The EU leadership is trying to contain a crisis that is emerging
at increasing speed: this challenge comprises the rise of contumacious states
(i.e. the UK, Poland, Hungary and Italy), or of defiant, historic ‘cultural
blocs’ (i.e. Catalonia) – all of whom are explicitly disenchanted with the
notion of some coerced convergence towards a uniform EU-administered ‘order’,
with its austere monetary ‘disciplines’. They even dismiss the EU’s claim to
be, somehow, a part of a greater civilizational order of moral values.
If, in the
post-war era, the EU represented an attempt to escape the Anglo-American
hegemony, these new defiant blocks of ‘cultural resurgence’ which seek to
situate themselves as interdependent, sovereign ‘spaces’ are, in their turn, an
attempt to escape another type of hegemony: that of an EU administrative
‘uniformity’.
To exit this
particular European order (which it originally was hoped, would differ from the
Anglo-Americanimperii), the EU nevertheless was forced to lean on the latter’s
archetypal construct of ‘liberty’ as empire’s justification (now metamorphosed
into the EU’s ‘four freedoms’) on which the EU strict ‘uniformities’ (the
‘level-playing-field’, regulation in all aspects of life, tax and economic
harmonization) have been hung. The European ‘project’ has become seen, as it
were, as something that hollows out distinct and ancient ‘ways-of-being’.
Indeed, the
very fact of their being attempted, at different levels, and in distinct
geographical cultural regions, these assays indicate that that EU hegemony has
already weakened to the point that it may not be able fully to hinder the
emergence of this new wave. What is at stake precisely for the EU, is whether
it can succeed to slow down, and curb in every way, the emergence of this
process of cultural re-sovereigntisation, which of course, threatens to
fragment the EU’s vaunted ‘solidarity’, and to fragment its matrix of a
perfectly regulated customs union and common trade area.
It was Carl
Schmitt – the political philosopher – however, who warned strongly against the
possibility of what he called a negative katechon accelerator. This would seem to apply –
exactly – to the situation in which the EU presently finds itself. This was a
notion, held by the ancients, that historical events often have a ‘backstage’
contrarian dimension – that is to say that some given ‘intent’ or action (by
say, the EU), may end upaccelerating precisely those processes which it was
meant to slow down or to halt. For Schmitt, this explained the paradox through
which a ‘braking action’ (such as the one being undertaken by the EU) may
actually reverse itself, in an unwanted acceleration of the very processes the
EU intends to oppose. Schmitt called this an ‘involuntary’ effect, since it
produced effects opposed to the original intent. For the ancients, it simply
reminded them that we humans often are merely history’s objects, rather than
its causal subjects.
It is possible
that the ‘braking action’ imposed on Greece, on Britain, on Hungary – and now
on Italy – may precisely slide towards Schmitt’s Katechon. Italy has lingered
in economic limbo for decades: Its new government feels obliged to relieve, in
some way, the accumulated economic stresses of past years, and to try to
re-kindle growth. But the state has a high level of debt to GDP, and the EU
insists that Italy must endure the consequences: it must obey ‘the rules’.
Professor
Michael Hudson (in a new book) explains how
the EU’s ‘braking action’ in respect to Italian debt, represents a certain
European strand of psychic rigidity that totally ignores historical experience,
and may precisely result in Katechon: the opposite of what is intended.
Interviewed by John Siman, Hudson says:
“In ancient
Mesopotamian societies, it was understood that freedom was preserved by
protecting debtors. A corrective model actually existed and flourished in the
economic functioning of Mesopotamian societies, during the third and second
millennia B.C. It can be termed the Clean Slate amnesty … It consisted of the
necessary and periodic erasure of the debts of small farmers — necessary
because such farmers are, in any society in which interest on loans is
calculated, inevitably subject to being impoverished, then stripped of their
property. and finally reduced to servitude … by their creditors.
[And was necessary too, as
a] constant dynamic of history has been the drive by financial elites to
centralize control in their own hands and manage the economy in predatory,
extractive ways. Their ostensible freedom [comes] at the expense of the
governing authority, and the economy at large. As such, it [stands as] the
opposite of liberty – as conceived in Sumerian time …
So it was inevitable [in
later centuries], that in Greek and Roman history, increasing numbers of small
farmers became irredeemably indebted, and lost their land. It likewise was
inevitable that their creditors amassed huge land holdings and established
themselves in parasitic oligarchies. This innate tendency to social
polarization – arising from debt unforgiveness – is the original and incurable
curse on our post-eighth-century-B.C. Western Civilization, the lurid birthmark
that cannot be washed away, or excised.
Hudson argues that the
long, decline and fall of Rome begins, not as Gibbon had it, with the death of
Marcus Aurelius, but four centuries earlier, following Hannibal’s devastation
of the Italian countryside during the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.). After
that war, the small farmers of Italy never recovered their land, which was
systematically swallowed up by the prædia, the great oligarchic estates,
as Pliny the Elder observed. [Of course, today it is small and medium sized
Italian businesses that are being swallowed up by oligarchic, pan-European
corporations.]
But among modern scholars,
as Hudson points out, “Arnold Toynbee is almost alone in emphasizing the role
of debt in concentrating Roman wealth and property ownership” (p. xviii) — and
thus in explaining the decline of the Roman Empire …
“Mesopotamian societies were not interested in equality,” he told
his interviewer, “but they were civilized. And they possessed the financial
sophistication to understand that, since interest on loans increases
exponentially, while economic growth at best follows an S-curve, this means
that debtors will, if not protected by a central authority, end up becoming
permanent bondservants to their creditors. So Mesopotamian kings regularly
rescued debtors who were getting crushed by their debts. They knew that they
needed to do this. Again and again, century after century, they proclaimed
‘Clean Slate’ Amnesties.”
The EU has
punished Greece for its profligacy – and is set to punish Italy if it flaunts
EU fiscal rules. The EU is attempting what Schmitt termed a ‘breaking action’,
to maintain its hegemony.
This is
however, truly a case of the EU seeing the ‘mote’ (speck) in Italy’s eye,
whilst ignoring the ‘beam’ in its own eye. The Economic Cycle Research
Institute’s Lakshman Achuthan writes:
“The combined debt of US, the Eurozone, Japan and China has
increased more than ten times as much as their combined GDP, over the past
year. It’s remarkable that the global economy – slowing in sync, despite
soaring debt – finds itself in a situation reminiscent of the Red Queen Effect.
As the Red Queen says to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass,
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same
place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast
as that!”.
But that –
running faster, taking on more debt – can only, in the end, be resolved with a
major default (or through inflating the debt away). Look at the US: its GDP is
growing at 2.5%; the US Federal debt is at 105% of GDP; the US Treasury is
spending $1.5 billion on interest per day, and debt is growing at 5-6% of GDP.
It is not sustainable.
Demands by
Greece and Italy for debt relief may be regarded by some as special pleading,
in the wake of past economic mismanagement; but Sumerian and Babylonian demands
were based not on such – but rather, on a conservative tradition grounded in
rituals of renewing the calendrical cosmos and its periodicities, Hudson tells
us. The Mesopotamian idea of reform had ‘no notion’ of what we would call
‘social progress’. Instead, the measures the king instituted under his debt
‘jubilees’ were measures intended to restore a ‘backstage’, underlying order in
society, or maat. “The rules of the game had not been changed, but everyone had
been dealt a new hand of cards”.
Hudson notes,
“the Greeks and the Romans replaced the cyclical idea of time and societal
renewal, with that of linear time” [with convergence toward an ‘End Time’]:
“Economic polarization became irreversible, not merely temporary” – as the idea
of renewal became lost. Hudson might have added that linear time, and the loss
of the imperative of dismemberment and renewal, has played a major role in
underpinning all of Europe’s universalist projects of a linear itinerary
towards human transformation (or, Utopianism).
This is the
essential contradiction: that ineluctable economic divarication and polarization
is transforming Europe into a continent torn by unresolved internal
contradiction. On the one hand it castigates Italy for its debts, and on the
other, it has been the ECB which has pursued interest rate ‘repression’ into
negative territory, and has monetized debt to the equivalence of one-third of
Europe’s global output. How can the EU not have expected banks and
businesses not to have loaded up on ‘positive-carry’ debt? How can
they have expected Banks not to have inflated their balance sheets
with ‘free debt’ to the point of becoming ‘too big to fail’?
The global
explosion of debt is a macro problem that vastly transcends the microcosm of
Italy. Like the ancient Roman Empire, the EU has atrophied in its ‘order’ to
become an obstacle to change, and, with no alternative, but to hold tight to a
‘braking action’ that will ultimately produce effects, completely at
odds to the original intent (i.e. involuntary, negative Katechon).
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/12/03/italy-eu-and-fall-of-roman-empire.html