European Union flag. Håkan Dahlström. Flickr/some rights reserved.I have always been of the opinion that, in politics, hypocrisy is as much an exercise of power as it is a moral flaw. It is a loud declaration that the rules apply to thee, and not to me. It shows that one does not fear accountability. Indeed, in a way, it is a declaration of sovereignty if we define sovereignty simply as “the power to make binding rules.”
In his book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste, Philip Mirowski discussed sovereignty and economic crises. Specifically, he cited Carl Schmitt, one of the 20th century’s most influential conservative legal theorists. Schmitt turned the idea of sovereignty around, saying that it wasn’t so much the right to make law as the right to decide when it does not apply: the right to “decide the exception.” Mirowski was specifically describing the role of capital in the neoliberal system during the banking crisis. Normally, capitalism would dictate that capitalists who were improvident with their money go to the wall; but during the banking crisis they “decided the exception”, demanded and got bailouts, and forced the state to pay for their mistakes. In that sense, sovereignty is closely tied to declaring and managing states of emergency or siege – which are indeed sometimes called “states of exception.”
This came back to me a number of times watching the Eurozone’s leadership deal with the crisis over the third Greek bailout. Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, recently made clear in the New Statesman that he thought Germany had control over the Eurozone, and Wolfgang Schäuble control over the Eurozone council of finance ministers. This is not legally true, but Schäuble’s actions throughout the most recent stages of this crisis suggest the attitude of someone who takes no exception to deciding the exception.
