The Emergence of Critical Orders in the European Crisis: A Comparative Study

The deleterious effects of the management of the European crisis on social benefits, public services, wages and employment have unleashed a wave of popular mobilization not seen in decades in the continent. In Greece where the economic involution has gone the furthest, mass demonstrations, strikes, civil disobedience and public unrests went to a point of quasi insurrection during the autumn 2011. Polls this year have seen a surge in the votes in favor of the radical left Syryza and the affirmation of in the elections and in the streets of Golden Dawn, a neo-nazi organization. In Spain and Portugal and, to a lesser extent, in Italy and France, there has been huge street demonstrations, occupations and strikes. The comeback of socio-political conflictuality is potentially an epoch-making process that demands theories of European integration that can account for a dramatically different, indeed disintegrating, Europe. The legitimacy of the European project of integration is seriously in question. Yet, relegitimation takes place on several levels.

Studying such “objectively overdetermined but subjectively indeterminate” processes of capitalist relegitimation (cf. Debray in Jessop, 2004, p. 8) is a task usually avoided by students of the economy, and certainly European integration. Indeed, we argue that existing approaches in European integration studies are ill-equipped to understand such periods of rapid and radical change; we argue that they ask the wrong questions, typically focusing on institutions, processes of governance and intergovernmentality. The crisis of European integration therefore calls for methodological innovation that can bring us to ask more meaningful questions and thus satisfy the need for a deeper understanding of complex process and agency.

Developing the notion of “critical order” from an International Political Economy angle, this paper provides a comparative case study of these developments. The emergence of “critical orders” following capitalist crises is not unusual historically, but the existence of a sustained one in which imagined recoveries can take form and stabilise in an advanced capitalist economy is. The paper takes in-depth looks at the cases of Greece, Spain and the control case of Iceland to explore such issues as cultures of mobilization, political violence and legitimation. Depending on their social, political, economic and cultural constitution, critical orders constitute varying tests for capitalism and its capacity to relegitimate itself.