nevertheless held capitalism’s social
costs within tolerable limits.
Until the seventeenth century, emerging European states
were defined by their sovereign rule over a specific territory;
their enhanced steering capacities made these states superior to
earlier political forms such as the ancient empires or city-states.
As a functionally specialized administrative state, the modern
state differentiated itself from the legally institutionalized private
sphere of a market economy; at the same time, as a tax-based
state, it grew dependent on a capitalist economy. Over
the course of the nineteenth century, now in the form of the
nation-state, the modern state began for the first time to open
itself to democratic forms of legitimation. In some privileged
regions of the world, and under the favorable conditions of the
postwar period, the nation-state — which had in the meantime
established the worldwide model for political organization —
succeeded in transforming itself into a social welfare state by
regulating the national economy without interfering with
its self-correcting mechanisms. But this successful combination
is menaced by a global economy that now increasingly escapes
the control of a regulatory state. Obviously, welfare-state functions
can be maintained at their previous level only if they
are transferred from the nation-state to larger political
entities which could manage to keep pace with a transnational
economy.
IV. Beyond the Nation-State?
For this reason, the focus is on the construction of supranational
institutions. Continent-wide economic alliances such as
NAFTA or APEC let national governments enter into binding
agreements, or at least agreements that are backed by mild
sanctions. The benefits of cooperation are greater for more
ambitious projects such as the European Union. Continent-wide
regimes of this sort can establish unified currency zones
that help reduce the risk of fluctuating exchange rates, but,
more significantly, they can also create larger political entities
with a hierarchical organization of competencies. In the future,
we will have to decide whether we want to rely on the status
quo ofa Europe that remains integrated only through markets,
or whether we want to a set a course for a European democracy.8
Of course, even a geographically and economically expanded
regime of this sort would at best still generate internal advantages
for global competition, and would thus enhance its position
against other regimes. The creation of larger political
entities leads to defensive alliances against the rest of the
world, but it changes nothing in the mode of locational competition
as such. It does not, per se, bring about a change of
course that would replace various adaptations to the transnational
economic system with an attempt to influence the overall
context of the economic system itself. On the other hand,
expanded political alliances are a necessary condition if politics
are to catch up with the forces of a globalized economy. With
the emergence of each new supranational entity, the overall
number of political actors grows smaller, but the club of those
very few actors capable of global action, or capable of cooperation,
gains a new member. Given the required political will,
such actors will be in the position to enter into binding agreements
that will set up a basic framework for a globalized
economy.
Given all the difficulties of creating a European Union, an
agreement for the creation of a worldwide order — especially
one that would not simply exhaust itself in creating and legally
institutionalizing markets, but would introduce elements of a
global political will-formation, and would work toward addressing
the undesired social consequences of global commerce —
would be much more difficult. As nation-states are increasingly
overwhelmed by the global economy, one clear alternative
emerges, even if somewhat abstractly and viewed, so to speak,
from the academic ivory tower: transferring functions that
social welfare states had previously exercised at the national
level onto supranational authorities. At this supranational level,
however, there is no mode of political coordination that would
both guide market-driven transnational commerce and maintain
social standards. Of course, the world’s 191 sovereign
states are bound together in a thick network of institutions
subsisting belowthe level of the United Nations.9 Approximately
350 intergovernmental organizations, half of which
were created after 1960, serve a variety of economic, social,
and peacekeeping functions. But these organizations are naturally
in no position to exercise any positive political coordination,
or to fulfill any regulatory functions in areas of social,
economic, or labor policy that are relevant for questions of
redistribution.
Nobody wants to spin out utopian fantasies; certainly not
these days when all utopian energies seem to be exhausted.10
Without some significant effort on the part of the social
sciences, the idea of supranational politics “catching up” with
markets cannot even attain the status of a “project.” Such a
project would, at the very least, need to be guided by examples
where differing interest positions are equalized in a way that all
involved could find reasonable, and it would need to sketch the
outlines for a range of unified procedures and practices. Social
science’s resistance to the project of a transnational regime
along the lines of a world domestic policy is understandableif
we assume that such a project could only be justified by the
given interest positions of existing states and their populations,
and put in place by independent political powers. In a stratified
world society, unredeemable conflicts of interest seem to result
from the asymmetrical interdependencies between developed
nations, newly industrialized nations, and the less developed
nations. But this perception is only correct as long as there are
no institutionalized procedures of transnational will-formation
that could induce globally competent actors to broaden their
individual preferences into a “global governance.”11
Globalization processes are not just economic. Bit by bit,
they introduce us to another perspective, from which we see
the growing interdependence of social arenas, communities of
risks, and the networks of shared fate ever more clearly. The
acceleration and the intensification of communication and commerce
shrink spatial and temporal distances; expanding markets
run up against the limits of the planet; the exploitation of
resources meets the limits of nature. These narrowed horizons
rule out the option of externalizing the consequences of many
of our actions: it is increasingly rare that costs and risks can be
shifted onto others — whether other sectors of society, other
geographical regions, other cultures, or future generations —
without sanctions of one kind or another. This fact is as obvious
for the risks of large-scale technologies, which can no longer be
localized, as it is for affluent societies’ production of toxic
wastes, which now endanger every part of the earth.12 But
how much longer will we be able to shift social costs onto the
“superfluous” segment of the working population?
International agreements and regulations aimed at counteracting
such externalizations of costs can certainly not be
expected from governments as long as they are perceived as
independent actors controlling their own national arenas, where
governments must always secure the support of (and reelection
by) their populations. The incorporation of each
individual state into the binding cooperative procedures of a
cosmopolitan community of states would have to be perceived
as a part of states’ own domestic policies. Thus the decisive
question is whether the civil society and the political public
sphere of increasingly large regimes can foster the consciousness
of an obligatory cosmopolitan solidarity. Only the transformed
consciousness of citizens, as it imposes itself in areas of domestic
policy, can pressure global actors to change their own self-understanding
sufficiently to begin to see themselves as members
of an international community who are compelled to
cooperate with one another, and hence to take one another’s
interests into account. And this change in perspective from
“international relations” to a world domestic policy cannot be
expected from ruling elites until the population itself, on the
basis of its own understanding of its own best interests, rewards
them for it.13
An encouraging example of this is the pacifist consciousness
that had clearly developed in the wake of two barbaric world
wars in the nations that were directly involved, and which
subsequently spread to many other countries. We know that
this change of consciousness did not prevent further regional
wars, or countless civil wars in other parts of the world. But it
did bring about a change in the political and cultural parameters
of interstate relations large enough for the UN Declaration of
Human Rights, with its prohibition against wars of aggression
and crimes against humanity, to gain the weak normative binding
force of a publicly recognized convention. This is not
enough, of course, for the institutionalization of the economic
procedures, practices, and regulations that could solve the problems
of economic globalization. An effective regulation of world society
demands policies that successfully redistribute
burdens. And that will be possible only on the basis of a cosmopolitan
solidarity that is still lacking; a solidarity that would
certainly be weaker and less binding than the civil solidarity that
developed within nation-states. The human population has
long since coalesced into an unwilling community of shared
risk. Under this pressure, it is thus quite plausible that the
great, historically momentous dynamic of abstraction from
local, to dynastic, to national to democratic consciousness
would take one more step forward.
The institutionalization of procedures for global coordination
and generalization of interests, and for the imaginative construction
of common interests, will not work in the organizational
form of a world state; a form that is itself not even
desirable. The autonomy, particularity, and uniqueness of formerly
sovereign states will have to be taken into account. But
what sort of path will take us there? The Hobbesian problem —
how to create a stable social order — overtaxes the cooperative
capacities of rational egoists, even on the global level. Institutional
innovations come out of societies whose political elites
find a resonance and support for them in the already transformed
basic value orientations of their populations. Thus the
first addressees for this “project” are not governments. They are
social movements and non-governmental organizations; the
active members of a civil society that stretches beyond national
borders. The idea that the regulatory power of politics has to
grow to catch up with globalized markets, in any event, refers
to the complex relationships between the coordinative capacities
of political regimes, on the one hand, and on the other a
new mode of integration: cosmopolitan solidarity.
December 18, 2008
Categories: critical theory, history, jürgen habermas, learning from catastrophe?, philosophical quotations, philosophy, the 20th century . Tags: critical theory, philosophical quotations, philosophy . Author: peter . Comments: Leave a comment