Is Capitalism Fighting Back Against the European Union?
Europe is still reeling over British Prime Minister David Cameron’s veto last week of a new European Union treaty, meant to save the euro. Cameron stood against the 27 other EU member states, refusing to sign on to the new plan because, apparently, it might lead to damaging regulation of the UK’s — or, more specifically, London’s — financial services industry.
As discussed in a previous post, there’s been a lot of frustration in Europe recently over the way market forces, and particularly the ratings agencies, seem to be able to push politics around. Some of the debaters in the media seem to think greater European integration would produce a political unit better able to resist market pressure. How frustrating, then, to see a plan for greater integration thwarted by, again, concern for a financial market!
There’s already been a lot of physical and digital ink spent on this topic, i.e. why Cameron did what he did and what it means. The Economist’s writers have made a pretty good case for seeing this more as a matter of Cameron’s own precarious position in British politics than a cut-and-dried London financial sector vs. EU standoff.
Since the European papers’ op-ed sections have had such a strong 19th-century-style anti-market theme in the past few months, though, why not go whole-hog at this point? Wacky though Marxist and neo-Marxist theory may be, the virtue of heading down the Marxian path is that it’s got a very neat and tidy explanation for what’s going on right now. In fact, Marxist thought is designed almost exactly for this type of situation; little backlashes in the political superstructure (e.g. Cameron’s veto) are treated as evidence of how our particular economic setup — in this case, capitalism, or the capitalist mode of production — dictates the rest of what’s going on in society and politics.
One particular modification of Marxist theory that might apply to this case comes from an American academic named Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein’s idea of “world-systems analysis” is based on the Marxist notion that our political structures — in this case, our entire system of states and international relations, our “world-system” — are all driven by the capitalist “world-economy” we live in. In other words, the political system exists to serve the market system. International relations reproduce an international division of labor. Let’s set this up and then return to David Cameron to see how it all fits together.