Resistance in the Age of Austerity: Nationalism, the Failure of the Left and the Return of God

178 Pages·2013·4.513 MB·English

by  Owen Worth

About the author
Owen Worth is a lecturer in international relations at
the University of Limerick, Ireland. He has published
widely in the areas of global political economy and in
particular in the areas of globalization, hegemony and
resistance. He is the author of Hegemony, International
Political Economy and Post-Communist Russia (2005),
and he co-edited European Regionalism and the Left
(with Gerry Strange, 2012), Globlisation and the ‘New’
Semi-Peripheries (with Phoebe Moore, 2009) and Criti-
cal Perspectives on International Political Economy (with
Jason Abbott, 2002). He has published work on resist-
ance and globalization in Global Society, Global izations,
Capital and Class and Third World Quarterly, and has
also published in International Politics, Review of Inter-
national Studies and Journal of International Relations
and Development. He is the current managing editor of
Capital and Class and is on the executive board of the
Conference of Socialist Economics.

RESISTANCE IN THE AGE OF AUSTERITY
NATIONALISM, THE FAILURE OF THE LEFT AND
THE RETURN OF GOD
Owen Worth
Fernwood Publishing
halifax | winnipeg
Zed Books
london | new York
Resistance in the age of austerity: nationalism, the failure of the left and the
return of God was first published in 2013 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street,
London n1 9jf, uk and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa
www.zedbooks.co.uk
Copyright © Owen Worth 2013
The right of Owen Worth to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988
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Books Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available
IsBn 978 1 78032 337 4 eb
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements | vi
Introduction: in search of a new Prince . . . . . . . . 1
1 The end of history? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2 Resistance and counter-hegemony . . . . . . . . . 32
3 Another world is possible?. . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
4 Nationalist and exceptionalist responses . . . . . . 72
5 The return of God. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
6 The age of austerity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
7 Neoliberalism and potential transformation. . . . . 132
Notes | 15o Bibliography | 154
Index | 164
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book was a number of years in the making, but was largely
written in the different locations of west Wales, Limerick and
Perth, Australia, at the end of 2011 and beginning of 2012. I
am grateful to Maura Adshead, at the time head of the Depart-
ment of Politics and Public Administration at the University of
Limerick, for giving me teaching relief for study leave at that
time. I am also grateful to the faculty of Arts, Humanities and
Social Sciences for seed funding in order to attend the World
Social Forum in Nairobi in 2007. I would like to thank Gerry
and Jackie Strange, Mark Beeson, Bruce Stone and the Politics
and International Studies department at the University of
Western Australia (UWA). I have benefited from feedback and
discussions from several talks that I have given leading up to
the writing of this book. I would like to thank Jason Abbott and
those at the Center for Asian Democracy at the University of
Louisville, Chris Farrands (as ever) and David Bailey for organ-
izing an excellent panel at the ECPR conference in Reykjavik
in August 2011. I have also benefited from excellent discussions
with colleagues and former students and would in particular
like to thank Luke Ashworth, Karen Buckley, Matt Merefield,
Kyle Murray, Swati Parashar and Andy Shorten. On a personal
level I would like to thank Perys, Rosa, Sam, Austen and family
and my many colleagues, friends and family on both sides of
the Atlantic and the Irish Sea.
INTRODUCTION: IN SEARCH OF A NEW PRINCE
He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command
(Machiavelli, 1513)
The financial crisis that had engulfed the world by 2008 shook a
whole genre of company directors, businessmen, economists, financial
advisers and investors who believed that the market-generated global
economy was structurally in safe hands. The fallout from the credit
crisis and the subsequent banking collapses had an even greater
knock-on effect on society in general as property mortgages that were
encouraged and distributed at high rates became unsustainable. As
production faltered and economies, at least in the developed world,
began to slide into recession, the general social ills associated with
depression economics began to surface.
In line with other periods of capitalist crisis in the past, its im-
mediate aftermath saw a whole collection of soul-searching and
analysis into how and why the system collapsed. This was perhaps
demonstrated best when, as noted recently by David Harvey, Britain’s
Queen Elizabeth II questioned economists at the LSE as to why no
one had seen the crisis coming. The response from economists was
that they underestimated the importance of systemic risk within the
workings of market economics as a whole (Harvey 2010: 235). Yet,
for those who have located themselves outside the circle that worked,
functioned and believed in the sustainability of the global economy, the
crisis was not a surprise. For long, students of International Political
Economy (IPE) have pointed to the unsustainability of the global
economy. At the same time those who have been involved within, or
have studied, the resurgence in protest movements that have emerged
from civil society have aired their discontent at the ideological under-
pinnings of the global economy. The neoliberal principles that the
global economy has been founded upon since the Thatcher–Reagan
era of the 1980s have been much maligned by such criticisms, and
it is these principles which have come under even greater scrutiny
since the economic crisis.
2 | introduCtion
Despite the underlying problems with neoliberalism being aired
more freely since the financial crisis, there has been a reluctance to
break away from its overall rhetoric and logic. One of the striking
features of this crisis has been that an alternative form of economic
governance has not been forthcoming. While the crash in 1929 paved
the way for an era of Keynesian economics and the stagflation in the
1970s saw the emergence of neoliberal free market ideas, the current
crisis has not really led to any fresh alternatives to neoliberalism. While
there have been discussions on the reform of the economic system in
the immediate aftermath of the crisis, a radical ideological overhaul
of the way the global political economy is managed has never been
seriously considered. Instead, there has been a commitment to ride
out the crisis through the reduction of sovereign debt that increased
in countries where banking bailouts have occurred, by reducing public
funds to welfare. As a result the welfare state is being rolled back even
more by the realities – if not the genuine ideologies – of neoliberalism.
The main purpose of this book is to look at whether or not, in light
of the financial crisis, neoliberalism can sustain itself as the hegemonic
ideology behind the governance of the global political economy. In
particular it looks at potential challengers to the neoliberal system
and questions whether such positions can muster a viable or coherent
alternative project capable of altering the nature of the current world
economic order. The decline of the USA, the rise of China and the
more structured form of state capitalism that has been favoured by
their stark economic growth might be one that could replace the
neoliberal model, which has often been associated with American
power (Beeson 2010). However, the realities of neoliberalism have seen
multinational firms move their interests away from developed states to
ones that offer cheaper labour costs, which have allowed for increased
profitability for the larger multinational corporations. As a result,
while the crisis has seen economies falter in the developed world,
productivity and economic growth on a global level have continued
to rise, with countries such as China and India, areas such as South
America, the Middle East and Central Asia, all enjoying significant
increases in economic growth in the last couple of years. Countries
on the fringes of the European core, such as Turkey and the Baltic
states, have benefited from the fallout in the financial heartland.
These circumstances all remind us of the observations made by
Karl Marx when he looked at the processes and realities of free market
introduCtion | 3
capitalism in the nineteenth century. In his classic analysis of capital
accumulation, Marx demonstrated that the capitalist system rested
upon the acquisition of surplus value and the reliance on expanded
profits through the reinvestment of this surplus (Marx 1976: 725–870).
The international expansion of capital thus relies upon the contin-
ued pursuit by companies (or the class of the bourgeoisie) of profit
maximization and new markets. As this allows for the globalization
of free market capitalism, then during times of economic crisis in the
heartland, greater productivity will emerge elsewhere. The twentieth
century saw a reaction against this process as the prominence of both
Keynes’s work in criticizing the chaotic nature of free market capital-
ism (Keynes 2004), and the respective socialist projects (through both
‘social democracy’ and through state socialism or communism), put
an end to the era of liberal capitalism. But the end of the Cold War
and the effective ideological defeat of state socialism brought a new
meaning to the idea of a global economy, as the effective opposition
to unfettered capitalism appeared to have subsided. Over twenty years
on, and with this post-Cold War form of global capitalism experiencing
its first major systematic predicament, this book outlines the move-
ments that are emerging from political and civil society that wish to
construct alternatives to the status quo. A collection of movements
that, as I intend to show, are far more diverse and less precise in
their alternative visions than were the different forms of socialism in
the twentieth century.
New Prince, modern Prince or postmodern Prince?
One of the much-commented-on criticisms of any opposition
to neoliberalism is that while opponents are quick to illustrate the
shortcomings of the contemporary system, they fail to outline viable
alternatives to it. What they do not add is that such alternatives can
be constructed by building a popular homogeneous movement that
contains its own norms, laws and customs that are distinctly different
to those inherent within the prevailing order. Writing from fascist
captivity in the 1930s, the former communist leader Antonio Gramsci
argued that for a socialist revolution to occur a transformation was
required that would incorporate all facets of society so that a mind-
set would be formed that would differ fundamentally in its nature
to that which preceded it. In this way, a transformation must occur
in order for the common sense of everyday life to be altered in a