What Does Europe Want? The Union and its Discontents. Slavoj Žižek

what worries me – that you will return claiming that the USSR is NOT socialist!’ What worried Hook was the naive defence of the purity of the concept: if things go wrong with building a Socialist society, this does not invalidate the idea itself, it just means we didn’t implement it properly.

      Do we not detect the same naivety in today’s market fundamentalists? When, during a recent TV debate in France, Guy Sorman claimed that democracy and capitalism necessarily go together, I couldn’t resist asking him the obvious question: ‘But what about China today?’ He snapped back: ‘In China there is no capitalism!’ For a fanatically pro-capitalist Sorman, if a country is non-democratic, it simply means it is not truly capitalist but practises its disfigured version, in exactly the same way that for a democratic communist, Stalinism was simply not an authentic form of communism.

      The underlying mistake is not difficult to identify – it is the same as in the well-known joke: ‘My fiancée is never late for an appointment; because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancée!’ This is how today’s apologist of the market, in an unheard-of ideological kidnapping, explains the crisis of 2008: it was not the failure of the free market which caused it but the excessive state regulation, i.e. the fact that our market economy was not a true one, that it was still in the clutches of the welfare state. When we stick to such a purity of market capitalism, dismissing its failures as accidental mishaps, we end up in a naive progressivism whose exemplary case is the Christmas issue of The Spectator magazine (15 December 2012). It opens up with the editorial ‘Why 2012 was the best year ever’, which argues against the perception that we live in ‘a dangerous, cruel world where things are bad and getting worse’. Here is the opening paragraph:

      It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age.¹

      The same idea was developed in detail by Matt Ridley. Here is the blurb for his The Rational Optimist:

      A counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our age, and proves, however much we like to think to the contrary, that things are getting better. Over 10,000 years ago there were fewer than 10 million people on the planet. Today there are more than 6 billion, 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going erratically upwards for 10,000 years and has rapidly accelerated over the last 200 years: calories; vitamins; clean water; machines; privacy; the means to travel faster than we can run, and the ability to communicate over longer distances than we can shout. Yet, bizarrely, however much things improve from the way they were before, people still cling to the belief that the future will be nothing but disastrous.²

      And there is more of the same. Here is the blurb for Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature:

      Believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful moment in our species’ existence. In his gripping and controversial new work, New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows that despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding myths about humankind’s inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious book continues Pinker’s exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly enlightened world.³

      With many provisos, one can roughly accept the data to which these ‘rationalists’ refer – yes, today we definitely live better than our ancestors did 10,000 years ago in the Stone Age, and even an average prisoner in Dachau (the Nazi working camp, not in Auschwitz, the killing camp) was living at least marginally better than, probably, a slave prisoner of the Mongols. Etc. etc. – but there is something that this story misses.

      There is a more down-to-earth version of the same insight which one often hears in mass media, in the quoted passage from The Spectator but especially those of non-European countries: crisis? What crisis? Look at the BRIC countries, at Poland, South Korea, Singapore, Peru, even many sub-Saharan African states – they are all progressing. The losers are only Western Europe and, up to a point, the US, so we are not dealing with a global crisis, but just with the shift of the dynamics of progress away from the West. Is a portent symbol of this shift not the fact that, recently, many people from Portugal, a country in deep crisis, are returning to Mozambique and Angola, ex-colonies of Portugal, but this time as economic immigrants, not as colonisers? So what if our much-decried crisis is a mere local crisis in an overall progress? Even with regard to human rights: is the situation in China and Russia now not better than fifty years ago? Decrying the ongoing crisis as a global phenomenon is thus a typical Eurocentrist view, and a view coming from Leftists who usually pride themselves on their anti-Eurocentrism.

      But we should restrain our anti-colonialist joy here – the question to be raised is: if Europe is in gradual decay, what is replacing its hegemony? The answer is: ‘capitalism with Asian values’ – which, of course, has nothing to do with Asian people and everything to do with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism, as such, to suspend democracy. From Marx on, the truly radical Left was never simply ‘progressivist’ – it was always obsessed by the question: what is the price of progress? Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheard-of productivity it unleashed; he just insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms. And we should do the same with today’s progress of global capitalism: keep in view its dark underside which is fomenting revolts.

      People rebel not when ‘things are really bad’, but when their expectations are disappointed. The French Revolution occurred after the king and the nobles were for decades gradually losing their full hold on power; the 1956 anti-communist revolt in Hungary exploded after Nagy Imre had already been prime minister for two years, after (relatively) free debates among intellectuals; people rebelled in Egypt in 2011 because there was some economic progress under Mubarak, giving rise to a whole class of educated young people who participated in the universal digital culture. And this is why the Chinese communists are right to panic, precisely because, on average, the Chinese are now living considerably better than forty years ago – but the social antagonisms (between the newly rich and the rest) exploded, plus expectations are much higher. That’s the problem with development and progress: they are always uneven, they give birth to new instabilities and antagonisms, and they generate new expectations which cannot be met. In Tunisia or Egypt just prior to the Arab Spring, the majority probably lived a little bit better than decades ago, but the standards by which they measured their (dis)satisfaction were much higher.

      So yes, The Spectator, Ridley, Pinker etc. are in principle right, but the very facts that they emphasise are creating conditions for revolt and rebellion. Recall the classic cartoon scene of a cat who simply continues to walk over the edge of the precipice, ignoring that she no longer has ground under her feet – she falls down only when she looks down and notices she is hanging in the abyss. Is this not how ordinary people in Cyprus must feel these days? They are aware that Cyprus will never be the same, that there is a catastrophic fall in the standard of living ahead, but the full impact of this fall is not yet properly felt, so for a short period they can afford to go on with their normal daily lives like the cat who calmly walks in the empty air. And we should not condemn them: such delaying of the full crash is also a surviving strategy – the real impact will come silently when the panic will be over. This is why it is now, when the Cyprus crisis has largely disappeared from the media, that one should think and write about it.

      There is a well-known joke from the last decade of the Soviet Union about Rabinovitch, a Jew who wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why, and Rabinovitch answers: ‘There are two reasons why. The first is that I’m afraid that in the Soviet Union the communists will lose power, and the new power will put all the blame for the communist crimes on us Jews – there will again be anti-Jewish pogroms …’ The bureaucrat interrupts him: ‘But this