Mary Dejevsky: Amid the chaos, we should hail the triumph of Europe
Posted by seumasach on October 3, 2008
For all that Europe has adopted the language of neo-liberalism, it has a way to go catch up, or rather, slide back to the UK and the USA. That this was the case was shown by the endless Anglo-saxon tirades against “socialist” Europe. Just how far the neo-liberal rot had set in will be revealed by this crisis, but I suspect it will pale in comparison to the devastation over here. Unlike the UK, Europe still has a substantial high-tech industrial base, thriving agriculture, good infrastructure and high levels of education. It still has a bureaucracy which has served as a check on oligarchy and a robust dirigiste tradition. The EU doesn’t run a huge current account deficit nor is its public sector saddled with massive debt from PFI/PPP schemes: the Euro is a rising currency. Sometimes we forget that we are actually members of the EU such is the permanent mood of hostility promoted by our press. It’s time to recognise our good fortune and to enter fully into the spirit of building Europe and to join the Euro as soon as possible.
Mary Dejevsky
3rd October, 2008
The vast majority of European financial institutions are not in difficulty
President Sarkozy has called European leaders to Paris tomorrow to discuss what everyone is fatalistically calling the global financial crisis. But it is not a world financial crisis, is it? It would be more accurate to describe it as a crisis of what the French used to call, with a contemptuous Gallic shrug, the “Anglo-Saxon model”.
This is the high-salary, low-tax, easy-credit model that has now been exposed for the con it always was. The Continental Europeans – and they could be forgiven for pointing this out at the very top of their communiqué – ran their economies according to a very different, social market, model. It is a model that has now been triumphantly vindicated.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, of course – that is, in the US and Britain, but not many other places – you will hear it argued that globalisation lands us all in this together. But this confuses cause and effect and blurs responsibility. The Continental European economies are affected only in so far as they have been contaminated by US and British excesses. The German, Dutch and Icelandic banks that have needed rescuing were in trouble because they fell for the seductive patter of our transatlantic friends. In Europe, the crisis is more one of fear than insolvency.
The vast majority of European financial institutions – and that includes the Spanish bank, Santander, which is buying up ailing chunks of our own financial sector – are not in difficulty. They have stuck to a more old-fashioned form of banking: more local, more personal and more responsible.
Until very recently, the differences between banking in the UK and France were glaring. Our British bank seemed to be a stream of lost letters, call centres, confused lines of responsibility, deceptive savings rates and offers of “financial products”. Banking in France meant a direct phone number to the branch manager, emails if needed, and a stern letter and interest charges if the account went a centime overdrawn.
Alas, “financial products” and call centres have been gaining ground there, too, along with many other aspects of the Anglo-Saxon model, such as casualisation of the work force. And regrettably, the British bear much of the blame. Citing our – as it now turns out, inflated – growth, we were enthusiastic advocates of the so-called Lisbon agenda, designed to make the European Union more “competitive” – competitive being defined by the particular economic indices that showed Britain and the US to best advantage. The growth rate was king; and the sure way to growth, as we argued it, was deregulation of pretty much everything that remained in the public sector.
Why this diktat of the growth rate – rather than, for instance, sanitary housing, clean air or low crime – deserves to be debated at more leisure. But the French and Germans spent the best part of the next eight years figuring out how to meet the Lisbon targets without sacrificing too many positive elements of their way of life. The political and institutional contortions this entailed were little short of heroic. Angela Merkel’s centre-right alliance barely won a German election fought on this very issue.
Looking back, the hectoring that the French and Germans suffered from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown about their supposedly stagnating economies, high unemployment and short working hours deserved some smart ripostes about the less desirable by-products of the Anglo-Saxon model, such as unstable house prices, violent crime, hospital infection rates and low educational attainment. Our high employment and low tax rates should have been exposed for what they were: very similar, or inferior, to those of our Continental neighbours, only disguised by stealth accounting.
If only, it is tempting to wish, the Continental Europeans had not been swayed by our boasts and burnished statistics, there would now be an alternative economic template out there. It would be a social market model that preserved a balance between private and public, services and manufacturing, domestic and global, and kept the issuing of credit within bounds. Unfortunately, that model has been so adulterated that it will be hard to reconstruct.
The tragedy of the present crisis for Europe – a tragedy that must take its place alongside the individual tragedies of repossessions, failed businesses and lost pensions – is that France and Germany allowed themselves to be dragged reluctantly towards the “Anglo-Saxon” way of doing things, just as that model started to come unstuck. Not only are they now stranded between two conflicting models of growth, but they can no longer preach back to the Americans and the British as unequivocally as they would once have been qualified to do.
In These New Times 
emcguire said
It’s very disappointing to see this much admired website giving such prominence to renewed advoacy of the failed euro project. Indeed I hope the editorial line could be reconsidered – especially in the light of the EU being a self defence club of crisis ridden capitalists. It has proven its solid neo-liberal credentials by its imposition of wholesale privatisation both in its member states and in its dealings in Africa. It is attacking workers as is seen in the Laval and Viking cases. Its increasing militarisation and the financial shockwaves of this moment prove its interdependancy and ‘joined-at-the-hip’ relationship with US imperialism which you always so rightly condemn. If we are to create any viable future for ourselves then surely we have to be free, both of the USA and of a European superstate – free from both dollar and euro!
inthesenewtimes said
The only way Europe can demonstrate its neo-liberal credentials is by showing itself to be as bankrupt as the US/UK. It doesn’t appear to be, and if we’re right about that it is because it has been tardy in demolishing its public sector as well as its industrial and agriculutural base and substituting for them a parasitic sytem of finance. Its workers enjoy greater security and protection than here in the UK- that is one of the main reasons New Labour opted out of the Maastricht social clauses. In terms of militarisation it has nothing on us- do I really have to argue this? As for its subordination to the US, well, despite the Americans apparently having their own people in power in France and Germany, Europe is increasingly taking an independent line and in my view an independent Europe is taking shape. Do the Americans and Brits support Sarkozy’s call for a union of Europe and Russia? Certainly not.
For Britain to stand aloof from Europe would be to go against the currents of the times. Everywhere, regional organisation is taking place involving some pooling of sovereignty and good neighbourliness is at a premium. There is nothing viable about Britain exceptionalism – we are finished economically, militarilly and the pound is going to sink like a stone. Most British people don’t like the idea of joining Europe but when they see the alternative, to be crucified on the alter of British banks, they will hopefully start to think differently.
smeddum said
EC. I am sorry to hear that you are disappointed but perhaps your understanding of our editorial position is not quite the same as ours. There is a parallel in history, when Lenin advocated that workers should join right wing trade unions. The syndicalists of course objected. The only thing I would say that I want to take out of this is that Lenin had a political strategy beyond the black and white or rigid right and rigid left.
Bear in mind we should fight inside Europe against the oppressive legislation that matches our own draconian anti-trade union laws.
Your criticism of the European Union is in a good part correct but they are not as joined at the hip as one would believe. There is opposition to the war in Iraq to consider, and all the anti-French racism that came from the US establishment . However, while the US dominates the world, is it not rational to look for a pole against US hegemony? Perhaps even an internationalist duty. The US empire is the main enemy of workers and has ended workers governments such as Allende’s Chile, and acted as the world policeman.
Europe has not cuddled up to the United States as much as Britain. It is of strategic importance to break the UK/US special imperialist relationship. This is a priority and I see very little inside the UK that broaches on this issue. This can only be the result of the greatest poverty of philosophy
There are strands in Europe pulling towards Russia, China, India and Brazil and thus the multipolar ideas of the Non-Aligned movement which have long been an enemy of US foreign policy
“Richard Kluger in his article “U.S military strategy and force posture for the 21st century” for the America’s National Defence Research Unit speculates the American capacity needed for the future.
50% – Global harmony
75% – Reduced regional tensions
110% – Enhanced regional tensions
125% – Fascist Russia
135% – Unstable multi-polar world ”
I wrote this article just after just after the US/UK bombing of Belgrade .
http://www.geocities.com/paulanderson9/paulsdir/articles/
The multipolar enemy of the United States is not pictured by the mainstream of the British left or even the Scottish left.
I believe that we must support everything in Europe that pushes the UK away from the US and that includes the Euro and its stronger regulations such as Basel II. Such bourgeois “socialism”.
I have no particular fetish for any form of money. The British pound?
I might be accused of being a stagist theorist, but I think the US superstate
is much more dangerous to a viable future than a nascent EU ‘superstate’ that can either go with the rest of the world towards a multipolar world, or much more pessimistically sink in the mire with the crashing US economy.
Free Europe from American hegemony!
Build a multipolar world
Join the euro!