Foucault on the Idea of Europe (and Adam Smith, Hume & Kant), Part 1

So we find this idea, which will be at the center of the economic game as defined by the liberals, that actually the enrichment of one country, like the enrichment of one individual, can only really be established and maintained in the long term by a mutual enrichment...Consequently there is a correlative, enrichment, an enrichment en bloc; a regional enrichment: either the whole of Europe will be rich, or the whole of Europe will be poor. There is no longer any cake to be divided up. We enter an age of an economic historicity governed by, if not unlimited enrichment, then at least reciprocal enrichment through the game of competition.
I think something very important begins to take shape here, the consequences of which are, as you know, far from being exhausted. What is taking shape is a new idea of Europe that is not at all the imperial and Carolingian Europe more or less inherited from the Roman Empire and referring to quite specific political structures...It is a Europe of collective enrichment; Europe as a collective subject that, whatever the competition between states, or rather through the competition between states, has to advance in the form of unlimited economic progress.
This idea of progress, of a European progress, is a fundamental theme in liberalism and completely overturns the themes of European equilibrium, even though these themes do not disappear completely. With this conception of the physiocrats and Adam Smith we leave behind a conception of the economic game as a zero sum game. But if it is no longer to be a zero sum game, then permanent and continuous inputs are still necessary. In other words, if freedom of the market must ensure the reciprocal, correlative, and more or less simultaneous enrichment of all the countries of Europe, for this to function, and for freedom of the market to thus unfold according to a game that is not a zero sum game, then it is necessary to summon around Europe, and for Europe, an increasingly extended market and even, if it comes to it, everything in the world that can be put on the market. In other words, we are invited to a globalization of the market when it is laid down as a principle, and an objective, that the enrichment of Europe must be brought about as a collective and unlimited enrichment, and not through the enrichment of some and the impoverishment of others. The unlimited character of the economic development of Europe, and the consequent existence of a non-zero sum game, entails, of course, that the whole world is summoned around Europe to exchange its own and Europe's products in the European market.
Of course, I do not mean that this is the first time that Europe thinks about the world, or thinks the world. I mean simply that this may be the first time that Europe appears as an economic unit, as an economic subject in the world, or considers the world as able to be and having to be its economic domain. It seems to me that it is the first time that Europe appears in its own eyes as having to have the world for its unlimited market. Europe is no longer merely covetous of all the world's riches that sparkle in its dreams or perceptions. Europe is now in a state of permanent and collective enrichment through its own competition, on condition that the entire world becomes its market. In short, in the time of mercantilism, raison d'Etat, and the police state, etcetera, the calculation of a European balance enabled one to block the consequences of an economic game conceived as being over. Now the opening up of a world market allows one to continue the economic game and consequently to avoid the conflicts which derive from a finite market. But this opening of the economic game onto the world dearly implies a difference of both kind and status between Europe and the rest of the world. That is to say, there will be Europe on one side, with Europeans as the players, and then the world on the other, which will he the stake. The game is in Europe, but the stake is the world.
It seems to me that we have in this one of the fundamental features of this new art of government that is indexed to the problem of the market and market veridiction. Obviously, this organization, or at any rate this reflection on the reciprocal positions of Europe and the world, is not the start of colonization. Colonization had long been underway. Nor do I think this is the start of imperialism in the modem or contemporary sense of the term, for we probably see the formation of this new imperialism later in the nineteenth century. But let's say that we have the start of a new type of global calculation in European governmental practice. I think there are many signs of this appearance of a new form of global rationality, of a new calculation on the scale of the world.--Michel Foucault, 24 January 1979, The Birth of Biopolitics. 54-6

Foucault correctly discern the significance of Kant's Perpetual Peace to Ordoliberal thought (recall here; here; here). (He mentions Kant's essay on the following page, and he begins to develops his idea about the Ordos in the subsequent lecture on 31 January.) While it is not surprising Addison is ignored, it is a bit surprising that Hume goes unmentioned because his essays on "The Balance of Trade" and "The Jealousy of Trade" are key steps in the positions described by Foucault. In particular, "The Balance of Trade" explicitly adopts a European stance (and contrasts Europe with China, in particular [recall this post]).*

One way to put Foucault's point in Schmittian terms he does not use is that once the non-zero-sum logic of mutual gains of trade is accepted as state policy, enemies can be transformed into possible mere rivals. Rivals can be genuine competitors in one sense, but since they are playing the same game also partners of a certain sort. And this transformation entails the possibility of permanent self-limitation in foreign affairs, even a route toward confederation (or "ever closer union"). I use the language of possibility because subsequent history suggests the temptation of continental-wide conquest does not disappear altogether. 

The significance of all of this is that foreign affairs is transformed from the Hobbesian state of nature to something distinctive. Foucault emphasizes the development of a species of "global rationality" (there are shades of Hegel here) and the significance of global markets for European exports and imports. I return to this point below. But before i get to that, when regional enemies are turned into regional rivals, one is incentivized to develop and sustain regional institutions and norms that manage various features (trade, communication, international law, etc.) of the rivalry. This is the possible mechanism that underwrites (recall) Smith's idea of a transatlantic empire and Kant's idea of regional con-federation.

One effect is that the world is divided between peoples (rivals) with which one has shared interests and peoples who remain possible enemies. This way of putting it makes sense of Foucault's idea that the development of liberalism generated a European subject, who viewed part of the world as ripe for, if not, colonialism and  imperialism, then at least continued mercantilism. That is, on this view, intra-European liberalism strengthened the system of global mercantilism. Foucault can grant, and even argues this, that liberalism understood itself as a limitation and correction of mercantilism (and the mercantile police state in particular). But this self-understanding, while partially correct, occludes the fact that the embrace of domestic and regional liberalism sustains a system of global mercantilism.

The benefit of this analysis is that it can explain why mercantile forces made such a powerful comeback after 1870 (as neoliberals lament and their critics acknowledge). For rather than being defeated by the victory of 19th century liberalism, its position had de facto been improved. 

Now, against Kant and Smith, Foucault comes close to implying that the non-zero sum intra-European relationships presuppose a zero-sum extra-European relationship that extracts wealth from would be enemies (in what we may call the Global South). On this view a zone of open-ended progress requires the domination of the backward, even if the shape of this domination is product of contingent features. 

It is important to register that while this is certainly not implausible (given subsequent history) this is not the necessary liberal self-understanding. Smith is quite explicit that non-zero-sum relations are possible with peoples everywhere and, as is well known, he is very critical of the mercantile spirit of war that has occasioned the "savage injustice" of non-Europeans. For both Smith and Kant, progress toward a global organization that creates non-zero-sum logic can accompany open-ended economic progress. Whether the self-conception is correct or is ideological delusion or sensible regulative ideal is, in part, an empirical question. 

I am about to wrap up. But note that there is a further implication of the division of states into European rivals and non-European possible enemies. The possible enemies are all, in principle, geographically distant. And so the grounds of enmity much fewer than among the formerly local enemies. This fact was obscured by the existence of European imperialism/colonialism itself the consequence of (a) capacity to project power globally; (b) the relative military weakness of most non-Europeans; (c) and the development or ethnic/racialist/cultural ideologies of European superiority. With global shifts of balance of power against Europe, (a-c) are de facto being undermined. So, this makes possible a form of European subject that does not thereby indirectly support global mercantilism. So, Europe's current relative weakening may, in fact, be good news for European liberalism understood as a global aspiration. If that's right, this may be the first grounds for optimism about a possible third wave of liberalism, if we can generate it.

Okay, that's it for today. Somewhat surprisingly, when later in the lecture series, Foucault turns to the Ordos and the Chicago school, Foucault does not really return to theme of European subjectivity, nor global rationality. But in a follow up post, I will try to rationally reconstruct it and address the question whether neo-liberalism generates imperial mechanisms.

 

 

*One nitpicking point: Foucault ascribes to Smith the idea of "fluctuation of the price around the value, which...was assured by the freedom of the market." (53-4) I think this is really more the position of Smith's rival, Steuart, who was, however, greatly influenced by Hume. 

 

Comments

[Matt]

this is interesting. It does make me wish Foucault had known more about economics, at least earlier. I would say, though, that your one point isn't so much "putting things in Schmittian terms" but rather showing that Schmitt was just flatly wrong about politics, at least if we're considering it a question about essential natures (as he seemed to be suggesting) and that this also shows that current "left Schittian" "realists" are going down a wrong path too.

It also would have been interesting to see what Foucault would have thought about the development of the WTO (which also seems to falsify Schmitt) if he'd lived long enough to see it. (I think this is so even if it's being trashed by Trump now.)

[Eric Schliesser]

Hi Matt, thank you (yes?)!
1. I am no expert, but it's clear that in The Birth of Biopolitics, he is also revisiting, en passant, a lot of features of his earlier works which both make this lecture series possible, but also need revision in light of it. Even so, perhaps not knowing economics earlier helped him be so fresh.
2. Yes, I like the implications you draw from this about Schmitt, which is something that is baked into Foucault's method. (So may be thought begging the question.)
3. See my previous comment; i have to think about to what degree today's left Schmittians and realists presuppose essential nature(s). Have you developed this?
4. Indeed, it is notable that Foucault is uninterested in GATT, Haberler, etc. This is really why Slobodian's book is so relevant to my own recent thinking. [Although in fairness to me, I have been blogging for a few years before about the significance of the international dimension to neoliberalisms.]

[Matt]

I'm no expert on Schmitt, but I read _The Concept of the Political_ in my spare time recently, and it certainly seemed to me that he thought he was saying something about the essential nature of politics. (Would we call it, pretentiously, "the political", if he hadn't written in German? I'm skeptical.) He seemed to think it was _essentially_ friend/enemy, and that if the relationship wasn't like that, then it either wasn't "political" or else would become friend/enemy. As far as I could tell, there really wasn't much of an argument. The book seemed to me to be largely a string of ipse dixits, said with great conviction but not much evidence

The left version sometimes invokes Lenin, of course, but not with much more plausibility as to the essential nature of politics. (I'm skeptical that there is an essential nature, but if that's so, then both Lenin's "who/whom" and Schmitt's "friend/enemy" are at best occasional situations, ones to be avoided if at all possible.) I find these approaches all so obviously wrong that it's hard to gather energy to try to write about it.

But! I should read the Slobodian book, in any case, it seems. Thanks for mentioning it.

[Shelley Tremain]

Do you still plan to post Part II on this subject?