Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  In continental Europe the state will continue to play the major role in public life for three general reasons. The first is cultural. People expect the state—the government, the administration, the executive offices—to take the initiative or at least pick up the pieces. When the French demand that their government provide shorter working hours, higher wages, employment security, early pensions, and more jobs, they may be unrealistic but they are not irrational. They do not generally press for lower taxes (in contrast with the U.S. political obsession with tax cuts). They recognize that high taxes are the means by which the state might meet such expectations, and they are indeed highly taxed, which is why they resent it when the state fails to deliver the social goods. Germans, too, expect the state to ensure their well-being. And although, for historical reasons, they are disposed to identify the latter with social compacts and a stable currency, they too expect the state to play an active role in maintaining job security, regulating commerce, and servicing the remarkably generous welfare net with which they have provided themselves.

  Even in Italy, where the state is weak and much more politically vulnerable, it has played a crucial role in providing employment, transfer payments, regional largesse, and an intricate variety of support schemes, all of which have contributed enormously to the social stability of a country whose unity has always been in question and that has been prey to more, and deeper, political crises than the Anglo-American experience can begin to appreciate. Let us pose the counterfactual question: Where would Italy be now without its huge and inefficient civil service, its over-staffed public services, its dysfunctional and discredited systems of wage-price linkage, its underfunded pension schemes, and its corrupt and abused Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, established in 1950 to channel resources to the backward south but long a feeding ground for the political clients and business associates of the governing Christian Democrats?

  The Italian state has stood not between Italy as we now see it and some hypothetical Italian miracle of the neoliberal imagination, but between postwar Italy and political collapse. This is not just because the country would otherwise have faced insuperable social conflicts and regional disparities, but because the long-standing cultural expectations of Italians—that the state must do what society and economy, left to their own devices, cannot—would have been unacceptably thwarted. In unsteady and fragmented societies the state is often the only means by which some measure of coherence and stability can be guaranteed. The historical alternative in such cases has usually been the military, and it has been Italy’s and Europe’s good fortune that that route has been taken infrequently in recent memory.

  Thus, although the state itself has had a bad press in the recent European past, there has been little loss of faith in the importance of the things it can do, properly led. Only a state can provide the services and conditions through which its citizens may aspire to lead a good or fulfilling life. Those conditions vary across cultures: They may emphasize civic peace, solidarity with the less fortunate, public facilities of the infrastructural or even the high cultural sort, environmental amenities, free health care, good public education, and much else. It is generally recognized that not all of these may be available in their optimal form, but in that case too it is only the state that can adjudicate with reasonable impartiality between competing demands, interests, and goods. Most important, only the state can represent a shared consensus about which goods are positional and can be obtained only in prosperity, and which are basic and must be provided to everyone in all circumstances.

  These are things the market—much less the global market—cannot do. Paradoxically, the idea of an active state today represents an acknowledgment of limits on human endeavor, in contrast to its overweening utopian ambitions in the recent past: Because not everything can be done, we need to select the most desirable or important among what is possible. The idealization of the market, with the attendant assumption that anything is possible in principle, with market forces determining which possibilities will emerge, is the latest (if not the last) modernist illusion: that we live in a world of infinite potential where we are masters of our destiny (while somehow simultaneously dependent on the unpredictable outcome of forces over which we have no control). Proponents of the interventionist state are more modest and disabused. They would rather choose between possible outcomes than leave the result to chance, if only because there is something intuitively and distressingly callous about leaving certain sorts of goods, services, and life chances to the winds of fate.

  The second case for preserving the state today is pragmatic, or perhaps prudential. Because global markets do exist, because capital and resources fly around the world and much of what happens in people’s lives today has passed from their control or the control of those who govern them, there is a greater need than ever to hold on to the sorts of intermediate institutions that make possible normal civilized life in communities and societies. We are accustomed to understanding this point when it is directed to the need for voluntary organizations, community structures, small-scale exercises of autonomy in public life, and local civic ventures or issues of common concern, such as safety, environment, education, culture. And we understand, or think we understand, the importance of intermediate institutions when we study totalitarian regimes and notice the importance their rulers attached to the destruction of anything that came between the isolated, anomic subject and the monopolistic state.

  What we have failed to grasp is that, on the eve of the twenty-first century, the state itself is now an intermediary institution too. When the economy, and the forces and patterns of behavior that accompany it, are truly international, the only institution that can effectively interpose itself between those forces and the unprotected individual is the national state. Such states are all that can stand between their citizens and the unrestricted, unrepresentative, unlegitimated capacities of markets, insensitive and unresponsive supranational administrations, and unregulated processes over which individuals and communities have no control. The state is the largest unit in which, by habit and convention, men and women can feel they have a stake and which is, or can be made to appear, responsive to their interests and desires.

  Finally, the need for representative democracy—which makes it possible for a large number of people to live together in some measure of agreement while retaining a degree of control over their collective fate— is also the best argument for the traditional state. Indeed, the two are fated to live or die together. Political choices will always be made because politics, as an antithetic activity, is the proper form in which different collective preferences are expressed in open societies. And because the state is the only forum in which politics can be practiced—something that becomes obvious as soon as we envisage the alternatives—it is imprudent as well as unrealistic to seek to reduce or bypass the state. It is because the free flow of capital threatens the sovereign authority of democratic states that we need to strengthen these, not surrender them to the siren song of international markets, global society, or transnational communities. That is what many perceive as wrong with the European project, and it is what would be wrong with assigning the policymaking initiative to global market forces.

  Just as political democracy is all that stands between individuals and an overmighty government, so the regulatory, providential state is all that stands between its citizens and the unpredictable forces of economic change. Far from being an impediment to progress, the recalcitrant state, embodying the expectations and demands of its citizenry, is the only safeguard of progress to date. Whatever the gains in social legislation on working conditions and hours, education, the dissemination of culture, safeguarding health and the environment, insurance against homeless-ness, unemployment, and old age, and the limited redistribution of wealth, they are all vulnerable and politically contingent. There is no historical law that says they may not someday be undone. For it is with social advance as with political freedoms: We must always stave off threats to what has been
won, rather than presume these gains to be a secure part of some unassailable heritage.

  Furthermore, it is not in the interest of proponents of global market forces to seek the dismantling of the providential state. Unregulated markets are frequently self-delegitimizing, as numerous historical examples suggest. Perceived as unfair, they can become dysfunctional and will be rejected even by those who stand to gain from their smooth operation. For social and political stability are important economic variables too, and in political cultures where the providential state is the condition of social peace, it is thus a crucial local economic asset, whatever its actual economic behavior. That is why “the market” has worked well, albeit in very different ways, in situations as distinct as Social Democratic Scandinavia, Christian Democratic Italy, social-market Germany, and providential-state France.

  THE LOSERS IN today’s economy have the most interest in and need for the state, not least because they cannot readily imagine taking themselves and their labor anywhere else. Since the political Left by convention and elective affinity is most motivated to capture the support of this constituency (and had better do so if we are to avoid a selective replay of the 1930s), the present afflictions of the European Left are of more than passing concern. And they are serious. Since the late eighteenth century the Left in Europe, variously labeled, has been the bearer of a project. Whether this project has been the march of progress, the preparation of revolution, or the cause of a class, it has always invoked the historical process, and history itself, on its behalf. Since the decline of the industrial proletariat, and more precipitously with the end of the Soviet Union, the Left in the West has been shorn of its agent, its project, and even its story—the “master narrative” within which all radical endeavors were ultimately couched, which made sense of their programs and explained away their setbacks.

  This is self-evidently the case for Communists, but it is no less serious an impediment to moderate social democracy as well. Without a working class, without a long-term revolutionary objective, however benign and nonviolent in practice, without any particular reason to suppose that it will succeed or a transcendent basis for believing that it deserves to do so, social democracy today is just what its great nineteenth-century founders feared it would become if it ever abandoned its ideological presuppositions and class affiliation: the advanced wing of reforming market liberalism. Now, just as it has been relieved by the death of Communism from the crippling mortgage of revolutionary expectations, is the European Left to be reduced to defending hard-won sectoral gains and glancing nervously and resentfully at a future it cannot understand and for which it has no prescription?

  The reconciliation between the European Left and capitalism is still fresh and long overdue. We should recall that as recently as 1981 François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party came to power on the promise and expectation of a grand soir: a radical and irreversible anticapitalist transformation. And anyone who supposes that this was a peculiarly and typically French aberration should reread the British Labour Party’s 1983 election manifesto—the “longest suicide note in history,” in Labour Member of Parliament Gerald Kaufman’s felicitous phrase. But today the Left is no longer shackled to irrelevant, ineffective, or unpopular policies. On the contrary, the sort of society that the French, Swedish, Italian, and even the German socialists claim to seek is a fairly accurate reflection of the generalized preferences of the majority of their fellow citizens.

  The real problem facing Europe’s Socialists (I use the term purely for its descriptive convenience, since it is now shorn of any ideological charge) is not their policy preferences, taken singly. Job creation, a more “social” Europe, public infrastructural investment, educational reforms, and the like are laudable and uncontroversial. But nothing binds these policies or proposals together into a common political or moral narrative. The Left has no sense of what its own political success, if achieved, would mean; it has no articulated vision of a good, or even of a better, society. In the absence of such a vision, to be on the left is simply to be in a state of permanent protest. And since the thing most protested against is the damage wrought by rapid change, to be on the left is to be a conservative.

  The brief success story of European social democracy and British Labour over the past half-century can be seen in retrospect to have depended on the same fortuitous circumstances as the welfare states they helped create. Now the Left wants to preserve its positions and its hard-won sectoral gains. In defending these acquired rights and supporting those who would add to them—like railway engineers and truck drivers in France who demand retirement on full pensions at fifty-five or even fifty—the Left (and sometimes the Right) in France, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere confuses and discredits itself and its case by a failure to choose between ultimately incompatible claims. It is not so much fighting the ideological battle against neoliberal heartlessness as it is seeking to conserve privileges on behalf of the broadest possible constituency of well-organized voters who are anxious at the prospect of reduced income and services.

  This paradox, if it is one, is not original. The left was often socially conservative—notably during the French Revolution, when some of the most radical moments occurred on behalf of artisans’ struggles to preserve established claims and privileges, and again during the early Industrial Revolution. Trade unions, especially those in the skilled trades, were always instinctively conservative—even when supporting radical political solutions. But theirs is an unconvincing posture, and given the impossibility of avoiding some unsettling changes in coming years, it is an improvident one.

  In these circumstances the dangerous illusion of a radical center or “third way” has taken hold. Like the French Socialists’ 1997 slogan “Changeons d’avenir” (“Let’s Have a Different Future”), Tony Blair’s “radical centrism” is an empty vessel, clanging noisily and boastfully around the vacant space of European political argument. But whereas the French Left’s clichés are familiar, those of New Labour are seductively novel at first hearing. Of course, there are political advantages to being in the center. In normal times that is where the winning votes are to be found in any binary representative system. But if times become somewhat less normal, as seems likely, the center will be quickly evacuated in favor of more extreme options. For the moment, Blairism consists of the successful displacement of the old, discredited Left by what might be termed the bien-sentant center: the politics of good feeling, in which lightly retouched Thatcherite economics are blended with appropriately well-intentioned social adjustments borrowed from the neighboring liberal tradition. In this way the charge of heartless realism is avoided without any need to imagine alternatives.

  It is a tempting solution; but it is a mistake. Like the “as if” and “civil society” language of the Czech, Polish, and Hungarian opposition in the 1980s, it is a good and effective weapon in the struggle against insensitive or authoritarian governments. But once those governments have been overthrown or defeated, the morally unimpeachable advocates of antipolitics find themselves confronted with political choices for which their previous experience has not prepared them. They must either compromise—and lose their credibility—or else quit public life. For most of the past century, the European Left has somehow managed to do both. If it is to do better in the future, to avoid repeating its historical pattern of morally redeeming failure, it must return to the drawing board and ask itself these questions: What sort of social improvement is both desirable and envisageable under the present international configuration? What sort of economically literate policies are required to bring such an objective about? And what sort of arguments will be sufficiently convincing to make people vote to see these policies implemented?

  The fact that the Left is in office in most of Europe today is irrelevant to these requirements. Many of the Socialists who now govern (in France, Britain, and Italy, for example) got there because of the collapse or splits of the local Right. In Britain and France a system of proportional representation wou
ld have deprived the present Labour and Socialist parties of their parliamentary majority in the elections of 1997. In that sense, they are minority governments without mandates or long-term policies, whose strongest suit is the promise that they can undo some of the damage wrought by their predecessors in office, simply by doing something different. They will not be reelected indefinitely if they fail to come up with something better than their present offerings.

  To begin with, the Left might want to make a virtue of the necessity entailed in abandoning the project by which it has lived and died this century. History is the history of more than just class struggle, and the economic identity of social beings that was so central for nineteenth-century social theorists—whose encumbered heirs we remain—is now distinctly peripheral for ever more people. The disappearance of work— something the nineteenth-century utopians could only dream about!— is a crisis, but it is also an opportunity to rethink social policy. Some members of the European Left have latched quite effectively onto the idea of protecting the exclus: but they still think of them as just that— excluded from the norm, which remains that of fully employed, wage-earning, socially integrated workers. What needs to be grasped is that men and women in precarious employment, immigrants with partial civil rights, young people with no long-term job prospects, the growing ranks of the homeless and the inadequately housed, are not some fringe problem to be addressed and resolved, but represent something grimly fundamental.

  There must, therefore, be a role for the state in incorporating the social consequences of economic change, and not merely providing minimum compensatory alleviation. This has two implications. Given the limited range of policymaking initiative in monetary and fiscal matters now open to any one government, the control or regulation of production in all its modern forms is not only undesirable but impossible. But it does not follow that we should divest the state of all its economic controls. The state cannot run a car company or invent microchips, but it alone has the incentive and the capacity to organize health, educational, transportation, and recreational services. It is in the social interest to have a flourishing private productive sector, yes. But the latter should provide the means for a thriving public service sector in those areas where the state is best equipped to provide the service, or where economic efficiency is not the most appropriate criterion of performance.