Explain a bit about the Geneva School’s approach to labour mobility and what it revealed about their ideological framework more generally.
Right, well this is kind of a shadow subplot in the book that I wrote and in retrospect I wish I had drawn it out more but it’s something that I realize after writing the book that it’s sort of happening without me drawing the reader’s attention to it. But what’s happening is that things change over the course of the 20th century. And at the beginning of the 20th century the frame of reference for people like Hayek and Mises and Haberler is really the Hapsburg Empire and then the Danubian Basin or the area of Eastern Europe that is comprised of the different nation states that succeed the Hapsburg Empire. And when they are looking at that space they’re actually pretty doctrinaire in their support of the freedom of labour to move from one site to another. For Mises especially, I mean in his early work he is quite orthodox about the absolute necessity of the freedom of labour. That labour, like all other factors of production needs to be able to go where it’s most needed, and in his mind this is a salutary process that will probably lead to the kind of dissolution of some nations, but then it might lead to their recombination in different forms once they’ve emigrated, and there’s no central problem with this. He saw nationalities and ethnicities as unmoored from this or that territory. They should be able to form themselves in emigration as much as in the places they are ancestrally rooted to. So this is still a kind of 19th century vision of the great migrations that moved people from Central and Eastern Europe to North America and also the huge migrations that were moving internally from the countryside to the city that really drove the industrial revolution. So it’s quite absolute in its belief in labour mobility as a principle, this early Austrian position. What changes is really world wars. So the second world war produces a situation in which human mobility is now perceived as quite an acute national security threat, particularly when you think about the way the entire Japanese population was brought under suspicion as kind of a 5th column of the Emperor. The German population was, too, but to a lesser extent, stigmatized and brought under suspicion, even if they had been there for generations. And what people like Mises said, looking at the situation was effectively, this is a problem but it’s a temporary problem, but for the time being, let’s try to conceive of a system of global capitalism that doesn’t rely anymore on free labour mobility. So they say, given these constraints, what might we see as a provisional working model of something that could still work. And in that kind of, “let’s bracket this for the moment” state of mind, someone like Haberler comes up with the theory of comparative costs, which makes in sort of formal international trade economics terms the argument that if you have enough movement of goods and capital then you can profit just as much from free trade and free capital policies as if you had free movement of labour. He produces a kind of epistemological foundation or alibi for a “closed borders for people” position, not, I think, because he has any inherent antipathy towards foreigners or people of different races but because the circumstances of the borders that came up in the course of the second world war are sort of being taken seriously.
It’s telling perhaps that while Neoliberals are capable of cultivating such a utopian disposition toward markets, they are sort of realists when it comes to the boundaries of the nation states for ordinary people.
Oh absolutely, I think that’s unquestionable and the way that this develops only drives that point home all the more clearly. Because what we get in the course of the 20th century is not just two major world wars but also migration from the global South to the global North in significant quantities that we haven’t seen since, well, of course, the mass forced migration of slavery that effectively founded the United states, and the movement of Asian labourers to the western United States and to Canada and Australia in the late 19th century before it was shut down by exclusion acts. But when you get into the post-war period of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, you start to get the movement from French colonies, and then the former French colonies into the French metropole, you get guest workers arriving in large numbers from places like Turkey and Morocco into countries like West Germany and the Netherlands, and you get people from places like the British Commonwealth and the former British Empire migrating into the United Kingdom. So the creation of a multicultural and a multiracial Europe, a multiracial Britain, a multiracial France, a multiracial Germany, brings home this quote unquote problem of a clash between different cultural styles in a way that Neoliberals now are forced to confront. And the way that they confront it is exactly as you say, not exactly inspiring in the evenness with which they apply their principles to people as they do to goods and capital. What Hayek concludes in the late 1970s, looking at Margaret Thatcher’s policy, which was to effectively end immigration from countries of the global South if she had her way, this is her official position at that time, Hayek supports it. He doesn’t come out in principled opposition to that and say, even, that, you know, people deserve the same rights and movements that capital does. That would at least be a kind of honourable libertarian position, you could say, but he says, no, people are a special kind of factor of production in effect and they can be very disruptive. And, as he says, the kinds of origins of racialism come from the inability of the long-standing residents of countries to extend their welcome to newcomers. He creates and analogy to Vienna on the arrival of large numbers of Jews from further East in Eastern Europe and Russia. And he says, well, when the Jews arrived they were unable to assimilate quickly and they ended up being a disruptive force and they actually ended up producing anti-semitism. Their presence produced anti-semitism.
—Quinn Slobodian interviewed by Daniel Denvir
