Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series: Zsuzsa Gille "Politics and Materiality: European Capitalism with a Human Face?" Response by Emanuel Rota
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
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by Roman Friedman
[On February 22, the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory hosted the latest installment in its 2015-2016 Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series, "Politics and Materiality: European Capitalism with a Human Face?" The speaker was Zsuzsa Gille, Associate Professor of Sociology. Below Professor Emanuel Rota's (French & Italian/History) response to the lecture.]
Tiny Apocalypses
Written by Emanuel Rota (French & Italian/History)
Hungary joined the European Union in 2004, after a popular
referendum held the year before. Since Hungary became a member of the EU,
Hungarians have had many quarrels with the European institutions, and the
populist right wing party that has been in power since 2010 has been voicing a
strong popular resentment against Europe. The powerful Western European nations
are accused of having a colonial attitude toward Eastern Europe, preaching
equality, integration, and development, while exploiting their less powerful
Eastern neighbors. In her recently published book, Paprika, Foie Gras, and
Red Mud (Indiana University Press, 2016), and in her Unit for Criticism
Distinguished Faculty Lecture, Zsuzsa Gille analyzes three crucial moments
where the relation between Hungary and the EU took a turn for the worse. Her
goals are both political and theoretical. As a political activist, she wants to
understand the modality of power relations between the EU and Eastern Europe
without falling back on the conspiracy theories of the populist right or the
self-denigratory mantra of Hungarian liberal intellectuals. As a
sociologist, she wants to use the ethnographic research that she has conducted
to create a theory of power that can account for the way power operates at the
level of the European Union. At the center of her approach to these two
problems is the concept of materiality, a post humanist and nonhumanist
approach to power and society.
The three ethnographic studies are in themselves extremely
fascinating because of their undeniable symbolic power. A large-scale contamination
of paprika, an essential ingredient in Hungarian cuisine; a boycott of foie gras, a specialty food produced in
great quantities in Hungary; and the “red mud” spill of 2010 are all connected
to and shed light on the role of the EU in Hungary. By opening the Hungarian markets to red
peppers produced in warmer climates (Spain and Brazil), the EU created the
conditions for the use of “foreign” and untested peppers, which contained a
contaminant dangerous for human health. The boycott of foie gras promoted by an
Austrian animal rights organization caused economic damage to Hungary, while
France, thanks to its political influence within the EU, remained untouched.
The need to conform to EU rules in the production of aluminum forced
Hungarian firms to absorb the costs of converting their technologies and to cut
corners to save money and remain in business. In all these cases, Gille shows
how, rather than improving the quality of products or the health of citizens, EU policies favored the most powerful Western countries and damaged
Hungary.
What makes these cases theoretically interesting is that
governance structures within the EU were neither the result of colonial
projects, as claimed by right wing populists, nor the effect of Hungarians’
inability to become fully European, as suggested by Hungarian liberals.
Rather, Gille states, it is the result of frictions and adjustments between the
materiality of things and the EU policy regulating things, including small
things. She enters into a productive dialogue with Bruno Latour and actor-network
theory (ANT) to understand how objects can become equal participants with
humans in networks, and can substitute human agency with nonhuman agency. Thus, in the
clever title she chose for her talk, “Capitalism with a Human Face,” she refers
not only to the famous idea of “socialism with a human face” that inspired
the dream of reforming Communism in Eastern Europe, and to the self-representation
of European capitalism as “humane,” but also to the nonhuman agency that shapes,
through the regulation of material things, power relations in the EU.
By taking advantage of her large theoretical toolbox, she
explains, rather convincingly, how the lofty, quasi-ethereal ideals of European
integration co-exist with the feeling, shared by many Hungarians, of being
disenfranchised and even colonized. By focusing on regulations and small
things, she claims, what is subtracted from public opinion is a democratic
discussion. From “doing the right thing” to “doing things right” political
discussions are neutralized and left to the slow abrasive power of things to
integrate Eastern Europe into the logic of Western Europe. The demise of
democratic debates encourage rather than discourage the emergence of the very
right wing populism that the EU aspired to overcome.
Personally, I found Gille’s approach extremely productive and I
believe she is fundamentally right in her description of the phenomenology of power
and materiality in the EU. However, I actually believe that the intellectual
history of the European Union shows that the approach that she describes is not
so much an unintended consequence of unplanned evolution, as the desired course
given to European integration by Jean Monnet’s functionalism. As in the case of
the inclusion of Eastern European countries in recent years, the European
communities were designed to bring together nations that had been at war with
each other in the recent past. Those who had observed the rise of fascism in
Europe knew all too well that various forms of radical and authoritarian
nationalism had been very successful among Europeans. Confronting the problem
of bypassing both the resistance of national governments to giving up power and
the attachments of populations that had been successfully nationalized, the
European communities turned to things that could create automatic, impersonal
spillover effects. In this perspective, Jean Monnet should be regarded as one
of the early proponents of ANT. Unfortunately, the intellectual history of the
process of European integration is also a victim of this impersonal movement
and only a few scholars are willing to research this history which is so tied to the nonhuman.
A more substantial objection to Gille’s book should be her lack
of comparative analysis between the events in Hungary and other areas in the
EU. Since Italy and France, to mention two places that I have studied, have a
large number of stories that would compare well with her three ethnographic
studies, it would have been interesting to test her theory through comparative
analysis. In particular, I believe that she would have discovered that the
opposition between East and West would not hold up in a comparative frame.
Italian and French farmers and small producers could easily add their
testimonies to show that EU regulations have often disrupted or even destroyed
local industries without producing tangible benefits for consumers and
citizens. If there is a unifying feeling among Europeans today it is precisely
that the EU governs small things without benefiting citizens or the democratic
process. Hungarians are less isolated than they feel.
Finally, I also suspect that the Hungarian position in the EU
should be explained not only in terms of the European policies, but also in
relation to the dynamics of European capitalism, humane or otherwise. As we
know very well, the division of labor does not stop within countries, but
extends to the realm of international relations. As a matter of fact, the place
of birth is still by far the largest factor in determining the income of
anybody born on our planet today. The income of the poorest five percent of the
US population is still significantly larger than any five percent of the Ethiopian
population. Semi-peripheral countries like Hungary feel exploited by the core
economies, while aggressively guarding their privileged position compared to
peripheral economies. Thus, the Hungarian government could loudly protest the
British proposal to exclude EU citizens living in Britain from their welfare
state, a change which would impact numerous Hungarian migrants in the UK, while
simultaneously building a fence to keep Syrian refuges and other migrants
out of their country. I believe that Hungary’s position in the world economic
system provides an alternative explanation of the role of right wing populism
in Hungary. The European Union certainly creates tiny apocalypses, but the effect
of the economic system of which Hungary and the rest of Europe are a part
cannot be ascribed to EU bureaucrats.
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