I
Consider the following:
The EU cannot finance its budget through debt, but the EU Treaties do not prohibit the issuance of EU-27-backed securities or bonds for off-budget operations, as long as they are approved by the Council. The largest collective borrowing operation in EU history so far was the temporary Covid-19 recovery program NextGenerationEU (NGEU), which received 90 per cent of its financing through the Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) for which the European Commission borrowed €807 billion on behalf of the EU-27 by issuing green bonds. NGEU presents itself as a green industrial investment program for the benefit of future generations, but it is pervaded by a fundamental contradiction: the repayment involves an intergenerational debt transfer, burdening future generations with €30 billion in annual debt servicing , starting in 2028 and ending in 2058.
Angela Wigger (2025). “Behind InvestEU’s Trojan Logic: Public Guarantees, Private Gains, and the Illusion of Climate Action,” accessed online at https://www.somo.nl/behind-investeus-trojan-logic/
I’d like you to focus on the bolded terms: off-budget operations and intergenerational debt transfer.
First, that notion of off-budget. Here a familiar adage is nowhere truer: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Once upon a time, the basic idea of a system budget was to be comprehensive. There’s nothing “off-budget” if the objective is constrained maximization of system benefits and costs. Of course, that hasn’t stopped all manner of moves to sequester below-line expenses as if they weren’t subject to budget constraints. Statements like
Technocrats’ creative reinterpretation of their own authority and governments’ creative fiscal accounting via off-budget financing vehicles can improve fiscal-monetary coordination and create significant fiscal space (van ’t Klooster, 2022; Guter-Sandu and Murau, 2022). However, the hidden and interim nature of these solutions preempts. . .
(accessed online at https://scispace.com/pdf/green-macrofinancial-regimes-2o45dbuoim.pdf)
. . .and in the process referring to articles with titles like “The Eurozone’s Evolving Fiscal Ecosystem: Mitigating Fiscal Discipline by Governing Through Off-Balance-Sheet Fiscal Agencies,” give the game away.
Nor does the old-fashioned riposte work: Future generations will have more income than we to cover these debts. We’re in times of decreasing per-capita incomes and near-zero discount rates, where the generations ahead are to be treated just as alive as we are.
If however you really do believe the latter, then the wider declension narratives at work–apocalypse, catastrophe, polycrisis–undermine the very persistence of concepts, like government budgets, intergenerational debt and future generations.
So what? What’s to be done? Well, one question and answer suggests itself: What life-worlds already exist that do not rely on these terms, budgets, debt and generations; apocalypse, catastrophe and polycrisis?
II
Are there, more specifically, the equivalent of free ports out there? “Free ports”?! Where did that come from? You can thank complexity for all manner of novel analogies.
Current free ports are to be found in places like Singapore, Luxembourg, and Geneva, and it is reported that the largest of them, Geneva Freeport, houses about 1.2 million artworks, some six times that of New York City’s MOMA. By extension, if “all painting is nothing but make-up, that it is part of its essence to deceive,” then are there equivalent free ports of such diverse testimonies as to offer far more and different metaphors than present-day reductionism provides? As in: realities are metaphors that last longer.
The analogy of free ports would, however, seem to take us right back to the heart of capitalism, with its Special Economic Zones (SEZ) and such. But we would be wrong. The authors of a recent global study of free ports, Koen Stapelbroek and Corey Tazzara (2023), stress their own version of “off-balance sheet”. “Free ports offered essential services that the prevailing system of political economy scarcely allowed.” More specifically:
Rather than treating free ports as intrinsically liberal or illiberal, it is better to see them as controlled breaches in the prevailing political economy, whether that be of a state or of an entire trading system. With respect to national political economy the breach is obvious, since by definition a free port policy entailed a relaxation of ordinary controls over trade and often other parameters such as immigration. The extent of control varied for reasons ranging from technology to the fiscal trade-offs unavoidable in any customs policy. The underlying strategy varied, too – in some cases, free ports served to stabilise a state’s political economy (as in Genoa), in other cases as a forerunner to transform the interior economy (as in the Caribbean). The free port shows that the modern state has never endorsed homogeneous space: there have always been breaches, sometimes of great importance.
Koen Stapelbroek & Corey Tazzara (2023) The Global History of the Free Port, Global Intellectual History, 8:6, 661-699, DOI: 10.1080/23801883.2023.2280091
That is, in addition to the always-on search for alternative social movements, we are looking for these breaches in political economies, state controls or not; that is, we are looking for heterogeneities–early commercial, mercantilist, capitalist, hybrid–that displace, re-situate or unaccent the terms that now leave us nowhere to go on their own.
Other sources
https://academic.oup.com/fh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/fh/craf018/8202932
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
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