Turmoil in Europe – some reflections from Perry Anderson

TURMOIL IN EUROPE

http://newleftreview.org/II/73/perry-anderson-after-the-event

What longer-term political dynamics underlie the current dramas of the Eurozone? Notoriously, they pose stiff analytic problems, requiring attention both to the ongoing development of a supranational polity with no real precedent and to the varied trajectories of the—still—intractably national states it overarches. One attempt in this field has been Perry Anderson’s New Old World, which follows a comparative survey of pre-capitalist Europe in two much earlier works, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, with reflections on the continent at a high point of bourgeois rule, on the eve of the crisis that now grips the EU. The issues raised — the institutional incoherence of the Union; the economic disparities between its northern and southern tiers; the political gulf between its elites and popular classes; the sub-imperial pretensions of its regional policies—will continue to haunt the new Europe, whether the immediate emergencies of its monetary union are met or not. The zone that only yesterday was congratulating itself on combining prosperity, civility and democracy in a synthesis no other region on earth could match, has become a danger to the global stability of capital, watched not with envy but anxiety by its partners and rivals in the rule of the planet