Today, the Con-Lib Coalition announces their full plan for spending cuts. Although many bits have been leaked, this will be the first chance we have to take the full measure of what is to come. Much has been and will be written about how these cuts are necessary, and even that they don’t go far enough.
And while much has been said about the economic arguments for and against the cuts proposed by Mr. Osborne, what is not talked about enough, or with sufficient care, is the ethics of austerity. By this I mean the ethical claims that have been made to prepare the ground for the austerity measures announced today. To borrow a phrase from the political theorist Bonnie Honig, we are seeing the culmination of a discourse of emergency politics.
While Honig uses the idea of emergency politics to get at how the threat of emergency is deployed to reassert the sovereignty of the state over the democratic sovereignty of the people as the source of law and legitimate political power, I want to suggest that the financial crises has resulted in a similar discourse, which claims we are in a state of emergency economics.
What the claim of emergency economics does, by framing our current experience in terms of emergency, is reaffirm the sovereignty of the capitalist markets over democratic society by presenting us with a catastrophic choice. We must accept the radical restructuring of public life out of necessity; there is no alternative but catastrophe. To discuss solutions is to waste time; to insist on the imperative of democratic values is to court disaster; to oppose the hasty reform of fundamental elements of the social order is to be a dangerous ideologue. Emergency economics are hardly unique to the UK, but today we are witnessing a clear expression of its consequences.
The Disorder Of Things 