The European Union has reimposed tight limits on states’ budget deficits — but with exemptions for military spending. After years of claims that austerity was over, we’re now seeing it used selectively to put limits on democratic choice.
The “debt order” is back, warns French sociologist Benjamin Lemoine. In 2024, the European Commission formally reimposed fiscal deficit guidelines on European Union member states, although important carve-outs are being negotiated in order to finance a substantial increase in military spending.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the political momentum behind an increasingly libertarian far right points toward draconian spending cuts and tax breaks — threatening major turmoil for state finances and social welfare systems. Lemoine argues that what is being revived is the use of debt as a political “technology” to discipline society, burying the “silent revolution” in debt and monetary policy that occurred just a few years ago to allow pandemic-era deficit spending.
A sociologist at the École Normale Supérieure, Lemoine is the author of L’ordre de la dette and La démocratie discipliné par la dette. A translation of his most recent book, Chasseurs d’États, is forthcoming from Zone Books.
In an interview, Lemoine sat down with Jacobin’s Harrison Stetler for an extended discussion on monetary policy and the politics of sovereign debt.
Harrison Stetler
Over the last decade and a half, central banks have made multiple dramatic breaches of policymaking orthodoxy. Why?
Benjamin Lemoine
Since the 1980s, the dominant ideology driving monetary and fiscal…
Auteur: Benjamin Lemoine
