Claus Offe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_Offe
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Claus Offe
Europe in the trap
Claus Offe opts for democracy over "TINA" logic
("there is no alternative"), which only leads to a politics that
fails to provide the electorate with choices. And therein lies the trap. Only
more solidarity and more democracy, he argues, can rescue the eurozone from the
brink of collapse.
Europe finds itself in what
may well be its worst crisis since 1945. More and more historically aware
commentators are reminded of the situation prior to 1933. If this crisis cannot
be overcome, then the political project of European integration will suffer
serious harm, as will the European and even the global economy – not to mention
the far-ranging social harm that the crisis has already caused in the countries
of the European periphery.
The crisis is so serious because of the seemingly insoluble
contradiction it presents. In simple terms: the course of action so urgently
needed is extremely unpopular and thus cannot be implemented by democratic
means. Nor does the post-democratic, technocratic option present a feasible
solution. Experts are "in principle" agreed on what is required –
namely a long-term debt-sharing agreement, or other grandiose transnational
measures to spread the burden – but it is difficult to make electorates in the
rich nations listen.
The situation in the countries of the periphery is similar:
they must quickly become more competitive and remain so, while driving down
labour costs to achieve some semblance of a sustainable balance of trade and a
half-way manageable budget deficit. The experts and elites regard all this as
"necessary", but it is clearly unattainable without seriously
damaging these nations' democratic sovereignty, since their populations
"demand" exactly the opposite. Thus the mismatch between what is economically
necessary and what is politically feasible can be seen on both sides of Europe's north-south divide today. If the eurozone
collapses because it proves impossible to square that circle, this will most
likely mean the end of the EU as well. Chancellor Merkel is quite right to warn
of this outcome.
Articles
En Es PDF
Therese Kaufmann, Ivan Krastev, Claus Offe, Sonja
Puntscher-Riekmann, Martin M. Simecka
The EU: The real sick man of Europe?
Democratic deficit, enlargement fatigue and ever more rescue
funds: is there still a future for a common Europe?
In a discussion in Eurozine's series "Europe talks to Europe",
prominent intellectuals and opinion makers from western and eastern Europe
diagnosed causes for the current malaise of the EU.
Therese Kaufmann: Martin Simecka, you once said that the
biggest political moment for Slovakia
was not 1989 but 1998, referring to a moment in Slovakian political history
when the nationalist authoritarian government of Vladimir Meciar fell. You have
also said that this political change was the result of a combined effort of
many different groups in Slovak society: intellectuals, NGOs, media,
politicians and diplomats. What is necessary for political transformation? Can Europe learn something from the Slovakian experience?
Articles
En Es PDF
Therese Kaufmann, Ivan Krastev, Claus Offe, Sonja
Puntscher-Riekmann, Martin M. Simecka
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-08-05-vienna-en.html
The EU: The real sick man of Europe?
Democratic deficit, enlargement fatigue and ever more rescue
funds: is there still a future for a common Europe?
In a discussion in Eurozine's series "Europe talks to Europe",
prominent intellectuals and opinion makers from western and eastern Europe
diagnosed causes for the current malaise of the EU.
Claus Offe: In the current situation, hardly anyone stresses
the European social model; all the attention is now directed at surviving the
crisis, at preventing things from falling apart. But the Agenda 2020 actually
does contain many interesting new ideas and is not as shamelessly
over-ambitious as the Lisbon Agenda was.
However one concept that is being used in a defensive and
even obstructive way is "subsidiarity", the policy of
non-interference in the member states' remaining realms of jurisdiction. The
process of negative integration – "market making" – makes it more
difficult to pursue social policies, to initiate reforms, at the national
level. The common market has created a "competition state"
characterized by stiff competition between member states. One way for national
politicians to win an advantage in this competition is to pursue policies of
austerity – social as well as fiscal. If a member state insists on a different
tradition – Bismarckian or otherwise – of organizing healthcare, pensions, the
labour market and poverty, it risks losing out as a "competition
state". This logic of Europe as expanded
market causes it to be perceived by its citizens as an entity that in fact
undermines social protection and socio-economic security.
Recently both the Commission and the Council of Europe
introduced a new concept that has the potential to inspire a supranational
approach to issues of social justice and redistribution: "shared social
responsibility". I don't know if this concept will take off, but at least
it has been thrown up in the air. I find the concept interesting, but I guess
that most European politicians will think that there are more important things
to attend to at the moment. Nevertheless, issues of cohesion, integration,
solidarity and redistribution are bound to remain on the agenda, including
redistribution among member states, which is currently denounced using the term
"transfer union".
I like to think of Europe
as a set of building sites. These are places where raw materials are somehow
synthesized by architects and engineers who know how to construct something out
of these materials. We know which and where the European construction sites
are, but nothing happens there. The engineers and architects have either stayed
at home or have run out of ideas. Or else they are simply incompetent. Europe is full of permanent construction sites that make
a lot of noise but where very little if anything ever gets built. No wonder
that Europe is watched by many of its citizens
– primarily the more vulnerable and precarious ones – with fear and suspicion
rather than with confidence and hope.
Let me point to three of those construction sites. The first
is obvious: East vs. West, old member states vs. new member states (including
future or potential member states). Ten of the twelve new member states of the
EU-27 are post-communist states, marked by the historical and political
experience of state socialism. Analysts have started to talk about the specific
features of post-communist capitalism and post-communist democracies. These are
telling terms and are accompanied by descriptions such as capitalism without
capitalists, democracy without democrats, or Europeans without European
aspirations. The eastern enlargement was based on an implicit misunderstanding.
The old western European member states, the EU 15, had a single ambition: to
ensure via external control and discipline that "those people over
there" become "normal", i.e. are turned into liberal democracies
and viable market economies. Afraid of the Meciars of these countries, the
western states promised EU membership and hoped that would encourage the
post-communist states to "behave". The priority was political
normalization.
The expectations on the other side of the former Iron
Curtain were quite different. What people wanted wasn't the rule of law and
other features of liberal democracy but prosperity and market access. But
precisely in this respect they have been confronted with a series of
disappointments. Eastern European economies turned out to be dependent
economies, and many of them – not only Latvia – were severely hit by the
financial crisis. In some places, GDP shrunk by 30 per cent within a year.
Wages were cut. Together this has caused huge economic disappointment.
The old member states also experienced a series of
disappointments. After accession, all sorts of phenomena surfaced: the Meciar
regime, the new Hungarian constitution, ethnocentric populist movements all
over the place, etc. These are phenomena that do not fit the image of liberal
democracy. Worse still, they are spreading in the old member states as well.
What characterizes this building site, then, is mutual disappointment.
The second construction site is the relationship between
north and south: the core countries vs. GIPS or PIGS (Greece, Ireland,
Portugal and Spain).
Europe seems so far unable to manage the euro
crisis in a fashion that is both effective and acceptable to national
constituencies of the poor and the rich nations alike. Politicians want, first
of all, to be (re)-elected – they aren't to be blamed for this; that's what
they do – and if you listen to what they say, 90 per cent of their public
speech acts belong in one of three categories. The first is "blame
avoidance"; the second is "credit taking" or "credit
claiming"; and the third is "position taking", i.e. taking
positions that they know are popular. Yet if we look for political leaders who
are credibly committed to European integration – as an indispensable means to
preserve accomplishments such as international peace, liberal democracy and
socio-economic security throughout the mega-region called Europe by the means
of cooperation and mutual supervision and accountability – we find hardly
anyone who could be remotely compared to Schuman or Monnet, Mitterrand or Kohl.
The third
construction site is the relation between the member states and Brussels: the nation
states vs. the Commission. Here, we see clear centrifugal tendencies. Issues
that urgently need to be coordinated at European level – recent examples are
the refugee crisis, the thorny issues of tax harmonization, fiscal policy, or
the EU budget – aren't dealt with together; the will and capacity to cooperate
is simply not there. On the contrary, national politicians and governments exploit
these issues in order to be re-elected. Berlusconi in Rome,
Sarkozy in Paris, Seehofer in Bavaria,
Merkel in Berlin
– they all take positions that they know are popular, in this case to keep
migrants out and never pay for others.
This is a strong political trend that not only hampers but
actually reverses European integration. I know, this isn't a very cheerful
discourse and the spectacle is not one that one can observe with pleasure. It's
a disaster! And the greatest disaster is that there are very few ideas about
how to solve it.
Claus Offe
Lessons learned and open questions
Welfare state building in post-communist EU member states
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-01-28-offe-en.html
"Democracy" in post-communist Europe
is strongly associated with high levels of state-sponsored social protection,
indicating a culture far removed from the prevalent system of market-mediated
private provision. The dissatisfaction with democracy expressed by the many not
to have benefited from transition suggests CEE welfare states have a long way
to go before they attain western levels of credibility. Their democracies
depend on that gap being bridged.
The EU: Broken or just broke?
http://www.eurozine.com/comp/focalpoints/eurocrisis.html
Robert Cooper
The European Union and the Habsburg Monarchy
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-12-10-cooper-en.html
The threat that the EU now faces is as deadly as the one
that confronted the Habsburg Monarchy a hundred years ago, writes British
diplomat Robert Cooper, one of the intellectual architects of EU foreign
policy. But getting it right does not need a miracle.
The Habsburg Monarchy lasted five centuries. It was both
solid and flexible; it aroused genuine affection among its citizens. But it
vanished in a puff of smoke. Should we expect the European Union, shallow in
history and unloved by those it serves, to do better?
Jan-Werner Müller
The failure of European intellectuals?
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-04-11-muller-en.html
Intellectuals have been accused of failing to restore a
European confidence undermined by crisis. Yet calls for legitimating European
narratives – combined with nostalgia for a golden age of Europeanism – remain
faithful to the logic of nineteenth-century nation building, argues Jan-Werner
Müller. What, then, should Europe's
intellectuals be doing?
Claus Offe | Professor of Political Sociology, Hertie School
of Gove
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cXu-HA4EvA
Panel Three | Innovations of democracy -- new modes of
forming collective decisions
Chair: Claus Offe, Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, and
Professor Emeritus, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
Jon Elster, Columbia University,
New York, and Collège de France, Paris
Robert E. Goodin, Australian
National University,
Canberra, and University of Essex
Lea Ypi, London School of Economics, and Australian
National University,
Canberra
Liberal Democracy in Hard Times: Transitions, Dilemmas, and
Innovations | Symposium in Honour of Claus Offe
Discussion with Philippe Van Parijs | Commentary by Claus
Offe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlBZK-8bheU
Social Justice in the European Union: Four Views.
Lecture by Philippe Van Parijs. Commentary by Claus Offe |
03.04.2013
Nationalism in Belgium
might be different from nationalism in Ukraine, but if we want to
understand the current European crisis and how to overcome it we need to take
both into account. The debate series "Europe talks to Europe"
is an attempt to turn European intellectual debate into a two-way street.
From Autumn 2009 to Spring 2011, Eurozine organized a series
of public debates in cities across central and eastern Europe, including Budapest, Bratislava, Brno, Bucharest, Lviv, Sofia, Warsaw and Vienna. A cooperation
with ERSTE Foundation.
Europe talks to Europe
http://www.eurozine.com/comp/europetalkstoeurope2.html