Left antisemitism – preliminary remarks
August 6, 2018
The debate over antisemitism within Labour and the broader UK left has often been pretty unedifying, but I thought this twitter thread by Edmund Griffiths was valuable. I’ll quote it in full, then make some remarks of my own:
One point I don’t think gets made often enough in the antisemitism conversation is that the things antisemites say aren’t true. The Rothschilds don’t run the central banks; British & US foreign policy isn’t made by a Jewish lobby; Jews don’t control the media; the Holocaust did happen. Maybe it seems too self-evident to bother saying. But if you’re newly politicized, & you’re angry with the way things are, & you’re looking—especially online—for answers, then it’s pretty easy to come across those untrue claims & perhaps it is not going to be self-evident to you that they’re wrong. You’ll see antisemitic arguments made on explicitly far-right sites, but you may well see them being put forward in left spaces too; & you won’t always see them being robustly countered by the left. And, on top of that, leftists sometimes choose to express themselves in ambiguous language (“global elites”) that can be understood in antisemitic terms even if that isn’t the intention. And, to the extent that antisemitic propaganda gains any traction, it does great harm: it encourages people to direct their anger against a minority who are not really to blame, and it lets the capitalist class & its institutions off the hook. As a movement, we need to do much much better at producing propaganda & educational materials—especially online—to expose antisemitic scapegoating as lies & misdirection. We need to ensure that anybody who is looking for political answers encounters clear, convincing rebuttals of antisemitic ideas. Obviously convinced antisemites are unlikely to be persuaded, & need to be fought; but the people who are exposed to their propaganda do need to be persuaded. And I think the form of our rebuttals should be less “You mustn’t say that because it’s antisemitic” than “That is untrue, & it scapegoats a minority, & it shields the actual ruling class from criticism, & therefore it is profoundly anti-socialist”. The Labour Party & Momentum both have the resources to do this on a large scale, & I hope they will; but there’s nothing stopping other organizations & even individuals doing it to, & I mean to do it more energetically myself. The main objective isn’t to prevent antisemitism generating bad headlines for the Labour Party—it’s to reduce the actual prevalence of antisemitic ideas, in society as a whole but particularly in spaces where the left can get a hearing.
I think this is right, and although I don’t myself feel very comfortable producing propaganda and educational materials (in general, who am I to propagandise and educate?) I do feel comfortable writing about ideas.
Left, political antisemitism functions not just as a prejudice but also as an explanatory system. Stigmatising antisemitism as prejudice is unlikely to be persuasively effective if its explanatory components still seem compelling – and so the rebuttal of left antisemitism requires not just the exclusion of antisemites from the left (if that’s even possible), or the emphasis on the political undesirability of prejudice (of course prejudice is bad, but people who hold prejudiced attitudes often don’t regard them as prejudiced – they regard them as true), but also the explanation of why antisemitism is (as Griffiths says) wrong – and not just factually wrong, but also explanatorily wrong: wrong as a way to understand the world.
One of the obstacles to doing this, I think, is an inadequate ‘map’ of left antisemitism as a system of ideas. In particular, a lot of the analysis I’ve read of left antisemitism writes as if it is a single thing, rather than a set of quite distinct commitments which can be bundled in all kinds of different ways. Moreover it is common, I think, to write as if antisemitism is intrinsically associated with political commitments with which it is in fact only contingently – and yet non-accidentally – associated.
Thus for example two recent pieces in the New Statesman suggest that left antisemitism is in some sense an intrinsic feature of Corbynism’s current political project. Writing in March, Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts argued that:
the anti-semitic tropes which pervade the Corbyn-supporting “alt-media” and activist base, as well as Corbyn’s own dubious brand of “anti-Zionism” and “anti-imperialism”, are not mere contingencies, but the logical outcome of the movement’s morally-charged, personalised critique of capitalism as conspiracy.
More recently, in July, David Bennum argued that, for the anti-imperalist left:
the West is always bad, no matter what its civic virtues; anybody opposed to it, no matter how awful, is better, or certainly no worse. Capitalism becomes part of a grand, overarching, unified conspiracy, to which Jews invariably prove to be integral. Anti-Semitism is thus not some random blight that affects all sectors of society and opinion roughly evenly. It is utterly enmeshed in far-left thought, just as it is in that of the equally conspiratorially-minded far-right.
In my own opinion both of these pieces significantly overstate the extent to which antisemitism is a core or necessary feature of the kind of political project pursued by Corbyn and ‘Corbynism’. At the same time, though, these pieces are correct that left antisemitism can’t or shouldn’t be understood simply in terms of prejudice, but also as part of a broader ideological perspective or political explanatory system.
Carefully differentiating the non-antisemitic dimensions of radical left political positions and projects from their antisemitic variants is therefore I think important for two reasons. First, it makes it harder for (for example) anti-imperialist politics in general to be written off as antisemitic – which is important if you (like me) regard anti-imperialist politics as valuable. Second, and probably more importantly, it means that people who are interested in (say) anti-imperialist politics are less likely to be persuaded by antisemitic variants of these political positions.
One of the things I’d like to do, then, over the coming… however long, is write a bit about the common left explanatory frameworks associated with left antisemitism, and why they’re not good as explanatory frameworks. For reasons articulated by Griffiths’ twitter thread, the primary argument here is not that they’re not good because they’re antisemitic, but rather that they’re not good because they fail as explanatory frameworks. This failure of the explanatory framework then carries through to the inadequacy of any political antisemitism grounded in it, in addition to the fact that such perspectives are also bigoted.
I think there’s a pretty high chance that this will be one of my many projects that never goes beyond its preliminary remarks, but in the spirit of hope I’ll make a few comments here and sketch what I might want to write about next.
First – obviously in this approach I won’t be dealing with left antisemitism as a whole, but rather with its explanatory dimensions. There are some thorny metatheoretical issues that I don’t want to get into in this preliminary post, and which render the remarks in this post a little over-simplistic – but I intend to largely ignore the issue of whether any given explanation is itself antisemitic, and just focus on the issue of whether it’s any good as explanation. This usefully lets me sidestep issues of intention and affect, which are always a nightmare regardless.
Second – I’ll attempt here a preliminary broad schematisation of left antisemitisms. I think you can broadly speaking see antisemitic variants of the following positions, on the left:
– Conspiracism (that is, conspiratorial explanations for political-economic events);
– Anti-imperialism;
– Anti-capitalism;
– Critiques of Israel.
None of these categories of political stance are intrinsically antisemitic, I would argue, but all of them have antisemitic variants that are sufficiently common that some care needs to be taken when discussing these issues.
I myself don’t feel qualified to discuss the politics of Israel and Palestine, so I expect to mostly leave that aside altogether in this (possible) series of posts (which is unfortunate, because this is the most central issue in current debates within and about the UK left – but I see no point in moving far outside my areas of competence.) Still, I think I have something to say on poor explanatory approaches to anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, and the discussion of conspiracies, and it’s these that I’ll focus on.
My plan, for what it’s worth, is to start with anti-imperialism – and specifically to start with two texts that express rather different explanatory frameworks that give disproportionate explanatory weight to Jewish actions: Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, and Hobson’s Imperialism. Then (if I ever get that done) maybe I’ll move on to anti-capitalism and conspiracism. My ultimate goal is to assemble a collection of quite short posts that together form a potentially useful ‘ideological map’ of the different explanatory frameworks often associated with contemporary left antisemitism.
As I say, I don’t rate particularly highly my chances of getting far with this project – but one can’t get anywhere at all if one doesn’t make a start, so, here’s a start.
Labour’s Brexit Policy
June 8, 2018
There’s been a lot of debate recently about what Labour’s Brexit policy actually is – that is to say, what are the generative principles underlying the Labour leadership’s Brexit policy announcements and parliamentary tactics. One popular narrative is that Labour’s Brexit policy amounts to de facto support of ‘hard Brexit’, and that the Labour leadership’s strategy is to pursue a ‘hard Brexit’ while pulling the wool over the eyes of its core Remain support. Another narrative is that Labour’s strategy is to gradually shift its position towards a strongly pro-EU stance, while trying to minimise the electoral support it loses among Leave voters in doing so. A third narrative is that Labour doesn’t really have a Brexit position at all – that it is simply trying to hold its electoral coalition together by any means necessary. And there are of course a large number of more complicated and nuanced alternative narratives out there too.
In this post I’ll aim to lay out my own interpretation of the ‘generative principles’ underlying Labour’s Brexit policy. Obviously my goal here is explanatory, rather than normative. My own preferences (“open borders Bennism”) are briefly outlined towards the end of the post, fwiw – but the main goal here is just to sketch the political terrain.
Ok then. To understand Labour’s Brexit policy, one needs in my opinion to understand that the Parliamentary Labour Party has four major interests or constituencies in relation to Brexit.
- Don’t blow up the economy. This position enjoys more or less complete consensus in the parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). Moreover, there is considerable consensus as to what this means in practice: don’t damage UK-EU trade too much. Unlike the Tory party, which has a significant number of MPs who believe that reduced trade with the EU can be more than compensated for with a bonfire of regulations and a series of alternative international trade deals, Labour MPs are in general of the opinion that the final Brexit deal should disrupt UK-EU trade as little as possible. This position is captured by the 2017 manifesto commitment to “prioritise jobs and living standards”.
In addition to this broad consensus position there are then three distinct factions:
- ‘Continuity Remain’ – this position advocates for as close ongoing participation in EU institutions as possible. Ideally this would take the form of a second referendum that would enable parliament to reverse Brexit, but in terms of Brexit negotiations it means ongoing full participation in the single market. This wing of the party is most vocally represented by liberal or Blairite MPs like Chuka Umunna and Chris Leslie.
- Bennites. This is the old socialist Euroscepticism, which sees the EU as a capitalist club enforcing constraints on economic policymaking at the national level, to the benefit of capital. There are three major areas of contemporary Bennite objection to EU rules: constraints on state aid policy, public procurement policy, and nationalisation – Bennites want to break European Court of Justice jurisdiction over these areas of economic policymaking. There aren’t all that many Bennites in the party, but the position occupies the leader’s office (Corbyn) and shadow Treasury (McDonnell), and is therefore very influential.
- ‘Very Real Concerns’ border control advocates. These MPs see the Brexit vote as driven in significant part by ‘concerns about immigration’, and believe those concerns need to be addressed in the Brexit negotiations – or be seen as being addressed – by a Brexit outcome that reduces – or is seen as reducing – immigration. Yvette Cooper and John Mann are (quite different) representative figures for this tendency within the PLP.
Clearly these categories are not as sharply drawn in real life as this schematisation suggests. There are different strengths of feeling and variant positions within each group; moreover there is considerable overlap between some of the positions. There are plenty of liberal pro-EU advocates who nevertheless believe that greater border controls can and should be a feature of the final Brexit outcome – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are both representatives of this opinion, as is Stephen Kinnock. At the same time, there are liberals who advocate a ‘full liberalism’ ideological package which sees freedom of movement as one of the major benefits of the EU. There is also plenty of overlap between Bennite and ‘border controls’ Euroscepticism, grounded both in an economic argument that free movement of labour undercuts the rights of domestic labour, and in a ‘Blue Corbynism’ effort to tie Bennite economic policymaking to a nationalist or communitarian ideological package. At the same time, there are socialists for whom open borders (for some value of ‘open borders’) is a core component of their socialism (Diane Abbott is the most influential advocate of this position within Labour). In addition to these ideological overlaps, there are also factional alliances of convenience, on which more in a moment.
In parliamentary tactical terms, the Labour leadership has two goals: to inflict damage on the government, and to maintain a Brexit line that will be satisfactory enough to enough of the parliamentary party to minimise major rebellions. In electoral terms, the leadership has a single goal: to adopt a Brexit policy that can sustain its electoral coalition, which is majority Remain but includes a large minority of Leave voters, including in a large number of electorally fragile current Labour seats. Finally, in substantive terms, the goals of the leadership are to balance “don’t blow up the economy” with Bennite Euroscepticism, with different bits of the party obviously contributing additional, different substantive goals, as enumerated above.
How do these different goals play out in practice in the determination of Labour’s Brexit policy? The overriding goal of the leadership has been to sustain its parliamentary and electoral coalitions. That has meant, in the first instance, a policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’, which has been able to sustain the possibility of an outcome compatible with as many different Brexit goals as feasible. Under pressure of a series of parliamentary votes, however, this strategic ambiguity has slowly been clarified – and the nature of this clarification is informed by the substantive balance of forces within the party.
As I wrote above, the leadership’s major substantive goal is in my view to balance “don’t blow up the economy” with Bennite Euroscepticism. Bennite Euroscepticism does not enjoy much support within the parliamentary party – if this were the only form of Euroscepticism in the party, the leadership would be in a very weak position indeed. Fortunately for the leadership (and, one could argue, unfortunately for the broader public discourse), there is a much larger block within the PLP of ‘Very Real Concerners’. The Bennite leadership has therefore made an alliance of convenience with the ‘Very Real Concern’ border controllers, to form a (moderately) Eurosceptic block within the parliamentary party. (Moderate because both factions still believe in the underlying “don’t blow up the economy” position, and take this to require keeping disruption to UK-EU trade as low as is feasible given their other policy goals).
This moderately Eurosceptic block is then opposed by the liberal/Blairite wing of the party, who want a stronger commitment to ongoing participation in EU institutions. This conflict (between the Bennite and Real Concerner alliance on the one hand, and liberals on the other) can plausibly be presented by the liberal wing as a disagreement about ‘open’ versus ‘closed’ politics (free movement of goods and people on the one hand; closed borders, nationalism and a tendency towards autarky on the other). It can equally plausibly be presented by the Bennite wing as a disagreement about socialist versus neoliberal approaches to economic governance (state intervention in the economy on the one hand versus neoliberal regulatory constraints on state action, on the other). One of the complexities of the ideological terrain around left and liberal Brexit debate is that, because of the way the various factions and institutions align, both of these ‘framings’ are true.
To make this factional conflict still more weighted, it has also become a major site of the proxy war within Labour between Corbynite and Corbynsceptic members and MPs. After the 2017 general election result made Corbyn (temporarily) unchallengeable within the party, many Corbynsceptics shifted their activities from overt criticism of Corbyn’s leadership, to specific policy and ideological battles. These proxy battles typically serve, from many Corbynsceptics’ perspective, a double function – aiming both to advance policies that Corbynsceptics support, and to weaken Corbyn within the party. Corbynsceptic pro-Europeans thus aim both to shift Labour’s Brexit policy in a more pro-EU direction and to expose Corbyn’s Euroscepticism, thereby reducing Corbyn’s popularity with the majority-Remain Labour membership. These goals stand in some tension – pro-European liberals within Labour have made a series of pro-EU parliamentary amendments to Brexit bills that have been extremely ineffective in gathering parliamentary support, in part because one of their tacit goals (I would argue) has specifically been to expose the party leadership’s unwillingness to endorse these stances.
Nevertheless, these parliamentary tactics – alongside the more central need for Labour to challenge the government in parliament – have slowly required the Labour leadership to reduce the ambiguity of its ‘strategic ambiguity’ approach. The position that Labour has shifted towards is, as I say, determined by the balance of parliamentary and electoral forces. On the one hand, the leadership wants to retain as strong EU ties are as feasible given its other policy commitments. On the other hand, it has two sets of exemptions from EU governance rules that it wants, in principle, to achieve. First: the Bennite leadership wants an institutional arrangement that enables exemptions from state aid, public procurement and nationalisation policies. Second: the Very Real Concerners on whom the Bennite leadership is reliant want exemptions from single market free movement rules.
The current Labour Brexit preferred initial negotiating position has therefore resolved to something like this: a customs union with the EU, and significant participation in the single market, via the establishment of an alternative EFTA-style institutional framework which gives the UK the ability to negotiate exemptions from some elements of single market rules, while still being bound by the great majority of those rules, in a manner that maximises single market participation.
This is a moderate Eurosceptic position (and as it happens corresponds to the most popular outcome in the electorate as a whole, per recent Opinium polling). However, it remains ‘strategically ambiguous’ in two key respects.
On the one hand, Labour’s position is deliberately ambiguous as to which single market rules the UK intends to prioritise gaining exemptions from, in a hypothetical situation in which Labour is negotiating with the EU. This strategic ambiguity is necessary in order to maintain the opportunistic big tent alliance between Bennites and Very Real Concerners within the PLP. In a situation in which Labour is actually negotiating Brexit, this ambiguity will have to be clarified, and considerable tensions within the PLP will come to the fore.
At the same time, Labour’s current position remains compatible with much fuller participation in EU institutions than either of the two Eurosceptic positions would wish. This is one of the key reasons why Labour’s ‘clarifications’ of its Brexit position can be interpreted as motivated by either ‘pro-Leave’ or ‘pro-Remain’ impulses. What is this latter ‘strategic ambiguity’ about?
In my view, this second category of ongoing strategic ambiguity serves three distinct functions.
First, lack of clarity about how much overlap with existing EU institutions Labour aspires to achieve serves the traditional goal of strategic ambiguity: keeping both Leavers and Remainers within the electoral and parliamentary big tent.
Second, lack of clarity about the exact institutional outcomes Labour aspires to achieve enables Labour the freedom to oppose Tory negotiating tactics on the basis of Starmer’s six tests, on the premise that Labour’s approach would achieve better outcomes than the Tories’, more or less irrespective of what the Tories actually do.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, Labour’s Brexit policy is, if Labour were to find itself in government, the first volley in a negotiation with the EU. It is unclear what outcome Labour would actually be able to achieve in that negotiation. It seems extremely likely, however, that the EU27 would be unwilling to grant many of the exemptions from EU governance principles that Labour aspires to negotiate. It is therefore extremely prudent for Labour to give itself the ability to back down from its best-case Brexit outcome, to a series of second-, third-, fourth- etc. best case outcomes. The ambiguity over the extent to which the Labour negotiating position overlaps with the liberal ‘full EU alignment’ position strongly suggests to me that Labour intends this liberal / Blairite position to be its negotiating fallback, if the leadership’s preferred outcomes cannot be achieved. More strongly, here is some reason to speculate that something in the space of this liberal fallback position is the preferred outcome of Keir Starmer, the Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the EU, whose six tests, vague as they are, certainly seem to imply a very ‘soft’ Brexit. One does not need to attribute any specific individual strategy to Starmer, however, to conclude that Labour is preparing the ground for something like this EU-aligned outcome, should it find itself leading negotiations in office.
This preparation for a liberal ‘fallback’ Brexit is in my view the most important way in which Labour’s negotiating position differs from the Conservatives’. The Conservative position on Brexit began with a series of red lines (on ECJ jurisdiction, the customs union, etc.). Labour’s negotiating position began from Starmer’s six tests, which articulate the benchmark of “the exact same benefits” as current EU membership. It is therefore extremely easy for Labour to fall back, in negotiations, on a high degree of alignment with EU institutions, whereas it is very difficult for the Conservatives to do so (though of course they may well end up doing so in practice). It is this latter point that seems to me to give rational warrant to Remainers’ confidence that Labour’s negotiating position is on a Remainward trajectory.
To sum up – I started with three simple rival ‘narratives’ of Labour’s underlying position on Brexit. I’ve articulated my own interpretation of Labour’s position, which implies that all of these narratives have something to them. In my view, Labour’s preferred Brexit outcome involves significant breaks with existing EU governance rules. The leadership wants those breaks to be in the area of neoliberal constraints on socialist policy-making; much of the PLP wants those breaks to be in the area of freedom of movement. In a scenario where Labour is in government without the Brexit deal having been concluded, those two categories of negotiating priority will be in tension. Nevertheless, the tension between those two categories of negotiating priority is (I would argue) not as fundamental as the tension between some of the Conservatives’ commitments. Moreover, unlike the Conservatives, Labour have been quite careful not to articulate any commitments that cannot be backed down from towards greater compatibility with existing EU rules. Thus in a scenario in which Labour were negotiating with the EU, I would expect Labour to make an effort to achieve a set of concessions around EU rules, and if those concessions could not be achieved, to capitulate in the direction of a more liberal existing-EU-institutions-aligned position.
In other words, Labour’s Brexit policy is – contra many pundits – coherent and in my view quite strategically sound.
Is it a good policy? That obviously depends on your own political preferences. My own political preference, as I outlined in this earlier post, is a position that I would characterise as something close to “open borders socialism”. I think the Bennites are right that EU rules are egregiously constraining on democratic socialist policymaking, and I think an optimal Brexit outcome would break with these dimensions of the EU as an institution, while also maintaining sufficiently close regulatory alignment with the EU to reduce the negative political-economic impacts of Brexit on the UK economy. (This post follows the traditional mainstream UK pundit approach of just ignoring Northern Ireland, but obviously a high degree of ongoing UK-EU integration is desirable w/r/t the border.) At the same time, increasing free movement of people is a political good, and the ‘Very Real Concerners’ desire to reduce free movement – as well as the Labour leadership’s opportunistic alliance with this position – should in my view be opposed from the left. If this post is right about the logic of the party’s Brexit position, in a scenario in which Labour actually gets a go at negotiating Brexit, the balance of negotiating priorities between Bennites and Real Concerners will be a crucial factional and ideological conflict within the party. As I see it, this element of Labour’s negotiating strategy remains somewhat open (though it also seems to be that the groundwork has been laid for the rebranding of existing freedom of movement rules as a departure from the status quo).
If one were negotiating Brexit ‘from the left’, then, clearly one ideally wouldn’t start from here. Still, there’s room for left pressure to have impact even within the existing parameters of Labour Party politics, I think. Not, of course, that we need to operate within that framework of Labour Party factional politics in our political advocacy. Nevertheless, it helps to understand what’s going on with Labour’s Brexit policy in order to understand what’s going on with Brexit in general. There’s a lot more than can be said than I have here, and I’m sure there’s stuff I’ve got wrong, but this post is more or less my current take, fwiw.
Very brief reading notes on a paper by Benoit Godin, ‘National Innovation System: the System Approach in Historical Perspective’. The basic goal of Godin’s paper is to argue that many of the core concepts of the National Innovation Systems literature – as articulated by Freeman, Lundvall, Nelson and others, from the late 1980s onwards – were already present in publications put out by the OECD in the 1970s. In these OECD publications, Godin argues, the ‘research system’ was composed of four sectors – government, university, industry, and nonprofit – and embedded within a broader economic and international environment. Analysis of the research system focused on five relationships: between economic sectors; between basic and applied research; those determined by policy itself; between the research system and the broader economic environment; and those associated with international cooperation.
This research system framework therefore already incorporated many of the elements of the later National Innovation Systems approach. Godin argues that there are two big differences between the research system and the NIS approaches. First, for the research system approach, government was regarded as having “prime responsibility in the performance of the system”. For the later NIS approach, “it would rather be the role of government as facilitator that was emphasised”. Second, the research system approach focused on the research system as a whole, whereas the NIS approach privileges the firm as the key component of the system. Both of these shifts (I would argue) can be seen as representative of the shift towards neoliberal economic governance and theory.
Mirowski, ‘Science-Mart’ – reading notes
April 1, 2018
Some quick notes on Mirowski’s ‘Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science’. This is a wide-ranging semi-popular book about neoliberal governance of US science, with different chapters addressing different elements of the topic. These include:
– a very critical survey of the economics of science;
– periodisation of twentieth and twenty-first century US science governance into three regimes: the ‘captains of erudition’ regime in which the modern research laboratory developed; the ‘cold war’ regime in which the state greatly increased both its funding and its control of scientific production; and the ‘neoliberal’ regime characterised by privatisation of the research process and greater ‘enclosure’ of scientific inputs and outputs in intellectual property law;
– a discussion of material transfer agreements and the constraints they place on researchers;
– a critique of biotech – and, more broadly, commercialised science – as a ‘Ponzi scheme’ in which very few companies are, in fact, commercially viable;
– an argument that the quality of scientific research outputs is declining as a result of the neoliberalisation of science;
– a discussion of a range of different ways in which the neoliberal regime produces ignorance, rather than knowledge (such as the ghostwriting of apparently independent research papers by employees of pharmaceutical companies, for example).
All up the book is a concerted attack on ‘neoliberal science’, and connects to Mirowski’s critiques of other dimensions of neoliberal economic governance, in other works.
My take, fwiw: some of the book provides a good entry into important issues in the political economy of science, and Mirowski’s periodisation seems like a useful way to carve up both the political and the intellectual history of US science governance. Mirowski’s discussion of the deliberate creation of systematic bias in the scientific literature is good as far as it goes – though I’d recommend Ben Goldacre’s ‘Bad Pharma’ as a popular work focussed specifically on this issue. However, I think Mirowski’s book as a whole should be approached with some caution.
It’s possible I have the wrong end of the stick, but it seems to me that Mirowski’s critique of biotech as a ‘Ponzi scheme’ is based on a misunderstanding: in a speculative industry many companies can fail because the investment gambles they take do not pay off in the creation of a marketable product. This fact enables fraudsters to make money off the industry, because a straight-up fraud is from a distance indistinguishable from a bad but rational bet – so significant segments of a speculative industry based on product innovation will, typically, be actual scams. Nevertheless, provided the few success stories are profitable enough, the industry as a whole can be fulfilling the capitalist social function of profit generation just fine – and the rent-seeking associated with intellectual property monopolies over medical goods means that successful medical innovations are indeed often extremely profitable.
Mirowski also seems to me to sometimes be unreliable as a summariser of the intellectual figures (mostly economists) that he discusses. Mirowski is critical of economists who advocate for neoliberal policies (privatisation, expanded intellectual property rights, etc.); but he is also critical of economists who oppose these policies, on the grounds that – as economists – they are tacitly supporting the same policies regardless, by virtue of their use of ‘neoclassical’ economic theory. So, for example, Paul David (an advocate of open science, who engages heavily with intellectual resources outside economics, and who has also developed models of scientific research dynamics that do not make use of the ‘rational actor’ approaches Mirowski elsewhere criticises) is nevertheless for Mirowski as much a participant in the neoliberalisation of science as those advocating neoliberal policies, by virtue of him using game theoretic and other ‘neoclassical’ modelling tools. Social scientists can of course be criticised for tacit implications of their approaches which contradict their stated policy goals. But Mirowski’s broad brush dismissal of economics of science as a whole seems excessive, to me.
At some point maybe I’ll write something on Mirowski’s criticisms of neoliberalism more broadly – my thoughts on this issue don’t feel quite nailed down enough, yet – but I wanted to put up these very brief notes on Science-Mart now, before it all goes down the memory hole.
Is the Labour manifesto ‘regressive’, and how?
January 27, 2018
Some very quick points about the claim that Corbyn’s Labour’s policies are ‘regressive’. This has become a common centrist critique of Corbyn’s Labour (occupying the discursive space vacated by “Corbyn’s leadership will condemn Labour to electoral oblivion”). But the basic point covers a range of different arguments. I want to typologise those arguments, very quickly and crudely, into three categories.
First – the argument that means testing of government provision is intrinsically better than universalism. This argument is bad and wrong – it grounds public provision of welfare and services in a social ontology which divides the deserving from the undeserving, and which can easily be repurposed for reactionary social policy (the deserving versus the undeserving poor); it leaves redistributive policy more vulnerable to rollback by failing to achieve upper and middle class ‘buy in’; and it bakes the oversight and disciplining apparatus of the administrative state into policy implementation.
Second – the argument that a policy which is not targeted at the poorest is intrinsically bad because of its regressive redistributive outcomes. I can’t do better on this argument than the excellent Policy Sketchbook blog, which addresses this category of argument in some detail in this post (as well as in earlier ones). Tl;dr: policies come in bundles, and it doesn’t make sense to call a policy ‘regressive’ unless you know what else is changing in the overall policy package to achieve it. A universalist policy (or indeed a middle-class-targeted policy) funded by highly progressive taxation is not regressive in any useful sense.
Third – the argument that given its budgetary constraints, Labour’s spending priorities are poor – that the money Labour plans to spend on university tuition fees abolition (to take the highest-expense new budget item as the example), would be better spent on other policy goals (for example, fully reversing Conservative and Coalition welfare cuts, or the NHS, or both.)
I think this last argument has a great deal of merit. Labour has imposed quite significant fiscal constraints on itself – McDonnell’s fiscal rule prohibits borrowing for day-to-day spending which is not balanced out by increases in taxation, and Labour’s 2017 manifesto proposed quite modest (in the grand scheme of things) tax increases, while actively ruling out a range of other possible tax increases. Moreover, any Labour government will almost certainly be inheriting a state with welfare spending significantly impacted by years of austerity budgets, an underfunded NHS, etc. etc. In this context, Labour’s spending priorities, in its 2017 manifesto, do seem strange. Labour’s university fees abolition policy is not – contra the centrists – regressive in any meaningful sense. However, the opportunity cost of this policy is extremely high, absent a budget with much larger overall spending increases than those currently proposed.
This problem could of course be fixed by increasing overall tax and spend. At present, however, Labour’s commitments are what they are. Unless and until those commitments change, I think the left should be quite seriously concerned about the policy implications of Labour’s platform.
Ok – this is a literal ‘notes to self’ post, in that I’m going to use it to record my reading notes on Danny Nicol’s ‘The Constitutional Protection of Capitalism’. Nicol is a professor of public law at the University of Westminster. The book is, if I have the right end of the stick, an argument that the UK’s participation in a range of international treaties and governance institutions has transformed the British constitution in far-reaching ways. Specifically, the relevant international treaties and law have ‘hard wired’ neoliberal policies into the British constitution, in a way that is heavily constraining of parliament’s democratic policy-making powers.
I’m reading the book because it seems to be the most-cited work by advocates of ‘Lexit’ (that is: left-wing Brexit) – and as I said in my last post, I think the Lexit position in general is under-represented in UK policy debates. The main goal of the post is just to make summary notes, but I’ll no doubt opine, as I go – I’ll try to be clear about what’s summary of Nicol and what’s my own opinion. I give myself permission in advance to read huge swathes of text without writing them up, or the book is never going to get finished. Likewise, this isn’t really the reading I ought to be doing, so I give myself permission to go months between updates here. I guess I’ll note updates here:
20/1/2018 (1) – pages 1-5.
20/1/2018 (2) – pages 6-11.
22/1/2018 (1) – pages 12-22.
22/1/2018 (2) – pages 23-31.
22/1/2018 (3) – pages 32-37.
23/1/2018 – pages 38-46
28/1/2018 – pages 47-81.
10/3/2018 – finished the book and wrote up a summary (at the end of the post below), but still lots of note-taking to do for the later substantive chapters.
Ok, here goes.
Chapter 1 – Transnational Regimes and the Constitution
Nicol starts with the basic thesis:
there has been a constitutional ‘transnationalisation’ that has introduced a far more severe ideological bias into the constitution than has hitherto existed, certainly since the ending of the veto power of the House of Lords in 1911; this in turn has seriously compromised British democracy… In particular, the free choice of economic policies – on such matters as state aid, public procurement, state regulation and, above all, the choice between markets and public sector monopoly – has increasingly been rendered constitutionally impermissible. Only the strength of neoliberal consensus amongst the present generation of politicians has served to conceal this democratic diminution. (1)
Nicol then moves on to defining neoliberalism. Following David Harvey, Nicol suggests that there are two definitions of neoliberalism. First, a utopian theory – “a model of social relations in which government regulation and social welfare guarantees are reduced in order to foster the play of market forces driven by private enterprises pursuing profit maximisation” (3 – he’s quoting Harvey). Second, “a political project designed to restore the power of economic elites” (3).
Again following Harvey, Nicol argues that the second definition is the most important one, and the first definition is typically just ideological cover for the second. Nicol quotes Antinori:
laissez-faire is a myth, and the question is never between government regulation of the economy and no government regulation: the question is always what type of government regulation. (4)
For what it’s worth, I think this is mostly right as far as it goes, but not quite right all up. It is definitely the case that neoliberalism is in significant part a class-driven political project – but that’s true for economic governance systems in basically every class society. It’s also definitely the case that neoliberal ideology serves as ‘cover’ for political-economic actions that conflict with their ideological warrant – but this is also very common, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the ideology is contentless, but rather that it is partial. The fact that neoliberal practice doesn’t match neoliberal principles means that we need a better definition of neoliberalism as a bundle of economic practices than the ideological one offered by many of its advocates. But that definition should (in my view) pick out neoliberalism as a historically distinctive set of beliefs and practices within which and through which class power operates, rather than reduce the elements of neoliberalism that escape its ideological framing to straightforward elite class interests. I’m not really prepared to try to offer an alternative account of neoliberalism that achieves that, so these gripes are basically just vapourware – but let this serve as a marker of mild disagreement.
Having outlined these two conceptions of neoliberalism, Nicol then distinguishes between neoliberals who really believe the ideology (“free market principle neoliberals”) and neoliberals who are really only interested in the class interests of the elite (“class interest neoliberals”). Again, I’d argue that this distinction is a bit simplistic – though I guess you could counter-argue that analytic frames should be as simple as they can be while still serving their analytic function, which this probably does.
Still, the shortcomings of this analytic frame are clear on page 5, where Nicol writes:
Neoliberalism, as defined above, has in fact usually been the dominant governmental doctrine in Britain since the birth of capitalism itself. (5)
This is not true in any useful sense, in my view – it’s just conflating neoliberalism with economic liberalism in general. Probably doesn’t hugely matter for the analysis of the book, but again not quite right in my opinion.
In the next section, Nicol argues that constitutional law – which has traditionally focused on the nation-state as the locus of the constitution – would benefit from understanding international governance institutions as de facto determining elements of the British constitution. He writes a bit about the power of transnational corporations, but his focus is not corporations but transnational institutions – the WTO, the EU, and the ECHR.
perhaps we have reached the point at which, in ever wider fields, the most important element of Britain’s constitution (and indeed, the constitutions of other countries) is no longer Parliamentary sovereignty but rather transnational regulation. (8)
[As an aside, there may be a story to be told here about how British constitutional law has traditionally been able to regard the nation-state as sovereign because Britain was an imperial power that exerted legal force over other nations, rather than the reverse – and as Britain has declined to third-tier power status this has changed.]
Anyway, Nicol argues that the expansion of transnational influence over nation-states’ constitutions has been achieved via two mechanisms: “the scope of transnational regulation has expanded” (5) and “certain international law regimes have become more effective” (6).
Now Nicol asks: “What brought about this constitutional transformation?” (12)
He periodises (I think accurately enough) post-war transnational economic ‘constitutional’ history into two stages: from 1945 through the 1970s there was “an intensification of institutionalisation” (GATT, the EEC), but “these organisations were characterised by the toleration of a variety of capitalisms and had relatively weak enforcement processes”. From the 1980s a neoliberal consensus emerged, with corresponding changes in “transnational constitutionalism” which bound states much more tightly to a neoliberal policy framework. (12)
Nicol locates globalisation at the heart of this process. Following Held et al., he distinguishes three different concepts of globalisation: hyperglobalist, sceptical and transformationist. Hyperglobalists, for Nicol, think that the nation state is basically obsolete; sceptics think that globalisation is basically a myth; transformationism is the ‘goldilocks’ option that argues globalisation is real but unclear in its future direction and potentials. For transformationists:
the powers of the state are not necessarily diminished by globalisation; rather, states are being reconstituted and restructured in response to a more interconnected world. (13)
Nicol adopts this ‘transformationist’ perspective. In Nicol’s narrative, from the 1980s a range of world leaders gained power who adhered to neoliberal ideological tenets; these leaders implemented neoliberal policy not just at the national level, but also at the transnational, binding national states’ democratic decision-making within a neoliberal policy framework. Nicol argues that this is not a conspiratorial perspective:
when neoliberal leaders were called upon to make constitutional choices, they naturally enough opted for constitutional arrangements that benefited the attainment and retention of their own favoured policies. (18)
Nicol draws on Hirschl to argue that three categories of elite were influential in this process: political elites (trying to achieve their policy goals), economic elites (trying to promote their interests), and judicial elites (trying to increase their power relative to democratic decision-making). Nicol argues that political elites are the most influential of the three. These constitutional transformations, Nicol argues, have, moreover, been concealed by political consensus.
the transnational constitution can be perceived as a kind of insurance policy guaranteeing the preservation of a particular variety of capitalism. Its object is to lock in place a system of privatisation and commercial liberty, so that things will not change very much when new governments are elected. Thus the new constitutional law serves to guard against the possibility that future governments might abandon the creed of private enterprise. (19)
Along the same lines:
The real purpose of transnational constitutionalism is to ensure the stability of policy in the event of today’s neoliberals being succeeded by politicians of a different ilk. Was the insurance policy really necessary? It is in the nature of insurance policies to guard against eventualities that are unlikely but nonetheless possible. Perhaps the strength of neoliberal ideological hegemony is such that neoliberalism does not really require constitutional protection. But one never knows.(20)
Now Nicol turns to questions of democracy and legitimacy. Nicol suggests (perhaps not entirely convincingly) that his book is not concerned with the question of whether neoliberal institutions are ‘just’ or ‘unjust’ – rather, its normative import is focussed on the question of their relation to democracy.
Thus the book will question whether the constitutional constraints ushered in by legal globalisation make Britain more or less democratic. (21-2)
Nicol will suggest that:
Britain’s pre-globalisation constitution offered a superior degree of democracy than is available under today’s more globalised arrangements. (22)
Nicol focuses on three attributes of democracy: “contestability, ideological neutrality, and accountability. Assessed on this basis, it can be argued that Britain’s pre-globalisation constitution offered a superior degree of democracy than is available under today’s more globalised arrangements.” (22)
Taking these attributes of democracy in turn:
Contestability:
Contestability means that since people disagree about everything, there can be no universal or self-evident truths that can be enshrined as supreme law. Accordingly, everything that government does needs to be democratically contestable. This should be the case irrespective of the issue involved. Thus, policies and decisions should be contestable regardless of whether they involve basic liberal political rights, the fundamentals of economic policy or social rights. There is no principled basis on which these different aspects of policy can be disentangled from each other… The bottom line is that there can be no entrenchment of favoured policies, since entrenchment would cocoon such policies from the full rigour of contestability… There should therefore be no division between ‘ordinary’ politics and ‘constitutional’ politics. Moreover, the constitution should guarantee the permanence of contestability. All in all, therefore, the democratic constitution should not privilege substantive outcomes but should represent the structure for reaching collective decisions in a democratic way. (22)
Ideological neutrality:
The idea here is that the political sphere is a space where differing ideological perspectives contest for policy influence, and that the goal of a constitution is to mediate that contestation in a neutral manner:
the constitution’s enduring ideological commitment must be to democracy itself, thereby permitting the country to be drawn in whichever political ideology reflects the will of the political community. Such a constitution should be preferred over one with an inbuilt bias in favour of one substantive political creed at the expense of others, since this would detract unacceptably from the power of people to determine their own future.(23)
Accountability:
The need for power-holders to compete for re-election is what makes them responsive to the public. Thus the idea of democratic accountability – that it is possible to replace political office-holders through elections – is one that has great resonance. It is fundamentally important to us that those who rule in our name are in the end answerable to us…. Whilst the language of accountability has expanded in recent years to embrace weaker forms of public dialogue not involving the possibility of sanction, there surely need to be compelling reasons of principle (such as the independence of the judiciary) to justify a weakening of accountability in the case of those who wield very substantial government power. (23)
Nicol divides the British constitution, conceptually, into “internal” and “transnational” aspects, and argues that the internal dimension of the constitution gives expression to these three principles (“however imperfectly”) while “the transnationalisation of the constitution has fatally compromised our constitution’s adherence to these three attributes” (24). In the next three subsections Nicol will therefore look at each of these attributes in relation to the internal and transnational dimensions of the British constitution, as he defines it. Going through these categories again, then:
The British model and contestability:
Nicol argues that because of parliamentary sovereignty, the British constitution has a high degree of contestability.
Dicey famously defined parliamentary sovereignty as meaning that parliament enjoys ‘the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having the right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament.’ (24)
Now,
This traditional view of parliamentary sovereignty whereby Parliament cannot be bound in any way whatsoever is to be contrasted with the so-called ‘new view’ of ‘self-embracing sovereignty’ whereby, although Parliament cannot bind itself as to the substance of future legislation, it can bind itself as to the manner and form by which future legislation is to be enacted.(27)
British participation in transnational governance institutions like the WTO and the EU obviously, in Nicol’s eyes, binds parliament in this way, reducing contestability.
The British model and relative ideological neutrality:
Nicol quotes Jack Straw’s expression of this principle: “the constitution doesn’t belong to any one party and should not be used as a partisan tool.” (31)
Nicol makes the same basic argument here as in earlier sections:
the internal constitution operates in a way that shows a reasonable, if imperfect, degree of ideological neutrality. By contrast, the transnational constitution – with its rigid ethos of ‘capitalism first, democracy second’ – limits us to one particular ideology, so that even if it were to become discredited, we would be stuck with it. (32)
Nicol contrasts this element of the British constitution with the US constitution, whose framers “had a definite substantive ideological agenda.” (32-3):
The transnational constitution resembles the American more than the British model, insofar as it is widely perceived as being tied to a particular substantive ideology based on its own particular vision of the good life, namely market liberalism. (34)
The British model and accountability
This is quite a load-bearing section. Nicol argues that transnational constitutional institutions reduce democratic accountability in two ways (I’m reversing Nicol’s order of presentation here):
First, they transfer power from democratically-elected elites to non-democratically elected elites:
On this reading, there is less difference than might be supposed between, say, the European Court of Human Rights, the panels of the WTO, the European Commission and the European Central Bank. All are unaccountable bodies to which government power has been transferred. (36)
Second, they disperse democratic accountability mechanisms across different processes, which can potentially conflict, resulting (in Nicol’s view) in a de facto reduction in accountability:
It is tempting to assume that more institutions and more elections mean more accountability, but this is not the case. A surfeit of institutional checks and balances can be inimical to accountability. In a piece entitled ‘A Plethora of Parliaments?’ Harlowe has drawn attention to the way in which a superfluity of accountability mechanisms tends to reduce the centrality of any one of those mechanisms, with the consequence that a democratic deficit is brought about by a ‘democratic surplus’ or fragmentation of power. (35)
[As an aside, I have substantial disagreements with the arguments Nicol makes in these sections, but I’ll postpone discussion of those until I’ve at least finished the chapter.]
In the next section, Nicol argues that current transnational economic institutions can usefully be seen as efforts to realise the vision of constitutional government outline by Hayek in his ‘The Constitution of Liberty’. My main takeaway from this section is that I badly need to finally get around to reading ‘The Constitution of Liberty’. In my version of Nicol’s summary, though, Hayek is in favour of strict constitutional limits on government action, in a way that constrains (what is in Hayek’s eyes) coercive state power. Since for Hayek the state is the major threat to political freedom, constitutional restrictions on state power preserve freedom, while granting states sufficient ability to enforce the rule of law, etc. Specifically, on Nicol’s account:
Hayek therefore canvassed a supranational form of government that would prevent states from regaining unfettered sovereignty in the economic sphere by being able to veto their economic policy measures. (39).
For Nicol, transnational institutions like the WTO and the EU can reasonably be seen as partial realisations of this Hayekian ambition.
Now Nicol moves on to more recent neoliberal international relations theorists, some of whom I have read. He summarises Keohane, Macedo and Moravcsik’s ‘Democracy-Enhancing Multilateralism’. These theorists are making the case that transnational institutions do not diminish democracy but rather enhance it. First they offer three ‘conventional’ arguments, then some new ones.
The three ‘conventional’ arguments are that:
– Transnational institutions are directly accountable to their member states and thus indirectly to the publics who elect the representatives of those states.
– Powers democratically delegated to transnational institutions could also be democratically rescinded.
– Even if democracy is reduced by delegation of powers to transnational entities, the ends justify the means.
Keohane, Macedo and Moravcsik add to these arguments the claim that transnational institutions “actually improve the functioning of domestic democracy” (40). The argument here is that:
whilst popular elections are essential to democracy, democratic systems above all required constitutional rules and institutions to constrain the power of governments and temporary majorities…. Competing public institutions and a system of checks and balances, including politically independent courts and agencies with specialised expertise, can help ensure that policy choices are defended against robust criticism and that errors are identified and corrected…. They insist that transnational decision-making helps to achieve this sort of democracy in three ways: by combatting special interests, by protecting rights and by fostering robust public deliberation. (40-1)
As Nicol says, this approach – “a Madisonian conception of ‘deliberative democracy’ based on the American model of constitutionalism” (42) – is clearly incompatible with Nicol’s characterisation of the democratic principles informing British constitutionalism.
Nicol goes through each of Keohane et al.’s three Madisonian sub-arguments in turn, and presents counter-arguments. I may return to these in a later post, but I think the basic lines of the debate are clear enough already here for summary purposes. Finally in this subsection, Nicol briefly summarises Habermas’s ‘The Postnational Constellation’, and rather curtly dismisses it:
Habermas openly favours reducing the importance accorded to votes and accountability and increasing the weight given to ‘the procedural demands of communicative and decision-making processes’. But he admits that the transnational edifice he is seeking to construct would depend on whether a cosmopolitan consciousness would arise on the part of national electorates. It will be readily apparent that Habermas’ hopes for democratic revival depend not only on the materialisation of this elusive consciousness but, much more importantly, on redefining democracy out of all definition. (43)
In my own view this is unfair to Habermas, for whom I have a lot of time, whatever his shortcomings – but again this is not the place for working through these complicated issues.
Next up, Nicol discusses the argument that market mechanisms are themselves a sort of democratic decision-making, if you squint a bit – the argument (in my own rephrasing, using Hirschman’s terms) that market exit is a superior substitute for democratic voice. Nicol doesn’t have much time for this position, and neither do I, so I’ll move on. He then discusses France a bit, to say that different countries under the same transnational institutions must be analysed differently, but that this is not a comparative work. Then he sums up, and we’re done with Chapter One.
In terms of own thoughts – I’ve made some comments as I went, above, but I also have some quite large disagreements that I don’t want to get into here in any depth. I’ll probably write up a separate blog post on some of these issues, once I’m done with the read-through. To summarise very briefly: although, like Nicol, I have a range of criticisms of Hayek, I am at base much more sympathetic to liberal constitutionalism than Nicol is in this book. I think Nicol is being much too blasé here about the risks associated with reducing institutional checks and balances on a democratically-mandated executive. It’s clear from the framing of Nicol’s book that his core objection to the transnational institutions he’s discussing is the way they bake neoliberal economic policy into legal constitutions. I think that is an appropriate thing to object to. But the actually argument Nicol makes, in this chapter, is much stronger than this position: Nicol objects to any politically substantive constitutional constraint on a democratically elected political decision-making body. In my view, this position provides no legitimate method to constrain a democratically-mandated state from riding roughshod over the rights of at the very least a large minority of its citizens. The liberal principle that there are human rights which cannot legitimately be disregarded by state power, even if that power has received a democratic mandate at the ballot box, is a good one that we should fight both to preserve and to more fully realise, in my view. Nicol’s constitutional theory does not give us any mechanism to do either.
I want to quickly note a couple of specific ‘tension points’, then move on. On page 23, Nicol suggests that an independent judiciary is sufficiently important as to warrant a weakening of the general principle of accountability. I agree with this point – but it’s unclear why this logic could not in principle apply to other independent elements of the state apparatus (such as some substantive elements of the constitution). Nicol’s position is therefore a bit more ad hoc than it might appear at first pass, in my view.
Finally, on page 43, Nicol criticises Habermas for his (as Nicol sees it) unrealistic idea that European citizens’ sensibilities can be transformed in a more cosmopolitan direction. Nicol might be right in his suggestion that this is an unrealistically utopian hope, on Habermas’s part – but if Nicol is right about this – if, that is, we should in fact be more pessimistic about the possibilities for shifts in public sensibilities – then this could, against Nicol, be seen as an argument for caution around constitutionally unconstrained power for any given democratically elected government.
Put differently: the thing about Habermas, which I think is insufficiently appreciated, at least by many of his critics, is that his core project – the bedrock motive for the entire apparatus – is anti-fascism. Habermas is, for fathomable historical reasons, intensely interested in establishing a governance system and broader polity in which fascism cannot succeed. When Habermas wants constitutional constraints on an executive such that state power cannot be wielded without limit, and such that those constraints on state power themselves cannot easily be undone, the perspective informing these goals is that of somebody who grew up in Nazi Germany. These liberal political principles can of course also be used for other ends – such as the constitutional enforcement of a neoliberal economic framework – but Habermas’s basic rationale for the value of institutions of this kind should in my view be taken very seriously.
From my point of view, then, Nicol errs in making a general argument against substantive constitutional constraints on any and all political action, when his true target is – or should be – substantive constitutional enforcement of neoliberal economic policy. I’ll probably blog more about all this in another post – but this concludes my notes on chapter one.
Chapter 2 – The World Trade Organisation and the sanctity of private enterprise
Ok. Chapter one dealt with the theoretical and normative perspective of the book – the next three chapters deal with the substance. From the table of contents I gather that chapter two is focussed on the WTO, chapter three on the EU, and chapter four on the ECHR. Start with the WTO then. I’m going to try to take notes much more sparingly on this chapter than the last.
In Nicol’s words, chapter two is about:
the question of whether the World Trade Organisation (WTO) gives constitutional protection to the private sector. (47)
Nicol starts with a brief history of the establishment of GATT, post-WWII, and the development of the WTO out of GATT. The most important innovation of GATT, Nicol argues, was the ‘most favoured nation’ (MFN) rule:
The MFN rule requires states to extend to every GATT country the most favourable trade treatment accorded to any country, the most favoured nation.(56)
GATT also “permits a customs union to be treated as if it were a single contracting party” (57). For this reason, European nations could, in 1957, establish a common European customs union, and thereby maintain differential treatment of European and non-European trading partners.
When Britain joined the Community in 1973, therefore, there was a transfer of authority for trade relations from Whitehall and Westminster to the EEC Commission and Council. Thus trade policy to a considerable extent ceased to be a matter of British politics. (57)
The primary goal of the WTO, on Nicol’s account, was to have more effective enforcement machinery than GATT. The WTO Disputes Settlement Understanding (DSU) was more legalistic and binding than the previous GATT process. Moreover, because the WTO was founded at a point when neoliberalism was in the ascendent, its ‘constitutional’ role gave more weight to private enterprise. In Nicol’s words:
The fundamental difference between the DSU procedure and its predecessor lies in the inability of states to veto the judicial process at its various stages. Previously, crucial decisions – to establish a panel, to adopt its report, to authorise the remedy of suspension of concessions – had to be taken by consensus, which meant that losing states could in effect veto unfavourable decisions. Under the WTO regime, by contrast, the procedure progresses through these stages automatically unless there is a consensus against doing so. In practice this makes the adoption of all three stages automatic.(62)
Moreover, the private sector plays a major role in WTO decision-making:
Both the European Commission and the US Trade Representative rely on industry initially to kickstart litigation by drawing attention to obstacles to free trade, and then to sustain that litigation, by providing convincing factual information and legal argument (64)
In Nicol’s view:
Private companies have thereby been accorded a privileged institutionalised position from which to challenge the legislation and policies of states. (64)
So, Nicole argues that the WTO gives private companies a central role in de facto constitution-formation, and moreover has stronger enforcement mechanisms than GATT. In addition to these innovations, the WTO also expanded its remit, relative to GATT, bringing not just trade in goods but also services within the ambit of transnational constitutional constraints:
If the great institutional achievement of the WTO is dispute settlement, then its great substantive breakthrough is the General Agreement on Trade is Services (GATS). (70)
The institution design of the WTO, Nicol argues, has a ‘ratchet effect’, whereby members can commit themselves to greater liberalisation but cannot easily undo those commitments:
As in the case of GATT, the cardinal principle is that a WTO Member is never able to reduce its general level of liberalisation. (72)
This applies, Nicole argues, to public procurement…
The GPA… obliges government entities to provide, on request from any unsuccessful tenderer, relevant information as to why its tender was not selected, as well as the identity of the successful tenderer. The challenge procedure represents a profound development in terms of effectiveness of remedies for breaches of an international agreement. (77)
… and subsidies:
The WTO Agreements include a Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM Agreement) … Under the SCM Agreement, only two types of subsidies are prohibited per se – export subsidies and import substitution subsidies. The vast majority of subsidies, by contrast, are ‘actionable’: they can be challenged if they cause adverse effects to the interests of another WTO Member. Such adverse effects may consist of injury to the Member’s domestic industry; nullification of GATT benefits; or serious prejudice to the interests of another Member.(78)
In sum:
Negotiating the schedules to the various agreements essentially involves a series of one-way-only, once-and-for-all decisions: states can elect to ‘ratchet up’ their commitment to market access and therefore privatisation, but there is no scope for negotiating in the opposite direction, in favour of extending public sector provision. The WTO can thus be seen as a ‘commitment device’ in which states hold themselves to their initial preferences by tying the hands of government for the future. It has created a rule-oriented landscape, fashioned to reduce ‘risk premium’ for private enterprise. (80)
These notes are brief and don’t adequately summarise the relevant WTO rules and enforcement mechanisms – but I’ll leave things here for now, and move on to chapter three.
Summary
Ok, I’ve finished reading his but am badly behind on my note-taking. Just to quickly summarise my ‘take’:
1) The book makes an strong case that transnational institutions (particularly the WTO and the EU) are significantly constraining on British democratic decision-making in economic policy, in a way that effectively writes elements of ‘neoliberal’ policy into the UK ‘constitution’ (in the sense of placing these elements of economic policy beyond the reach of parliament).
2) It makes in my opinion a less strong case that this is also true of the European Court of Human Rights (Nicol’s argument about the ECHR is largely – though not exclusively – that it is vulnerable to being pushing in this direction in the future).
3) Nicol argues that this is an unacceptable ‘democratic deficit’ – that parliament should be sovereign, or at least much more sovereign than it is now.
4) For my political tastes, Nicol makes this latter case too strongly. Nicol is broadly sceptical of constitutionalism, because he sees constitutionalism as undemocratic. He is of course right about this, in the sense that constitutionalism places areas of policy outside the (easy) reach of democratic decision-making, but I think he is wrong to suggest that this is always bad. Obviously these matters can be debated, but I myself have very little problem with core human rights being protected by a judicial apparatus that is difficult for democratic processes to override.
5) The strength of Nicol’s position, in my view, is in his argument that too much substantive economic policy has been shifted into this sphere of transnational legal decision-making. Nicol’s book seems to me to make this case very well indeed – if I get round to writing up the later chapters in more detail I’ll summarise some of the examples Nicol gives.
6) As with a lot of ‘Lexit’ arguments, Nicol seems to underestimate the extent to which transnational constraints on local economic sovereignty have been a feature of the capitalist world-system for much of its history. The reason they haven’t been a feature of British law for much of that history is that Britain was the dominant capitalist power for a long period, and has only recently again been on the receiving end of transnational constraints on sovereignty rather than the imposer of them.
7) Related to this last point, the book doesn’t really have an adequate sense of the difference between different forms of capitalist ‘laissez faire’, identifying (wrongly, imo) neoliberalism (a specific form of recent economic governance) with laissez-faire in general. This isn’t a huge issue, it’s just another example of the book’s perhaps too narrow historical perspective.
8) Again for my political tastes, the book is also excessively sceptical of forms of economic governance beyond national democratic processes. Nicol’s argument in the conclusion is that national (and, secondarily, sub-national) sovereignty is the only realistic form of democratic governance – there’s a case to be made for that, but it’s in my view a somewhat pessimistic case. The book’s political-normative standpoint is intrinsically a non-internationalist one.
9) Nevetheless, with all these hedges and criticisms, the core case of the book is made very strongly indeed, in my view. I don’t have the knowledge to independently assess Nicol’s discussion of ECJ legal decisions, and so on, but it’s hard to think, having read the whole thing, that he doesn’t have a point about transnational constraints on left wing democratic policy-making. I think defenders of the EU really need to accept the merit of this basic position, and defend these institutions on the grounds that their benefits outweigh their costs, rather than deny the existence of the costs altogether (as seems to be the current favoured stance among EU advocates in the UK).
