The current crisis offers an opportunity to return to a healthier world, in which every citizen feels valued, whether he rises socially or not, argues Peter Giesen.
In December 1973, the BBC stopped broadcasting at 10:30 am to save electricity. Throughout the United Kingdom, the thermostat in offices was not allowed to exceed 18.5 degrees and half of the street lighting was switched off. Historian Dominic Sandbrook compared the dark holidays of 1973 to “the last days of Pompeii, with reports of people queuing outside shops for bread, candles, paraffin, toilet paper and cans of soup.”
The United Kingdom was groaning under inflation and the oil crisis, fueled by a miners’ strike that led to power rationing. Six years later, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came to power, beginning the neoliberal upheaval in Europe.
At the end of 2022, Europe will again be faced with an energy crisis. A winter of inflation, high energy prices and economic hardship is coming. Just as the oil crisis of the 1970s led to neoliberalism, a different world will emerge today. The first contours of this are already visible: the state is trying to regain control of the energy market and to protect citizens and companies against the economic consequences of the war in Ukraine.
Of course, stories that argue that good can come out of a crisis should be distrusted. They tend towards Calvinist kitsch: suffering purifies, we have to go through a deep valley before we see the light. After the 2008 financial crisis, many people predicted a resurgence of the left because capitalism had become so discredited. The opposite happened.
Yet the situation is different now. The 2008 crisis was a financial crisis, the 2022 crisis a security crisis. Europe feels unsafe in a world in which Russia is aggressive, China is becoming increasingly assertive and America’s support has become less obvious. Security requires a state that safeguards its strategic interests and takes a defensive attitude towards the outside world. That resilience starts with internal cohesion. Security requires brotherhood: you cannot ask the population to make sacrifices in the fight against the outside world if solidarity is not guaranteed in their own country. In other words, citizens must find democracy worth defending.
Active state is needed
A number of foundations of social order after the fall of the Wall have been swept away. Europe can no longer rely on the supply of cheap products produced elsewhere, now that it has become apparent how easily those supply lines can be cut. If Europe does not want to be dependent on China, the United States and other countries at a time of increasing geopolitical tensions, it will have to build its own defense and technology sector. It will also have to guarantee access to scarce raw materials. In addition, there is a climate crisis that threatens global stability. All this requires an active state, which not only acts as market master, but also orders society. The war thus breaks the primacy of the market that characterized the period 1989-2022.
Another foundation of neoliberalism, the primacy of personal responsibility, has also been broken by the war. A low-income person living in a drafty house cannot help getting into financial difficulties because of a war for which he bears no responsibility. War has always been a great equalizer. Whoever asks the population for support will have to protect and reward it.
The story of neoliberalism is the story of a generation to which I myself belong. It is incomprehensible without the intense malaise that plagued European welfare states in the 1970s and 1980s. Today it is talked about quiet quitting of young employees who no longer feel like working their ass off for a boss. In the years of no future we had our own form of quiet quitting: the assistance. Because the social services did not check whether someone was seriously trying to find work, many young people lived carefree on benefits, by way of basic income. “It’s antisocial to go to work,” a friend told me. ‘Because then you take the place of someone who likes to work.’
Neoliberalism brought new energy to a demoralized society. Leaning on the state gave way to a belief in the creativity and personal initiative of the individual, in particular the entrepreneur. Virtually everyone agreed, including those on the left of the political spectrum. The new ideology may have had its ugly sides, but anything was better than a return to the dull sense of crisis of the early 1980s.
Caricature neoliberal Netherlands
The current neoliberal Netherlands is often caricatured, as if we are back in the times of Kruimeltje, with a small, overfed elite and a large impoverished mass that can hardly afford a roof over their heads. Of course there are people who can’t keep up. According to Statistics Netherlands, 6.8 percent of households had an income below the poverty line in 2020, 3.1 percent for the long term. But walk through any village, even one where the flags hang upside down, and see how neatly the houses are painted, how neatly the gardens are raked and how the car is shining in the driveway. The broad masses are doing well, also because free trade and globalization have made most products and services much cheaper. Electronics now cost next to nothing, while in the 1980s I paid a monthly salary for a VCR.
Yet it is clear that neoliberalism has bit its own tail because politicians have relinquished control of society. When I was a correspondent in France from 2013 to 2018, I regularly commented on French radio. I was seen as the representative of a successful, pragmatic Northern European nation that seemed to adapt effortlessly to modern times, while France fell further and further behind in its ideologically driven opposition to globalization. In France things are immediately flattened, in the Netherlands the beacons were moved in time after a tour through the polder.
Nothing is left of this positive image after the benefits affair, the nitrogen crisis, the housing crisis and the youth care crisis. In the land of the permacrisis, the state has lost its grip on society. Youth care is perhaps the best example. The national government left youth care to the municipalities, after considerable cutbacks had been made. Subsequently, market forces were introduced. Municipalities purchased care for their citizens. This led to a proliferation of cheap care for minor mental illnesses, sometimes offered by agencies owned by ‘venture investors’, while children with serious problems were placed on a waiting list. Thus, social solidarity was undermined. Whether a child is helped depends on the question in which municipality he lives and whether there is still money left.
Neoliberalism also bit its own tail from a socio-cultural point of view. In the 1980s, the winners experienced the new ideology as a mental liberation. They no longer had to hold back, they could compete for their place on the monkey rock and no longer had to be ashamed of the fruits they reaped. The yuppies era began. Social prestige was linked to material possessions and propagated with BMWs, Armani suits and other expensive and slick products.
Meritocracy became the keyword. Social positions were no longer distributed on the basis of origin, but on the basis of merit. Left-wing politicians such as Wim Kok, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schröder enthusiastically went along with it. Unequal outcomes were no longer objectionable, as long as the odds were equal.
However, meritocracy is a very problematic concept. First, there is never really equal opportunity: the importance of social origin has diminished, but not disappeared. Secondly, a perfect meritocracy will also fail, as the inventor of the term, the British sociologist Michael Young, already foresaw at the end of the 1950s. Winners believe they owe their position solely to their own efforts, so they no longer have to worry about the losers. Losers will feel misunderstood and despised.
The meritocracy is not always friendly at the top either. An ever-increasing group of highly educated potential winners is fighting for top positions that by definition remain scarce. Many people can’t handle the pressure or feel like a failure if their lives don’t live up to high expectations. As a result, the number of psychological complaints is increasing sharply, wrote the German-Korean thinker Byung Chul-Han. In the 21st century, we no longer suffer from cholera, typhoid or TB, but from ADHD, depression or burnout: ‘Excessive performance pressure leads to an infarction of the soul.’
Crisis offers opportunities
The current crisis offers an opportunity to return to a healthier world, where every citizen feels valued whether they rise socially or not. A world in which the state ensures that all citizens are decently housed, are not at the mercy of a flexible labor market and receive help with psychological problems.
Thanks to the corona crisis, we dare to dream about such a world again, wrote the Portuguese thinker Bruno Macaes in his book Geopolitics for the End of Time from 2021. Suddenly politicians turned out to be able to do much more than they had told us in recent decades. Man need not be a plaything of impersonal economic forces such as ‘globalization’, says Macaes: ‘Like the hero in a Bildungsroman, we had to wait for an unexpected crisis to discover the true extent of our strength.’
Yet Macaes also realizes that politicians face an enormous task. Neoliberalism has become a head of Jut, but the period between 1989 and 2022 has been marked by peace and prosperity. In a rawer world with more conflicts, wars, geopolitical and economic shocks, that prosperity will be more difficult to maintain. Moreover, the climate calls for curbing consumption, which has come to play such a central role in the self-image of Western citizens.
Politicians must create a new world in a fragmented political landscape that is detrimental to administrative power. Interest rates are rising, making it more difficult to buy off dissatisfaction with borrowed money. Immigration is a divisive issue for which no solution has yet been found. Meanwhile, populist nationalists are poised to exploit the discontent. If they win, the world will fragment further and the number of conflicts will increase even more.
But after World War II, politicians faced an equally daunting task in a devastated Europe threatened by the Soviet Union. Even then, internal cohesion was a problem: in countries such as France and Italy, communism could count on the support of a quarter of the population.
The West defended itself against communism, but tied its citizens to the Western model by building the welfare state. With the fall of the Wall, the enemy disappeared and the world became one big market.
The war in Ukraine has brought back the enemy. We experience fears that we had forgotten, such as the fear of nuclear weapons. But war also offers the opportunity to create a better world, with less market and more order, with less competition and more solidarity and an eye for the common interest. The more unsafe the outside world, the greater the need for a safe inner world. The coming winter will show whether the fledgling new world can withstand the tensions that the war evokes. It will be an important test.