Book of the week: THE WORLD WE'RE IN
Former Observer editor, one time Newsnight economics correspondent, Will Hutton's 1995 book, The State We're In captured the mood of a country deeply disappointed with the free market capitalism of the long-standing Conservative administration. Now head of the Industrial Society, Hutton has again pitched for the cause of the moment with The World We're In, a trenchant critique of the globalisation of American capitalism, that offers Europe as a better alternative.
The World We're In is racy, but as English reviewers, including European Commissioner Chris Patten and Keynes' biographer Robert Skidelsky have already noted, its one-sided assault on the US distorts the argument. It is intriguing that a positive case for Europe is less easy to make than a negative one against America - though even here Hutton's argument strains at the seams.
In effect what Hutton does is to load all of the things that he dislikes (welfare cuts, untrammelled property rights) onto the US, while seeing all the good things (responsible employers, public spending) as intrinsically European. But Hutton has to misrepresent the two societies to achieve the effect. So. for example, Hutton treats the US as if it was still essentially the same country as it was in the 1980s when Republican Ronald Reagan was elected, and effectively ignores the Clinton presidency. Similarly he talks of a Europe of social democrats that has not existed since the 1970s. Historical change is something that takes a battering, since Hutton takes the real course of the two continents out of the rhythm of political change, to make them each stand for intrinsically different political options.
In the course of this somewhat forced argument Hutton ends up reinventing some rather old fashioned - if not reactionary - concepts. In particular, he revives a romantic notion of national essence, insisting that markets are only the superstructure upon the underlying cultural genus. So Europe, apparently, is shaped by a medieval notion that private property is circumscribed by social obligation - while the US of course puts things the other way around. The medievalist reading of European history forcibly collapses social movements as distinct as Marxism, conservatism and catholicism together. Meanwhile all those elements of European history that do not fit the European essence, like English political economy or French enlightenment are passed over in silence, or at best relegated to 'exceptions'.
The conservative implications of Hutton's idea are made explicit when he asserts that the values he holds up as European 'are so deeply embedded that Europeans could hardly be changed even if Europeans wanted to relinquish them' (52).
Hutton's screed has unfortunately been tested to the limit by recent events. Though it is up-to-date enough to find the US wanting in its facilities at the Guantanamo Naval base, it still features some strange has-beens like Lionel Jospin - remember him - as examples of the positive side of European thinking. Italian rightist Silvio Berlusconi is dismissed as an exception, though he has now been joined by right wing premieres in Spain and France as Europe lurches away from Hutton's vision.
The World We're In plainly captures a mood of Euro-radicalism that was demonstrating against the 'Toxic Texan' George W. Bush after he scrapped the Kyoto agreement but before September 11. Hutton is astute to read that radicalism as a subterranean Euro-nationalism, but wrong to think that it is the only expression of Euro-nationalism. Already British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is rubbishing the Europe of the effete, leftish technocrat Commissioner Romano Prodi as out of date. Instead Europe is shaping up into a rather more miserablist Union of concentration camps and law and order. Some American-style civil liberties agitation would not go amiss.
The World We're In, Little Brown, 2002, GBP12.99 -- James Heartfield The 'Death of the Subject' Explained is available at GBP11.00, plus GBP1.00 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'