The polish plumber and the two faces of anti-globalization.
In France, the "nons" had it on Sunday, defeating the proposed EU constitution 55-45 in a popular referendum. If no other countries follow France's lead (a big if given the Netherlands vote scheduled for this Wednesday where the "no" forces, leading in the polls, will be bolstered by the French result), this may not be such a great blow to the EU as being portrayed in the international press. In part, the vote was a statement of non-confidence on the performance of France's long-time president, Jacques Chirac whose popularity tumbled to 39% in the weeks leading up to yesterday's vote while 69% of French voters say they believe an EU constitution can be successfully negociated in the future. As well, from the beginning, some "yes" proponents alleged that Chirac and his allies were selling the reforms dishonestly and failing to properly address popular fears about a stronger EU less bound by the doubts and internal governing ideologies of its member states. In 2007, there is a good chance that Chirac will be succeeded in the French presidency by his party's chairman Nicolas Sarkozy. If so, Sarkozy -- a prominent and popular yes-with-reservations politician -- is likely to resubmit the constitution to the French electorate in plenty of time for France to be on board for 2009 when the time frame of the current constitution, negociated in Nice in 2000, runs out.
More interesting is the global reaction to the vote and what it says about current international and European attitudes to globalization, and who makes up the pro- and anti-EU (and, by extention, the pro- and anti-globalization) ranks. British neoliberal columnist Martin Kettle offered a fairly standard analysis in the Guardian:
France's 55%-45% verdict on the EU constitution is not the end of the story, but its beginning. The detail of the vote is illuminating. There was an almost complete convergence against the treaty between the voters of the extreme left and the extreme right; according to the Ipsos exit poll, fully 98% of communist voters voted no, along with 94% of the non-communist extreme left - but also 93% of National Front voters.
The more moderate parties of right and left were more divided. There was generally solid support for the treaty among Jacques Chirac's UMP, where 80% voted yes, and in the centre-right UDF, with its 76% yes vote. But it was among Greens and, especially, Socialist voters where the divide was deepest and had greatest impact. In both parties, the hierarchy called for a yes but a majority of their electorate voted no, replicating the national picture almost precisely.
The French crisis, in other words, is not only a national crisis, but also a Socialist one. French Socialist voters divided 44% yes against 56% no. This was the decisive political dynamic of the May 29 outcome. It was what made the difference in the overall result. And, by taking their stand alongside the protectionists of the extreme right and the extreme left, the majority of France's Socialists declared their identity to be with the past not the future, with the nation state rather than the globalised world.
True, they did this for all kinds of reasons that cannot be easily separated out. Some did it to oppose globalisation. Yet many did it because they dislike Chirac, resenting having had to cast a vote for him against Le Pen three years ago. Others wanted to protest because for a decade there has been 10% unemployment in France. Some voted no simply because they actually dislike the EU constitution, though some thought it too strong, while others thought it too weak. Others voted no because they want to stop Turkish accession to the EU.
Whatever their motives, this was a vote to keep tight hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse. It was the politics of Peter Pan, of not wanting to grow up. True, in many respects what the French have got is very good - short working hours, generous welfare benefits, subsidies to privileged sectors of the economy, a health service to envy. But it comes at a very high price of persistent high unemployment (one in four young people in France is now out of work), faltering economic growth, a relative decline in income per head and a two-tier labour market of haves and have-nots.
In fact, the ideological determination and breakdown of "yes" and "no" is even more complex than that. Though the socialist ID-ing voters eventually went with the "no" forces (by as much as 59% depending on the report), earlier polling at the end of April had found a plurality of PS voters supporting the "yes", suggesting fluidity among center-left voters. The "no" forces were bolstered by the defection from the party line of Socialist deputy leader Laurent Fabius, who supported the "no". But they received a further, and perhaps definitive, jolt from a comment made by an EU diplomat (subsquently retracted in early April) that served to shake France's private sector labour unions. The Chicago Sun-Times, among others, laid out the story:
A faceless Slavic handyman has emerged as a symbol of the struggle to persuade a disgruntled French electorate to vote in favor of a European Union constitution this weekend.
For opponents, the "Polish Plumber" represents fears that under a tighter union, people from poorer European nations will take jobs away in France, where one in 10 is already unemployed.
The debate over the treaty, the result of months of negotiation and compromise among the 25 EU members, also taps into what appears to be a growing malaise about the costs and complications of further integrating member nations.
Former EU internal market commissioner Frits Bolkestein caused a controversy by saying he would have appreciated a Polish plumber when his French country vacation home sprung a leak and he was unable to find one nearby. Left-wing commentators were scandalized, and the local mayor vowed to send Bolkestein a list of unemployed French plumbers.
The Washington Post explains in further detail:
With France mired in double-digit unemployment rates, opponents said they worried that the constitution would enable low-wage workers from Eastern Europe to migrate to France and compete for scarce jobs. Others complained that the constitution increased the odds that French taxpayers would have to send more money to Brussels, which would in turn funnel it to poorer E.U. members.
Fatouma Diallo, 19, a nursing student in Paris, said she and many of her friends fretted that their job prospects would worsen under a stronger E.U. "They are already taking money from our paychecks," she said. "These changes are going to affect my generation more than others."
Indeed, the "Polish plumber", so casually alluded to by a denizen of the global capital movement, became a bright symbol of the strand of anti-globalization argument that finally dominated the French vote: that the economic integration of richer and poorer nations under the EU banner will lead to a decline in living standards among workers in the richer countries. The fear of this integration among workers and their representatives in rich nations is a variant on the same sort of arguments that characterize, for instance, the American AFL-CIO's opposition to economic globalization: that poor countries drag down wages and weaken the bargaining positions of workers in rich countries, in line with standard monopsony or "iron law" economic wage theories. The empirical evidence (not to mention the theory) of this "lowest common denominator" or "social dumping" phenominon is very mixed (though the argument that capital mobility decreases the bargaining power of first-world organized labour is far more plausible than the argument that outsourcing bids down non-union wages in the developed world other than through the effect of weakened unions.) But the arguments have a resonance that goes beyond just fear of economic encroachment, to encompass cultural erosion, one reason why Muslem Turkey's proposed membership in the EU has been more strongly contested by Western Europeans than that of the former Soviet satellites who joined the EU in 2004 or are slated to do so in 2007.
The "Polish plumber" argument is however only one of the two major strands of anti-globalization critique. The second line of this critique can be thought of as the "noblesse-oblige" or "enlightened capitalist" argument -- that globalization, carried out by economic elites, is a program designed by rich countries and their capitalist/industrial representatives to exploit poor countries. This argument grew out of the New New Left (Frank Foer's definition, not Steven Malanaga's) and was the central argument of Ralph Nader's presidential campaigns in the U.S. -- but it has also increasingly found traction among more mainstream liberals, including economists such as Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz. These critics allege that US- and European-led globalization has pandered to US corporate conglomerates -- most eggregiously to agriculture and the pharmaceutical industry -- in designing treaties that force smaller, weaker WTO member countries to adopt painful concessions, for instance on seed-crop storage and drug patent protections, that have nothing to do with free trade but that force these weaker "client states" toward import-substitution, buying their seeds and drugs from powerful Western employers.
These two branches of anti-globalization dispute -- the labour-nationalist and the nobless-oblige -- share some things in common: both tend to view globalization from a class perspective -- as a rich elite oppressing economically weaker victims, and even from a Marxist perspective, as an attempt to divorce labour from the means of production in order to achieve dominance through the primacy of capital in politics and development. Both types of arguments can -- and in their political rhetoric do --claim to speak for the oppressed against their economic oppressors. Both tend to be fatally plagued by their attraction to the proponents of ugly radical politics -- Pat Buchanan and Jean Marie Le Pen on the right, Alexander Cockburn and the French Communists on the left. And both tend to be opposed, politically and intellectually, by both moderate political parties and, more stridently, by the economic elites that allign with these moderate parties. The result is that while the globalization dispute looks to some extent like a struggle between capital and labour within developed countries, it also shakes down in the broader arena more as a dispute between global moderates and radicals than between the global (or even domestic) right and left.
Further, because of their distance from domestic labour interests, the noblesse-oblige globalizatin critics are bound to be politically weaker, less emotionally resonant and to have less popular heft than the more nationalistic anti-globalization arguments. At the same time, they are more inherently more intellectually respectable, particularly in the neoliberal press, leading to the occasional union between the two camps, for example between the American labour unions and New Leftists at the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle. The similarities, however, mask more fundamental differences between the two camps: fear of the "Polish plumber" is fundamentally a a fear of losing at a zero-sum global game. It is generally isolationist and illiberal, its arguments often uncomfortably close to far-right (rather than far-left) politics -- and easily castigated as such by writers like Kettle. In a country like France, which combines one of Europe's strongest leftist movements and an extremely ideologically diverse electorate (the Communists hold several mayorships including the Paris suburb of Bobigny; far-left candidates pulled over 16% of the first-ballot presidential vote in 2002 while Jean Marie Le Pen famously took more of the vote than the center-left's Leonel Jospin), with chronically high unemployment and what is popularly viewed as a major immigration problem, fear of losing economic and cultural ground to foreigners is a major political determinent, whether or not it is acknowledged by "respectable" centrist parties and commentators. The noblesse-oblige critque of globalization, by contrast, is fundamentally a liberal argument. Its proponents are not inherently hostile to global integration but, in fact, argue that rich countries should make concessions to poorer ones in order to spur development and global economic equality -- should send them jobs, buy their products, offer a genuine international level playing field. To the extent that its proponents promote solidarity among non-capitalists, they extend that solidarity across borders to a embrace the global poor (and to impose rules on the global rich.) In essence, the noblesse-oblige anti-globalizers don't fret about the low-wage Polish plumber stealing jobs; they fear instead that the French government will find ways to make sure that he doesn't benefit from that chance, even as it takes advantage of the opening of Poland's borders to French goods and capital.
Of course, the internal turmoil, complexity and contradictions are not limited to the globalization critics. There is much to recommend a stronger EU on liberal grounds, especially given Europe's centuries of bloody history, the shame of some EU members' midcentury politics, and its continuing problems with racism of various kinds. But while the proponents of a stronger EU do offer solidarity with Eastern Europe and even to Muslem Turkey, they are not in themselves wholly altruistic liberals. Chirac, for instance, warned his countrymen that a strong EU was necessary to defend Europe's interests against the United States and China and part of the desire to widen the circle is to buttress that power, which is in itself a form of conflict-mongering against foreigners. Meanwhile, as anti-globalizers from both camps have aruged, the pro-globalization platform has made it difficult for center-left or Third Way governments to distinguish their platforms from their center-right opponents and, because of the influence of money in politics, to divorce their policies from the interests of big business and, particularly, global capital. Perhaps the strongest critique of globalization (though one I don't completely share) is the noblesse-oblige argument taken to its extreme logical conclusion: that domestic politics and national self-interest will prevent globalization from ever creating a level playing field, so that the whole project is essentially futile from the perspective of global good.
The European Union will almost certainly survive and will eventually get a new constitution, even if less powerful than the version currently on the table. The globalization disputes will go on. Maybe the greatest upshot of yesterday's vote is that the pro-EU forces, led on the center-right by Sarkozy, are now arguing that the debates that simmer underneath the official globalization disputes be brought out into the open and debated before the French vote again and before the EU and the integration it represents, proceeds. That surely would make for better politics than the visage of an unnamed shadowy slav, the confused nervousness of French workers fearing their social security, and the lack of national leadership in confronting the real questions about global integration and the sacrifices it must entail.
More interesting is the global reaction to the vote and what it says about current international and European attitudes to globalization, and who makes up the pro- and anti-EU (and, by extention, the pro- and anti-globalization) ranks. British neoliberal columnist Martin Kettle offered a fairly standard analysis in the Guardian:
France's 55%-45% verdict on the EU constitution is not the end of the story, but its beginning. The detail of the vote is illuminating. There was an almost complete convergence against the treaty between the voters of the extreme left and the extreme right; according to the Ipsos exit poll, fully 98% of communist voters voted no, along with 94% of the non-communist extreme left - but also 93% of National Front voters.
The more moderate parties of right and left were more divided. There was generally solid support for the treaty among Jacques Chirac's UMP, where 80% voted yes, and in the centre-right UDF, with its 76% yes vote. But it was among Greens and, especially, Socialist voters where the divide was deepest and had greatest impact. In both parties, the hierarchy called for a yes but a majority of their electorate voted no, replicating the national picture almost precisely.
The French crisis, in other words, is not only a national crisis, but also a Socialist one. French Socialist voters divided 44% yes against 56% no. This was the decisive political dynamic of the May 29 outcome. It was what made the difference in the overall result. And, by taking their stand alongside the protectionists of the extreme right and the extreme left, the majority of France's Socialists declared their identity to be with the past not the future, with the nation state rather than the globalised world.
True, they did this for all kinds of reasons that cannot be easily separated out. Some did it to oppose globalisation. Yet many did it because they dislike Chirac, resenting having had to cast a vote for him against Le Pen three years ago. Others wanted to protest because for a decade there has been 10% unemployment in France. Some voted no simply because they actually dislike the EU constitution, though some thought it too strong, while others thought it too weak. Others voted no because they want to stop Turkish accession to the EU.
Whatever their motives, this was a vote to keep tight hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse. It was the politics of Peter Pan, of not wanting to grow up. True, in many respects what the French have got is very good - short working hours, generous welfare benefits, subsidies to privileged sectors of the economy, a health service to envy. But it comes at a very high price of persistent high unemployment (one in four young people in France is now out of work), faltering economic growth, a relative decline in income per head and a two-tier labour market of haves and have-nots.
In fact, the ideological determination and breakdown of "yes" and "no" is even more complex than that. Though the socialist ID-ing voters eventually went with the "no" forces (by as much as 59% depending on the report), earlier polling at the end of April had found a plurality of PS voters supporting the "yes", suggesting fluidity among center-left voters. The "no" forces were bolstered by the defection from the party line of Socialist deputy leader Laurent Fabius, who supported the "no". But they received a further, and perhaps definitive, jolt from a comment made by an EU diplomat (subsquently retracted in early April) that served to shake France's private sector labour unions. The Chicago Sun-Times, among others, laid out the story:
A faceless Slavic handyman has emerged as a symbol of the struggle to persuade a disgruntled French electorate to vote in favor of a European Union constitution this weekend.
For opponents, the "Polish Plumber" represents fears that under a tighter union, people from poorer European nations will take jobs away in France, where one in 10 is already unemployed.
The debate over the treaty, the result of months of negotiation and compromise among the 25 EU members, also taps into what appears to be a growing malaise about the costs and complications of further integrating member nations.
Former EU internal market commissioner Frits Bolkestein caused a controversy by saying he would have appreciated a Polish plumber when his French country vacation home sprung a leak and he was unable to find one nearby. Left-wing commentators were scandalized, and the local mayor vowed to send Bolkestein a list of unemployed French plumbers.
The Washington Post explains in further detail:
With France mired in double-digit unemployment rates, opponents said they worried that the constitution would enable low-wage workers from Eastern Europe to migrate to France and compete for scarce jobs. Others complained that the constitution increased the odds that French taxpayers would have to send more money to Brussels, which would in turn funnel it to poorer E.U. members.
Fatouma Diallo, 19, a nursing student in Paris, said she and many of her friends fretted that their job prospects would worsen under a stronger E.U. "They are already taking money from our paychecks," she said. "These changes are going to affect my generation more than others."
Indeed, the "Polish plumber", so casually alluded to by a denizen of the global capital movement, became a bright symbol of the strand of anti-globalization argument that finally dominated the French vote: that the economic integration of richer and poorer nations under the EU banner will lead to a decline in living standards among workers in the richer countries. The fear of this integration among workers and their representatives in rich nations is a variant on the same sort of arguments that characterize, for instance, the American AFL-CIO's opposition to economic globalization: that poor countries drag down wages and weaken the bargaining positions of workers in rich countries, in line with standard monopsony or "iron law" economic wage theories. The empirical evidence (not to mention the theory) of this "lowest common denominator" or "social dumping" phenominon is very mixed (though the argument that capital mobility decreases the bargaining power of first-world organized labour is far more plausible than the argument that outsourcing bids down non-union wages in the developed world other than through the effect of weakened unions.) But the arguments have a resonance that goes beyond just fear of economic encroachment, to encompass cultural erosion, one reason why Muslem Turkey's proposed membership in the EU has been more strongly contested by Western Europeans than that of the former Soviet satellites who joined the EU in 2004 or are slated to do so in 2007.
The "Polish plumber" argument is however only one of the two major strands of anti-globalization critique. The second line of this critique can be thought of as the "noblesse-oblige" or "enlightened capitalist" argument -- that globalization, carried out by economic elites, is a program designed by rich countries and their capitalist/industrial representatives to exploit poor countries. This argument grew out of the New New Left (Frank Foer's definition, not Steven Malanaga's) and was the central argument of Ralph Nader's presidential campaigns in the U.S. -- but it has also increasingly found traction among more mainstream liberals, including economists such as Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz. These critics allege that US- and European-led globalization has pandered to US corporate conglomerates -- most eggregiously to agriculture and the pharmaceutical industry -- in designing treaties that force smaller, weaker WTO member countries to adopt painful concessions, for instance on seed-crop storage and drug patent protections, that have nothing to do with free trade but that force these weaker "client states" toward import-substitution, buying their seeds and drugs from powerful Western employers.
These two branches of anti-globalization dispute -- the labour-nationalist and the nobless-oblige -- share some things in common: both tend to view globalization from a class perspective -- as a rich elite oppressing economically weaker victims, and even from a Marxist perspective, as an attempt to divorce labour from the means of production in order to achieve dominance through the primacy of capital in politics and development. Both types of arguments can -- and in their political rhetoric do --claim to speak for the oppressed against their economic oppressors. Both tend to be fatally plagued by their attraction to the proponents of ugly radical politics -- Pat Buchanan and Jean Marie Le Pen on the right, Alexander Cockburn and the French Communists on the left. And both tend to be opposed, politically and intellectually, by both moderate political parties and, more stridently, by the economic elites that allign with these moderate parties. The result is that while the globalization dispute looks to some extent like a struggle between capital and labour within developed countries, it also shakes down in the broader arena more as a dispute between global moderates and radicals than between the global (or even domestic) right and left.
Further, because of their distance from domestic labour interests, the noblesse-oblige globalizatin critics are bound to be politically weaker, less emotionally resonant and to have less popular heft than the more nationalistic anti-globalization arguments. At the same time, they are more inherently more intellectually respectable, particularly in the neoliberal press, leading to the occasional union between the two camps, for example between the American labour unions and New Leftists at the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle. The similarities, however, mask more fundamental differences between the two camps: fear of the "Polish plumber" is fundamentally a a fear of losing at a zero-sum global game. It is generally isolationist and illiberal, its arguments often uncomfortably close to far-right (rather than far-left) politics -- and easily castigated as such by writers like Kettle. In a country like France, which combines one of Europe's strongest leftist movements and an extremely ideologically diverse electorate (the Communists hold several mayorships including the Paris suburb of Bobigny; far-left candidates pulled over 16% of the first-ballot presidential vote in 2002 while Jean Marie Le Pen famously took more of the vote than the center-left's Leonel Jospin), with chronically high unemployment and what is popularly viewed as a major immigration problem, fear of losing economic and cultural ground to foreigners is a major political determinent, whether or not it is acknowledged by "respectable" centrist parties and commentators. The noblesse-oblige critque of globalization, by contrast, is fundamentally a liberal argument. Its proponents are not inherently hostile to global integration but, in fact, argue that rich countries should make concessions to poorer ones in order to spur development and global economic equality -- should send them jobs, buy their products, offer a genuine international level playing field. To the extent that its proponents promote solidarity among non-capitalists, they extend that solidarity across borders to a embrace the global poor (and to impose rules on the global rich.) In essence, the noblesse-oblige anti-globalizers don't fret about the low-wage Polish plumber stealing jobs; they fear instead that the French government will find ways to make sure that he doesn't benefit from that chance, even as it takes advantage of the opening of Poland's borders to French goods and capital.
Of course, the internal turmoil, complexity and contradictions are not limited to the globalization critics. There is much to recommend a stronger EU on liberal grounds, especially given Europe's centuries of bloody history, the shame of some EU members' midcentury politics, and its continuing problems with racism of various kinds. But while the proponents of a stronger EU do offer solidarity with Eastern Europe and even to Muslem Turkey, they are not in themselves wholly altruistic liberals. Chirac, for instance, warned his countrymen that a strong EU was necessary to defend Europe's interests against the United States and China and part of the desire to widen the circle is to buttress that power, which is in itself a form of conflict-mongering against foreigners. Meanwhile, as anti-globalizers from both camps have aruged, the pro-globalization platform has made it difficult for center-left or Third Way governments to distinguish their platforms from their center-right opponents and, because of the influence of money in politics, to divorce their policies from the interests of big business and, particularly, global capital. Perhaps the strongest critique of globalization (though one I don't completely share) is the noblesse-oblige argument taken to its extreme logical conclusion: that domestic politics and national self-interest will prevent globalization from ever creating a level playing field, so that the whole project is essentially futile from the perspective of global good.
The European Union will almost certainly survive and will eventually get a new constitution, even if less powerful than the version currently on the table. The globalization disputes will go on. Maybe the greatest upshot of yesterday's vote is that the pro-EU forces, led on the center-right by Sarkozy, are now arguing that the debates that simmer underneath the official globalization disputes be brought out into the open and debated before the French vote again and before the EU and the integration it represents, proceeds. That surely would make for better politics than the visage of an unnamed shadowy slav, the confused nervousness of French workers fearing their social security, and the lack of national leadership in confronting the real questions about global integration and the sacrifices it must entail.
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