The values of the glorious thirty undermined

The articles of the third part stress that this crisis is also a crisis of values, principally those that flourished between 1945 and 1975, during a period of reconstruction and prosperity in the West. The end of the seventies was marked by world crises and this led to the creation of a vicious circle in sovereign debts and opened the way for new mechanisms. “The observations in these different articles all point to the same conclusion”, states Nicolas Thirion. “That of the demise of the welfare-state, a ‘marketization’ of companies and a financiarisation of the economy. This occurred from the 1980s onwards. The end and the means became reversed. The economy was no longer about producing goods and services to satisfy consumers. The primary aim was a return on investment. The state, and indeed this is the subject of my own contribution (see below, “From multiple meaning to clarification”, Editor’s note.), is there to supply a legal framework that makes it possible to reach this objective”.  

Two motors that represent this financiarisation of the economy are the emergence of pension funds (dealt with in a contribution by Alexia Autenne(5)), privatization and the progressive destruction of company shareholdings that were public and monopolistic up to that point (as illustrated by Carole Monaco(6), who looked at France as an example of this). The idea is also dealt with in the third part that economic law married with ethics could lead to a legal world order to correct the perverse effects of the markets. Capitalism, when it was created, was supposed to be capitalism between gentlemen. This has become a total illusion.

The contribution of Isabelle Corbisier(7), finally, places the evolution of company values in a historical perspective, by placing them in the context of company law. She criticizes the transformations in the legal and social status attributed to companies, from the moral person who, amongst other things, has to work for the common good, to the simple disembodied place where contracts are exchanged. This shake-up took place in the 1980s and initiated imperatives that became antagonistic between financial law (International scope) and company law (anchored in nations) and which deprived states of their bargaining power. This historical perspective also makes it possible to re-establish a rebalancing of capitalism between competition and cooperation. If neoliberal ideology worships the cult of the principle of competition, by elevating it to an almost divine level, it is the result of collective amnesia because companies are made up of criteria of cooperation and solidarity between themselves as are states, but also with of people by whom they were entrusted with a mission for the common good.

From multi-meaning to clarification

When dealing with a subject such as an economic crisis, the ideas invoked are often warped in favor of arguments that are sometimes antagonistic. Definitions pile up on top of each other or oppose each other and stratify words which, by their polysemy end up losing their meaning and force. A complementary focus of the work is to suggest rehabilitation, or more exactly, a clarification of some of the most used ideas. The contribution by Nicolas Thirion is a perfect illustration of this. The author returns to the idea of “regulation” and discards conceptual imprecisions. In Europe, the concept has principally defined three great ideas. First, it signified a frame working process for the liberalization of public companies from the end of the 1980s, and which aimed to safeguard collective interest in these sectors. At the end of the 1990s, regulation characterised the guarantee of the balance of the interests of companies existing on the already-competition-based market. In both of these cases, public authorities were strongly represented, which led to a third mode of regulation, self-regulation. Companies took the initiative of finding the balance they needed for themselves.  

(5) Alexia Autenne, research associate at the FRS-FNRS and Professeur at UCL and ULB, The organization and governance of pension funds: the challenges facing Belgian and European Union law.
(6) Carole Monaco, Doctoral researcher at the University Mons, The capitalistic restructuring of the French economy: between nationalization and privatization.
(7) Isabelle Corbisier, Professor at the University of Luxembourg and at HEC/University of Liege, Enterprise: what are its founding values and goals?