04.10.2025, Germany.
Over the past 30 years, it has been repeatedly praised: “Now we have a global world, it is governed globally, there is the G-7, G-8, G-10…” I took a look at what they were actually doing, and it turned out that this boundless, deregulated economy was, in principle, the economy of a single state—the United States.
Wolfgang Streeck is one of the most renowned European scholars working at the intersection of sociology and political economy, and is the honorary director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Streeck’s main areas of scientific interest are the contradictions between capitalism and democracy, the evolution of democracy, and crises of the global order. For decades, he has been analyzing how social institutions and political systems have changed and why traditional forms of democracy are increasingly under pressure.
In his recent book Between Globalism and Democracy: Political Economy in Late Neoliberalism, the German scholar describes the gradual transformation of capitalism under the influence of neoliberalism, followed by the emergence of a unipolar world with the United States as the hegemon. However, according to Streeck, this formation was inherently unstable, and the gradual collapse of unipolarity will only lead to new wars.
In an interview with Jacobin magazine editor-in-chief Loren Balhorn, Streeck shared his understanding of current global processes and possible developments in the context of Middle East conflicts, Russia’s special operation, and the growing role of BRICS on the world stage. Rossa Primavera News Agency publishes an abridged translation of the interview.
Wolfgang Streeck: When I talk about democracy today, I am talking about capitalist democracy. Democracy in capitalism. I begin with the contradictions and transformations that this concept has undergone. The starting point is the liberal revolutions in Great Britain and France, the Law of Le Chapelier of 1792. There, all intermediate levels of society were radically prohibited. There are only relations between the citizen and the state, and that is called democracy, isn’t it?
And then we see how, during the 19th century, the labor movement forced something else to happen, namely tariff negotiations and strikes, which developed into law. And then in Germany, in 1918–1919, in the Weimar Republic, the Weimar Imperial Constitution for the first time allowed not only the existence of trade unions, but also that the state should not interfere when they were engaged in their tariff struggles. Such is the historical development of events.
Today, if someone is engaged in the theory of democracy at the level of the early 19th century and simply looks at who is elected, who has the right to vote, and so on, they have forgotten that the modern concept of democracy, which was won, includes not only the actions of the state, but also has a second dimension—one in which social struggle can be waged collectively. This is then called collective democracy, as opposed to bourgeois democracy.
And this great movement for democratization in capitalism — up until the 1970s and 1980s — was linked to the desire to fix this intermediate level of autonomous collective action in the constitution of the democratic system so that neither the market nor the state could destroy it. And now we are at the point of the 1980s and 1990s, when neoliberalism, aimed precisely at this, interrupted this very development.
Lauren Balhorn: That’s an intermediate level.
Wolfgang Streeck: Yes, deunionization. In the 1970s and 1980s, the state was constantly faced with the question: how to restrain inflation? This was achieved through what was called Political Exchange in English or Scambio Politico in Italy, meaning that unions showed restraint on wages, but in return received something else: for example, a fairer pension system.
Lauren Balhorn: Yes, so this deal was already in place in the 1970s?
Wolfgang Streeck: Yes, in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, you couldn’t just say, “Be disciplined,” or something like that. Keynes was interested in ensuring that Keynesian policies did not lead to inflation. But the unions had enough bargaining power to provoke it. If they acted smartly and were strong enough in relation to their own members, they used it to demand political improvements. The state is necessary, but it all depends on what kind of state it is. Who does it listen to?
If we turn to my latest works, in particular the book on globalism, everything stems from the following situation: by the end of the 1980s, both the global and national orders of the post-war phase had been destroyed, the “second post-war agreement” had been destroyed. Communism disappeared, the East opened up. The world became unipolar; it was no longer bipolar. And within states, it became apparent (it had started earlier, but from that moment on it really took off) that there was no longer any need to bother with some kind of collectively organized working class when disciplining, or rather, integrating labor into the social system could be achieved much better and cheaper if enterprises were subjected to international competition.
Then people obeyed on their own. You could just say to them, “If you continue to make your stupid demands here, we can just move to China.” And then, in all countries of democratic capitalism, there was a kind of polar shift: the disappearance of the intermediate, quasi-public level of regulation in favor, on the one hand, tough government intervention, like with Thatcher, or, on the other hand, tough market intervention — neoliberalism, where the problem was always “adapt to the market,” while before that, the idea was still “let’s adapt the market to the needs of society.” This was a social democratic idea, and the decline of social democracy could be observed.
And then I said, let me see what happened during the 30 years of the unipolar world order? 1990, Bush Sr., the new world order until 2020, approximately, the pandemic and then the war, etc. 2008 — the peak of this development and the crisis that began there. The book talks about how, during those 30 years, people kept saying, “Now we have a global world, it’s managed globally, there’s the G-7, G-8, G-10…” I looked into what they were actually doing. And it turns out that this boundless, deregulated economy was, in principle, the economy of a single state — namely, the United States.
So the illusion was that if we eliminated the state everywhere, there would be more freedom, economic freedom. That, I don’t know, all people would be able to travel anywhere. But in fact, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that one state was able to spread its own specific economic tradition throughout the world, through the World Trade Organization, etc.
You must remember that in the early 1990s, the United States was so powerful that all resolutions, including the first Iraq war, were passed unanimously by the UN Security Council. <…> The Americans asked the Chinese, “Do you want to join the World Trade Organization?” And they replied, “Yes, with pleasure, with great pleasure.”
And the Russians? They were ground into powder. Completely ground into powder. Yeltsin was the Americans’ errand boy. This only ended in 1999, when Putin came to power. That is why they were so angry with him and continue to be angry to this day, because he stopped this “wonderful integration” of Russia into a united world.
Lauren Balhorn: Can these processes be conceptually separated from the dominance of the United States, or would they be possible without the US as the center of power?
Wolfgang Streeck: No, that would be completely out of the question. And this needs to be said very clearly. When I said earlier that these concepts, these models, need to be justified historically, in 1990 there was no one in the world who could even remotely claim to be a global power establishing order. They [the US] had an ideology, which they still have today, and cultural influence. It is impossible to imagine people singing Chinese pop songs.
Lauren Balhorn: Not yet, but the ones that are becoming popular sound more and more American.
Wolfgang Streeck: It couldn’t be any other way. Here it is necessary to say what [Karl] Polanyi and others have repeatedly described very well — capitalism is aimed at expansion. You can say whatever you want about the Chinese, but Chinese society, if I understand it correctly, is not aimed at expansion, but rather at “we want peace and quiet here and to go about our business; if anyone from outside tries to interfere, they’ll get a beating, but otherwise, it’s peaceful here.”
American capitalism is associated with a universalist philosophy and a self-imposed duty to send a couple of F-35s to everyone in the world who is being mistreated, so that order can be restored. You won’t find this kind of missionary consciousness anywhere else.
In this sense, it would be good to look at what actually happened during this time. In my book, there is a section that asks a question along these lines: if we say that there are five, six, or seven major problems in our societies, what have these 30 years contributed to solving these problems? And here we can say that “global government” has been the biggest technical failure in human history.
I show various graphs there. For example, CO₂ emissions are getting higher and higher. You can literally put it in the diagram: the conference in Oslo, the conference in Paris, this and that conference — and nothing changes at all. Global warming — nothing. Government debt, citizen debt — they’re going up. And in 30 years, social inequality has been added to this.
And these neoliberal economists kept telling us: “This is wonderful. Now the average income in the poorest countries has risen from $1.89 to $2.10. Look, they’ve already gotten themselves out of the shit.” And just imagine the impudence with which this was sold!
When the pandemic broke out, it became clear (it could have been known in advance, we on the left knew it, we should have said it louder) that it is not per capita income, but conditions, public goods, clean water, and access to a more or less functioning healthcare system that make a country rich. Not that nonsense with calculated average statistics. We could have said all this. But people didn’t dare. They looked at the World Bank statistics: “Oh, yes, maybe there is something to it after all.” But there was nothing there.
So, social inequality [exists] both in large industrialized countries and throughout the world, with this wonderful global economy. It’s not that there are no rich people in so-called poor countries, it’s just that their wealth goes into US government bonds and Swiss banks, but not back home. And for this, we created a global open financial system, which every country was supposed to join under pressure from the World Bank.
At the time, it was called increasing the competitiveness of the developing world, when local investors or capital owners were given the right to take all this wealth to Europe instead of using it locally. There was no longer any control over the movement of capital.
Lauren Balhorn: One more question about Americanization or globalization: Isn’t it brilliant or genius on the part of globalization or the American elites at this moment in history that they have managed to align their interests with those of the global elites in almost every country?
Wolfgang Streeck: Absolutely.
Lauren Balhorn: And what you just touched on, that the money of the rich from poor countries is stored, for example, in the US, in Switzerland, and the difference between today and the past is that at least part of the elite in some parts of the world no longer considers its interests to coincide with those of Americans?
Wolfgang Streeck: Absolutely! My book is one big appeal: while you still have the goodwill, stop this nonsense. Just look at the American education system. I spent seven years at one of the major public universities [in the US], and people always overlook the fact that it is one of the best universities in the world. And these universities coexist in this country with a terrible secondary school education system.
Why? Because instead of investing money to finally get their high schools to produce people who are good at math, they have the strongest universities, which sit on top of [the schools] like lumps of fat on soup. Why? Because they are liberal, they take people from all over the world. But that’s not all. The idea is that these people who are attracted there return to their countries and run branches of American companies there.
They socialize there, and this elite then buys houses in New York <…>. They fraternize with the American elite through these elite universities. (And now Trump, who doesn’t understand this, is kicking them all out.) Here I can only say — well, yes, this may serve as an explanation — that this country lets [migrants] in for its own interests, not for their own good. They could learn a lesson from this, that they could also create something similar at home. They are not stupid.
(To be continued)
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
