23:11, 12 March 2010
A quarter of a century ago, it was said that Europe was in the grip of ‘Eurosclerosis’. The intellectual retreat of Keynesianism, as the modest inflation critical to a Keynesian demand-management programme became a vertiginous problem, and the failure to develop a persuasive post-capitalist model, exemplified by the defeat of the wage-earner funds project in Sweden, meant that ‘Europe’ no longer meant the better tomorrow with which it had been associated ever since the defeat of fascism and mass unemployment. It was the Delors presidency of the EU which, even though Delors himself had no answers to these new challenges, eventually rescued Europe–even if that only postponed the crisis.
Today, there is another Eurosclerosis. In part it is a product of success: the attractiveness of the European ‘club’ has brought about its marked expansion to 27 members, but at the expense of the broad, progressive, anti-fascist consensus which once it shared (no surprise since the east and central European members could understandably take a cynical view of that rhetoric, measured against their own post-war experience). In part, it is that globalisation has allowed capitalist firms to escape national regulation, yet an obvious co-ordination dilemma has prevented the EU taking on that role, which would imply for not just a monetary but a fiscal union.
Yet the paradox is that the citizens of Europe, however alienated they feel from the ‘actually-existing Europe’ of the institutions, are crying out for solutions to the challenges they currently face–job insecurity, cultural diversity, environmental crisis, and so on–which can only come at a European, and then global, level. The only other show in town is a mistrustful and lowest-common-denominator relationship between a centre-right (under Obama) US and, as at the climate-change summit, a right-wing Stalinist dictatorship in China.
Finding a way through this is going to be incredibly difficult. And while huge amounts of academic analysis of ‘Europe’ in recent decades has gone into endlessly (and tediously) surveying the institutions and their evolution, relatively little has addressed whether it is possible for the PES and NGOs across Europe to construct a new historical bloc. Yet this is key to determining whether ‘another Europe is possible’ and whether it can provide a beacon to the world–in the absence of which, we are, among other things, on a countdown to global ecological disaster.
