Britain and Europe: Class, state and the politics of integration z;

Britain and Europe: Class,

state and the politics of
integration
Hugo Radice
This paper explores the way socialists have deployed
Marxist theories in analysing European integration and
Britains participation in it. The first section shows how
theories of the relationship between nation states and
global capitalism opened up new perspectives on
regional integration in Europe. The second section looks
at later debates about varieties of capitalism, and
argues that these debates have ignored the global
constitution of capitalism and exaggerated the range
of variation within it. The third section develops this
point in relation to the possibility of challenging
neoliberalism within the EU.
Introduction
A
t the time of the 1; referendum on British
membership of the ccc, the socialist left both within
and outside the Labour Party was virtually unanimous
in its hostility to membership. As Gamble observed (181:
18), ccc membership was seen as incompatible with the
national strategy of state-led industrial modernisation that
the left then espoused, and the lefts defeat on the referendum
indeed led quickly to the Wilson governments abandonment
of that industrial strategy in favour of an early form of
monetarism. The ignominious defeat of Labour in 1; under
Capital & Class z8
Callaghan ensured that the left remained steadfastly anti-
Europe through the Thatcher years, but over the last twenty
years that hostility has steadily diminished, both in the trade
union movement (Strange, zooza) and in the extra-
parliamentary context of the social forum movement. As the
European political elites prepare to celebrate the fiftieth
anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, it seems appropriate to
consider this evolution from a historical-materialist
standpoint.
The argument that follows develops in three stages. The
first section looks at the way Marxist theorising on class, state
and the world economy has evolved in Britain in relation to
European integration, drawing largely on the Open Marxism
tradition developed within the csc. The second section then
examines European capitalism through the lens of the
varieties of capitalism literature, arguing that the left has
too readily accepted a discourse that excludes socialist
transformation in favour of reformist attempts to moderate
the effects of global neoliberalism. The third section looks
more directly at political strategy: it begins by rejecting any
attempt by the left to reconstruct nationalism as progressive,
and goes on to argue that the increasing entrenchment of
neoliberalism in Europe has removed any possibility of the
European Union moderating the anti-working-class policies
of New Labour.
Marxist theory and European integration: A brief
history
While some capitalist states in western Europe negotiated
their paths to the 18 Treaty of Rome, to the east of the iron
curtain, the death of Stalin was followed by a period of political
uncertainty, reform and even revolution (16 in Hungary).
These changes in the east, culminating in the twentieth
congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (cisc),
helped to generate the renaissance of western Marxism
which, in the 16os, yielded a substantive renewal of the
Marxist critique of political economy and the first tentative
critical analyses of European integration.
Official Soviet ideology had prescribed for western
communists the theory of state monopoly capitalism, under
which the apparently inexorable expansion in the economic
role of the state was seen as the ruling classes last and doomed
attempt to offset the sclerosis of monopoly and the growing
Britain and Europe: Class, state and the politics of integration z
economic strength of labour. The novel analyses offered by
the new non-communist left included (to cite English-
language work only) the work of Baran (1;), Barratt Brown
(16), Baran and Sweezy (166), Mandel (168), Magdoff
(16), Frank (16) and Mattick (16), who sought to
renew Marxs critique of political economy by analysing
contemporary capitalism and imperialism in ways that
departed, to varying degrees and in various respects, from
the Soviet orthodoxy.
The response of orthodox state-monopoly-capitalism
theory (stamocap) to European integration was to see it as
a further phase in the fusion of capital and the state. The
roots of national state monopoly capitalism lay in the
concentration and centralisation of capital, which prevented
the law of value from operating effectively through
competitive market-adjustment processes. This, taken
together with the growing power of organised labour to resist
exploitation and to challenge capitalist power politically, had
led the bourgeoisie to develop complex mechanisms of state
regulation and intervention that would ensure the expanded
reproduction of capital and stave off the systems crisis
tendencies. However, in postwar Europe the economic
processes of concentration and centralisation had outgrown
the confines of the national state, most notably in the crisis
of overcapacity in the regions coal, iron and steel industries.
While historically such tendencies had led to fusions,
annexations and wars, the new postwar world of cs hegemony
and Soviet threat now led western-European capitalists to
seek the peaceful negotiation of a solution to these economic
problems. For communists, the participation of the European
powers in Na1o indicated further that the primary political
drivers of European integration, reinforcing this economic
motive, were subordination to cs imperialism and hostility
to the cssn.
In the post-16 renewal of Marxian economic analysis,
there are abundant signs of continuity with the old orthodoxy:
it is as if the political break with the Soviet Union was not yet
matched by an analytical break with its ruling ideology. In
particular, the analysis of international economic relations
remained heavily circumscribed by Lenins Imperialism and
the other classic contributions by Kautsky, Hilferding,
Luxemburg, Trotsky and Bukharin. This is very clear from a
rereading of Mandel (16;) and Picciotto & Radice (1;1)
on European integration, and Rowthorn (1;1) on imperial
Capital & Class o
rivalries: these are fundamentally economistic analyses, in
which the state is treated as an epiphenomenonan agent of
class rule whose activities are designed directly for that
purpose.
The break with this approach came from three sources.
First, the economists took note of an emerging debate on
the nature of the capitalist state, which in Britain is usually
remembered as the Miliband-Poulantzas debate (e.g.
Miliband, 1;; Poulantzas, 1;6, reviewed in Clarke, 11:
16zz). Second, political events around the world in 168
led to a surge of interest in Marxist theory centred on the
study of Marxs work in general, but especially the early Marx,
the Grundrisse and Capital. Third, significant parts of the new
left in western Europe and North America sought to engage
with labour movements which were themselves responding
to the end of the postwar boom with rank-and-file opposition
to the rule of capital, most spectacularly in France in May
168. In Britain, the 1;os saw intensive debates within the
inherited framework of Marxist theory over the law of value,
accumulation and economic crises, class, state and
imperialism, and these debates soon generated new analyses
of the causes and consequences of European integration.
For the understanding of imperialism and international
economic relations, the new analyses led some Marxists to a
radically different ontological stance in relation to class and
state. While the revival of value theory had already generated
new insights into the economic role of the state in relation to
crisis, Clarke (1;;) and Holloway and Picciotto (1;8) (the
latter drawing on contemporary German debates) argued that
the state should itself be treated as a form of capitalist social
relations, rather than as being in some sense relatively
autonomous, or as intervening in economic relations from
outside. Historically, the state was central to the constitution
of capitalism, while in contemporary practice, the struggle of
workers against capital took place at one and the same time
in and against both the workplace and the state (London
Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, 18o). The historically-
contingent character of the capitalist state also encompassed
the states system: there was nothing in the social relations of
capitalist production as such that entailed a multiplicity of
states, the existence of which had its origins in pre-capitalist
territorial politics. Capital as a social relation had no inherent
territoriality, and its very boundlessness implied that it was
constituted immediately as global. However, the struggle to
Britain and Europe: Class, state and the politics of integration 1
establish and reproduce capitalism, and workers struggle
against it, took place in the inherited multiple states through
national political processes.
The implication of this approach for the analysis of
European political integration is clear: rather than a potential
fusion of intrinsically national states, it is a contingent and
partial territorial reconstitution of class rule (Holloway &
Picciotto, 18o). The form and content of European
integration therefore develops in a specific, concrete historical
context, shaped by the course of class struggle. From this
perspective, the analytical frameworks offered by bourgeois
social science reflect the latters ideological limitations. Belief
in the real autonomy of the political and its separation from
the economic lies behind the ahistorical abstractions of
neofunctionalism, liberal inter-governmentalism,
Europeanisation and the various forms of institutionalism
and constructivism deployed to analyse the renewed drive
for integrationdeeper and widerthat set in in the mid-
18os. Instead, analysis starts from those particular elements
of bourgeois politics that constitute the core roles of the state
as a form of the capital relation, securing the reproduction of
capitalist social relations through the public administration
of laws related to proper ty and labour-power. The
development of European state-like institutions takes place
alongside, and not in place of or in opposition to, the
development of institutions and political practices at national
level. It also takes place alongside the development of wider
multi-regional and global institutions: political
regionalisation and globalisation appear as alternative and
contingent strategies for particular national ruling classes,
offering a choice of sites in which the state can seek to
reproduce capitalist social relations.
From this perspective, the new Europe constructed in
the 1os, from the Single European Act and the exchange-
rate mechanism to the euro and the zoo eastward
enlargement, must be analysed in conjunction with both
the global rise of neoliberalism
1
and its nationally specific
forms, shaped by the circumstances of each member state.
As Bonefeld et al. (1: 1) put it, we are witnessing the
recomposition of labour/capital relations expressed as the
restructuring of relations of conflict and collaboration
between national states.
Since 18o, two other approaches to the analysis of
global capitalism and European integration have also
Capital & Class z
emerged within the Marxist tradition, and in close
interaction with the approach outlined above (e.g. Bieler
et al., zoo6): that of the Amsterdam School (e.g. van der
Pijl, 18(, 18; Overbeek, 1o, 1) and the neo-
Gramscian tendency in international political economy
(e.g. Bieler & Morton, zoo1; van Apeldoorn, zooz). Very
briefly, the formers key contribution was to develop the
analysis of the internationalisation of capital (as in e.g.
Palloix, 1;) by identifying different fractions of capital
based on whether their circulation took place nationally
or transnationally, leading to the advocacy of different sets
of institutions and policies at national, regional and global
l evel s. The domi nant fracti ons of capi tal generate
comprehensive concepts of control that translate their
material interests into strategies and practices of class rule
embracing the global, regional and national levels. Their
analysis of European integration therefore centres on the
identification of a nascent European capitalist class, and
its contradictory relationship with cs hegemony (see e.g.
Holman & van der Pijl, 16).
The more recent emergence of an explicitly neo-Gramscian
approach to European integration has its origins in the work
of Cox (18;) and Gill (1), who have sought to apply the
key concepts in Gramscis political thought, mutatis mutandis,
to the analysis of international political economy. In this
approach, disciplinary neoliberalism is promoted as a
framework for safeguarding and intensifying the rule of capital,
taking concrete forms at global, regional and national level
that are shaped by struggles between opposing social forces.
The renewal of European integration in the 1os is seen as
a new constitutionalism (Gill, 1) in which the regional
embedding of neoliberalism overcomes national social forces
of resistance through its imposition as an ineluctable external
constraint.
The neo-Gramscian approach had already been vigorously
criticised by Burnham (11), drawing on the work of Clarke
and others outlined above, for its identification of the states
policies and practices with the interests of specific capital
fractions rather than with capital in general. It has, however,
clearly provided a fruitful approach to the empirical analysis
of struggles over cc accession and enlargement and its
institutional evolution (e.g. Bieler, zooz; Cafruny & Ryder,
zoo; Shields, zoo; McCarthy, zoo;). The next section takes
up these issues.
Britain and Europe: Class, state and the politics of integration
What sort of Europe? From the struggle for socialism to
the defense of social capitalism
The previous section offered a history of Marxisms analytical
strategy for understanding European integration; this section
examines its normative political engagement in terms of
attitudes to particular policies and directions of institutional
change.
The political conjuncture of the cold war in Europe in the
16os ensured that the lefts political engagement with the
early process of integration divided primarily along the
traditional line between reform and revolution. Social
democracy, economic interventionism and the welfare state
stood on the middle ground of bourgeois politics in the
European democracies, as part of what Holman and van der
Pijl (16: ;) term corporate liberalism. Reformism in
Britain as elsewhere took an instrumental attitude towards
the Common Market, up to and beyond British entry and
the 1; referendum: would membership (or in member
states, specific policy initiatives) promote or impede the
pursuit of cherished objectives of domestic and foreign policy?
For the Labour Party, the key stated domestic objectives
remained full employment, economic growth, industrial
modernisation and the provision of equal opportunities
through investment in education, housing and health: in these
areas there was a predictable tension between those who
thought that market integration would yield substantial
economic benefits through economies of scale, and those who
feared the erosion of Keynesian capacities of fiscal and
monetary management. In foreign policy, Atlanticism, anti-
communism and Commonwealth neo-colonialism had
formed the three pillars of Labour thinking since 1(, and
included a barely-hidden strain of hostility towards
continental Europe that seemed confirmed by de Gaulles
veto of Britains first application for ccc membership.
However, by 1;( the erosion of cs hegemony, Brandts
Ostpolitik and the growing investments of ck business in
Europe had reconciled most of Labours centre and right to
campaigning for membership.
The left of Labour and of the 1cc (the latter dominated at
this time by the ostensibly left barons of the 1cwc and acc,
Jones and Scanlon) predictably opposed British membership
through a mixture of commitment to the old politics of British
exceptionalism, and opposition to anything advocated by the
Capital & Class (
Labour right. Yet there was remarkably little real interest in the
ccc among either the labour Left or the revolutionary left,
whether communist, Trotskyist or libertarian: the issues of The
Socialist Register for 1;1(, and likewise the short-lived Trade
Union Register of the period, contain no articles on the ccc or
on British membership. Apart from 168s brief spark of
internationalism, which scanned rapidly from Hue to Paris to
Mexico City to Prague, the left was far more preoccupied with
the domestic politics of industrial and social issues.
After Thatchers second election victory in 18, however,
Europe assumed a far greater importance for British politics
and for socialists in Britain. Thatcher cleverly exploited the
sclerotic processes of policy-making in the cc to rail against a
largely imaginary federalism, and then return in triumph with
budgetary concessions; in the end her cultivation of
Euroscepticism proved instrumental in her downfall, but every
British government since her departure has played the same
game. However, the crude instrumentalism of the ruling
stance towards Europe led the moderate left of the Labour
Party, and especially the 1cc, to look more closely at the
potential of the cc as a defense against Thatcherism. Beset
by electoral failure, declining membership and the steady
march of anti-union legislation and privatisation, they saw
Jacques Delorss cc presidency, and eventually and especially
his promotion of the 18 Social Charter, as offering them a
potential lifeline (Strange, zooza). By the time the Blair
Brown Labour leadership took over in 1, only a few isolated
elements on the left still called for British withdrawal from
the cc, while the great majority both within and outside the
Labour Party saw the cc as part of their normal arena of
political struggle.
At the same time, events in the east once again, as in the
mid-1os, dramatically changed the broader global context
of the British lefts political engagement with the wider world.
The rapid collapse of Soviet communism in 181 and the
apparent triumph of global neoliberalism was a political defeat
not only for diehard communists but for all democratic
varieties of socialism, which were completely unable to offer
a viable alternative third way. The restoration of capitalism
in eastern Europe went largely unchallenged by the left, and
was shaped along neoliberal lines by new political elites
supported steadf astly by the whole panoply of
intergovernmental institutions from the cc, Na1o and the occb
to the i:r, w1o and World Bank (Shields, zoo; Radice, zoo).
Britain and Europe: Class, state and the politics of integration
From the ashes of the confrontation between capitalism
and communism, however, arose a pale shadow that might,
by a trick of the light, be mistaken for an equally historic
confrontationbetween varieties of capitalism. Popularised
in Britain by Hutton (16), the comparative analysis of
Anglo-Saxon/neoliberal/free-market capitalism on the one
hand and Rhineland/social-market/organised capitalism on
the other offered a new strategy of political engagement for
the British left, explicitly limited to a progressive agenda
centred on the defense of the Keynesian welfare state. The
varieties-of-capitalism (hereafter voc) literature embraced a
positive research strategy aimed at convincing political elites
that some specific variety would generate superior results in
terms of desired outcomes imputed to a given society (see
Albert, 1; Berger & Dore, 16; Crouch & Streeck, 1;;
Hall & Soskice, zoo1; Coates, zoo). An early example of
this came in the USA in the 18os, when the superior
economic and technological performance of Japan led
progressive scholars to advocate the adoption of Japanese-
style statebusiness relations in place of the Reagan
administrations militant neoliberalism (Burkett & Hart-
Landsberg, 16).
In Europe, there was a parallel espousal of alternatives to
Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism. Given the political climate in
Britain, this focused not on the statist model attributed to
France and Italy, but rather the social market capitalism
(s:c) attributed variously to Germany, Austria, Holland and
the Scandinavian countries. The effectiveness of this advocacy
depended, however, on two necessary conditions: first, the
superior performance of s:c, and second, the persistence of
salient differences between the two models. In the early-to-
middle 1os, these conditions appeared to be fulfilled. cs
and ck economic performance appeared decidedly weaker
under George Bush senior and John Major respectively, while
the German slowdown could plausibly be attributed to the
burden of post-1o unification, and the other s:c exemplars
appeared to be doing well. By the end of the decade, however,
these circumstances were reversed: the csa was dramatically
outstripping Japan (and the east Asian miracle was over),
while the Blair government was trumpeting its success over
European s:c in reducing unemployment and restoring
sound finance (Radice, 1).
The second condition for the effective advocacy of s:c
concerned the question of convergence. The mainstream voc
Capital & Class 6
literature was precisely structured around perceived
divergences between countries in the institutions and
practices of capitalism. Differences in national economic
performance had conventionally been attributed by
economists to comparative advantages in trade, based on
resource endowments, capital accumulation and productivity
growth. voc writers proposed a further factor, drawing on
the new institutionalisms in the social sciences: the
effectiveness of institutions in managing a countrys
economic responses to the challenge of international
competition (Hollingsworth, 1(). The new institutional
economics proposed that institutions were themselves
subject to a process of market selection, ensuring the survival
of the fittest model; sociological institutionalism argued
that the process of elimination of unfit models might be
slow or incomplete because the embeddedness of institutions
led to path dependency and thus inertia in the face of
pressures for change; and certain forms of political
institutionalism would add that culturally-rooted political
and policy preferences could further slow or prevent change
(Peters, 1; Radice, zoo(). Thus convergence might be
slow, and alternative models could coexist and compete over
significant periods of time, with international comparative
success perhaps changing hands in response to exogenous
factors; and in any case, at some level of observational or
analytical detail, institutional differences are bound to
persist. Within the terms of the voc literature, it is simply
not possible to establish either the existence or otherwise of
convergence, or the definitive superiority of one or another
model. This, then, provides the intellectual justification for
continuing to advocate forms of s:c in opposition to the
global tide of neoliberalism; whether this advocacy occurs
at national or cc level depends pragmatically on political
and economic circumstances.
However, what is clear is that the voc literature is
powerfully locked into methodological nationalism (as defined
by Gore, 16: 8o8), and this has led to tensions and
contradictions in relation to the question of globalisation. It
was argued in the previous section that while states as forms
of the capital relation are national, capital itself, and thus the
mode of production in general, is constituted globally. This
explains why the political and economic circumstances just
referred to are experienced as exogenous to the politics of
institutional and policy positions contested at national or cc
Britain and Europe: Class, state and the politics of integration ;
level. But the neoliberal reconstitution of global capitalism is
unquestionably not exogenous: it is the outcome of a complex,
multilayered and often barely visible process of class struggle.
Within the European Union, at any point in time and in any
given country, the modalities of response to these apparently
external forces will be contingent on the disposition of social
forces in that country, but both state and market remain as
social forms of a global capital relation.
z
In this context, the alternative institutions and practices
debated in the voc literature, including its progressive wing,
undoubtedly do represent arenas of class struggle. However,
it is only an exploration of how these institutions and practices
have evolved within the global relation of capital that can reveal
the potential and the limits of the fight for a preferred model
of capitalism. What is all too rarely appreciated is the extent
to which elements of that preferred model have historically
either emerged as or been transformed into purposive
strategies for the containment of challenges from the working
classes and the elimination of any emancipatory content. This
is especially clear in relation to that most fundamental of
capitalist processes: the exploitation of labour power.
The class politics of Britain and the EU
In workplace relations between labour and capital, the choice
between the simple carrot-and-stick modalities of exploitation
visible in the neoliberal model and the participation-and-
consensus modalities attributed to the s:c model was
understood long ago by Friedman (1;;) as a choice of
managerial strategy within the capitalist firm. Attempts were
made in the 1;os to turn the managerial strategy of job
enlargement into a springboard for new forms of collective
challenge to the rule of capital through the advocacy of
workers participation, cooperatives and the conversion of
production to meet social needs (e.g. Cooley, 18;;
Wainwright & Elliott, 18z). At the level of state policy, all
such proposals had been successfully eliminated from
discussion twenty years later.
A parallel story can be told about the institutions and
practices surrounding the labour market, including skills
and training. The highly-regulated German model was
widely lauded in the progressive voc literature for
generating a virtuous circle of high wages and high
productivity, which would at least improve the life
Capital & Class 8
circumstances of a significant part of the working class.
Such regulation has persisted in the teeth of ideological
disapproval from the Anglo-Saxon world because social
protection aids the market by helping economic actors
overcome market failures in skill formation (Estevez-Abe
et al., zoo1: 1(), indicating that this is an effective strategy
for some employers in the face of global competition, rather
than necessarily a prefigurative strategy for the working
class. The adoption of a minimum wage by New Labour,
while welcome in itself, has been overshadowed by the
governments refusal to act against illegal employment
practices, especially in relation to migrant labour.
Third, consider the condition of trade unionism in Britain
and in Europe (see also Taylor & Mathers, zooz). The Blair
governments, while not challenging the constitutional role
of the unions in the Labour Party, have resolutely refused
to restore any semblance of the policy partnership that
existed at least on paper between the Labour Party and the
unions prior to 1;. The recent industrial-relations
literature charts the relentless advance of the business
unionism model and the decline of effective collective
bargaining in favour of workplace and partnership
agreements; and the election of left-wing leaderships in a
number of unions since 1;, while heartening, has not
stemmed the tide (McIlroy, zooo).
Parallel tales could be told, if space permitted, about many
other policy areas in which the voc literature sets out the
endurance and superiority of the s:c model (Radice, 18).
None of this means that socialists should proclaim indifference
to the potential for change within capitalismon the contrary.
What should be expected is a degree of realism, and above all
an understanding of the overarching framework of capitalist
relations within which policy institutions and practices are
set. Nevertheless, the approach taken so far will be interpreted
by many as pessimistic and defeatist, as Strange (zoozb)
argues in relation to previous contributions on globalisation
by the present author. Such an interpretation depends on
perceiving substantive opportunities for contestation within
the framework of European governance:
Taken together, Euro-Keynesianism and radical Euro-
corporatism can be seen as providing a socially inclusive
governance framework for a sustainable alternative
compromise between European labour and European
Britain and Europe: Class, state and the politics of integration
capital based on negotiated involvement. In neo-Gramscian
terms, such a framework can be seen as having the potential
to mobilise an alternative transnational, European historic
bloc in favour of a new regional social democracy
appropriate to the structural constraints of globalisation.
(Strange, zoozb: z)
an alternative that is transforming of the system rather
than merely transcending of it (ibid: 6o). This section seeks
to refute that argument, suggesting instead that the renewal
of socialism in Britain and in Europe as a whole requires a
resolutely and consistently global political strategy guided
by the objective of transcending it.
Taking up the argument of the previous section, the
potential for social-democratic or progressive change in
capitalism at the European level is heavily constrained not
by the structures of globalisation (important though they are),
but by the historical experience of British nationalism. Over
the past zo years, almost every political nation has
experienced nationalism at some time or other as a socially-
progressive political ideology. However, it takes only a
moments reflection to appreciate both how paper-thin this
progressive character is in most cases, and how utterly
regressive nationalism has been at other times. The modern
British left has relentlessly castigated itself for its inability to
wrench Britishness from the extreme right: it has looked
back to the Dunkirk spirit that resonated from 1(o through
the postwar Labour governments, and further back to the
rise of organised labour from the creation of the 1cc until the
defeat of the 1z6 general strike, to Chartism, cooperatives
and the Luddite resistance to the industrial revolution, and
to Thomas Paine. Those Eurosceptic social democrats and
socialists who have opposed European integration have,
however, found their appeals to these radical British roots
swamped by much uglier social forces on the political right,
epitomised by the Murdoch and Rothermere presses.
The same inability to effectively articulate a progressive
nationalist alternative can be identified throughout the cc in
recent years, whether in relation to opposition to accession,
to enlargement, or to the new constitution sidelined by the
French and Dutch referendum defeats. Even in the
mobilisations of ethnic-minority communities within
European nation states, traditionally taken to be almost
naturally progressive by the left, perceived historical injustices
Capital & Class (o
or religious differences have provided the strongest
justification for revolt, rather than any predisposition against
capitalism or even social inequality. But in the British case,
to argue on the basis of the last fifty years that British society
is in any sense more socialist, more democratic or indeed
more egalitarian than Europe is frankly ludicrous. Over little
Britain rejection of European integration, then, there can
surely be no disagreement: the revival of any sort of socialist
or even progressive politics in Britain has to embrace a
European dimensionand that means not clarion calls for a
united socialist states of Europe, but politically living in
actually existing Europe, recognising and celebrating our
multiple identities as citizens of Europe and the world and
as, historically, a blessedly mongrel nation.
From that starting point, the more interesting question is
posed: how is European socialism to be nurtured?
Traditionally, this issue has been presented rather
mechanically in terms of a strong European movement can
only be built on the basis of strong national movements.
Restricting the argument to the labour movement, this is not
however simply a matter of choice, whether for union leaders
or rank-and-file members. We live in a world in which the
legislative and policy frameworks governing our spheres of
political action remain very predominantly national, while
the social forces shaping the challenges we face are
increasingly transnational. What implications can we draw
for the politics of labour from this apparent contradiction
between the national and the global?
For the neo-Gramscians, economic globalisation (of
production, trade and finance) means that an increasing
number of sectors of the economy are transnationally
integrated, and in these sectors both capital and labour will
seek to influence government policies in a neoliberal
directionincluding that of cc accessionwhile this is
resisted by both capital and labour in those sectors that remain
predominantly national in orientation (Bieler, zooz).
However, such a view implies that the dynamics of capitalism
are merely those of competition in the marketplace. The neo-
Gramscians appear to assume that sectors are independent
of each other in terms of value chains; but most national
business sectors are characterised by relatively small firms
which are characteristically highly dependent on large,
typically transnational enterprises, as Shutt & Whittington
(18;) have explained. The crucial point is that, while the
Britain and Europe: Class, state and the politics of integration (1
circumstances faced by workers in any given workplace are
contingent on product- and labour-market factors, the overall
conditions of exploitation are necessarily determined through
the operation of the law of value at the level of capital in
general, which is enforced by the capacity of individual
capitalists to withdraw their money capital from one locus of
production, and reinvest it elsewhere (or hoard it). The
existence of significant differences in wages and working
conditions, both between sectors and between individual
workplaces, merely indicates that the law of value is mediated
by the contingent circumstances of individual parts of total
social capital (see Botwinnick, 1). So extensive are the
transnational interrelations of investment, production and
trade now for all European countries, but pre-eminently for
Britain (Radice, 18(), that it no longer makes any sense to
distinguish national and transnational fractions of capital in
terms of alternative world-market strategies of free trade or
protectionism.
Instead, what is required is the charting of the historical
development of the patterns of engagement between capital,
labour and the state in each particular national context, on
the understanding that these patterns necessarily co-evolve
with those of global capitalism. In the British case, as Gifford
(zoo;) has recently restated, the national forms of class
struggle have over several centuries been unusually
transnational in content, embodied in the predominance of
mercantile and financial interests in the determination of
government policies and the shaping of the institutions of
governanceperiodically imposed as an external constraint
(Callaghan, zooz) on social democracy. There was a brief
moment in the second quarter of the twentieth century in
which the intrinsically global character of British capitalism
appeared to be seriously under threat; but the postwar Labour
government, whatever its achievements in relation to the
welfare state, rejected any real break with the past as vigorously
as had the National government of 11. Neither the Labour
Party nor the trade unions challenged the Atlanticimperial
international economic policies of the 116( Conservative
governments. The left attempted to articulate a strategy of
national industrial modernisation for thirty years from the
mid-16os, culminating in the alternative economic strategy
(e.g. London csc group, 18o; Cowling & Sugden, 1o),
but in 1;(6, at the only moment in which this could have
been brought into effect, it was decisively rejected by Labour
Capital & Class (z
in government in favour of a monetarist retrenchment that
echoed that of Snowden in 11.
The turn to Europe by British unions in the 1os was
entirely understandable at the time: it amounted to an attempt
to expose the British business and political elites to a very
different kind of external constraint, namely the imposition
of social-market capitalism from Brussels. But the course of
events since New Labour came to power has amply
demonstrated that the BlairBrown strategy of engagement
with Europe has consistently promoted the neoliberal agenda
of reform, aimed especially at imposing labour-market
flexibility and the mobility of capital, in historical continuity
with the pattern of British engagement with global capitalism.
The new social-democratic dawn of the late-1os was swept
aside by Lisbon (Gifford, zoo;: (;z), and by the accession of
new member states in eastern Europe whose politics appeared
to offer only a choice between neoliberalism and national
revanchism. What is now required is a far more arduous long
march into and across the European Union, constructing a
popular movement against neoliberalism based on common
concerns about equality, citizenship, human rights and the
environment, and engaging unions and social movements as
well as the groundswell of broader opposition since zoo to
European complicity in the renewed imperial adventures of
the cs regime.
Notes
1. It is increasingly clear that the term neoliberalism has
been overused and underinvestigated almost as much as
has globalisation. A succinct and helpful account can
be found in Gamble (zoo1); see also Saad-Filho and
Johnston (zoo) and Harvey (zoo).
z. Callaghan (zooz) gives a historical analysis of the role of
external constraints in explaining the limits of social
democracy in Britain and Europe.
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