The World Wolfgang Streeck Wants

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: The New York Times called you “the Karl Marx of our time” after the release of Taking Back Control?, which diagnosed the crisis of “neoliberal globalization” and liberal democracy. Of course, there are plenty of theories regarding the cause(s) of this crisis, so what makes your argument distinct—and are you surprised by the attention the book has garnered here in the US?

Wolfgang Streeck: I am trying, in all modesty, to contribute to a materialistic rather than a normative, moralizing theory of the decline, not of liberal but of capitalist democracy. This brings the state—more precisely, the international state system—back into class theory. One of my central claims is that in neoliberal globalism, the would-be governors—the national and international political classes of the capitalist state—are no longer able to govern, facing problems that escape “solution,” while a growing section of the supposed-to-be-governed refuse being governed by them: Lenin’s definition of a “revolutionary moment.” Put this conceptual grid on the situation of the United States, first under Biden and then under Trump, and you will see it fits reasonably well.

DSJ: You have spoken and written persuasively about how the Second World War gave rise to a new political and economic order. What kinds of possible rupture do you see for the current order that could lead to a similar shaking of its foundations?

WS: The two world wars of the 20th century resulted in a deep reorganization of the capitalist world system: first, the replacement of the Europe-centered empires by a system of nation-states; second, the rise of the United States as the imperial center of a capitalist world system with its unique combination of national sovereignty and international hegemony. It is true that both moments of capitalist reorganization benefited, in many ways, the working class in the two “postwar settlements.” But this doesn’t always have to be so.

Today, the ruling classes of the United States may conclude that they can remain ruling classes, in a way that suits them, only by going to war against America’s rising rival in China. This does not necessarily mean more power for the subordinate class. Wars are now mostly fought by professional soldiers, and the working class in the United States and elsewhere—in many cases low-skilled and at risk of deportation—may be much less capable of organizing and fighting for their own interests instead of American interests. Technology is central to the way wars are fought and ended too, and the stuff that will be used next time seems very different from what was used even in World War II.

DSJ: How do you respond to left critics who see you as being a nationalist?

WS: I don’t care about clichés; I say what honest thinking leads me to conclude is true. Otherwise, the answer depends in part on what is meant by nationalist. If nationalism means feeling superior to others on account of your origin, this is both morally destructive and politically explosive. There are people in the United States who believe that their country is morally special, “the indispensable nation,” a “shining city on a hill,” somehow in charge of setting things right everywhere, the “American way.” But if nationalism means to accept a special responsibility for the country, the society, that has brought you up, then it is, in my view, an essential element of citizenship—only in this case, I would prefer to speak of patriotism rather than nationalism.

In the case of Germany, of course, something else plays a role. As a German, you are expected to feel some lasting responsibility for the unprecedented breakdown of civilization—of humanity—that occurred in your country. However you may define that responsibility, in my view it includes reminding oneself of the possibility that something as unimaginably terrible as this could really happen, right where you grew up a few years later, in what everybody would have thought was a civilized country. Being that close to the scene of the disaster, you have, I firmly believe, some special duty to remind yourself and perhaps others of this apparently real possibility. I consider this expectation legitimate, which played a role when I decided not to take on American citizenship, because it would have seemed to me like an all-too-cheap cop-out.

In this context, I cannot avoid confessing that I have a strong emotional attachment to Bertolt Brecht’s “Kinderhymne,” or “Children’s Hymn,” written in 1950 as an alternative national anthem for the young German Democratic Republic. There are decent English translations, but inevitably they cannot fully render the masterful poetic craftsmanship of the original. Here is the first verse, first in German, then in English:

Anmut sparet nicht noch Mühe
Leidenschaft nicht noch Verstand
Dass ein gutes Deutschland blühe
Wie ein andres gutes Land.

(Spare no grace and spare no labor,
Passion, heart, nor intellect,
That a just and noble Germany
Like all others may be kept.)

DSJ: You have a long-running feud with the economic historian Adam Tooze. Ultimately, what does Tooze represent for you?

WS: No “running feud,” no. He once tried to publicly character-assassinate me in a way that I consider unforgivable, that’s all. Don’t call this a “feud,” because a feud—in particular a “running” one—would require an ongoing exchange of blows. Nothing like this here. In fact, I am right now in deep admiration of the courage with which Tooze is acting in the Columbia University battles over Palestine and freedom of speech—while the university where I was proud to study sociology in the early 1970s behaves in such detestable ways.

DSJ: In Germany, if your politics are most accurately reflected in the party program of Sahra Wagenknecht —a program that some have described as “left conservatism”—then why has it not once, but twice now, failed to gain traction?

WS: Your question suggests that if a political program came close to my politics, that would somehow guarantee it a majority in the Bundestag. I wish it was so. In a multiparty system, you work yourself up from below—very below—with lots of political ruins along the road. Nor am I sure what you mean by “not once, but twice”: In February’s federal election, BSW [the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht] failed by a hair’s breadth to cross the 5 percent threshold—no other new party came as close to 5 percent in the history of the Federal Republic. Bad luck.

The fact that the election had been called seven months early played a role—that lost time could have been used to write and pass a coherent program; build up 16 halfway-stable state-level organizations; and assemble a team around Sahra Wagenknecht to distribute the burden of leadership on more shoulders. There also was Donald Trump, who can always be blamed, in this case for taking the peace issue briefly out of the battle, neutralizing BSW’s strongest card in the election. I have analyzed this and the surrounding political context in a lengthy article for New Left Review’s Internet journal, Sidecar.

DSJ: You have written in different ways about migration over the years. You argue that voters never really have much say in the issue, which gets decided well above their heads not only in Berlin, but perhaps more crucially in Brussels. Let’s leave the substantive impact of migration on European wages to the side and just agree that, discursively speaking, this is an issue that is not going away anytime soon.

Why, in such a fraught atmosphere, do you not write more constructively about forms of development abroad that could stem the amount of migration into Europe? You have at times said that the last thing Europe needs is a new underclass of migrants. But instead of giving vent to popular passions on the subject, how do you think the problem could be alleviated in a humane way? If you were a young person living in an economically depressed part of the world with little opportunity, wouldn’t you also look into how to get to Europe?

WS: Not all do, I’m sure. Some can’t find the money to pay the smugglers; others may look for local collective action instead. In my younger years, I might have found it plausible in their situation to try and get hold of a machine gun, to get rid of those hoarding my country’s wealth in Swiss bank accounts while lobbying the societies of Europe to employ their potential revolutionaries as street sweepers. I find it outright obscene to celebrate ourselves for employing a low-wage proletariat in our countries who, via remittances, keep their families at home from starving, which is a poor substitute for the economic development of which the local rich, together with the global rich, deprive the local poor. How? By taking their countries’ capital as investment to the same places where their countries’ poor end up as immigrants—places where the appearance of charitably open borders covers up their refusal to agree to a fair international trade system that would allow for sustainable economic development, making emigration unnecessary.

DSJ: What might this fair international trade system look like that allows for sustainable economic development in these countries that currently are suffering? Would it need to take into account the ways that Europe has extracted wealth from them and hindered their development in the past? And is developing this humane system something that could feasibly be initiated at a moment when the world is moving in the opposite direction—toward retrenchment and protectionism?

WS: Let me remind you that not only Europe has extracted or is extracting wealth from elsewhere in the world. The question is not for us, or me, to design a fair world trade regime—nor is it for the United States, of all countries. The good news is that we are moving into a multipolar world where a new alignment of the nonaligned, the BRICS countries, are trying to set up a new financial system that would enable them to do without the US dollar—and without the kind of “development aid” that has become self-perpetuating because it causes so little “development.”

I have nothing at all against what you call “protectionism” if it protects those who need and deserve protection—for example, in the form of capital controls. There are astounding sums of money that originate in so-called poor countries that are hidden in New York, London, and Zurich. Would it not be progress if the BRICS countries actually succeeded in setting up an international development bank and a payment system and free trade zones of their own?

DSJ: In recent years, you have consistently pointed out that the European Union, and Germany in particular, has paid a high price for weaning itself off Russian gas supplies—that what has replaced them is a growing dependence on the United States for both energy and defense. At a time when the new Trump administration is playing hardball with European allies, even signaling that its commitment to NATO is conditional, do you see an opening for a Euro-Gaullist realignment that would perhaps not break Europe’s dependence on its guardian power, but at least reduce it?

WS: Those surveys count for nothing; all depends on how the questions are worded and framed. “Euro-Gaullism,” as you call it, is almost a contradiction in terms, because in “Gaullism” of any kind, Europe can be Europe only if it is led by France. But would Germany, the biggest and richest country in Western Europe, be willing to submit to French hegemony and entrust its national interests to the vagaries of French domestic politics? I consider this totally unrealistic. Mind you, the next French president might be Marine Le Pen. Also remember that France is a nuclear power but Germany isn’t. Could Germany trust a French promise of nuclear protection? It has been difficult enough to trust in the American nuclear umbrella all through the Cold War.

In practice, this trust was made easier by Germany’s being a de facto American dependency, with 40,000 American troops stationed on German soil together with an unknown number of nuclear warheads, making Germany the strategically most important American military base next to Okinawa—all American military operations in the Middle East being controlled out of Wiesbaden, and the bulk of American military air traffic east of the Atlantic being routed through Ramstein. Will the Americans give this up? The hardware sunk into the ground at Ramstein alone must be absolutely phenomenal. Still, and in spite of all this, all German governments had a hard time convincing themselves that the United States would risk losing its German-based troops—let alone New York—in a war to defend Bonn, then Berlin. That France would sacrifice Paris for this purpose, or the British London, seems even more unimaginable. Mourir pour Dantzig?

However you look at it, Germany is the linchpin of the post-American European state system. As long as European governments succeed in dressing up Russia as something like the Land of Mordor in the European collective imagination, East European, Baltic, and perhaps Scandinavian EU member states will try to bind Germany—and with it, the EU as a whole—firmly into an anti-Russian alliance. At the other end, France will use its seat on the UN Security Council and its status as a nuclear power to turn a united Europe into a third or fourth global power under French leadership, while the East Europeans draw on the rich resources of a nonnuclear Germany in pursuit of their own national interests.

None of this corresponds to German interests, as in both versions of a future European state system—East European and French—Germany figures merely as a means to other countries’ ends. There is no provision in them for arms control and a generally confidence-building regime on the broader Eurasian continent: for a Eurasian economic zone from Lisbon to Vladivostok, as has been proposed by Russian presidents from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Putin; for pulling Russia away from China rather than driving it into its arms; for incentives to Russia rather than—or at least in addition to—deterrence, etc. As long as Germany is not a military great power—especially a nuclear power, one that can aspire to hegemonic status in a West European regional Grossraum, and God beware!—Germany’s national interests can only be in a peaceful settlement of conflicts that would have to include rather than leave out Russia.

DSJ: Do you think that the Baltic countries are right to worry about a possible Russian invasion? And if so, do you think Germany has any obligations to help her allies?

WS: I assume that the majority of the citizens of the Baltic countries do not want a second European war with Russia, in addition to the war in Ukraine—apart, perhaps, from a few fanatics who would like to see a second front opened, hoping for a victory of “the West” and a cutting up of the Russian Federation into four or five independent—i.e., West-dependent—states. I am sure that, Ursula von der Leyen’s war rhetoric aside, nobody in Western Europe in their right mind would be willing to give this a try and pay the price for it, even if the war could be “won,” which in my view it cannot. Still, the prevailing attitude in the Baltics seems to be the Imperial Roman one: Si vis pacem, para bellum—”If you want peace, prepare for war.” Since the Baltic states are too tiny to credibly prepare for war against Russia, they are trying hard to get other European countries, in particular Germany, to do this for them. I doubt that the Germans will, in the end, buy into this, especially if the United States extracts itself from the European theater to move on to the China Seas.

I still want to convince myself that, in Germany and other West European countries, the insight will ultimately prevail that if you want peace, you must prepare for peace—not for war. By “preparing for peace,” I mean building a system of collective security that includes Russia, of mutual arms control, of the protection of national minorities, as well as an economic free trade zone “from Lisbon to Vladivostok,” etc. If the Baltics have no confidence in this sort of peacemaking, this does not mean that other countries are obliged to have no confidence either. It is dangerous for the tail to hope that it can wag the dog, especially if being wagged may cost the dog’s life.

It may not be entirely inappropriate in this context to remember that the Baltic states had already sided once with Germany against Russia before 1945, betting on Germany winning its war against the Soviet Union. This didn’t quite work out, although the Baltic countries never failed in their loyalty to the Nazis, supporting them with a good number of SS divisions and loyally participating in the persecution and extermination of the local Jewry. Less fiery anti-Russian rhetoric might be advisable also in light of the vivid Russian memories of being invaded by Western powers—memories that clearly played a role in the case of Ukraine. Moreover, it might help as a confidence-building measure to grant full rights of citizenship to the Baltic countries’ sizable Russian minorities, perhaps even combined with some sort of federalist devolution, which could well be part of a European peace settlement—along the lines of the current Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—at the end of the war in Ukraine

DSJ: What do you make of the Trump presidency so far? Does it confirm the argument of Taking Back Control?, or are you surprised by anything that Trump is doing?

WS: I try not to be surprised. The United States is a country in complete, perhaps even terminal disarray; anything can happen there, but so far little, I believe, can be made to stick. I even don’t preclude a deep-state uprising against Trump, perhaps in the form of his being removed from office as incompetent, as provided for in the American Constitution. There might also be civil unrest issuing in something like a civil war, with right-wing militias defending the Trump regime against the judiciary, the military, parts of the secret services, even left-wing militias—Europeans tend to forget that American citizens are armed to the teeth. The argument in the book is: Protect yourself from being protected by the United States under Trump and his successors, JD Vance or Elon Musk or whoever. It is also that a unipolar global order, such as that of the three neoliberal decades since the 1990s, cannot and in any case must not be restored. Try instead to build in Europe an egalitarian commonwealth of sovereign states dedicated to voluntary cooperation in their and all others’ interests.