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Article by an MPIfG researcher
Wolfgang Streeck: The Post-Capitalist Interregnum: The Old System Is Dying, but a New Social Order Cannot yet Be Born. In:
Juncture 23(2), 68-77 (2016). Wiley-Blackwell
The original publication is available at the publisher’s web site: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/newe.906

The post-capitalist interregnum
The old system is dying, but a new social order
cannot yet be bornA ‘post-capitalist interregnum’ is dawning, argues Wolfgang Streeck – a prolonged periodof social entropy, radical uncertainty and indeterminacy, in which society is essentiallyungovernable and no new world order waits in the wings. Tracing the four-stage crisis
sequence of neoliberal capitalism up to today’s disintegrating state system, he finds it
exemplified in borderless Europe – and specifically in Britain’s fateful referenda.
Capitalism was always a fragile and improbable order that depended oncontinuous repair work for its survival.1 Today, however, too many of its
frailties have become acute simultaneously, while too many remedies tothem have been exhausted or destroyed. Rather than picking one of thevarious manifestations of the crisis and privileging it over others, I suggestthat all – or most – of them may add up to a condition of multi-morbidity,
in which different disorders coexist and, more often than not, reinforce eachother. The end of capitalism may, then, occur as a death from a thousandcuts – from multiple infirmities, each of which will become all the more
untreatable as all will demand treatment at the same time.
In other words, I do not believe that any of the potentially stabilising forces
frequently mentioned – be it regime pluralism, regional diversity and unevendevelopment, political reform, independent crisis cycles or whatever2 – will
be strong enough to neutralise the syndrome of accumulated weaknesses
that characterises contemporary capitalism as a social order. No effective
opposition being left, and no successor waiting in the wings of history,
capitalism’s accumulation of defects – paralleling its accumulation of capital– amounts to an entirely endogenous dynamic of self-destruction, one that
follows an evolutionary logic that is moulded by contingent cirumstancesand coincidental events but cannot be suspended by them, along ahistorical trajectory from early liberal capitalism, via state-administeredcapitalism, to neoliberal capitalism, which for the time being culminatedin the financial crisis of 2008.

Towards social entropy
For the decline of capitalism to continue, I suggest, no revolutionary
alternative is required, and certainly no masterplan of a better societythat will displace or replace capitalism. Contemporary capitalism as
12This article draws in part on the introductory chapter of my forthcoming book, How Will Capitalism End?
Essays on a Failing System, to be published by Verso in November 2016.
Wallerstein I, Collins R, Mann M, Derluguian G and Calhoun C (2013) Does Capitalism Have a Future?,
Oxford University Press.

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a functioning social order is vanishing on its own account, collapsingfrom internal contradictions – not least as a result of having vanquished
its enemies, who have often rescued capitalism from itself by forcing
it to evolve into a new form. What will follow on from capitalism next
will, I submit, not be socialism or some other defined social order,
but a long interregnum3 – no new world system equilibrium, butrather a prolonged period of social entropy; of radical uncertainty4
and indeterminacy. It is an interesting problem for sociological theory
whether and (if so) how a society can turn for a significant length of time
into less than a society – a post-social society, or a society lite – until it
may or may not recover to again become a society in the full meaningof the term. I believe that one can get a conceptual handle on this bydrawing liberally on the distinction, introduced by David Lockwood
back in 1964, between system integration and social integration, or
integration at the macro and micro levels.5 An ‘interregnum’ would thenbe defined as a breakdown of macro-level system integration, depriving
individuals at the micro-level of institutional structuring and collective
support and shifting the burden of ordering social life, of providing itwith a modicum of security and stability, to individual actors and suchsocial arrangements as they can improvise on their own. A society ininterregnum, in other words, would be a de-institutionalised or underinstitutionalised society, one in which expectations can be stabilised
only now and then by local extemporisation, and which for this very
reason is essentially ungovernable.

“Contemporary
capitalism as afunctioning social
order is vanishingon its own
account, collapsingfrom internal
contradictions– not least as aresult of having
vanquished its
enemies.”

A post-capitalist society would, then, appear to be one whose
system integration is critically and irremediably weakened, so that thecontinuation of capital accumulation – for a final, intermediate periodof uncertain duration – becomes dependent on the opportunism ofcollectively incapacitated individualised individuals, struggling to protect
themselves from risk in their social and economic lives. Undergovernedand undermanaged, the social world of the post-capitalist interregnum– in the wake of neoliberal capitalism’s neutralisation of states,
governments, borders, trade unions and other moderating forces – canat any time be hit by disaster: bubbles may implode, for example, orviolence penetrate from a collapsing periphery into the centre. With
individuals deprived of collective defences and left to their own devices,
what remains of a social order hinges on their motivation to co-operate
ad hoc with other individuals, driven by elementary interests in individual
survival and, often enough, fear and greed. As society loses its ability toprovide its members with effective protection and proven templates ofsocial action and social existence, individuals have only themselves torely on while social order must depend on the weakest possible mode ofsocial integration – Zweckrationalität (or ‘instrumental rationality’).

34
5

I take this concept from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison notebooks, in which he speaks of an era in which ‘theold is dying but the new cannot yet be born’, ushering in ‘an interregnum in which sinister phenomena of
the most diverse sort come into existence’. See Gramsci A (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks ofAntonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Hoare Q and Nowell-Smith G, Lawrence & Wishart Ltd.
King M (2016) The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy, Little, Brown.
Lockwood D (1964) ‘Social Integration and System Integration’, in Zollschan G K and Hirsch W (eds)
Explorations in Social Change, Houghton Mifflin: 244–257.

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As explained elsewhere,6 I anchor this condition in a variety of interrelated
developments, including the intensification of distributional conflict asa result of declining growth; the rising inequality that results from this;vanishing macroeconomic manageability, as manifested in, among otherthings, steadily growing indebtedness, a pumped-up money supply, andthe possibility of another economic breakdown at any time; the suspensionof postwar capitalism’s engine of social progress, democracy, and theassociated rise of oligarchy; the dwindling capacity of governments andthe systemic inability of governance to limit the commodification of labour,
nature and money; the omnipresence of corruption of all sorts, in response
to intensified competition in winner-take-all markets with virtually unlimited
opportunities for self-enrichment; the erosion of public infrastructures andcollective benefits in the course of commodification and privatisation;
the failure, after 1989, of capitalism’s carrier nation, the US, to build andmaintain a stable global order; and so on and so on. These and otherdevelopments, I suggest, have resulted in widespread cynicism regarding
political and economic life, forever ruling out a recovery of normative
legitimacy for capitalism as a just society that offers equal opportunities
for individual progress – a legitimacy that capitalism needs to draw on in
critical moments.

“A number ofdevelopments
have resulted
in widespread
cynicism regarding
Moving disequilibrium
political andIn recent work I have argued that OECD capitalism has been on a crisis
economic life,
trajectory since the 1970s, the historical turning point being the abandonment forever rulingof the postwar settlement by capital in response to a global profit squeeze.
out a recovery
Subsequently, three crises followed one another: the global inflation of theof normative
1970s, the explosion of public debt in the 1980s, and rapidly rising private
legitimacy forindebtedness in the subsequent decade, resulting in the collapse of financial
markets in 2008. This sequence was, by and large, the same for all major
capitalism as acapitalist countries, whose economies have never nearly been in equilibrium
just society.”since the end of postwar growth. All three crises began and ended in thesame way, following the same political-economic logic: inflation, public
debt and the deregulation of private debt started out as politically expedientsolutions to distributional conflicts between capital and labour (and, in the
1970s, between the two and the producers of raw material whose cost had
long been negligible), until they became problems themselves. Inflation begot
unemployment as relative prices became distorted and owners of monetary
assets abstained from investment; mounting public debt made creditors
nervous and produced pressures for fiscal consolidation in the 1990s; andthe pyramid of private debt that had filled the gaps in aggregate demand andcitizen satisfaction caused by cuts in public spending imploded when the
bubbles produced by easy money burst.
Solutions thus turned into problems requiring new solutions which,after another decade or so, became problems themselves – which thencalled for yet other solutions that soon turned out to be as short-lived
and self-defeating as their predecessors. Government policies vacillated
between two equilibrium points, one political, the other economic, that
6

Streeck W (2014) ‘How Will Capitalism End?’, New Left Review 87: 35–64.

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had become impossible to attain simultaneously. Attending to the needfor democratic political legitimacy and social peace, so as to live up to
citizen expectations of economic prosperity and social stability, theyfound themselves at risk of damaging economic performance. Conversely,
efforts to restore the economy to equilibrium tended to trigger politicaldissatisfaction and undermine support for the government of the day, andfor the liberal-capitalist market economy in general.
Actually the situation was even more critical than that, although it was
not perceived as such for a long time as it unfolded only gradually,
spread out over two or three political generations. Intertwined with thecrisis sequence of the 1970s onwards was an evolving fiscal crisis of thedemocratic-capitalist state, again basically in all countries undergoing thesecular transition from state-administered ‘late’ capitalism to neoliberalcapitalism. While in the 1970s governments still had a choice, within limits,
between inflation and public debt as means of bridging the gap between
the combined claims of capital and labour and the resources available
for distribution, after the end of inflation at the beginning of the 1980s the‘tax state’ of postwar capitalism began to change into a ‘debt state’. In
this it was helped by the growth of a dynamic, increasingly global financial
industry based in the de-industrialising headquarter country of global
capitalism, the US. Concerned about the capacity of its new clients –who were, after all, sovereign states – to unilaterally cancel their debt, an
increasingly powerful financial sector soon began to seek reassurance fromgovernments on their economic and political ability to service and repay
their loans. The result was another transformation of the democratic state,
this time into what I have called a ‘consolidation state’, which began in
the mid-1990s. To the extent that consolidation of public finances throughspending cuts resulted in overall gaps in demand or in popular discontent,
the financial industry was happy to step in with loans to private households,
provided that credit markets were sufficiently deregulated.
Since 2008, we have been living in a fourth stage of the post-1970s crisis
sequence, and the by now familiar dialectic of problems treated withsolutions that themselves turn into problems is again making itself felt. The
three apocalyptic horsemen of contemporary capitalism – stagnation, debt
and inequality – are continuing to devastate the economic and politicallandscape. With ever-lower growth, as recovery from the Great Recession
made little or no progress, deleveraging had to be postponed ad calendas
graecas, and overall indebtedness is higher than ever.7 As part of a total debt
burden of unprecedented magnitude, public debt has jumped up again, notonly annihilating all gains made in the first phase of consolidation but also
effectively blocking any fiscal effort to restart growth. Thus unemployment
remains high throughout the OECD world, even in a country like Sweden
where full employment had for decades been a cornerstone of national
identity. Where employment has been restored it has tended to be at lower
pay and inferior conditions, due to technological change, ‘reforms’ in social
security systems that lower workers’ reservation wage, and de-unionisation

7“Since 2008, we
have been living
in a fourth stageof the post-1970s
crisis sequence,and the by now
familiar dialecticof problems
treated withsolutions thatthemselves turninto problems
is again making
itself felt.”

Dobbs R, Lund S, Woetzel J and Mutafchieva M (2015) Debt and (not much) deleveraging, McKinsey Global
Institute, McKinsey & Company.

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with the attendant increase in the power of employers. Indeed, ‘recovery’often amounts to replacement of unemployment with underemployment.
Although interest rates are at a record low, investment and growth refuse
to respond, giving rise to discussions among policymakers about lowering
them further, to below zero. While in the 1970s inflation was public enemy
number one, now desperate efforts are being made throughout the OECDworld to bring it up to at least 2 per cent, thus far without success. Whereas
in the past it was the coincidence of inflation and unemployment that left
economists clueless, now it is very cheap money coinciding with deflationarypressures, raising the spectre of ‘debt deflation’ and the collapse of apyramid of accumulated debt that far exceeds that of 2008.
Foremost among the signature characteristics of the current, fourth phaseof the post-1970s crisis sequence is the rise of the central banks tosupreme economic policymaking power – central banks that have, in thecourse of the liberalisation process, been made independent from national
governments by national governments, consequently making them all themore dependent on their other partner, the private banking industry. Since
the Great Recession, the same central banks that had been responsible
for the easy money policies that had produced the bubble have been
keeping the global economy alive by injecting a continuous stream of cash,
created out of thin air, into the international banking system. How long they
will continue to do so, and on what conditions, is considered a technicalquestion beyond the competence of governments and electorates. This
also applies to the question of which commercial and government bonds
central banks should buy in order to bring new money into circulation – apractice that has no less than tripled the balance sheets of the leading
central banks since 2007. Unlike governments, central banks deliberate andmake decisions in full secrecy, out of the public view, with the full supportof governments which, given the proven uselessness of their own policy
instruments and their complete lack of ideas on how to bring back growthand stability, depend vitally on being able to delegate responsibility foreconomic policy to supposedly non-political actors and institutions.

The Interregnum
Why, if capitalism is on its way out, is there no non-capitalism ready tosucceed it? A social order breaks down if and when its elites are no longer
able to maintain it; but for it to be cleared away, there has to be a newvanguard able to design and eager to install a new order. Obviously theincumbent management of advanced and not-so-advanced capitalism is
uniquely clueless. Consider the senseless production of money to stimulate
growth in the real economy; the desperate attempts to restore inflation withthe help of negative interest rates; and the apparently inexorable coming
apart of the modern state system on its periphery. Concerning the latter,systemic entropy originates in the weakening position of the US as the hostnation of global capitalist expansion. Historically, capitalism always advancedon the coattails of a strong, hegemonic state opening up and preparing newlandscapes for capital accumulation, through military force or free trade, andindeed typically through both. Political preparation for capitalist development
included not just the breaking-up of pre- or anti-capitalist social orders, but

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also the creation of new, ‘modern’ societies supportive of private capital
accumulation. After 1945, this meant the establishment of a global system ofsecular states with a ‘development’ agenda, sovereign but integrated in aninternational free trade regime. Also on the agenda was the containment and,if necessary and possible, suppression of alternative, oppositional systems –a program that at first glance came to its victorious completion in 1989.
This, however, was not the whole story. As it turned out, the US, while still
able to destroy its enemies, had lost the capacity to replace them withstable pro-American and pro-capitalist regimes – losing its constructive
powers while retaining its destructive ones. The causes of this include thedemonstration effect of the defeats suffered by the US in successive wars,
as well as declining domestic support for what a majority of US citizens
now consider foreign ‘adventures’. ‘Nation-building’ having failed in large
parts of the world, the global system of semi-sovereign, developmentfriendly free-trade states as originally envisaged shows growing holes
and gaps, with failed states as a permanent source of unpredictable andincreasingly unmanageable political and economic disorder. In many
regions, fundamentalist religious movements have taken control, rejecting
international law and modernism in general, and seeking an alternative tothe capitalist consumerism which they can no longer expect to replicate intheir countries. Others, having abandoned hope for ‘development’ at home,
are trying to join advanced capitalism by migrating from the periphery to thecenter. There they meet with second-generation immigrants who have given
up on ever being fully admitted to the capitalist-consumerist mainstream of
their societies. One result of this is another migration – the migration of theviolence that is destroying the stateless societies of the periphery into themetropolis, in the form of ‘terrorism’ wrought by a new class of ‘primitive
rebels’ that lacks any vision of a practically possible progressive future, ofa renewed industrial or new post-industrial society both developing further
than and overcoming the capitalist society of today.
Not just capital and its running dogs, but also their opponents, today lacka capacity to act collectively. Just as capitalism’s movers and shakers do
not know how to protect their society from decay, and in any case would
lack the means to do so, their enemies, when it comes to the crunch, haveto admit that they have no idea of how to escape neoliberal capitalism. Seefor example the Greek government and its capitulation in 2015, when the‘Eurogroup’ began to play hardball and Syriza (to use a different metaphor)
had to show its hand.
The historical period after the death of capitalist society from an overdoseof capitalism will be one lacking collective political capacities, making for along and indecisive transition – a time of crisis as the new normal, a crisis
that is neither transformative nor adaptive, and unable to either restore
capitalism to equilibrium or replace it with something better. Deep changes
will occur, rapidly and continuously, but they will be unpredictable and inany case ungovernable. Western capitalism will decay, but non-Western
capitalism will not take its place, certainly not on a global scale; and neither
will Western non-capitalism.

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be one lacking
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With regards to non-Western capitalism, China will for many reasons not beable to take over as capitalism’s carrier nation and provide an orderly global
environment for its further progress. Nor will there be a co-directorate of
China and the US, amicably dividing between them the task of making theworld safe for capitalism. And concerning non-capitalism, there is no suchthing today as a global socialist movement comparable to the socialismsof the 19th and early 20th centuries, which so successfully confronted andtransformed capitalism in national power struggles. As long as capitalist
dynamism continues to outrun collective order-making and the developmentof non-market institutions, as it has for several decades now, it disempowers
both capitalism’s government and its opposition, resulting in capitalism being
neither reborn nor replaced.

The state system in disarray
The social disorder of the emerging interregnum makes itself felt
at the macro level in a wide variety of dysfunctions of states andgovernments. In one way or another, they are all related to the politicallywilled obsolescence of national borders in a global economy, and thecontests that arise over it. Border contests raise basic issues concerning
the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, national
government and global governance, and particularism and universalism,in ever-new configurations and permutations. Generally, in an era of‘globalization’, governments are coming under pressure to open up theircountries, rendering national state borders economically and politicallyirrelevant. As a consequence they must commit to policies of structural‘adjustment’ in order to make their societies ready for global competition,by cutting back on protective social policies in favor of ‘enabling’ ones,
while increasingly allowing their citizens to be exposed to the vagaries ofinternational markets.

“As long as capitalist
dynamism
continues tooutrun collective
order-making andthe developmentof non-market
institutions it
disempowers
both capitalism’s
government andits opposition.”

Redefining borders in line with the demands of globalisation and in pursuitof liberalisation invalidates national democratic institutions as channels
for transmitting popular demands for social protection against market
pressures. For a while this resulted in electorates – and particularly
voters at the lower end of the income distribution – losing interest in
democratic politics. As restructuring pressures increased, however, votersnegatively affected by liberalisation and globalisation rediscovered politicalparticipation as a means of expressing protest. The resulting increase inelectoral turnout benefits new ‘populist’ parties, mostly on the right but
sometimes also on the left. Their common denominator is a radical rejectionof established political elites, combined with insistence that national
democracy must supersede the demands of international markets.
Ideologically, the ensuing conflict is complicated by the fact that freemarket liberals have found it convenient to appropriate the internationalismof the progressive left as a rhetorical tool with which to discredit social
protection and the institutions associated with it – particularly national
democracy and the national welfare state. As a result, their defenders run
the risk of being accused of nationalism or xenophobia, and indeed racism.
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it is driving a wedge into the constituency of left-liberal political parties,
between their new middle-class supporters who profess to internationalism
in the name of universal solidarity, and their traditional working-class voters
whose experience tends to be that open borders undermine their jobs andways of life. The issue is particularly relevant when it comes to immigrationand the possibility it raises for developed national economies to attract
an unlimited supply of labour, without having to improve the conditions inwhich families raise children. Here, conflicts over economic interests may
become particularly acute and emotionally and ideologically charged, as
those hoping to benefit from lower prices and better quality – for example,
in the provision of services – may be tempted to deploy a universalistic
rhetoric of international solidarity in order to silence those who feelthreatened by low-wage competition.
Returning to the architecture of the contemporary state system and its
growing dysfunctionality, all attempts to move redistributive government
and the protective national welfare state to the international level havefailed – even in Europe, where such attempts were more consciously
made than elsewhere. In the course of the 1980s, at the latest, thesocial democratic project to turn the then European Community intoa transnational welfare state was aborted, its most effective opponent
being the British government under Margaret Thatcher. Subsequently,‘Europe’ became a liberalisation machine for its associated national
political economies, with particular emphasis on social policy cutbacks,
the privatisation of public services, and fiscal consolidation. Today,
European integration is essentially about curtailing corrective stateintervention into the capitalist market economy and extending the socalled ‘four freedoms’ of the internal market, including the free movementof labour, conceived as a quasi-constitutional right of citizens of all
member states.

“Those hoping tobenefit from lower
prices and better
quality may be
tempted to deploy
a universalistic
rhetoric ofinternational
solidarity in order
to silence those
who feel threatenedby low-wagecompetition.”

The British case
Freedom of movement became a prominent issue with the eastern
accession in 2004. It was, unsurprisingly, Britain (this time under New
Labour) that made the most extensive use of the liberalisation of European
labour markets, by waiving the waiting period allowed under the treaties
and immediately opening its national economy to eastern European labour.
(Germany under Schröder, by contrast, chose a waiting period of sevenyears.) Clearly the intention was to improve the labour supply in Britain
both quantitatively and qualitatively, to compensate for domestic skill
deficits while keeping wages low. It appears that the move added roughly
750,000 Polish workers and several hundred thousand other eastern
Europeans to the British labour force in a short time.
In subsequent years, strong moral pressures from an all-party proimmigration ‘grand coalition’ notwithstanding, dissatisfaction with labour
market internationalism and EU immigration rules seems to have grownin Britain, frustrating all attempts to establish legitimacy for a borderlesscosmopolitan (that is, non-protective) nation state. A powerful expressionof this dissatisfaction was the rise of the UK Independence Party (Ukip),© 2016 The Author/s. Juncture © 2016 IPPR

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which articulated the rising popular discontent through a call for Britain toleave the EU that reflected an apparently widespread feeling that the country
should ‘take back control’ over its borders. ‘Taking back control’ promiseda restoration of democratic accountability that many, including many on theliberal left, felt had been lost to Brussels’ summit diplomacy and technocracy.
With hindsight it seems that the idea that Britain should again be free tomake its own laws was given added momentum by the spectacle of thetreatment of Greece as a member of the European monetary union, and also
by the claim of the German government in 2015 that its peculiar, domesticallymotivated interpretation of European and international law on refugees andasylum seekers had to be binding for Europe as a whole, including Britain.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, particularly in times of systemic
disintegration and radical uncertainty. The story of Brexit may be taken toillustrate the bizarreries of the perverse political power plays that become
possible when an old social order is dying without a new one waiting totake over. To the outside observer, it appears that popular anti-European
pressure must at some point have become so strong that David Cameron’s
wing of the Conservative party felt a need to once and for all re-establish
the legitimacy of open-borders liberalism. The way this was to be done wasby calling a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, which Cameronwas confident he would win thanks to a package of superficial concessions
on the free movement of labour that would be provided by Brussels. No
thought was given to what would happen if the vote was lost, because it was
firmly expected to be won. That the same Conservative party would spawn
a movement to leave the EU must have come as a surprise, especially since
Leavers and Remainers shared the same neoliberal economic philosophy.
Probably the prospect of carving up the Labour party right down the middle
by luring its working-class supporters into the Conservative camp while also
finishing off Ukip – thereby establishing ever-lasting electoral hegemony for
the Conservatives – was too tempting. Here, no thought was given to what
was to be done if the referendum was won, perhaps because the strategic
goal of the Leave camp within the Conservative party would have beenachieved even if the vote was narrowly lost.8
The politics of Brexit, national idiosyncrasies notwithstanding, areinformed (or misinformed) by a deep general crisis in the contemporary
state system that is in turn related to the decline of the capitalist social
order. This is already evident from the fact that the referendum on British
membership of the EU was preceded by a referendum on Scottish
membership of the UK. Like national sovereigntism, regional separatism
reflects declining confidence in a (self-)disempowered national state thathas given up its capacity to protect its citizens from market forces indeference to international liberalisation. (That Scottish separatists seemto intend to subject themselves, upon achieving independence, to thevery liberalisation engine that the UK has just decided to leave is another
8

The Remain revolt of old New Labour against the ‘populist’ ‘old Labour’ (led by the Remainer Corbyn)
might still result in the break-up of the Labour party. Cameron, of course, was also hoping to destroy
Labour. Where he differed from Conservative Leaver Boris Johnson was that he placed his bet on
attracting the progressive cosmopolitan middle-class Labour camp, especially since it was possiblethat Corbyn himself would opt for Leave. Since Corbyn didn’t do him this favour, the Tories now
depend on Labour cutting itself up.

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oddity that is characteristic of a situation of radical uncertainty in whichbeing small may seem beautiful but is also risky.) The struggle over British
EU membership, intertwined as it is with the struggle over Scottish and,perhaps, Welsh and Northern Irish UK membership, may be taken as
one manifestation among others of the ‘sinister phenomena of the mostdiverse sort’9 that, according to Gramsci, are to be expected in an ageof interregnum: a search for political and institutional reconstruction
under conditions of structural indeterminacy, offering ample opportunity
for disoriented, arbitrary, frivolous and cynical maneuvering as the statesystem of neoliberal capitalism turns dysfunctional with no cure in sight.
Ironically, the first modern state, the UK, could be also the first to
disintegrate, after having, under Thatcher, foreclosed the European rescueof the social-democratic welfare state in the 1980s. Equally ironically, it
is Britain, which was instrumental in turning European integration into
a neoliberal restructuring tool, that is now putting an end to its further
progress. As the supranational order of integrated Europe is breaking down,
nobody knows how a renationalised state system is to be sustained andoperated in a globalised political economy – note the absence of a plan B
on the part of the Remainers, and of a plan A among the Leavers. How will
the newly sovereign Britain of the future use its reinstated borders to ‘takeback control’ of its collective fate?
One cannot avoid taking note here of new prime minister Theresa May’s
Birmingham speech of 11 July, which won her the support of her party.
May vowed to honour the outcome of the referendum and duly resignfrom the EU (an organisation, of course, that is now – for reasons of its
own, related again to the multi-morbidity of contemporary capitalism –so moribund that one doubts whether it will still exist in five years). But
she also interspersed her obviously carefully crafted speech with a ‘one
nation’ rhetoric not heard from a Conservative leader since the 1980s(but heard from a Labour one rather more recently): less inequality,
controls on executive compensation, more equitable taxation, better
public education, a voice for workers in corporate governance, theprotection of British jobs from relocation abroad, and so on – all of this,of course, combined with less immigration. This program, clearly to theleft of the Labour party in its New Labour incarnation, may have been
‘just political’ – and if not, it may soon turn out to be impractical. But it
is interesting nevertheless that it appeared when and where it did.

“Ironically it isBritain, which was
instrumental inturning European
integration into
a neoliberal
restructuring tool,that is now putting
an end to its
further progress.”

Wolfgang Streeck is director and professor emeritus of the
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne.

9Gramsci 1971.

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Juncture\

Volume 23\

ISSUE 2

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