*** FRANCOIS CUSSET: La droitisation du monde. Les Editions Textuel (4 impasse de Conti, F-75006 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 53004040 – fax: 53004050 –Internet: http://www.editionstextuel.com ). “Conversations pour demain". 2016, 182 p., 15 €. ISBN 978-2-84597-566-8
François Cusset is a professor of American Studies at Université de Paris Ouest and a researcher in intellectual history and contemporary politics. In this book he really does put the cat amongst the pigeons. In this publication, he argues that we have effectively experienced “50 years of counterrevolution”. His arguments are based on the conversations that he has had with the anthropologist Régis Meyran. This historic period has run from the 1980s to the middle of the first decade of this century. During this time we have seen the world veer towards the control of the neoliberal right and their subsequent teaming up with the neo-conservatives. In his eyes these have been “years of deceit” where governments of both the left and right function “as cabinets whose main task is to optimise the market, as it is with all the other services they manage on a daily basis in an economic order that takes the decisions on their behalf”. It goes without saying that the European Union and its member states, particularly France, do not escape unscarred from the author’s accusation, which describes the parameters of a world that is disillusioned and extremely worried.
This historian initially located ideas in the context of the three decades that he believes characterised the relentless and extremely unhealthy rightward shift in the world. The first involves the 1980s and the ideological blow delivered that successfully imposed its ideological straitjacket and neoliberal vision within the respective ruling classes and public at large. This depiction obviously covers Thatcher and Reagan, as well as President Mitterrand and Chancellor Kohl, given that a left veneer can prove useful for overcoming certain misgivings and it would become increasingly clear that there had been “a comprehensive agreement struck between the right and left in the electoral arena” incorporating the political groups aspiring to govern. The second decade was the one that occurred between the “two major collapses”, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the destruction of the Twin Tours in New York. It is a time of “doctrinal euphoria” over the corps of communism (or at least of what was taking place in its name) and which coincided with “effective capitalistic deregulation phase and financial globalisation”. The third decade ultimately began on 11 September 2001 when, in the name of patriotism and that the fight against terrorism, the social movements that rose up “against the conquest of the neoliberalism” were reduced to silence and a time that saw a significant “security turning point in capitalism”. Since then, this “excess” in this connection has never disappeared. This period was subsequently characterised by the sub-prime crisis and a “neo-liberalisation of the state” because, as argued by François Cusset, the bailing out of the banks with public money and without obtaining any promises or guarantees of appropriate behaviour in the future was nothing other than, “a blank check, signed on the behalf of those who were primarily responsible for the economic disaster”. The author describes this as quite simply “stupefying”. This explains the current temptation to describe the world as one in which it being confronted by two “fundamentalisms”, that of the Muslim religion hijacked by radical Islam and that of the economy or at least by those who have distorted it and used it for their own exclusive interests. As Régis Meyran argues in his forward, “due to the complacency of the leaders of the European Union” it is indeed this fundamentalism that “caused the debt crisis in many states and the recession in almost all the others”.
Since then, this illness has effectively got much worse, according to François Cusset, due to an alliance concluded between the neoliberals and neoconservatives, “between those defending a total unbridled market and the heralds of moral, patriotic and civilising values” or those who would have previously been described as the “extreme right”. This is the terrain upon which he claims that their “security obsessed neoliberal regime” is currently developing, “a normative and bio-political regime with ideological motives and belief system that is clamping down on all the other areas of existence and not the labour force” and which overtly seeks to atomise social relations and make the idea of social conflict unthinkable. Is this all a little too much? Some people will think so but what can they find objectionable about the author’s denunciation of the behaviour of states in the fight against smoking: “instead of tackling the macro-power of the tobacco industry, we are criminalising individual behaviour using the pretext of prevention” and those who are depicted as “responsible for the increase in deficits in social welfare and even the deaths of other people through passive smoking”? The state is in fact trying to disguise itself in all this but it is in fact nothing other than a sanctimonious hypocrite!
Should we be counting on an upturn in action from the traditional left? The author does not believe this possible and highlights, on the contrary, an obsolescence and a classification of the word “left”. Nonetheless, he is not overcome by despair because he believes that within civil society developments we can witness that the “lengthy period of historic decline is now coming to an end” and that we are at the beginning of “a collective response to what is felt as a four-fold disaster in the contemporary world”, namely, economic, social, due political and environmental disaster. So, in short, let’s resume the struggle. Michel Theys
*** Politique. Revue belge d’analyse et de débat. ASBL Politique (9 rue du Faucon, B-1000 Brussels. Tel: (32-2) 5386996 – Email: info@politique.eu.org – Internet: http://politique.eu.org ). January-February 2017, No. 98-99, 164 pp. €15. Subscription: €45 (€39.60 for PDF, €50.40 for both versions).
This issue of the progressive Belgian French-speaking journal is available in a new format that is more dynamic and reader friendly, even though the more luxurious typesetting may disorientate some of the journal’s traditional readers. This double issue does, nevertheless, grab our attention more because it entirely focuses on Belgian views of France, in the perspective of the forthcoming presidential election. Even though, as the editor-in-chief, Henri Goldman, explains, the, “very genius of France has been flattened by the steamroller of liberal globalisation that is setting out the law throughout the European Union”, Belgian French speakers share an interest that, if it is not one of love with regard to France, they do feel strongly implicated, even though a well mannered critique of the country is not always appreciated there. At a time that France is riven by doubt and sometimes gives in to the temptation of drawing in on itself, this publication analyses this situation. It looks at subjects such as secularism, “Identity illusions”, the legacy of colonialism, the monarchical Republic, France as “A model of state intervention”, the Paris-centric view of the world. A large variety of subjects but nothing on Europe, as if France remained completely opposed to the“Great nation”, despite the fact that Edwy Plenel has the good taste to point out in his contribution that these “claims to grandeur” have in fact now become “a sign of its weakness”. (MT)
*** NIKOS PAPASPIROU: Les chemins du constitutionnalisme européen. Routes et réunions de la tradition anglaise, française et allemande avant la Grande Guerre. Editions Alexandria (133 rue Solonos, GR-10677 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3806305 – fax: 3838173 – Email alexpubl@alexandria-publ.gr – Internet: http://www.alexandria-publ.gr ). 2016, 264 pp. €18. ISBN 978-960-221-684-2.
The identity crisis the European Union is currently undergoing means that we can no longer unreservedly accept the glorification of the common European tradition for freedom and democracy. With this as his starting point, Nicos Papaspirou, senior lecturer in public law at the Athens Faculty of Law and Special Secretary at one of the Houses of Parliament during the 2009-2016 period, provides an inter-disciplinary analysis of the different avenues of European constitutionalism and their meeting points at the beginning of the 20th century. The study focuses on three crucial historic stages involving the idea of freedom: the Anglo-Saxon anti-dynastical tradition that emphasises the primacy of the freedoms of law and defence; the French emphasis on the public autonomy of citizens and the role of the sovereign in the centralised state whose implementation results from the general will; and, finally, the German concept of disciplined freedom and state guarantee. The book also clarifies the continental models of law at the time and which have subsequently maintained links with the republican tradition and the continental monarchical tradition, by restricting the conflictual dynamic of demands for freedom. The character of European constitutionalism in the era of its classical development is therefore highlighted, ahead of the Great War, which puts an end to this and plunges Europe into the darkest period of modern European history. In this way, the author helps us to understand not just the genealogy of form and current theoretical concerns, particularly the authority of law and parliamentarianism, but also how to interpret the naiveté and fragility of genuinely common accomplishments. (AKa)