„Die Amerikaner werden mit den Europäern noch eine ganze Weile Schlitten fahren“

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Ein Interview mit Wolfgang Streeck von Michael Hesse, Frankfurter Rundschau, 23. Januar 2026

Der Soziologe Wolfgang Streeck über Amerikas Gewaltpotenzial, die europäische Ohnmacht und den Zerfall
der alten Ordnung.

Herr Streeck, Trump hatte in seiner ersten Präsidentschaft verkündet, sich vor allem um die Amerikaner kümmern zu wollen. Erleben wir nun gerade eine Art Neo-Imperialismus der USA?

MAGA (Make America Great Again), Trumps Programm, hatte immer zwei Seiten: Repariere die kaputte amerikanische Gesellschaft oder restauriere die Weltherrschaft der USA. Welche Seite gemeint war, blieb immer offen und ist es heute noch. Einmal Isolationismus, ein andermal Interventionismus, zurzeit gerne auch beides abwechselnd oder zugleich. Eine Mischung besonderer Art ist übrigens Trumps „Donroe Doktrin“: Interventionismus beschränkt auf Mittel- und Südamerika; an sich nichts Neues. Global gesehen liefe das heute auf eine Aufteilung der Welt in gegenseitig respektierte regionale „Einflusszonen“ hinaus, in denen jeweils eine Großmacht mehr oder weniger nach Belieben schaltet und waltet. Nicht in dieses Bild passen beispielsweise die bedingungslose Unterstützung Israels in seinem Vernichtungskrieg in Gaza und der Westbank und die Drohungen, den Iran zu bombardieren (…)

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American Violence

In: New Left Review, January 28, 2026.

During his first term as president, Trump vowed to focus primarily on the American people. Are we now, by contrast, witnessing a kind of US neo-imperialism?

Trump’s programme to Make America Great Again always had these two sides: repair America’s broken society or restore US world domination. Which of these was dominant remained open and is still so today. Sometimes we have isolationism, sometimes interventionism; currently both alternately or even simultaneously. Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine’ is a particular version of this mixture: interventionism, but limited to Central and South America; nothing new in itself. Globally, this would amount to a division of the world into mutually respected regional ‘spheres of influence’ in which a major power more or less rules as it pleases. What does not fit into this picture is the unconditional support for Israel in its war of annihilation in Gaza and the West Bank, nor the threats to bomb Iran (…)

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Social Contract or Expert Rule: Capitalism, Democratic Politics, Economic Expertise, and the Battle against „Populism“

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In: Critical Review, 1-21

The German Wirtschaftswunder was not the result of economic expertise applied by Ludwig Erhard to postwar West Germany. There is no universally applicable theory-cum-practice of a “social market economy.” A capitalist economy is a political economy that requires an – always fragile – political settlement between capital and labour, one that needs to be re-negotiated on a current basis in the light of changing relations of power between the classes. To the extent that this requires expertise, it is the expertise of political practitioners, not of economists.“The economy” is not a second nature but a social battlefield..

François Godard’s book Germany, France, and Postwar Democratic Capitalims: Expert Rule – based upon his doctoral dissertation at the University of Geneva – could not be more ambitious: a history of post-1945 economic policy, indeed political-economic state-building, or democracy-building, in the two largest West European countries, Germany and France, complemented by two shadow cases, the UK and Italy, stretching out over nearly three decades. What we have here is, in short, high-grade historical institutionalism, driven by a dual program: empirically-historically, to show that West European postwar prosperity was owed, not to political compromise between capital and labor, but to states and governments applying expert knowledge on the economy to the economy; and theoretically-paradigmatically, to suggest that what counts in the world of democratic capitalism, and presumably not just there, are expert ideas, or “ideational models,” adopted and realized by government, rather than economic interests or the deals struck with and between them. (…)

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The World Wolfgang Streeck Wants

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An interview with Wolfgang Streeck by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, The Nation, June 18 2025

A conversation with the German sociologist about the challenges that face Europe and his polarizing views on how to roll back the excesses of globalization.

The New York Times called you “the Karl Marx of our time” after the release of Taking Back Control?, which diagnosed the crisis of “neoliberal globalization” and liberal democracy. Of course, there are plenty of theories regarding the cause(s) of this crisis, so what makes your argument distinct—and are you surprised by the attention the book has garnered here in the US?…

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Ukraine, Europe, and its discontents: interview with Wolfgang Streeck 

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An interview with Wolfgang Streeck by Chris Bambery, Counterfire, June 3 2025

Chris Bambery interviewed the German left economist and writer, Wolfgang Streeck about the EU, the prospects of European involvement in the Ukraine War and political instability

CB: The EU was, in many ways, disciplined by its Atlanticism. Loyalty to the USA helped hold it together. Without that, and despite current rhetoric, it now seems each member state will pursue its own self-interest. Do you agree?..

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The Road Right

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In: New Left Review, issue 152: On the German election of February 2025.

A high-turnout election, sharply polarized around immigration, has brought another centrist coalition to power in Berlin. Wolfgang Streeck offers an unsparing analysis of Germany´s political situation as its hardline incoming Chancellor rams through an expansive fiscal revolution and the far-right AfD doubles its seats..

In early march 2025, as Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz laid the groundwork for a massive German military build-up, sidelining the newly elected parliament to push through fiscal reforms that would double the annual defence budget to €100 billion, the Euro-establishment was in celebratory mood. Merz’s rearmament drive was ‘a stroke of commendable boldness’ and ‘a fantastic start’, declared the Economist. ‘From Paris to Warsaw, Brussels and beyond’, Merz’s move had understandably produced ‘giddy excitement’. The Guardian hailed it as a ‘bold and necessary leap’, a ‘chance to renew mainstream politics’ and ‘unleash the radical centre’. For the FT, it represented nothing less than ‘the reawakening of Germany’; for Le Monde, a ‘major and welcome turning point’. The measures may have required certain ‘democratic gymnastics’ to bypass the freshly elected Bundestag, Le Monde conceded, but ‘the times call for boldness’, and ‘the new dynamic in Berlin should be encouraged’. For El País, ‘“Germany is back” means “Europe is back”!’ Merz’s leadership ‘points the way for the rest of Europe.’ (…)

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Wolfgang Streeck: „Glauben Sie wirklich, amerikanische Porsche-Fahrer lassen sich von Zöllen beeindrucken?“

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Ein Interview mit Wolfgang Streeck von Dorian Baganz, der Freitag, 11. April 2025.

Im Gespräch erklärt Wolfgang Streeck, warum er in Trumps Zollpolitik einen Beweis für den Niedergang der Vereinigten Staaten erkennt. Und beantwortet die Frage, ob ein Hochindustrieland wie Deutschland überhaupt überleben kann, wenn die Amerikaner seine Produkte nicht mehr kaufen wollen.

der Freitag: Herr Streeck, wenn Sie aktuell EU-Kommissionspräsident wären …

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Overextended: The European Disunion at a Crossroads

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In: American Affairs, Volume IX, No. 1, Spring 2025, pp. 100-122.

With hindsight, one might consider Brexit, consummated after long haggling in 2020, the last, and lost, opportunity for the European Union to mend its ways and become a viable political entity, if not community.1 The departure of the United Kingdom did not register as a warning that the Union had become too internally diverse to hold together, having rapidly expanded both territorially and functionally. To the contrary, Germany under Merkel and France under Macron saw an opportunity, or pretended to see one, to push the old integration project—the “ever closer union of the peoples of Europe”—forward, now that “Euroskeptic” Britain, one of the Union’s Big Three, had left. But then, they arguably had little choice as the EU’s de facto constitution (two international treaties each hundreds of pages long) is practically unchangeable as any amendment has to be agreed by all member states, which some can do only after a referendum. One may assume that this rigidity was exactly what was desired when the treaties in their present form were signed in Maastricht in 1992 and Amsterdam in 1997, to cast in stone the logic of neoliberal political economy that was at the time considered the ultimate stage of economic wisdom. (…)

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Wolfgang Streeck: “Global Governance” is a Pipe Dream

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An interview with Wolfgang Streeck by Ewald Engelen, Jacobin, February 11, 2025.

Wolfgang Streeck’s new book Taking Back Control? argues that the neoliberal era of free trade and trickle-down rhetoric lies in the past. He spoke to Jacobin about the political shocks this might bring.

Wolfgang Streeck’s Taking Back Control? had only been out for a few weeks when it was applauded by Martin Wolf as one of the best books on economics for 2024. For the Financial Times sage Wolf, Streeck “is arguably the most thoughtful critic of globalisation.” (…)

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Wolfgang Streeck on Trump, fascism, Europe, the left, the end of capitalism… and a lot more!

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Crisis and Critique, 6. February 2025.

Frank Ruda and Agon Hamza sit down with the German economic sociologist to discuss the nature and prospects of Trump presidency, fascism, the upcoming German elections and Europe, contemporary capitalism and its crisis, as well as what will end capitalism.

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A Matter of State: The Politics of German Anti-Anti-Semitism

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In: European Journal of Social Theory, online first, 5 December 2024.

Accessing and explicating the complexities of the collective subconscious that underlies a culture requires a hermeneutic skill and a richness of concepts and examples that is not at my disposal. I have nothing to add to Heidrun Friese’s insightful psycho-analysis of the Tätervolk that wants to draw a Schlussstrich by insisting that it doesn’t want to draw a Schlussstrich, offering reparation, Wiedergutmachung, for what cannot be repaired, hoping to be forgiven the unforgivable by declaring it unforgivable. I will instead focus on a simpler subject, one that lends itself, I hope, to be treated with the less sophisticated toolkit of the political scientist: not the depths of culture but the heights of politics, of government, of state, in particular the contingencies and constraints faced by a German state which had chosen to be the successor state of the Drittes Reich, in its dual relationship with its international context and its domestic society. (…)

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