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Austerity The Lived Experience 1St Edition Bryan Evans Online Ebook Texxtbook Full Chapter PDF
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AUSTERITY
EDITED BY
BRYAN M. EVANS AND
STEPHEN MCBRIDE
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation
for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly
Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Acknowledgments ix
14 Austerity and Political Crisis: The Radical Left, the Far Right,
and Europe’s New Authoritarian Order 317
neil a. burron
15 Conclusion 344
stephen mcbride and bryan m. evans
Contributors 355
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments
REFERENCES
Alderman, Liz, Larry Buchanan, Eduardo Porter, and Karl Russell. 2015.
“Is Greece Worse Off than the U.S. during the Great Depression?” New
York Times, 9 July. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/09/
business/international/is-greece-worse-off-than-the-us-during-the-great-
depression.html.
Crouch, Colin. 2011. The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, UK:
Policy.
14 Austerity: The Lived Experience
the austerian approach. However, there are isolated and often intense
manifestations of opposition to the status quo. In the United Kingdom,
for example, the “Brexit” referendum on membership in the European
Union seems to threaten the British party system and indeed the very
existence of the British state. The Brexit referendum in particular looks
like an expression of rage by those who voted to leave the EU, not only
rage at the faceless technocrats in Brussels but also at the smug cosmo-
politan elites of all political parties who have ruled the United King-
dom for decades. The elite response was similarly one of rage at those
who had dared to vote against the consensus view. Many currents of
political dissatisfaction can be discerned in the campaigns surrounding
these referenda, but arguably an important aspect is a rejection of the
moral economy of “shared sacrifice,” manufactured by the elites, and
its replacement by sometimes incoherent subaltern hostility to all that
looks and sounds like the consensus of the last forty years. It remains
to be seen how widespread this dissatisfaction is (there is plenty of evi-
dence that it is not confined to the United Kingdom), and whether it
is capable of overcoming the factors, identified in these chapters, that
sustain some sort of consent to the prevailing orthodoxy.
2 A
rticulating Austerity and
Authoritarianism: Re-imagining
Moral Economies?
john clarke
it is “not until you get states that are big enough to cut that you really get
debates about cutting the state down” (2013, 170) before focusing on early
experiments with austerity in the 1930s – and their painful consequences.
Although “austerity” has emerged as the dominant global wisdom
for addressing the “problem of public debt” and has circulated widely,
particularly across the European Union and North America, we need to
remember that the global North is a relative latecomer to the regime of
fiscal austerity. The South has had a rather longer (and harsher) expo-
sure to its rigours (see, for example, Adepoju 1993, and Ferguson 2006
on Africa; Canak 1989, and Lustig 1995 on Latin America; and Yeldan
2001 on Turkey and the International Monetary Fund). That history is
a reminder about the controversial economics and politics associated
with austerity. The currently dominant consensus about fiscal austerity
continues an approach established in the IMF’s “structural adjustment”
policies in which public debt, public spending, and public services are
all viewed as problems to be overcome (to liberate enterprise, growth,
and development).
More banally, the term has also been used extensively in the field of
welfare state studies as a proxy for fiscal constraint and retrenchment
in Northern welfare state systems after the mid-1970s. In this context,
austerity does not seem to carry the symbolic political charge of its
current deployments (see, for example, Pierson 1998, 2002; Kittel and
Obinger 2003; and Korpi and Palme 2003). However, the long-running
accumulation of pressures on public spending – and their anti-welfarist
and anti-statist rationales – forms a critical part of the conditions of pos-
sibility for the current formations of austerity (an issue to which I will
return in the next section).
These different appearances of austerity across time and space con-
tribute to the problem of identifying what sort of thing austerity is or,
perhaps more accurately, points to the multiplicity of forms that aus-
terity might take. Is austerity, then, an idea (dangerous or otherwise)
or a philosophical principle? Is it, rather, an ideology or political dis-
course? Each of these keeps austerity primarily in the realm of the
symbolic, while other approaches have treated it primarily as a policy,
a program, or a political project (ranging from structural adjustment
to what Peck 2012 has called “austerity governance”). But here, too,
there are significant differences. Is austerity to be treated primarily as a
governmental economic policy – and therefore subject to debates about
economic analysis, outcomes, and performance? This question raises
issues about how to evaluate austerity – on its own terms (have budgets
22 Austerity: The Lived Experience
1 Pablo Iglesias MEP for Podemos: “We will now work with other parties from the south
of Europe to make it clear that we don’t want to be a German colony” (Gómez 2014).
Articulating Austerity and Authoritarianism 25
Peck’s elegant counterposing of the “new normal” and the “cusp of cri-
sis” is immensely suggestive – and reminiscent of Gramsci’s description
of the life of the state as a “series of unstable equilibria” (1971, 182). In the
following sections, I will look in more detail at how austerity has been
mobilized in the United Kingdom (itself an unstable geopolitical forma-
tion, where discursive challenges to austerity have increasingly emerged
in Scotland and Wales). The financial crisis of 2007–9 threatened British
Articulating Austerity and Authoritarianism 27
banks, among others, and was a focus for a massive program of pub-
lic spending to support at-risk banks, provide market guarantees, and
pump money into the economy in the form of “quantitative easing”
funds designed to create liquidity. The overall cost of these measures
is still debated (though the support for at-risk banks is estimated to
have been around £123 billion (Guardian n.d.). Such subsidies, guaran-
tees, and financial injunctions were central to the transformation of a
crisis of private sector institutions into a problem of public debt. The
2010 general election was fought on the terrain created by the financial
crisis – and proved inconclusive. However, a coalition of Conservative
and Liberal Democratic parties took office, committed to tackling the
problem of public finances (“getting the deficit under control”). In the
process, austerity became a political keyword.
The size, scope and role of government in Britain has reached a point
where it is now inhibiting, not advancing the progressive aims of reduc-
ing poverty, fighting inequality, and increasing general well-being. Indeed
there is a worrying paradox that because of its effect on personal and
social responsibility, the recent growth of the state has promoted not social
solidarity, but selfishness and individualism …
The first step must be a new focus on empowering and enabling indi-
viduals, families and communities to take control of their lives so we create
the avenues through which responsibility and opportunity can develop.
This is especially vital in what is today the front line of the fight against
poverty and inequality: education. (Cameron 2009a, 1)
The imagery and the project of the “Big Society” have proved unstable
and uncertain, and have, in significant ways, mutated into a more per-
sistent concern with “personal responsibility” alongside the commit-
ment to “rolling back the state” (or at least carefully selected parts of
it). The profound anti-statism of the Coalition has been underpinned by
the rise of “austerity” in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007–9,
and its careful reconstruction into a fiscal crisis of the state (and the
question of public debts and deficits, Clarke and Newman 2012).
(Clarke 2014).2 At stake in all these discussions of fairness and the prin-
ciple of “making work pay” is a sustained effort to obscure the growing
degradation of waged work and the stalling of average wages during
the last decade. Osborne’s “strivers” have not, in fact, been rewarded,
while the distributions of both income and wealth have become more
unequal. The numbers of the “working poor” have grown, with an
increasing number of those in work having wages supplemented by
public support (in the form of “working tax credits”). In 2015, the cam-
paigning group Citizens UK argued that supermarket workers’ wages
were subsidized by around £11 billion per annum (Sabin 2015).
The “unfairness” of benefits has provided a vocabulary that draws
on what are perceived to be established British virtues (the “sense of
fair play,” etc.) to manage the contradictions and potential antagonisms
resulting from deepening inequalities (and the experiences of economic
failure) by displacing the focus of attention from the rich to the poor,
misrepresenting the nature of poverty in the process. The framing
around “fairness” enables an imagined moral economy to be elabo-
rated, in which shared sacrifice and mutual obligation are represented
as governing social and economic relations. It has also underpinned an
increasingly brutal assault on welfare provision, in which austerity was
interwoven with fairness as the twin logics of “welfare reform.”
In the final section, I want to return to the ways in which austerity – not
least as entangled with fairness – has continued and contributed to the
political formation that Stuart Hall named as “authoritarian populism”
(Hall et al. 1978; Hall 1979, 1988). Hall coined the phrase to denote a
complex mixture of tendencies: towards a populist mode of political
articulation (drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau (2002) on Latin
American politics in particular) in combination with the expansion
or deepening of the coercive repertoire of state apparatuses and the
weakening of democratic controls in the name of “defending society.”
The perception and reality of this unfairness, and the perception that glo-
balisation is to blame, accounts for a good deal of the disaffection from
politics that has pervaded Western societies, with “insurgent” parties,
often nationalistic or worse, gaining ground steadily …
We should not be dismayed if voters refuse to accept this new Edward-
ian-style “Upstairs, Downstairs” society and protest as they have across
the eurozone in recent years and in England in 2011, as well as voting for
ever more maverick parties. (Independent 2014)
⁂ This book deals with Hanoverian and French society under King Ernest and
the Emperor Napoleon III.
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