Visions of Europeanism in the Mandel-Poulantzas Debate, 1967-1979

Visions of Europeanism in the Mandel-Poulantzas Debate, 1967-1979 * Anyone asking the question of what is dead and what is living in contemporary Marxist Europeanism can, of course, not evade a reference to recent political events. Although both traditions have always presented themselves as a rather curious pair, the practical coupling of ‘Marxism’ and ‘Europeanism’ will seem even more improbable in the light of recent political developments. 2015 saw both the parabolic rise and subsequent fall of Europe’s first far-left party to hold governmental power, diving from hope to hopelessness, 'Trotsky to MacDonald', in no less than a week.1 As expected, 1 Accounts of the episode can be found in Ken McMullen (ed.), OXI, An Act of Resistance: The Screenplay and Commentary (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016); Ambrose EvansPritchard, ‘Climbdown by Syriza as it agrees austerity terms rejected in vote’, in The Daily Telegraph (11 June 2015); Jan-Werner Müller, ‘Rule-breaking’, in London Review of Books 37 (August 2015), p.3; 1 ideological introspection on behalf of European leftists on the 'Greek debacle' has not held off. Engaging with the recent stream of self-examination, political scientist Philip Cunliffe has yet observed the existence of a peculiar trend: an inability on behalf of Marxist theorists to provide an ontological theory of the European Union – or, as Cunliffe notes, their incapacity to tell us what the EU is.2 As he puts it, ‘part of the problem with the latest left-wing face-back towards the European state is that the Left itself is not clear about what it is turning away from, and what it opposes in the EU’.3 On the one hand, the EU is seen as ‘monolithic and sprawling’, an ineffective bureaucratic moloch, while it is also cast as a ‘stripped-back proto-state, focused on neoliberal imperatives’.4 Both perspectives seem incommensurable in the least, and testify to the general impression that the European Union remains to Marxists ‘the coldest of all cold beasts’. 5 This essay will contend that some historical exegesis might be at place here. In surveying the genealogical trajectory of Marxist thinking on European integration, it turns to one of the most important post-war debates for the sake of historiographical clarification. The 1967-19796 discussion between Greek political theorist Nicos Poulantzas and Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel, I claim, still presents us with two elementary forms of Jan-Werner Müller, ‘Parsing Populism’, in Juncture 22 (September 2015), 80-89; Tariq Ali, ‘Diary’ in London Review of Books 37 (July 2015), pp.38-39; Dan Hancox, ‘Can They?’, in London Review of Books 37 (December 2015), pp.25-26; Dan Tooze, ‘After the Wars’, in London Review of Books 37 (November 2015), pp.15-17; Christopher Bickerton, ‘How Britain’s Left Fell Out of Love With Europe’, in Wall Street Journal (24 June 2015), p.13; Yanis Varoufakis, ‘Leur seul objectif était de nous humilier’, in Le monde diplomatique 62 (August 2015), pp.16-18; Frédéric Lordon, ‘DiEM perdidi’, in Le monde diplomatique 63 (February 2016), pp.15-17. The ‘Trotsky to MacDonald’-metaphor is Evans-Pritchard’s, while the ‘Greek debacle’ is a phrase of Perry Anderson’s. The ‘Europeanism’ referred to in the title denotes an economic process as much as an ideology; this meaning, certain ‘visions’ of how a politically and economically united continent would look like. This denotation is to be distinguished from the word as the synonym for ‘EU Studies’. 2 See Philip Cunliffe, ‘Swapping One Mirage for Another: The Left’s Turn Away from Social Europe’, in The Current Moment, online edn., August 2015 [https://thecurrentmoment.com/2015/08/10/ swapping-one-mirage-for-another-the-lefts-turn-away-from-social-europe/, last accessed 03/03/2016]. 3 Ibid., n.pag., web. 4 Ibid., n.pag. web. 5 Quoted in Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 19771978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave and MacMillan, 2008), p.144. The original citation is a Nietzschean product, originating in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 6 The temporal framework, although likely to appear arbitrary in its historical demarcations, refers to two seminal moments in what will be called the ‘Eurocommunist-Europeanist-‘debate between Mandel and Poulantzas: Mandel’s 1967 publication of Europe versus America, which first stipulated his ‘supranational’ theses, and Poulantzas’ final interviews on the problems of Eurocommunism before his suicide in 1979. 2 Marxist thinking on the EU: the one emphasising the inevitable ‘supranationalisation’ of European nation-states into a unified continental bloc, the other focused on the intergovernmental impetus behind European integration as mainly relying on American infrastructural and ideological backing. In offering a contextual reading of the MandelPoulantzas debate, I will argue that the theoretical commitments of both of the participants cannot be seen outside of their normative-political denominations. In doing so, this essay seeks to explain why, both in the fields of praxis and theory, the Left has had such troublesome dealings with the ‘actually existing’ EU and its institutional ethos. The final endeavour of this essay is by no means to personalise both of the theorists' contributions.7 Rather, its aims lie in localising both of the their theoretical interventions to the extent that, as I will argue, as much as they can be seen as contributions to a widening canon of Marxist scholarship, they must also be given worthy consideration as tactical moves on the chessboard of anti-capitalist politics. The proposed theses on Europeanism of both participants are, as I will claim, best read as specific interventions in historically located debates, relating as much to questions of practical politics as they contribute to a widening genre of Marxist state theory dealing with the rise of the European Leviathan. By providing such a contextual reading, the aim of this essay might then said to be twofold. Firstly, it seeks investigate how the theses of both participants in the ‘European capital-debate’ have managed to sediment themselves into a Marxist language on European integration which still holds wider currency today and continues to inform emancipatory practices, but whose theoretical underpinnings retain little empirical backing in the face of recent integrational developments. Secondly, this essay then seeks to make a more general point about contemporary praxis-theory relations with the European Marxist tradition, arguing that leftist thinking about the EU from an ontological perspective is always prone to entanglement with political commitments, and 7 This threat of ‘personalisation’, for example, is indeed a problem in recent biographical work on Mandel, such as that of Jan Willem Stutje. A tendency can be detected, which assumes a ‘primary psychoanalytical’ attachment of Mandel to the ideal of a united, internationalist Europe, thereby collapsing the political into the psychological. In no way does this essay intend to do the latter. See Jan Willem Stutje, Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred (London: Verso Books, 2008) and a criticism of the ‘personalistic’ tendencies within the work, Brian Palmer, ‘The Personal, the Political, and Permanent Revolution: Ernest Mandel and the Conflicted Legacies of Trotskyism’, in Internationaal instituut voor sociale geschiedenis 55 (2010), p.125. See also Tariq Ali, ‘Introduction’ in Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred (London: Verso Books, 2008), pp..xvii-xviii. 3 should not be confused with genuinely a-partisan reflection on the 'nature' of the European beast. The European Capital-debate, 1967-1979 Writing at a conjunctural moment for the European Left, Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel provided a rallying cry to those surveying the field of post1968 European politics. In the face of increasing capital integration between European monopolists, and a heightened class struggle in Western metropoles, there were for Mandel only two legitimate Marxist options to the occurrence of another ‘organic crisis’: relevance or anachronism. ‘Between the devil of subjection to America’ he noted ‘and the deep blue sea of ‘Americanization’, socialism offer us the only clear way out. Forward, against American and European monopolists, to the United Socialist States of Europe!’8 Mandel’s words were issued at the end of a lengthy and often highly technical treatment of what he saw as ‘one of the most important contradictions of imperialism in our current day’: the rise of a supranational European state-bloc, wholly capable of countering American hegemony in the Western hemisphere. As noted in the opening remarks to his Europe versus America, ‘no power ever lost absolute supremacy so quickly. The ‘American Century’ did not last ten years… After having benefited from the law of unequal development for a century, the United States is now becoming its victim.’9 Written just before the ‘revolutionary upheaval’ in France, and first published in Germany, Mandel’s book was to serve both as a theoretical exposition and a practical almanac. Contemporary Marxists, Mandel argued, should keep in mind that the unification of European capital was inevitable; therefore its political consequences should be heeded carefully. ‘When the socialist labour movement determines its tactics towards the rivalry between European and American Capital’ he concluded ‘it should remember that capitalism is ultimately the American ‘Trojan Horse’ in Europe.’10 The socialist answer to the crisis of European capitalism, in Mandel’s view, ‘is that we do not 8 Ernest Mandel, Europe versus America? Contradictions of Imperialism (London: New Left Books, 1970), p.134. 9 Ibid., p.7. 10 Ibid., p.134. 4 wish to choose between three hundred American or three hundred European masters to govern 350 million Europeans… Socialism offers us the only clear way out.’11 Contextually, Mandel’s call was undoubtedly addressed to a multiplicity of audiences, crossing political, academic and journalistic spheres. As for its scholarly reach, Europe versus America was mainly a criticism of the French dirigiste Servan-Schreiber, whose 1967 The American Challenge constituted one of the first explicit technocratic calls for the unification of European nation-states under the umbrella of supranationality. 12 Mandel saw in Servan-Schreiber’s theses a clear omen of the increasing obsolescence of the nation state against the anarchic expansion of European capitalism and interAtlantic competition, reading his book as a ‘bourgeois revolutionary manifesto’. 13 Although the formal aims proposed by the French politician were laudable, the overall thrust of his argument was in need of deep radicalisation: transnational co-operation on the European continent was desirable not because as it countered American hegemony, but because it spelled out the ‘accelerationist’ prelude to the ‘libretto of socialism in Europe’. ‘One should not deduce’ Mandel stated ‘that it is in the interest of the European working class to put a brake on the interpenetration of European capital… We must place our own socialist aims on the agenda.’14 The initial synthesis Mandel assembled in Europe versus America was explicitly extended into his practices as a political activist. As a quintessential ‘Non-Jewish Jew’ of Flemish descent, Mandel had long been a faithful proponent of a proletarian Europeanism that could escape the petty confines of national debates.15 Of all post-war Marxists, it is in fact hard to find a more committed internationalist than Mandel: child to Polish émigrés steeped in Communist militancy, a self-taught polymath in six 11 Ibid., p.131. See Mandel, Europe versus America, pp.32-39, pp.115-134; Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge (London: Collins, 1981), passim. 13 See Mandel, Europe versus America, pp.107-108, pp.118-120. 14 Ibid., p.112. 15 See Jan Willem Stutje,’A Young Man in the War’, Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred (London: Verso Books, 2009), 16-41; Jan Willem Stutje, ‘The Legendary Optimism of Ernest Mandel’, in Historical Materialism 80 (December 2007), 1-8; Gilbert Achcar (ed.), The Legacy of Ernest Mandel (London: Verso Books, 1999). For Deutscher’s coining of the term, see Isaac Deutscher, The NonJewish Jew and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). Stutje notes that Mandel was later seen as one of the most important non-neoclassical economists of the twentieth century. For Mandel’s own economic works, see Ernest Mandel, The Long Waves of Capitalist Development: A Marxist Interpretation (London: Verso Books, 1995); Late Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 1978); Marxist Economic Theory (London: Merlin Press, 1968). 12 5 languages, whose widely translated books on Marxist economic theory were often regarded as the nec plus ultra of their theoretical epoch.16 First and foremost, Mandel’s work as a theorist was complemented by what biographer Jan Willem Stutje called a ‘legendary optimism’ in his life as a professional revolutionary, characterised by an almost frenetic devotion to political action. 17 As Stutje notes, Mandel’s personal background practically destined him for a revolutionary activism that was pan-European in its nature, as heir to the internationalism his great intellectual hero Trotsky had displayed after the October Revolution.18 Inevitably, Mandel’s advice was borne out by the movement he acted as a spearhead for. In August 1965, the Fourth International’s monthly bulletin included a section on ‘The Evolution of Capitalism in Western Europe and the Task for Revolutionary Marxists’, discussing the ‘new economic situation’ that had arisen on the continent of late. As expected, the Trotskyites argued for an unabashedly accelerationist doctrine in the face of increasing capital concentration on the continent. ‘The longer the Common Market lasts and the more it becomes institutionalised (including particularly the adoption of a common currency), the more “European” capital will gain in importance in comparison to “national” capital, and the more the Common Market will become irreversible.’19 The section itself yet ended with a cautious proviso to those willing to battle for the proletarian cause in Europe, stating that ‘the point of irreversibility had not yet been reached’ and that only a ‘general recession’ could bring about the necessary momentum for a revolutionary conjuncture. 20 In a remarkably clairvoyant turn of phrase with regards to later developments in the capitalist heartland, the pamphlet distinguished between two possible tactics which the European ruling class might deploy in the face of such a historic recession: a ‘protectionist’ retreat into the boundaries of the national state, or a European ‘flight forward’ towards genuine supranationalism and shared monetary policy.21 16 Stutje, ‘Legendary Optimism’, pp.4-5. Stutje, Ernest Mandel, pp.41-59. 18 Ibid., p.246. 19 United Secretariat of the Socialist Workers’ Party, ‘The Evolution of Capitalism in Western Europe and the Tasks of Revolutionary Marxists’, in International Information Bulletin (August 1965), p.4. See also United Secretariat of the Socialist Workers’ Party, ‘The Rise of the World Revolurion’, in International Information Bulletin (October 1968), 1-46. 20 Ibid., p.5. 21 Ibid., p.5. 17 6 The same cautious proviso on the ‘embryonic’ nature of the current state of European integration could be found in Mandel’s work in the late 1960s. His Europe versus America was followed up by a pamphletic rendering of his original theses on European integration in another 1967 publication entitled ‘International Capitalism and Supranationality’, wherein he once again urged intellectual compatriots to heed the call of the Common Market and the political unification which would follow in its path. ‘The larger the growth of capital interpenetration’ he noted ‘the stronger the pull for transferring certain given powers from the national states of the six countries towards the Common Market supra-national units.’ 22 In an argument similar to the one expounded in his Europe vs. America, Mandel provided extensive empirical support for his claims, listing the recent Agfa-Gevaert, Schneider-Empain and other French-German mergers as examples in case.23 More specifically, he now lay strong emphasis on the ‘international interpenetration of capital’ as a structural necessity for European industrialists, who, in order to counter North-American competitive pressure saw themselves forced to resort to ‘capital amalgamation’.24 Mandel continued by making a transhistorical comparison with the German Zollverein, arguing that the Common Market was nothing more than a ‘free trade area’ confined by ‘one external tariff’.25 ‘By itself’, Mandel conceded ‘the Common Market is nothing but a means of facilitating trade expansion, and its impact on the national economies of the six member countries has still not yet outgrown these limits.’ 26 Yet again Mandel himself admitted to the temporary and incubatory nature of these developments. Mandel’s theoretical claims for the coming about of a European super-state, embodied by its own internationalised bureaucracy, were intimately linked to his own aspirations as to what a European form of socialism would look like. What he saw as 'the crystallisation of European capitals' was thus as much the expression of a historical observation as it was the voicing of an ancestral, Trotskyite wish: the attempt to create a European Federation of Soviet Republics, capable of countering the backward chauvinism which had bedevilled the Old World for too long. This ‘Trotskyite Europeanism’ – as later writers have named it – laid claim to a genealogy which went back to the very founder of the tradition Mandel operated in.27 22 Ernest Mandel, ‘International Capitalism and Supranationality’, in Socialist Register 4 (1967), p.31. Ibid., p.28-29. 24 Ibid., pp.28-36. 25 Ibid., p.30. 26 Ibid., p.30. 27 For an overview of Trotskyite Europeanism, before and after the October Revolution, see Perry 23 7 On the academic level, Mandel’s work on the impending advent of supranational statehood attuned with a wider strand of Marxist political economy dealing with the subject of European capital integration. In previous years, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy had published their ‘epoch-making’ Monopoly Capital, including a shorter section on how their theses could serve as a heuristic tool to interpret recent developments on the European mainland.28 In a similar vein, English political economist Bill Warren had asked the question ‘how international is Capital?’ in 1971’s New Left Review, while Cambridge academic Bob Rowthorn predicted a heightened period of ‘inter-imperial’ rivalry in 1971, foreseeing the coming about of a European supranational state towards the middle of the decade.29 If the late 1960s and early 1970s are indeed to be seen as a conjunctural moment for the European Left, it is foremost due to the highly factionalised nature of Marxist political action and debate taken in these years. It was to a plethora of views (forming, albeit disparately, a theoretical consortium on ‘European supranationalisation’) that, for example, newly schooled Althusserians reacted with unprecedented vehemence. In a 1973 piece first published in Economy and Society, Greek political theorist Nicos Poulantzas provided an overview of recent theoretical trends in Marxist theory on contemporary imperialism. 30 Poulantzas here classified Mandel under a long list of Marxist political economists such as Bob Rowthorn, Michael Kidron and Jacques Valier, seeing them as contemporary exponents of what he called a ‘new inter-imperialism’.31 To Anderson, ‘Antecedents’ in The New Old World (London: Verso Books, 2009), pp. 482-484; Isaac Deutscher, ‘Revolution and Conquest’ in The Prophet Armed: 1879-1921 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp.451-455; Palmer, ‘The Personal and the Political’, pp.124-125. For overviews of the first debates on ‘Europeanist Communism’ in the Second International, see, inter alia, Karl Kautsky, ‘Krieg und Frieden: Betrachtungen zu Maifeier’, in Die Neue Zeit (1910-1911); R. N. Berki, ‘Marxism and European Unity’, in Peter M. R. Stirk (ed.), European Unity in Context: The Interwar Period (London: Pinter, 1989), 42-61. 28 See Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, ‘Militarism and Imperialism’, in Monopoly Capital (New York and London: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1966), pp.203-207. 29 See Bill Warren, ‘The Internationalisation of Capital and the Nation State: A Comment’, in New Left Review 68 (July-August 1971), 1-6; Bill Warren, ‘Imperialism and Capitalist Industrialisation’, in New Left Review 81 (September-October 1973), pp.14-15. See also Warren’s discussion with Mandel on the subject of supranational state-formation, Ernest Mandel and Bill Warren, ‘Recession and its Consequences (Discussion)’, in New Left Review 87-88 (September-December 1974), 1-9. 30 Nicos Poulantzas, ‘Internationalization of Capitalist Relations and the Nation State’, in James Martin (ed.), The Poulantzas Reader (London: Verso Books, 2008), pp.220-223. The original form of this article was published in Sartre and De Beauvoir’s Temps Modernes under the title ‘L’internationalisation des rapports capitalistes et l’Etat-Nation’. See Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas p.368. 31 Ibid., pp.221-222, pp.426-427. See Rowthorn, ‘Imperialism in the Seventies’; Michael Kidron, Western Capitalism Since the War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968); Jacques Valier, 8 them, Poulantzas argued, the new political constellations arising in Europe could be conceived as a simple revamping of the old centre-periphery distinction which was used in older Marxist thought; a vision which, in his view, always stipulated the ‘rapid destruction, not to say the quasi-disappearance of the power of the national state.’32 Yet matters were not as straightforward for Poulantzas. Most importantly, he took strong issue with the inter-imperialists’ contention that the current modus operandi of European capital integration should be seen as antagonistic to American global predominance. Contra Mandel, Poulantzas brought forward an array of statistical data to prove the misguidedness of his ‘supranational’ hypothesis. ‘Whereas in 1950 Europe received only 24.3 per cent of American capital in this sector’ – referring to the European processing industries – ‘it received 40.3 per cent in 1966’, leading him to the conclusion that ‘the internalisation of capital described above is effected under the decisive dominance of American capital.’ 33 Rather than constituting a steady supranationalisation of European states into a unified continental bloc, Poulantzas saw in the institutional entrenchment of the EC a whole new ‘regime of statehood’ 34 , corresponding to ‘new forms of accumulation of capital on a world scale.’35 The language used by Poulantzas to describe these ‘new formations’ was as innovative as it was controversial. Not relying on classical schemes of Marxist interpretation with regards to imperialist state-formation – exemplified by age-old concepts such as the ‘comprador’- or ‘international’ bourgeoisie – Poulantzas emphasised the rise of a wholly new social class in the age of American imperialism: the interior bourgeoisie.36 While this ‘interior bourgeoisie’ did have its political base within the national state, it was economically and ideologically dependent on American capital to maintain its infrastructural power. Against what he viewed as the erroneous hypotheses towards ‘super-state’ institutional forms, Poulantzas saw a new European system founded foremost on an ‘induced reproduction of the form of imperialist power dominant in each ‘Impérialisme et révolution permanente’, in Critique de l’économie politique 4-5 (July-December 1971). 32 Poulantzas, ‘Internationalization of Capitalist Relations’, p.221. 33 Ibid., p.232-233, p.235. 34 Ibid., p.245. 35 Ibid., p.223. 36 Ibid., p.243-245. For classical statements on the different forms of imperialism within the Marxist tradition, see Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (London: V. Gollancz, 1932), pp.13-14. 9 national formation and its own state’. 37 Towards the end of the piece, Poulantzas explicitly arrowed his attacks on Mandel, accusing him of succumbing to the ‘recent bourgeois propaganda on United Europe’, claiming that his theoretical forecasts were based on ill-conceived conceptions of economic integration, thus putting forward ‘claims which are contradicted by the facts.’38 Yet the argument was no matter of petty empiricism. At the heart of the disagreement between Mandel and Poulantzas lay, above all, a disagreement on the nature of the state. Coming from an explicitly Althusserian background, Poulantzas emphasised the historical particularity of the post-war European state, and how it fitted into broader processes of changing political structures. In his criticism of the ‘inter-imperialists’, Poulantzas included a brief theoretical excursus on where the true caveat lay for their theses: their misconceived interpretation of statal power. ‘The state’ Poulantzas said, echoing an argument made two years ago in ‘The Problem of the Capitalist State’ ‘is not a mere tool or instrument of the dominant classes, to be manipulated at will.’39 Rather, for him the state epitomised the class contradictions of the social formation as a whole: a fact which gave it, in Poulantzas’ well-known formula, a ‘relative autonomy’ to the power-games played between social classes.40 As with Mandel, Poulantzas’ work on European integration was intensely connected to both earlier theoretical preoccupations and current activistic concerns. Only four years prior the New Left Review had seen the ‘instrumentalist-structuralist’-debate between him and Ralph Miliband, initiating a key set of conceptual changes which were to give 37 Ibid., p.244. Ibid., p.247. 39 Ibid., p.249. 40 For several statements of this Poulantzian position, see, amongst others, Nicos Poulantzas, ‘The Problem of the Capitalist State’, in New Left Review 58 (November-December 1969), 67-78; Nicos Poulantzas, ‘On Social Classes’, in New Left Review 78 (March-April 1973), 1-28; Nicos Poulantzas, Problems of the Modern State and the Fascist Phenomenon (Athens: Ekdoseis Themelio, 1977); Nicos Poulantzas, ‘The Political Crisis and the Crisis of the State’, in J.W. Freiburg (ed.), Critical Sociology: European Perspectives (New York: Halsted Press, 1979), pp.373-393. The literature of contemporary Marxist and non-Marxist state theory relying on Poulantzian schemes is vast, and providing a full summary would be a laborious task. For foremost examples within the field of political science (and thus excluding ‘politico-economic’ approaches such as regulation theory), see Jessop, Poulantzas; Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Bob Jessop, State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Thomas Lemke (ed.), Governmentality: Current Issues and Further Challenges (London: Routledge, 2011). For an overview of Marxist thinking on the state in the 1970s, see Bob Jessop, ‘Recent Theories of the Capitalist State’, in Cambridge Journal of Economics 1 (June 1977), 353-373. 38 10 birth to the field of ‘Marxist state theory’ now associated with figures such as Bob Jessop and Ellen Meiksins Wood.41 As Poulantzas wrote in his final response to Miliband, seizing mere state-power would not suffice to bring an end to the particularly capitalist state; since the state itself was a structural feature of the capitalist social formation – and, therefore, retained a certain autonomy towards the social classes trying to gain control of it – its destruction would foremost require an elimination of the ‘politico-ideological’ base underlying it. Adhering to such a ‘relational’ theory of the state, Poulantzas ordained that in order for a socialist revolution to materialise, it ‘must not only signify a shift in state power, but it must equally ‘break’, that is to say radically change, the state apparatus.’42 Nowhere did Poulantzas make more explicit use of this ‘structuralist’ understanding of the state than in his works on the Greek dictatorship, a theme which continued to inform his political writings well throughout the 1970s.43 As he noted in an article published in the immediate aftermath of the Athenian coup (entitled ‘The Political Forms of the Military Coup d’Etat’) the Greek colonels’ regime should be seen as a corresponding to 41 See Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso Books, 1991); Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas. passim. 42 See Nicos Poulantzas, ‘Preliminaries to the Study of Hegemony in the State’ in James Martin (ed.), The Poulantzas Reader (London: Verso Books, 2008), 74-119; ‘Marxist Political Theory in Britain’ in James Martin (ed.), The Poulantzas Reader (London: Verso Books, 2008), 120-138; ‘The Problem of the Capitalist State’, in New Left Review 58 (November-December 1969), 67-78; ‘The Capitalist State: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau’ in New Left Review 95 (January-February 1976), 63-83. For Miliband’s original account of ‘instrumentalist’ state-power and his response to Poulantzas’ criticisms, see Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969); Ralph Miliband, ‘Poulantzas and the Capitalist State’, in New Left Review 82 (SeptemberOctober 1973), 83-92; ‘The Capitalist State: Reply to N. Poulantzas’, in New Left Review 59 (JanuaryFebruary 1970), 53-60. For Laclau’s intervention and his theoretical work on the debate, see Ernesto Laclau, ‘The Specificity of the Political: Around the Poulantzas-Miliband Debate’, in Economy and Society 5 (February 1975), 87-110; Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1979). I leave aside the question whether the ‘instrumentalist-structuralist’ label caters sufficiently for the wild variety of topics discussed in the debate – Poulantzas himself strongly rejected the proposed dichotomy, for example. Yet later theorists have predominantly framed the debate in those terms, and as a historiographical reference it serves general clarity. See Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas, pp.109-110. 43 For a discussion of Poulantzas’ activism in the years of the Greek junta, see Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas, pp.10-19; James Martin, ‘Introduction’ , in James Martin (ed.), The Poulantzas Reader (London: Verso Books, 2008), pp. 16-19. For some of his writings on the Greek colonels’ regime, see Nicos Poulantzas, ‘The Target of Democratisation in Education’, in Thourios (June 1975); ‘The Crisis of Power in Greece’, in Anti 24 (September 1975); ‘Crisis in the Political Structures of Greece’, in Ta Nea 9 (September 1975). See also his 1976 book, La crise des dictatures (Paris: Maspero/Seuil, 1976). I leave aside whether Poulantzas’ short involvement with French Maoism (as in the Gauche Prolétarienne) informed his political writings in the late 1960s; a question which is only tangentially related to his theories of European state-formation. See Wood, The Retreat from Class, pp.31-33. 11 ‘an international strategy of American imperialism as specified in a particular zone.’44 In a turn of phrase congruent with his later perorations on ‘European dependence’, Poulantzas saw that only ‘popular resistance’ will determine the ‘the political forms of the coup’.45 After the fall of the dictatorship in 1975, Poulantzas again emphasised the ‘intergovernmental’ nature of European integration, stating that Greece’s entry into the European inner circle should be seen as a sign of further transatlantic dependence on American capital, rather than the first step to European ‘contra-imperialism’.46 By then, Poulantzas had already become one of the maîtres à penser for the newly formed Eurocommunist movement within European workers’ parties, whose project of ‘democratising’ and ‘pluralising’ the national state explicitly renounced the enterprise of a European communism under supranational guardianship.47 What orthodox critics later were to call ‘the retreat into the fortress of the national state’, was theorised by Poulantzas as ‘the search for a national consensus’; rather than seeking to integrate themselves into a wider European super-state, European communists should seek an ‘historic compromise’ within their respective national spheres, thereby opening up prospects for more pluralistic and democratic forms of Marxist political praxis. 48 44 See Nicos Poulantzas, ‘The Political Forms of the Military Coup d’Etat’, in James Martin (ed.), The Poulantzas Reader (London: Verso Books, 2008), p.167. See also, Nicos Poulantzas, ‘Interview with Nicos Poulantzas’, in Marxism Today 38 (July 1979), pp.198-205. 45 See Poulantzas, ‘Political Forms’, pp.393-398. 46 Ibid., pp.348. See also a Dutch version of this argument in Nicos Poulantzas, ‘Europa wordt geen superstaat’ in De Groene Amsterdammer 148 (June 1978). 47 For Poulantzas’ influence on the Eurocommunist Renaissance, see Nicos Poulantzas, ‘Is There A Crisis in Marxism?’ in James Martin (ed.), The Poulantzas Reader (London: Verso Books, 2008), 377386; Poulantzas, ‘Interview’, pp.391-392. Although broadly sympathetic to the intellectual trends within European Communist Parties, Poulantzas was often highly critical of them as well. He himself was often classified as a ‘left-Eurocommunist’, in opposition to ‘right-Eurocommunists’ such as the Spanish Santiago Carrillo and the French PCF-leader Georges Marchais. For overviews of Poulantzas’ political affiliations, see Geoff Boucher, “New Times”, in The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Zizek (Melbourne: re-press, 2008), pp.69-71; Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas, pp.11-15; Martin, ‘Introduction’, pp.22-24. For founding texts and historical accounts of the Eurocommunist tradition, see Santiago Carrillo, Eurocommunism and the State (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977); Lucien Sève, Les communistes et l’état (Paris: Editions sociales, 1977); David Scott Bell, Eurocommunism (London: Fabian Society, 1979); George Schwab (ed.), Eurocommunism: The Ideological and Political-Theoretical Foundations (London: Aldwych, 1981); Vernon Aspaturian (ed.), Eurocommunism Between East and West (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1980). For a discussion of the origins of the term ‘Eurocommunism’ and possible semantic caveats, see Vernon Aspaturian, ‘Conceptualizing Eurocommunism: Some Preliminary Observations’, in Vernon Aspaturian (ed.), Eurocommunism between East and West (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1980), pp.3-16. 48 See Nicos Poulantzas, ‘Towards a Democratic Form of Socialism’, in James Martin (ed.), The Poulantzas Reader (London: Verso Books, 2008), pp.367-375; Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The Forerunner: 12 Poulantzas’ argument was echoed by another hallmark text in the Eurocommunist canon, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, whose plea for a ‘post-Marxism’ cleansed of its doctrinal and anti-democratic Stalinist vestiges was to serve as an inspiration for a cohort of European political theorists.49 The Eurocommunists’ innovations did not go unassailed in Marxism’s high circles. Mandel’s belated 1978 response, for example, declared nothing less than the practical bankruptcy of the Poulantzian strategy. In his From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, a collection of writings compiled mainly for the Fourth International, Mandel went as far as to draw a linear progression from Stalinism to the ‘national-populism’ of the Eurocommunists, stating that the recent theoretical innovations within European communist movements were none other than ‘the bitter fruits’ of the Stalinist defence tactic adopted in the 1930s (exemplified by the infamous ‘socialism in one country’credo).50 The creation of a continent-wide European power bloc, Mandel contended, was simply inevitable, and those who argued against its desirability were engaging, above all, in deeply flawed politics. ‘The international interpenetration of capital within the Common Market’ he still wrote in 1978, ‘is a fact, even though it continues to develop in an uneven and contradictory manner. Under these conditions any scheme for the ‘gradual transformation of capitalism’ on a national basis… is thoroughly utopian, if not reactionary.’51 Again Mandel proposed a vision of a Europe united under one red flag, stating, in an almost verbatim Trotskyite citation, that ‘there is no substitute for an Nicos Poulantzas’, in The Retreat from Class: Towards a ‘True’ Socialism (London: Verso Books, 1986), 25-47. 49 See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso Books, 1985); Ernesto Laclau, Reflections on the New Revolutions of Our Time (London: Verso Books, 1990); Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London, Verso Books: 1996). For early critiques of the ‘discursive’ turn within Post-Marxism, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (London: Verso Books, 1986); Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London: New Left Books, 1983). The debate between Laclau and Mouffe and Geras, although mainly concerned with highly theoretical issues, equally had a strong political dimension in the way it pitted ‘classical’ Marxists against converted, ‘pluralist’ Eurocommunists. See Norman Geras, ‘Post-Marxism?’, in New Left Review 163 (May-June 1987), 4082; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, ‘Post-Marxism Without Apologies, in New Left Review 166 (November-December 1987), 79-106; Norman Geras, ‘Ex-Marxism Without Substance: Being A Real Reply to Laclau and Mouffe’, in New Left Review 169 (May-June 1988), 34-61. 50 See Ernest Mandel, ‘The Bitter Fruits of ‘Socialism in One Country’, in From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of Socialism in One Country (London: New Left Books, 1978), 9-41. Although one of the main tenors of Eurocommunism was an explicit renunciation of political Stalinism, Mandel – in a rhetorical sleight of hand – ascribed to Eurocommunism the very doctrine it was seeking to renounce. 51 Mandel, From Eurocommunism to Stalinism, p.35. 13 orientation towards the Socialist United States of Europe, the only historically valid and superior response to the capitalist integration of Europe.’52 The slow project of the democratisation of the national state as envisaged by Poulantzas and what Mandel called his ‘communo-chauvinistic acolytes’ 53 (Berlinguer, Marchais, Carillo) had been tried before, and it had failed miserably.54 Towards the end of the pamphlet Mandel directly engaged with Poulantzas’ work, accusing him of ‘pursuing the chimera of qualitative change.’55 Mandel criticised the Greek theorist of posing the question of the state in ‘false dichotomies’, stating that Poulantzas’ distinction between a ‘re-organisation’ and ‘democratisation’ of the state left no room for the oldest of all Marxist articles of faith – the decomposition of the state. His violent denial of the Eurocommunist via media between reformism and revolution lead Mandel to claim that the state cannot be ‘a little bit bourgeois and a little bit proletarian any more than food can be a little bit fish and a little bit fowl.’56 Mandel’s vitriol was, above all, a token of intellectual indignation. Refusing to yield to the wave of Althusserianism currently flooding the Western academe, Mandel clung to a highly orthodox understanding of the state conceived in the Leninist tradition as ‘the midwife of every old society that is pregnant with a new one.’57 ‘Middleclass liberals nowadays and the reformist socialists and Stalinists who trail in their wake’ Mandel noted in his 1969 The Marxist Theory of the State, (b)elieve in the existence of a state that stands as an impartial arbiter above the selfish contention of classes and deals justly with the respective claims of diverse "interest groups." This exalted notion of a classless state presiding over a pure democracy based on the consent of the people, rather than engaged in the defense 52 Ibid., p.36. For Trotsky’s original call for a ‘United Europe’, see Deutscher, Prophet Armed, p.451. Ibid., pp.60-68. The term itself had been coined by Trotsky in his early critiques of Stalinist orthodoxy. 54 Ernest Mandel, ‘The Strategy of Eurocommunism’, in From Eurocommunism to Stalinism: The Bitter Fruits of Socialism in One Country (London: New Left Books, 1978), pp.190-193. Mandel himself saw in Eurocommunism a historical avatar of the pre-World War I ‘attrition strategy’ advocated by Kautsky, wherein steady proletarianisation would eventually shift the political-parliamentary balance of forces in favour of socialism – a strategy often decried as ‘quietist’ and ‘determinist’ by later theorists, and heavily criticised by contemporary Leninists. See Karl Kautsky, ‘Was Nun?’ in Die Neue Zeit 2 (April 1910); Boucher, The Charmed Circle, p.69. 55 Ibid.,p.174. 56 Mandel, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, p.178. 57 See Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984), p.23. The original phrase is, of course, Marx’s. 53 14 of the property rights of the ruling class, is the core of bourgeois-democratic ideology.58 Mandel continued by reiterating the need to seize state-power directly (referring to the Leninist conception of ‘rupture’), fighting a war on different fronts in order to defend his vision of a ‘social’ Europeanism. His endeavour was articulated in economic, political and activistic work, spanning a wide array of books, pamphlets and meeting reports.59 Towards the beginning of the 1980s, for example, Mandel rallied a consortium of Marxist economists to articulate an answer to the rise of neo-Ricardianism as defined by the Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa, whose work on the labour theory of value had found a generous readership within the Italian Communist Party. 60 Equally he blamed Eurocommunist writers for adapting a highly reductionist reading of Gramsci, smiting them as ‘gradualists’ and ‘electoralists’ in disguise.61 Most importantly, Mandel saw in their pseudo-Gramscianism a mere ‘parliamentary cretinism’, standing for a strategy in which reforms would pave the way for a national-popular alliance similar to Kautsky’s ‘attrition strategy’.62 Progressively Mandel yet began to see the desperateness of the theoretical venture he was engaged in. With the majority of European Communist parties left in a state of disarray after the political conflagration of the 1980s – exemplified by the Thatcherite experience in Britain, the despondence of Mitterrandism in France, the failure of a German revolution under Kohl, all overseen by the calamitous disintegration of the 58 Ernest Mandel, The Marxist Theory of the State (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), p.5. See also Ernest Mandel, On Bureaucracy: A Marxist Analysis (London: IMG publications, 1973); Ernest Mandel, ‘Historical Materialism and the Capitalist State’, in Marxismus und Anthropologie 1 (1980), which was compiled to counter what Mandel saw as ‘Poulantzian platitudes’ with regards ‘to the relative autonomy of the state’. For Mandel’s anti-Althusserianism, see Stutje, Mandel, pp.127-129. 59 See, inter alia, Ernest Mandel, ‘East Berlin Conference: New Age in the Crisis of Stalinism’, in Inprecor 56 (July 1976), 21-26; Ernest Mandel, ‘The Common Market: At A Snail’s Pace’, in Inprecor 44 (February 1976), 16-17; Ernest Mandel, ‘How To Make No Sense of Marx’, in Canadian Journal of Philosophy 15 (1989), 105-132; United Secretariat of the Fourth International, ‘Critical Notes on “The Building of Revolutionary Parties in Europe”’, in International Internal Discussion Bulletin 13 (November 1976); Ernest Mandel, ‘Revolutionary Strategy – A Political Interview’, in New Left Review 100 (November-December 1976), 97-132. 60 See Ernest Mandel, ‘The PCI and Austerity’, in From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of ‘Socialism in One Country’ (London: New Left Books, 1978), pp.144-145; Ernest Mandel (ed.), Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa: The Langston Memorial Volume (London: Verso Books, 1984). For Sraffa’s original contributions and their Rezeptionsgeschichte, see Piero Sraffa, Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); Ian Steedman, Marx After Sraffa (London: New Left Books, 1983). 61 Mandel, From Eurocommunism to Stalinism, p.201. 62 Ibid., pp.201-208. See also Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Parliamentary Cretinism’, in New Left Review 12 (November-December 1961), 64-66; Boucher, The Charmed Circle, p.232. 15 Soviet bloc – Mandel slowly ceded his hopes of a ‘socialist Europeanism’ and instead emphasised the ‘duty to resist’.63As he wrote in a pamphlet issued towards the end of his life, compiled just after the introduction of the Maastricht Treaty: (M)any obstacles have to be overcome if supranational institutions are to take on the characteristics of a real supranational state… European unification remains suspended between a vague confederation of sovereign states and a European federation with some of the characteristics of a state, with a single currency, a central bank, a common industrial and agricultural policy, joint army and police forces and, finally, a central government authority. In the process of European capitalist unification there is a time bomb… It is more vital than ever to continue the fight against it.64 The Mandel-Poulantzas Debate Today Although it is easy to overestimate the historical fallout of the disagreement between Europeanists and Eurocommunists, it remains profitable to read contemporary debates through the prism of the earlier one. Christopher Bickerton, for example, has used the Mandel-Poulantzas debate as a template to illustrate a theoretical cleavage which continues to exist in contemporary EU-studies between ‘intergovernmentalists’ and ‘supranationalists’.65 Obviously, Bickerton’s illustration of later theoretical trends here merely assumes a didactic function, and there is no need overemphasise the influence of Mandelian and Poulantzian schemes on later scholarship, which has drawn on a wild variety of sources. Rather, this essay seeks to probe the extending influence of the debate within the Marxist tradition, and how, most importantly, the theoretical schemes proposed by both thinkers have managed to transpose themselves into practical imperatives. As shown extensively in previous paragraphs, both the Poulantzian and Mandelian ontological hypotheses were intimately linked to normative commitments. For both 63 See Willem Jan Stutje, ‘Conclusion’, in Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred (London: Verso Books, 2009), 252-260. 64 Ernest Mandel, ‘Why Keynes Isn’t the Answer: The Twilight of Monetarism’, in Socialist Outlook 29 (October 1992), p.7. 65 See Christopher Bickerton, ‘Europe’s Compromising Union’, in European Integration: From Nation States to Member States (London: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.4-9. See also Christopher Bickerton, ‘European Integration: From Nation-States to Member States’, in UACES Conference Papers (September 2012), pp.4-7. For intergovernmental perspectives (not necessarily relying on Poulantzian schemes), see Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (London: Routledge, 1994). 16 participants, Marxism functioned as much as a form of politics as it functioned as a form science, and there is little doubt that such a warning may now seem unnecessarily platitudinal in the face of the 'interpretivist' revolution in political science.66 Yet anno 2016, the visions of Europeanism of both theorists still occupy a distinct place within the shared imaginary of the European Left. Still today, contemporary Marxists take a dual stance on European integration: it is either seen as a necessary step towards further supranational fusion into a ‘European welfare-state’, making for a ‘progressive integrationism’ which will finally make possible the coming about of ‘that other Europe’ (l’autre Europe), or it is seen as an intergovernmental arena wherein neoliberalism reigns king, thereby constantly encroaching on the political agency of individual states. Both visions rely on specific ontological understandings of what the process of European integration constitutes, and how one must best understand the workings of the contemporary EU. Here, the ghosts of Mandel and Poulantzas loom large. One of the most explicitly Mandelian exponents of a supranational strategy can be found in Belgian economist Frank Vandenbroucke’s recent work on the possibility of a ‘social-democratic’ Europe.67 Although it is by no means necessary to range Vandenbroucke as an explicit heir to the legacy of the Leninist Mandel, the normative, political and analytical impetuses underlying his inquiry are deeply Mandelian in their character: Vandenbroucke’s ‘European Social Union’ is both ‘inevitable’ and ‘desirable’, seeing a ‘common purpose’ as the only viable option for those seeking to foster ‘continental reciprocity’. 68 His statement is echoed by a plethora of other voices on the European Left, such as Daniel Bensaïd, Yanis Varoufakis and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who all agree on the need for a transposition of national social democracy to a continental scale.69 Economically, such a 66 See Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); See Isaac, Joel, ‘Tangled Loops: Theory, History, and the Human Sciences in Cold War America’, in Modern Intellectual History 16 (August 2009), 397-424. See also Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: On Method (Volume 1) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 2007); Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002); David Howarth and Jason Glynos, Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory (London: Routledge, 2007). 67 Frank Vandenbroucke, ‘A European Social Union: Unduly Idealistic or Inevitable?’, in EIB Institute Working Papers (September 2015), 1-8. A former member of the Fourth International in his youth, Vandenbroucke himself states ‘that Europe should not become a welfare state’, but rather must seek a a ‘supranational polity’ and a common Weltanschauung. See Vandenbroucke, ‘Social Union’, p.2. 68 Ibid., p.7-8. 69 See Daniel Bensaïd, ‘Pourquoi l’Europe’, in Papiers Nouveau Partie Anti-Capitaliste (October 1989), 1-7; Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Guy Verhofstadt, Debout l’Europe! (Brussels: André Versailles Editeur, 17 narrative is often coupled with a call for a ‘good euro’-strategy, in which a European supranational polity will bring an end to the much maligned ‘sado-monetarism’ currently wreaking havoc on the continent’s social fabric. On the other side of the ‘intergovernmental’ versus ‘supranational’ divide then, lies the Poulantzian strategy often associated with neo-Eurocommunist movements such as Syriza. As an unofficial spokesman for the party’s strategic line (before becoming a zealous critic of it), Stathis Kouvelakis consistently argued for the need to mobilize popular power in order to break European tutelage over the Greek state.70 Echoing Poulantzas’ ‘relative autonomy’, Kouvelakis claims that a Greek state undone of its European shackles will still be able to return to its original ‘national’ form, followed up by a gradual withdrawal from previous Atlanticist allegiances.71 Conceiving of the EU as an ‘intergovernmental’ arena in which one could foster and build alliances, Kouvelakis’ Syriza remained committed to the Poulantzian perspective in which the national level could first be democratised, whereafter a shift in consciousness within European elites could be enforced. Both strategies rely explicitly on the idea that there is either a supranational European bloc one can take hold of, or an intergovernmental arena in which one must contest prevailing consensuses. The cardinal problem here is that later statistics bore out neither Poulantzas' nor Mandel’s hypotheses. Denouncing the EU as a ‘continental hegemon’ whose institutional grip serves to bridle national governments obscures the fact that most organs that make up the Brusselian bureaucracy only employ a marginally larger amount of technocrats 2012); Yanis Varoufakis, Modeste proposition pour résoudre la crise de la zone euro (Paris: Les petits matins, 2015). 70 See John Abromeit et al., ‘Introduction, in Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p.xxxi. For influences of Poulantzianism on Syriza, see Alexander Clapp, ‘Diary: The Theorists in Syntagma Square’, in London Review of Books 37 (April 2015), 46-47. The relationship between Syriza and the Athenian Nicos Poulantzas Institute has been one of consistent practice-theory exchanges. 71 Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘The Greek Cauldron’, in New Left Review 72 (November-December 2011), 1732; Stathis Kouvelakis et al., ‘The Greek Crisis – Politics, Economics, Ethics: A Debate Held at the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities’, in Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (October 2010), pp.304306; Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘The End of Europeanism’, in Costas Lapavitsas et al., Crisis in the Eurozone (London: Verso Books, 2012); Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘In Search of Lost Time’, in Jacobin (June 2015), n.pag.web. For general ‘Syrizian’ statements of this strategy, see Euclid Tsakalotos, ‘Out of the Mire: Arguments from the Greek Left’, in Soundings 57 (October 2014), 8-22; Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘Facing the Crisis: The Strategic Perplexity of the Left’, in International Socialism 130 (Spring 2011), 171-176. 18 than the BBC.72 Compared to the American state in its federal form (whose European equivalent was sure to arise according to Mandel) the degree of European supranational state-formation appears meagre indeed. 73 For Mandelians, there is simply no ‘supranational instrument’ one can seize hold of, thereby lacking, as Costas Lapavitsas notes, the necessary institutional leverage to end central bank independence and bring about the Europeanists’ new Keynesianism.74 Hoping on the theoretical salvage of the Poulantzian perspective, in which the EU is seen as a ‘relatively autonomous imperial centre’, yet seems equally problematic. Although there was increasing evidence of a growing European dependence on American capital in the 1970s, the degree of inter-European co-operation was to soar in the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in the formation of the European monetary bloc in the early 2000s. Magnus Ryner argues that Poulantzas 'underestimated the prospects of European capital's developing internally cohesive, distinct as well as competitive groupings.’75 It cannot be denied, as Ryner states, 'that since the launch of the single market, interlocking directorships of strategic control have assumed less of a transatlantic spatial fix.’ 76 Moreover, the Poulantzian approach now fails to account for the fact that European decision-making has increasingly been delegated to non-national bodies – a fact highlighted by the recent interventions of the Eurogroup, who now commands a position of de facto authority over key matters of European political economy.77 Strangely enough, as the work of Christopher Bickerton has demonstrated, these non-national bodies 72 With regards to the European Commission, for example, a difference of roughly 12000 (32296 and 19995) is registered in recent reports. As the Commission itself proudly notes, its number of employees does not exceed the scale of ‘a medium-sized European city.’ See ‘Who We Are’, European Commission Civil Service, online [http://ec.europa.eu/civilservice/about/who/index_en.htm, last accessed on 20/02/2016]. For British Broadcasting Corporation, see BBC People, ‘Freedom of Information Request: RFI20111450’, in BBC Information Policy and Compliance 21 December 2011. 73 For more extensive empirical observations, see Bickerton, European Integration, 2-44; Cédric Durand and Tristan Auvray, ‘Is There A European Capital? The Mandel-Poulantzas Debate Revisited’, in Historical Materialism (September 2015); Cédric Durand and Razmig Keucheyan, ‘Financial Hegemony and the Unachieved European State’, in Competition and Change 0 (October 2015), 1-16; Cédric Durand and Razmig Keucheyan, ‘Bureaucratic Caesarism: A Gramscian Outlook on the Crisis of Europe’, in Historical Materialism 23 (February 2015), 23-51. 74 Lapavitsas, Crisis in the Eurozone, p.63. 75 Magnus Ryner, ‘US Power and the Crisis of Social Democracy in Europe’s Second Project of Integration’, in Capital and Class 93 (Autumn 2007), p.12. 76 Ibid., p.12. 77 For exegeses of this increasingly ‘spectral’ entity, see Christopher Bickerton, ‘The real sins of Varoufakis’, in Le monde diplomatique 63 (July 2015), p.13; Müller, ‘Rule-breaking’, p.4. For an older analysis, Uwe Puetter, ‘The Informal Eurogroup: A New Working Method and Constitutional Compromise’, in Constitutional Web-Papers, ConWEB No.2 (2001). 19 themselves do not consist of a wholly separate social caste of Brusselian bureaucrats, and are predominantly populated by national elites.78 In Bickerton’s own words, the manner in which most European institutions act is ‘far removed from traditional assumptions about intergovernmental bargaining and negotiation’, showing the very opposite of an arena suited for political contestation, whilst simultaneously functioning as a ‘barrier to supranationalism’, in its insistence on national elites as the privileged agents of political decision-making. 79 To Bickerton, these observations make it seem that it is both a mistake to view the current EU as a super-state, or as an American-sponsored, intergovernmental cartel. As he writes: Broadly… these institutions point to the same puzzle in European integration. Made up of national representatives and officials, they function as deliberative forums for building policy consensus and not as vehicles for inter-state negotiations and bargaining. At the same time, this consensus is technical, and focused on individual policy issues. It neither betrays hidden aspirations towards supranational communitybuilding nor involves the imposition of a single national Weltanschauung upon all other members… In all cases, the categories of supranationalism and intergovernmentalism fall short both descriptively and analytically (emphasis added).80 Yet many on the Left seem to have no problem with such assessments – often given that it serves rhetorical effectivity in the face of increasingly suspicious national electorates. Even when absorbed in a highly incoherent and eclectic fashion, the theses accumulated in the Mandel-Poulantzas debate continue to haunt contemporary left-wing thinking on the EU. In a text by French economist Cédric Durand, the European Union is denounced as a despotic super-state, monomanically asserting mercantilist dogma across the continent.81 In another text, German political scientist Thomas Fazi sees in the current EU an institutionalised form of ‘supranational post-democracy’. 82 Similarly, English 78 See Christopher Bickerton, ‘A Union of Member States’, in Christopher Bickerton (ed.), The New Intergovernmentalism: States and Supranational Actors in the Post-Maastricht Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).For a criticism of the ‘new intergovernmentalism’, see Frank Schimmelfenig, ‘What’s News in the ‘New Intergovernmentalism’? A Critique of Bickerton, Hodson and Puetter’, in Journal of Common Market Studies 53 (July 2015), 723-730. 79 Bickerton, European Integration, p.34-35. 80 Ibid., p.38; p.46. 81 Cédric Durand, ‘The End of Europe’, in Jacobin, online edn., August 2015 [https://www .jacobinmag.com /2015/07/tsipras-syriza-euro-austerity-debt, last accessed 03/03/2016]. See also Cunliffe, ‘Swapping One Mirage’, n.pag.web. 82 Thomas Fazi, The Battle for Europe: How an Elite Hijacked a Continent and How We Can Take It Back (London: Pluto Press, 2014). Fazi writes ‘that a radical, progressive overhaul of these institutions (in the direction of a genuine supranational democracy and welfare state) is feasible, and it is arguably the best means forward.’ See Fazi, The Battle for Europe, p.13. 20 columnist John King makes a left-wing case for a British exit on the grounds that the EU is a ‘super-state’, in which centralising decision-making is laid in the hands of a technocratic elite. 83 Stathis Kouvelakis judges the EU a ‘neoliberal empire’ and predicates a return to Poulantzas’ ‘national-democratic state’, while ex-Syrizians now emphasise the need to say ‘goodbye to the national level’ and take hold of the supranational one.84 In the end, all of these assessments go back to theoretical schemes which were compiled in wholly different historical circumstances, and which, above all, don’t retain any empirical backing in the face of recent developments. As the Greek casus has shown so painfully, and as most likely also the newly formed DiEM-25 formation under Yanis Varoufakis will show, the same will hold for the practical schemes founded on it. Conclusion This essay has sought to elucidate on a long-lasting, but now increasingly thorny issue within European Marxist thinking, which has of late assumed the very form of a practical malaise. As I have argued, the debate between Mandel and Poulantzas still presents us with two prototypical forms of Marxist thinking on the European Union – the one focused on the impending ‘supranationalisation’ of European governments into a continental state-bloc, the other emphasising the more spurious, ‘intergovernmental’ character of this process. The theoretical heritage of this debate, although often absorbed in a varied and incoherent manner, has proven to be highly resistant to historical change.85 83 John King, ‘The Left-wing Case for Leaving the EU’, in New Statesman, online edn. July 2015 [http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/06/john-king-left-wing-case-leaving-eu, last accessed 03/03/2016] 84 Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘Turning “No” Into A Political Front’, in Jacobin, online edn. August 2015 [https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/tsipras-debt-germany-greece-euro, last accessed 03/03/2016]. Once again echoing Poulantzas’ American dependence, Kouvelakis sees the EU as a ‘relatively autonomous imperialist center’, now only under partial hegemony of American imperialism. 85 For full overviews of politico-economic work relying on the Mandel-Poulantzas debate, see Magnus Ryner and Alan Cafruny, ‘Critical Political Economy’, in Antje Wiener (ed.), European Integration Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 221-240; Magnus Ryner et al., ‘Regulation Theory and the Political Economy of the European Union’, in Journal of Common Market Studies 54 (2015), 53-69; Ryner, ‘US Power and Social Democracy’, pp.7-26; Ian Bruff, ‘The Relevance of Nicos Poulantzas for Contemporary Debates on the International’, in International Politics 49 (2012), pp.177-194; Bastiaan Apeldoorn, Transnational Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2002); Werner Bolefeld, ‘European Integration: Market, the Political and Class’, in Capital and Class 77 (2002), 117141. 21 Of course, Weberian approaches might simply dismiss the question as irrelevant, arguing that a mere lack of 'infrastructural power' can explain the reasons why the Left has failed to realise its hopes of a social Europeanism. ‘Governance’ theorists, on the other hand, might wholly dispense of such an ‘idealistic’ conception of political power, and instead opt for a focus on political subject-formation.86 In no way does this essay intend to deny the importance of such alternative approaches. Without doubt, a fully-fledged historical exegesis of the relationship between the Left and the EU must equally take in account shifting distributions of discursive, strategic and infrastructural power – a type of analysis that is, sadly enough, far beyond the register of the current inquiry. While its aims are more local, this essay has attempted to demonstrate how two dominant forms of Marxist thinking on European integration have managed to reproduce themselves without undergoing closer theoretical scrutiny. One of the problems with the historical heritage of the Mandel-Poulantzas debate, as I have argued, finds itself in the fact that contemporary scholars relying on their analytic schemata have often devoted insufficient attention to what both participants were doing when issuing their theses on Europeanism, thereby rendering their own theoretical work vulnerable to anachronistic contaminations. Of course it would be a sure sign of intellectual dishonesty to let both participants bear the brunt of a practical malaise that troubles contemporary European Marxists. The process of European integration, Mandel conceded, had always been characterized by ‘spasmodic shocks’ and ‘qualitative leaps’ 87 , and neither he nor Poulantzas could have foreseen the increasing vacillations of a post-Maastricht EU, in which a whole legion of ‘catallactic’ bodies now occupy themselves with European policymaking. The historical décalage between their Europe and ours, we might say, is simply too great, and it should not be seen as a capitulatory gesture to admit the overall weakness of ideas in the face of the ‘process without a Subject’ that is European integration.88 86 For the ‘governance’ approach, see Markus Jachtenfuchs, Beyond the Regulatory Polity? The European Integration of Core State Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). For the Weberian approach, Michael Mann, The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results (S.I: S.l, 1996). 87 Ernest Mandel, ‘Partially Independent Variables and Internal Logic in Classical Marxist Economic Analysis’, in Social Science Information 24 (March 1985), p.488. 88 See James Heartfield, ‘European Union: A Process Without a Subject’, in Christopher Bickerton, Alex Gourevitch, et al., Politics Without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations (London: University College London Press, 2007), 131-149. Adopting such a phrase does of course not imply a secret endorsement of Poulantzas’ ‘Althusserian’ reading of European integration. 22 Rather, this essay might serve as a warning for those intending on taking over the Mandelian and Poulantzian vocabulary without accepting certain intellectual provisos. Both theorists accepted fully that their visions of 'economic Europeanism' entailed as much a normative wish as a description, and both were wary in stipulating the inevitable materialisation of their predictions. The ‘vision’ referred to in the title might then said to denote both a descriptive and a normative moment – a category which the word ‘vision’ itself neatly conveys.89 The fact that both the Trotskyite and Eurocommunist pathways to a social Europeanism have stranded on an institutional antipathy, and no longer hold any empirical support in the face of the recent developments, should, in this sense, have led to a wholly different form of ideological introspection. It might seem platitudinal to argue that in order to defeat an enemy, one must know him first. 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