The Plasticity of Our Fears: Affective Politics in the European Migration Crisis

In the field of migration politics, a dominant rhetoric argues that liberal immigration and asylum policies must be avoided because they will inevitably lead to anti-immigration backlashes that exacerbate the very conditions they were supposed to remedy. Drawing on the work of German sociologist Heinrich Popitz and empirical data on the aftereffects of the European migration crisis, the article criticizes this “rhetoric of reaction” (Albert Hirschman) for ignoring the many variables shaping the consequences of more open borders. Backlashes to immigration are real and pose a constraint for liberal immigration policies, but these backlashes are not necessarily politically successful. Societies react neither uniformly nor automatically to rising immigration. A critical variable is the fear engendered by the (real, expected, or imagined) arrival of large numbers of migrants, and this fear can be either ramped up to paranoid levels or calmed by a politics of hope aimed at restoring what Popitz called the “human openness to the world.”

Integración y desarrollo

El artículo trata de bosquejar la riqueza del pensamiento sobre integración en los tiempos de formación de la primeras organizaciones regionales en Europa y América Latina, a lo largo de los años 1950 y 1960. Para hacer eso, se concentra en las experiencias, aptitudes y visiones de tres intelectuales europeos que tomaron parte en el debate sobre integración en las dos márgenes del océano atlántico. Mientras que los primeros dos, Pierre Uri y Ernst Haas, tuvieron un interés circunscripto por América Latina y su integración y nunca profundizaron su conocimiento de los países que la conforman, Albert Hirschman desarrolló una profunda empatía hacia toda la región. Sus distintas posiciones en el tema de la integración, de los prerrequisitos económicos y políticos necesarios para alcanzarla y de su relación con la modernización, nos ofrecen una prueba persuasiva de la irreductibilidad de los estudios sobre integración a algunas teorías abstractas.

Against a voiceless world: Albert O. Hirschman’s political economics as an alternative to public choice

This article proposes to analyze the contributions of Albert Hirschman to political economy. Although he was explicitly affiliated to any school of thought, Hirschman worked with both economics and political science to understand questions such as ‘why do people vote and participate in politics?’. He was disappointed with what mainstream economics could provide and elaborated the Exit-Voice-Loyalty (EVL) framework, to understand mechanisms of action in politics and the economy. His EVL framework has been widely read, but it did not develop a paradigm around it and was ignored by economists due to its lack of formal models. Hirschman went on to work on the political economy of citizenship in his works (Hirschman, 1977, [1982] 2002, 1991), in order to provide answers to questions of political economy away from rational choice theory, which he considered harmful.

“Exit” vs. “Voice”: Global Sourcing, Multinational Production, and the China Trade Lobby

This paper examines the influence of three different forms of global economic engagement on the lobbying behavior of US businesses with regard to trade relations with China: (a) input sourcing; (b) downstream export; and (c) vertical foreign direct investment. It will be hypothesized that firms involved in all three forms of global economic activities should have incentives to lobby over China-related trade issues in order to maintain unimpeded access to sources of supply or markets and to ensure the smooth operation of the entire supply chain. Going further, drawing on the exit-voice framework developed by Albert Hirschman (1972), it will be argued that compared to firms in those industries mainly involved in input sourcing from China, American multinational corporations that have verticalized their production should have even stronger incentives to engage in lobbying activities and “voice” their policy preferences due to their greater “sunk costs” and hence the higher cost of “exit.” Statistical analysis of the China trade-related lobbying activities of US firms between 2006 and 2016 lends substantial support to these conjectures.

Unbalanced Development

Balance is a powerful idea in economics—in equilibrium economics, in strategies of balanced growth, and many other strategies. This chapter argues for a different understanding of the history of capitalism and, therefore, of policy and strategy. The idea of imbalance is a springboard to explore the ideas of Albert Hirschman. These include the concept of linkages and the dynamics of unbalanced growth (pressures, tensions, and disequilibrium as the motor of change), the principle of the hiding hand, and a focus on unintended consequences and poorly measured side effects of development projects and policies. In line with Hirschman’s ‘possibilism’, we argue that the critiques of large ‘mega-projects’ are misleading. Hirschman also highlighted the difference between economists who think a country’s prospects are determined by its ‘endowments’ (what it is and has) and those more interested in what a country does and becomes through what it does.

No Solidarity without Loyalty: Why Do Member States Violate EU Migration and Asylum Law and What Can Be Done?

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it will display an ever-increasing phenomenon of Member States’ infringements of EU migration and asylum law as an instance of the violation of the principle of solidarity and discuss the reasons behind it. It will be suggested that EU inter-state solidarity is just as much about respecting EU law, as it is about helping each other, as the latter cannot subsist without the former. Second, the paper will consider whether the existing mechanisms of reducing the number of violations are sufficient and discuss the new mechanisms that are being developed—particularly the rule of law conditionality and other conditionality instruments. When addressing the reasons behind the frequent violations, the text will identify two groups of reasons, the first group being applicable to the whole of EU law, and the second one specifically to EU migration and asylum law. In this context, Member States’ violations will be construed as the process of political withdrawal or retrenchment from certain parts of the commonly adopted EU migration and asylum law. This will be explained by relying on the notion of “spillback” or disintegration (as opposed to further European integration based on the neofunctionalist concept of “spillover” effect into more policy areas) and on the concepts of “exit” and “voice” conceived by Albert Hirschman and developed further by Joseph Weiler in his seminal work “The Transformation of Europe”.

Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Response to my critics

My new book, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration. Playing Chess With History From Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin, considers the intertwined lives and work of Jewish intellectuals as they make their escape from war-torn Europe into new countries. Although the group which I consider, including Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Judith Shklar, Albert Hirschman and Isaiah Berlin, have a unique profile as migrants because of their formidable education and intellectual capital, I argue that their lives are still exemplary for many of the dilemmas and risks faced by all migrants. In the reply to critics, I consider such issues as the intellectual relations between Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer; differences between Arendt’s and Adorno’s views of an interpretive social science; and why international law played such an important role in the imagination of Jewish intellectuals. A further question involves the generalizability of the experience of Jewish otherness in European culture. Liberal societies always designate some others as their constitutive exterior. How continuous is the experience of emigré Jewish intellectuals with the exclusion of ethnic and racial minorities in our societies? Finally, if the founding of the State of Israel has by no means resolved the problems of statelessness but re-created it for the Palestinian population, what kind of political stance should we assume vis-à-vis this reality today?

Errors in Politics: An analysis of the concept of political error

Although political errors are likely to be as old as politics itself, it is only in modern times – and I will suggest that it is only with Machiavelli – that the notion of political error clearly emerged on the background of other kinds of errors with which it has long been mingled. In an article entitled Morality and the social sciences, Albert Hirschman analysed the connection between morality and politics. He shows that there is a durable tension between the two. He writes: “modern political science owes a great deal to Machiavelli’s shocking claim that ordinary notions of moral behaviour for individual may not be suitable as rules for conduct for states.” Such an analysis invites to go back to the distinction between the different kinds of errors that can be done by humans with the goal of identifying the nature of those that can be specifically called “political errors”.