The age of privatisation is over. Politics not the market is responsible for promoting the common good. Philosopher Jürgen Habermas talks to Thomas Assheuer about the necessity of an international world order.
Thomas Assheuer: Herr Habermas, the international financial system has collapsed and a global economic crisis is looming. What do you find most worrying about this?
Jürgen Habermas: What worries me most is the scandalous social injustice that the most vulnerable social groups will have to bear the brunt of the socialised costs for the market failure. The mass of those who, in any case, are not among the winners of globalisation now have to pick up the tab for the impacts of a predictable dysfunction of the financial system on the real economy. Unlike the shareholders, they will not pay in money values but in the hard currency of their daily existence. Viewed in global terms, this avenging fate is also afflicting the economically weakest countries. That’s the political scandal. Yet pointing the finger at scapegoats strikes me as hypocritical. The speculators, too, were acting consistently within the established legal framework according to the socially recognised logic of profit maximisation. Politics turns itself into a laughing stock when it resorts to moralising instead of relying upon the enforceable law of the democratic legislator. Politics, and not capitalism, is responsible for promoting the common good.
You recently lectured at Yale University. Which images of this crisis impressed you most?
A seemingly endless loop of melancholic Hopperian images of long rows of abandoned houses in Florida and elsewhere with “Foreclosure” signs on their front lawns flickered across the television screens. Then you saw buses arriving with curious prospective buyers from Europe and wealthy Latin Americans, followed by the real estate agent showing them the closets in the bedroom smashed in a fit of rage and despair. After my return I was struck by the sharp contrast between the agitated mood in the United States and the calm feeling of “business as usual” here in Germany. In the US the very real economic anxieties coincided with the hot end-spurt of one of the most momentous election campaigns in recent memory. The crisis also instilled a more acute awareness of their personal interests in broad sectors of the electorate. It forced people to make decisions that were, if not necessarily more reasonable, then at least more rational, at any rate by comparison with the last presidential election which was ideologically polarised by “9/11”. America will owe its first black president—if I may hazard a prediction immediately before the election—and hence a major historical watershed in the history of its political culture, to this fortunate coincidence. Beyond this, however, the crisis could also be the harbinger of a changed political climate in Europe.
What do you have in mind?
Such tidal shifts change the parameters of public discussion and in the process, the spectrum of political alternatives seen as possible. The Korean War marked the end of the New Deal, Reagan and Thatcher and the waning of the Cold War the end of the era of social welfare programs. Today, with the end of the Bush era and the bursting of the last neoliberal rhetorical balloons, the Clinton and New Labour programs have run their course too. What is coming next? My hope is that that the neoliberal agenda will no longer be accepted at face value but will be suspended. The whole program of subordinating the lifeworld to the imperatives of the market must be subjected to scrutiny.
According to the neoliberal slogan the state is just one player in the economic field and should play as small a role as possible. Is this way of thinking now discredited?
That depends on what course the crisis takes, on the perceptual capacities of the political parties and on the issues that find their way onto the public agenda. In Germany, at any rate, things are still strangely calm. The agenda that recklessly prioritises shareholder interests and is indifferent to increasing social inequality, to the emergence of an underclass, to child poverty, a low wage sector, etc., has been discredited. With its mania for privatisation, this agenda hollows out the core functions of the state, it sells off the remnants of a deliberating public sphere to profit-maximising financial investors, and subordinates culture and education to the interests and moods of sponsors who are dependent on market cycles.
Are the consequences of the privatisation mania becoming apparent in the financial crisis?
In the United States the crisis is exacerbating the already apparent material, moral, social, and cultural damage caused by a policy of deregulation pushed to an extreme by the Bush administration. The privatisation of social security and health care, of public transport, the energy supply, the penal system, military security services, large sectors of school and university education, and the surrender of the cultural infrastructure of cities and communities to the commitment and generosity of private sponsors are part of a social design whose risks and consequences are difficult to reconcile with the egalitarian principles of a social and democratic constitutional state.
State agencies are incapable of conducting business in accordance with economic imperatives.
Yes, but certain vulnerable areas of life should not be exposed to the risks of stock market speculation, which conflicts, for example, with basing provision for the elderly on shares. In democracies there are also some public goods, for example undistorted political communication, which cannot be tailored to the profit expectations of financial investors; the citizens’ need for information cannot be satisfied by the culture of easily digestible sound bites that flourishes in a media landscape dominated by commercial television.
Are we experiencing a “legitimation crisis” of capitalism, to quote the title of a controversial book of yours?
Since 1989-90 it has become impossible to break out of the universe of capitalism; the only option is to civilize and tame the capitalist dynamic from within. Even during the post-war period, the Soviet Union was not a viable alternative for the majority of the Left in Western Europe. This was why in 1973 I wrote on legitimation problems “in” capitalism. These problems have again forced their way onto the agenda, with more or less urgency depending on the national context. A symptom of this are the demands for caps on managers’ salaries and the abolition of “golden parachutes,” i.e. the outrageous compensation payments and bonuses.
But aren’t such policies merely window dressing? There are elections coming up next year.
Yes, this is of course symbolic politics designed to divert attention away from the failures of the politicians and their economic consultants. They have been aware of the need for regulation on the financial markets for a long time. I just reread Helmut Schmidt’s crystal-clear article “Regulate the New Mega-Speculators” from February 2007 in Die Zeit. Everyone knew what was going on. In America and Great Britain, however, the political elites viewed the wild speculation as useful as long as things were going well. And Europe succumbed to the Washington Consensus. In this regard there was also a broad coalition of the willing for which Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t need to advertise.
The Washington Consensus was the notorious economic plan proposed the IMF and the World Bank in 1990 that was supposed to provide the template for economic reform, first in Latin America and then throughout half of the world. Its central promise was “Trickle Down”: led the rich become richer and affluence will trickle down to the poor.
Empirical evidence of the falsehood of this prognosis has been accumulating for many years. The effects of the increase in affluence are so asymmetrical, at both the national and the global level, that the zones of poverty have grown before our very eyes.
Let’s confront the past a bit: How did it come to this? Did the end of the communist threat strip capitalism of its inhibitions?
The form of capitalism reined in by nation-states and Keynesian economic policies—which, after all, conferred historically unprecedented levels of prosperity on the OECD countries—came to an end somewhat earlier, already with the abandonment of the system of fixed exchange rates and the oil crisis. The economic theory of the Chicago School already acquired practical influence under Reagan and Thatcher. This merely continued under Clinton and New Labour—and during the period as British chancellor of the exchequer of our most recent hero Gordon Brown. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a fatal triumphalism in the West. The feeling of being among the winners of world history is seductive. In this case it contributed to inflating a theory of economic policy into a worldview permeating all areas of life.
Neoliberalism is a form of life. All citizens are supposed to become entrepreneurs of their own labour power and to become customers...
...and competitors. The stronger who win out in the free-for-all of the competitive society can claim this success as their personal merit. It is deeply comical how managers—though not just them—fall prey to the absurd elitist rhetoric of our talk shows, let themselves be celebrated in all seriousness as role models and mentally place themselves above the rest of society. It’s as if they could no longer appreciate the difference between functional elites and the ascriptive elites of estates in early modern societies. What is so admirable about the character and mentality of people in leading positions who do their job in a halfway competent manner? Another alarm signal was the Bush Doctrine announced in Fall 2002, which laid the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq. The social Darwinist potential of market fundamentalism has since become apparent in foreign policy as well as in social policy.
But Bush wasn’t alone. He was flanked by an impressive horde of influential intellectuals.
Many of whom have learned nothing in the meantime. In the case of leading neoconservative thinkers like Robert Kagan, the thinking in terms of predatory categories a la Carl Schmitt has become only more apparent after the Iraq disaster. His recent commentary on the current regression of international politics into a nuclear armed and increasingly unrestrained power struggle is: “The world has returned to normal.”
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