Last Wednesday, Olaf Scholz’s German government became perhaps the first indirect victim of Donald Trump’s election win. It’s not that the American president-elect targeted the coalition — the result of a 2021 deal between Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the neoliberal-hawk Free Democrats (FDP) — as some sort of red menace. The crisis in Germany’s government had been mounting for some time already. But the key actors waited for the US election result before letting it play out in full.
Just hours after confirmation of Trump’s victory, Chancellor Scholz fired his finance minister, Christian Lindner, who is also FDP leader. Lindner is an ardent champion of a monetarist orthodoxy that is no longer bearable even in Germany (the country that had, in the previous decade, imposed the same austerity regime across Europe). But what are the real roots of the German crisis? Why could this crisis lead to dangerous outcomes for the old continent and beyond? And how can we get out of it?
In Wolfgang Streeck’s latest book, published in English next week as Taking Back Control?, the German sociologist describes the process of European integration since the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 as the construction of a German-driven liberal empire. Naturally, when Streeck speaks of “empire,” he does not necessarily mean a power that pursues military conquests in order to extend its authority from center to periphery. Rather, he uses this term to refer to state institutions that cede sovereignty to some other, outside center of power.
We can…
Auteur: Tommaso Nencioni
