Can we think of an economic reconstruction project involving Europe, North African coastal countries and the Middle East based on the principle of gratuitousness?
Last update: 2024-11-26 17:04:30
There are many forms of social behaviour that are based on the principle of gratuitousness. It is only if we take these as the starting point for rethinking the concept of capitalistic private ownership that it makes sense to commit to an economic reconstruction project involving Europe, the North African coastal countries and the Middle East. Otherwise, we will reproduce the capitalistic and neo-colonialist monstrosities that have thrown the entire planet into an economic emergency.
The feasibility of a “Marshall Plan” for the Mediterranean cannot even be envisaged if such a plan – whatever its economic proposal may be – does not find the geostrategic conditions needed for it to unfold and achieve a regional balance of power. The great obstacle to this hypothesis aiming at not just the economic but also the demographic reconstruction of the Mediterranean’s two shores is the fact that it is impossible to reconstruct a path to economic recovery solely by appealing to the concept of capitalistic private ownership.
A new Marshall Plan can only be the testing ground for polygamy in the forms of exchange described so well in Caritas in Veritate. Precisely because we still have not come out of the great economic crisis, the current debate ought to be about diversifying the forms of exchange and exploring different modes of allocating property rights. These two trains of thought on capitalism run into the thinking of Karl Polanyi[1] and his school, according to whom there would be a contradiction between the market and its moral basis: when, in the “great transformation,” the market establishes itself as a fully-fledged form of exchange, the “moral economy” disappears. Many support this position even today. In reality, history contradicts it. Studies such as those by the great English historian Edward P. Thompson (who coined the expression “moral economy” to indicate a vision of economic relations inspired not by individual profit but by the quest for collective well-being) demonstrate how the moral economy continued even with the advent of capitalism.[2]
Of course, the world also contains abominations such as the market for organs, for example, but here we are in the sphere of the criminal economy. People pursue these ends, too, but I continue to believe that they are a minority. And yet, I hear many people asking whether the current crisis has not corroded the market’s moral basis.
The “Stock-Option” Manager
To be sure, this moral basis has been compromised by what I have called the “stock-option manager”. Grossly overpaid through stock options and unknown algorithms, this figure has removed every ethical foundation from the market by taking his opportunistic behaviour to the extreme.[3] A good part of the crisis derives from this excessive appropriation and manipulation of the market indices fostered by, precisely, stock options. I am convinced that Pope Ratzinger was referring to this when he wrote in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate that the market’s moral bases were being undermined. When conflicts of interest become endemic and those who run an enterprise also decide how much remuneration they should receive, a well-organized minority can succeed in controlling a disorganized majority. To what extent this extra-economic behaviour constitutes one of the reasons for the crisis was made clear by the ex-governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, in his recent book The End of Alchemy. Money, Banking and the Future of Global Economy (Norton & Company, New York 2016). Not by chance, it opens with a quotation from Thomas Stern Eliot’s The Rock in which the poet wonders what has become of the “wisdom we have lost in knowledge” and the “knowledge we have lost in information.”
My old friend Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize at the age of eighty-four for her theory on the “commons”. That is to say, those goods that are defined as “public” not because they are owned by the state but because the form of ownership, not being directed at individual profit, is essentially co-operative i.e. ownership by small and large social groups that allows use by all those who wish to have access, observing rules that guarantee that the goods may be infinitely replenished. I have argued with Stefano Rodotà (whose book Il terribile diritto [“The Terrible Law”])[4] I liked very much, nevertheless) because he maintains that water is a common good, whereas I believe that it is a good that can be private, state-owned or self-managed by the populations that have historically enjoyed the use of it. The “common goods” principle is founded on the governance principle and envisages – and this seems to me to be the point on which we need to work – an allocation of property rights that differs from the one governed by the capitalistic principle because the ownership it proposes is collective (i.e. pertaining to a small group) and not the state’s. The good is managed by members of the collectivity, whose purpose is to distribute it on the basis of the needs of the community’s families.
An Incentive to Experiment
The fact that the effects of the crisis are material provides an incentive to experiment. People frequently talk of the sharing economy in order to indicate forms of service-sharing relating to homes, means of transport and workspaces and involving broad groups of people, thanks to the use of digital platforms. “Sharing” is a word that brings with it a whole cluster of analogous terms including, for example, “collaborate” or “co-operate”. These are rich in meaning and, in their turn, bring to mind experiences of “social economy” that aim at recomposing the economy and society. These new forms of sharing only concern use, however: never ownership. What is striking is the absence both of every mutualistic principle and of any hypothesis about superseding capitalistic ownership.
Conversely, in a polygamy of the forms of exchange and ownership described in Caritas in Veritate (co-operative, not-for-profit and capitalistic), one can see a reaction to the excesses that were revealed by the economic crisis and provoked by the “shareholder value” principle [the value quantified in the dividends paid to shareholders Ed.] In benefit corporations, for example, the figure of the dominant shareholder is flanked by that of the stakeholder [a party that has an interest in a company, Ed.], who tempers and restrains the former by shifting the utility function from a maximization principle to a principle of shared living and social utility. Thus the capitalism is a well-tempered one and a well-tempered capitalism is certainly better than a fully-fledged capitalism.
Social enterprises, on the other hand, foster an allocation of capitalistic property rights thanks to which one can nevertheless pursue both the production and the enjoyment of public goods, as is typical in the neoclassical theories of welfare economics, from Pigou[5] onwards. The different forms of sharing economy, lastly, emerge as forms of sharing in the sphere of material and immaterial consumer goods and never call into question the principles of production. Therefore they are not interested in how the property rights have been allocated when such goods are being consumed or used. These last forms have nothing to do with the principles of co-operative ownership or mutualism and therefore do not produce that ‘scare-effect’ or ‘terror’ that was produced amongst the capitalistic classes and their organic intellectuals when, between 1800 and 1900, and with the intellectual support of giants such as Alfred Marshall, Luigi Luzzati, Leone Wollemborg and Friedrich W. Raiffeise, Don Luigi Cerruti, Charles Gide, Ugo Rabbeno, Bruno Cossa and Giovanni Montemartini, the co-operative and mutualistic principle was built – David against Goliath – thereby challenging the capitalistic ownership principle’s totalitarian hypostatization. The multiple forms of sharing economy do not challenge such a totalitaristic hypostatization because they are hoping for a biodiversity in the forms of consumption of goods and services rather than of their production.
The circular economy stemming from masonic thinking falls fairly and squarely within this context. The fact that it is an all-encompassing idea brings it closer to the co-operative model: it, too, tends not to maximise profit but, rather, the enterprise’s continuation and, therefore, work. Even Marshall, a man of extraordinary intelligence who had a great passion for history, dedicated a chapter of his Principles of Economics (the foundation of neo-classical economics) to the co-operative enterprise. What he highlights quite clearly is that it introduces, precisely, the moral principle into the economy, the sustainability of those who work in it and their families and it maximises the enterprise’s continuation. It does not distribute profits except in relation to the factors fostering re-production.
Now, the issue to think about rationally is how to produce value in enterprises that do not enjoy capitalistic property rights. If we do not begin to construct segments escaping the capitalistic economic model (through the form of the co-operative enterprise, first and foremost), we will not pull out of this crisis because it is unprecedented (the 1929 depression was ‘a walk in the park,’ in comparison). For example, this crisis is creating structural unemployment. The first thing to do, therefore, is to create employment within a work process that has been revolutionized by technological innovation. Unfortunately, however, co-operative thinking is becoming weaker and weaker because it imitates the capitalistic enterprise too closely. But it could work constructively with the “common goods” model that Ostrom was talking about and draw new lifeblood from it.
The Principle of Gratuitousness
The common ground is still property rights. People have forgotten or mystified Ostrom too quickly, thereby defusing her theory’s revolutionary, alternative potential; both as regards the allocation of property rights and as regards the principles underpinning a genuine and effective corporate governance.
As I have frequently written (and this is my critique of Polanyi), the advent of the capitalistic market does not destroy the people’s subjectivity. Therefore, it does not destroy gift. It is my conviction that gift co-exists in the market: it is not, therefore, an alternative or something interstitial but, rather, a formidable and powerful resource. The giving that effectively acts to temper the market is an unreciprocated gift. If there is an obligation to render something in return, people are prisoners of the person who has given. As I was taught by one of my teachers, Maurice Godelier (a great anthropologist from the second half of the twentieth century), a gift does not always need a counter-gift. It needs to be invisible and is more widespread than it seems. And it cannot be subjected to pure cognitive calculation because it is psycho-affective energy.
Lastly, there are many forms of social behaviour that are based on the principle of gratuitousness. The gift economy is embodied in the not-for-profit, above all: you give a part of your time and you get no return. This giving sustains you and enriches your life. The “give and you will be given to” taught by Federico Ozanam, founder of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, does not deny the existence of the market and justice but sweetens and mitigates the pain of economic growth.
It is only on these theoretical, faith-inspired bases that it makes sense to commit to a Marshall Plan in the Mediterranean; otherwise we will reproduce the capitalistic and neo-colonial monstrosities that have thrown us into this tragic situation.
Reconstructing a Geopolitical Order
To these considerations must be added a geopolitical assessment. Without new nation and state building, any and every kind of economic reasoning is impossible. A power situation that restores peace must be built first and this can only be done through war. The world is now dominated by the North-African conflict. This is witnessing the return of Nasserism revisited in the light of the changes occurring on the international scene following the fall of the Soviet Union and the re-emergence of military leaders as a stabilizing force. Together with Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Baathist movement, these leaders were building the nation. Today they are defending it from the cosmopolitanism that followed the Ottoman Caliphate’s destruction; a cosmopolitanism that gave birth to the Muslim Brotherhood and is now jeopardizing the very relationship with the West, what with what remains of that past and the new hierocratic formations that, from the fall of the Shah in Iran onwards, have been seeking in various ways to assume power. These various actors enjoy the support of powerful state forces such as Iran, on the one hand, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar on the other. This is the result of the so-called Arab Springs, which quickly proved to be a revolt of the secular and Islamic middle classes, at daggers drawn with each other and partly encouraged by the moral suasion of the United States, who had decided to renew the Egyptian leadership bloc. The United States’ incomprehension of the changes occurring in the Arab, Persian and Turkish world has been catastrophic: they have proved incapable of foreseeing the instability caused by the Muslim Brothers’ penetration of the Egyptian institutions. The mechanism for dismantling the military dictatorships through a political reform entrusted to forces such as the Sunni radicals has had the same effect as that produced in Iraq and, earlier, in Iran, where the most intransigent Shi‘ism came to power.
The Islamic world is currently seeing the United States’ hegemonic role increasingly diminish, with consequences that may be devastating if this vacuum is not filled immediately. The energy theme is fundamental but is not sufficient for an understanding of the situation. To be sure, shale oil and gas are increasingly weakening OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) but the problem is an older one. It began in the mid-1970s, when the proven and unproven reserves began to be concentrated not in the hands of the majors[6] any more but, rather, in those of the NOCs i.e. the prevalently non-OPEC national companies that currently possess 90 per cent of the reserves. This has generated a staggering technological revolution and an increase in competition.
The Rift Between Sunnis and Shi‘ites
The fact that an alliance between Saudi Arabia, Israel and Russia is timidly emerging with the aim of regaining control over the Syrian situation by supporting Bashar al-Assad and at the same time supporting the Egyptian Army (which has saved not only its own country but also the West by avoiding the creation of an enormous Salafi Islamic state destined to threaten both Europe and Central Africa) is a positive one. Its institutionalization must overcome a huge difficulty, however. It is, in the first place, a cultural one: that is to say, the demise of Westphalian culture and the shamefulness of the theories on humanitarian intervention and human rights that are devoid of any regard for the points of compatibility in and the cultural specificities of the nations, peoples and élites with whom they come into contact. All that has caused the West to plunge into a form of anti-Kissingerism the huge price of which we are only now beginning to evaluate. The military rupture between Shi‘ites and Sunnis is only the beginning of a long inter-Islamic war that it will be possible to resolve only by bringing about communication between the three fundamental cultures in the area: the Arab culture, the Turkish culture and the Persian culture. This is the role the West must play.
Except that everything is proceeding along other lines. The market is certainly developing, but amidst a thousand fault lines and fissures and Stein Rokkan’s forgotten theory on the cleavages[7] that the whole world suffered and suffers during change processes is coming back to light with an unusual force. Today, in addition to these processes, there is the presence of terrorism on a fault line that risks dividing the world precisely in the crisis area with the strongest disintegrating force: the one where there is the densest concentration of hydrocarbon energy reserves on the planet. A fault line that splits North Africa in two and reaches as far as the Persian Gulf, threatening to break up the Middle East and Central Asia. At one end, there is Saudi Arabia with its hegemony over the Sunni world and at the other, Iran with its Shi‘ite ideology: both are, in a piecemeal fashion, dividing, splintering and setting all the Gulf States and the states in the Middle East against each other, from Lebanon to Persia. Were Syria to disintegrate, the fault line could open up, taking the Hashemite monarchy and also the Moroccan Alawite one with it (as well as Israel, naturally).
The Libyan crisis is an indirect consequence of this general process, to which is added the specific lack of state-building and nation-building within that tribal aggregate dominated à la Bonaparte by Gaddafi after the collapse of the Senussi monarchy: a tribal equilibrium that has not yet been restored and one that only the Western powers will be able to reconstruct. The Anglo-French military pact must be read in this light, in the face of the United States’ relative military disengagement in the West.
In actual fact, that pact was the prelude to the development of a strategy that was not European but duopolistic, a fight for control over the real bone of contention: sub-Saharan Africa and, in particular, the region of the Great Lakes, which is the energy, nutritional and industrial heart of the future. The next fifty years of world economic history will be the history of Black Africa’s emergence: whoever dominates those lands, along with the Africans, will dominate the world.
This in a context in which the North American decline is not, as many people think, inevitable, but remains more visible by virtue of the economic crisis and strategic uncertainty. The United States must find another strategic pillar with whom to collaborate because Europe can no longer do the job as a united whole. Hence the importance of direct engagement with China and the alliance with the emerging countries.
Nationless States
The great historical fault lines running through the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean have always been determined by encounters or extremely fierce clashes between the three great civilizations that have dominated those lands for centuries: the Arab, Persian and Turkish civilizations. This truth has been obscured only by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the ensuing treaties that, drawn up during the First World War, give birth to a series of states that had no connection with either the ethnic or the historical reality. States without a nation: this is the Arab problem. And, the other side of the coin, nations with strong States built by modernizing élites: this is the secret of the Persian tradition and the Turkish invention. Such a balance could hold only because Europe was too busy, between the two world wars, building the bases for destroying the Treaty of Versailles. During the period immediately following the Second World War, it proceeded to construct the two defence walls against Stalinism: to the east, Saudi Arabia, a North American construction based on tribalism and the sacred dominion of religious tradition and, to the west, Egypt, which after the dissociation very publicly pursued by the United States in relation to the post-colonialist attempt to re-conquer the nationalized Suez Canal (the war of 1956), was to be the faithful guardian of North-African Atlanticism. In short, everything was unified in one single piece of strategic thinking (rather than divided, as most people think) by the Cold War. Indeed, the latter gave a meaning to Turkey’s role as NATO’s southern flank and made it possible to establish a balance of power in Syria as well; something that old Hafez al-Assad did magnificently. In Iran, the fall of the Shah and, even earlier, that of Muhammad Mossadegh by virtue of an Anglo-American coup d’état that was as stupid as it was poorly planned, paved the way, years later, for a hierocratic regime the likes of which had never been seen in the Muslim world. In this context, jihadist terrorism is challenging the big shift that developed on the international horizon during the 1990s. As globalization was opening up the financial markets in the tragic absence of any regulation, abandonment of the firmly Westphalian Kissinger perspective paved the way for a series of strategically thoughtless military adventures that have been the black hole of international disorder over the last twenty years.
What is happening today in Africa is, in the first place, the fruit of the failure to stabilize relations between Europe and Russia. The Gaullist ideal of a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals was the only international counterbalance that could be set up against what is now the solitude of the United States. Must America still linger in its guaranteeing the bases of power to her weary, war-shy European ally that is incapable of constructing a self-sufficient military force able to guarantee security on NATO’s southern flank and in northern Africa? Now that their dominion over the Gulf has freed them of their need for the transatlantic relationship, how much longer will the United States continue to protect Saudi Arabia? This is the most dramatic of the questions that strategic thinking poses us nowadays.
It is precisely this question that we must answer before proposing any “Marshall Plan” – a benevolent but perhaps premature initiative.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Oasis International Foundation
[1] An economist, sociologist and anthropologist born in Vienna in 1886. His main work, The Great Transformation, is a critique of market-based societies and of the economy’s autonomy vis-à-vis society (Ed.)
[2] Edward P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth century,” Past & Present 50 (1971), no. 1, pp. 76-136. In addition to Thompson, Albert O. Hirschman and Barrington Moore Jr, also remind us of this: for them, the market cannot exist without a moral foundation. See Albert O. Hirschman, L’Économie comme science morale et politique (Seuil, Paris, 1984); and Barrington Moore Jr, Moral Aspects of Economic Growth and Other Essays (Cornell University Press, Ithaca & London, 1998).
[3] A still current practice. The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund (worth 870 billion dollars) recently added to its rigorous standards the decision not to invest any longer in businesses whose managers are paid disproportionately.
[4] Stefano Rodotà, Il terribile diritto (Il Mulino, Bologna, 2013).
[5] Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877-1959) was an English economist. A pupil of Alfred Marshall and his successor to the chair in political economics at King’s College, Cambridge, he is considered to have pioneered welfare economics (Ed.).
[6] Shale oil and shale gas are oil and gas produced unconventionally. Proven reserves are those in relation to which extraction is considered highly probable (90 per cent). Unproven reserves are geologically the same as the proven reserves but their extraction cannot be estimated with the same degree of certainty for technical or political reasons. The majors are the big oil companies (Ed.)
[7] According to the Norwegian political scientist, Stein Rokkan (1921-1979), modern Western society is crossed through by four “cleavages”: centre/periphery, State/Church, town/country and capital/labour. These cleavages would explain the origins of political parties (Ed.)