Paying for the Post-Industrial: The Global Costs of West German and European Capitalist Crisis and Revival, 1972-1988

Abstract

European politicians, business leaders, and citizens confronted a number of pressing questions during the long economic stagnation of the 1970s and 1980s. Amidst a landscape littered with shuttered factories, and in a collective mood dominated by unemployment and bankruptcies, West German and European policymakers sought to salvage the postwar capitalist system from what some considered to be the gravest menace to European stability since the 1940s. “Paying for the Post-Industrial” investigates a central if little-studied dimension of this crisis and the ensuing capitalist revival that began in the 1980s: namely, how the rescue of West German and European capitalism imposed a new, unequal allocation of human, economic, and environmental burdens between the powerful and the marginalized, and between the continent’s center and its periphery. To adopt the distinction developed in this period by the sociologist Ulrich Beck, western Europeans became increasingly concerned with how they might retain the “goods” provided by capitalist production while outsourcing the “bads.” How, for instance, could the environmental devastation wrought by heavy industry be mitigated and moved out of sight, away from an increasingly environmentally conscious public? How could the immigrants (especially Muslim immigrants) who worked disproportionately in declining heavy industries like coal and steel – and who were hard hit by unemployment – be encouraged to leave and return “home”? How could a project premised on human and ethno-religious segregation not just coexist with, but support, greater economic interconnection and higher levels of foreign investment? “Paying for the Post-Industrial” investigates how diverse forms and modes of foreign investment led to new arrangements in the unequal geography between Europe’s richer northwestern core and its poorer southern periphery. It addresses foreign investment in the widest possible sense: as a means to replace foreign workers at home with foreign workers abroad; as a vehicle for outsourcing pollution and toxic waste; and as a salve for imperiled factories and declining industries. West German and European attempts to use investment abroad to solve internal crises entailed elements of what the theorist of capitalism David Harvey has described as the “spatial fix.” “Paying for the Post-Industrial” is structured around three thematically focused parts that explore various dimensions of West Germany’s and Western Europe’s “spatial fix” in response to the interlocking social, environmental, economic, and migratory crises of the 1970s and 1980s. It is based on research in over a dozen archives, located in seven countries and utilizing five languages (German, Turkish, French, Italian, and English). Methodologically, it offers a transnational and multi-perspectival approach through an investigation of the archival records of states, political parties, labor organizations, international organizations, environmentalist groups, development and aid agencies, banks, and multinational corporations. In doing so, it highlights new connections between environmental history, the history of migration, and environmental history, as well as between the history of modern Europe and global history.