Leestip: Fantastisch Newsweek-stuk over problematiek Europa...

[Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Prachtstuk over de problemen van Europa. Over de angst van haar inwoners de
controle over hun eigen leven te verliezen (over hoe open grenzen leiden tot
de verplichting om in eigen straat een paspoort op zak te hebben - om het
enige foutje maar bij naam te noemen) in de Newsweek van volgende week...
Leerzame kost !

Studentje Bert mag dit van z'n professor aan de rest van de klas geven...
                                                                         :-)

Bron:   Newsweek (International edition)
Datum:  20 juni 2005
Auteur: Claude Smadja
        President of Smadja & Associates, Strategic Advisory.
URL:    http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8184874/site/newsweek/
Opm:    Zie ook in hetzelfde nummer:
        http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8185444/site/newsweek/


A Last Chance For Europe
------------------------
Forget the breast-beating. All the EU needs is a dream.

Could we stop the crocodile tears? The French non and the Dutch nee are the best
news Europe's had in years. They give the EU a last chance to shift gears and
get back on track.

Europeans are not morons, confused by the issues. The reality is simpler: if
you've been told for years that "ever-closer union" - the process of integration -
is the best medicine for Europe, and instead you get sicker and sicker, with
unemployment and anxiety growing, you have to conclude at some stage that (a) the
prescription is wrong, (b) the doctor is incompetent or (c) that he's fooling you.

Rejecting the European constitution is best read as a strong act of defiance.
It should come as no surprise. Europe's man in the street understands only
too well what the establishment has long ignored: that for more than a decade
European integration has been conducted in a way that misses the only question
that counts - how to generate growth, jobs and hope across thcontinent. Instead,
Europe's leaders have offered only so much gargle-visions of a common foreign
policy, a European foreign minister, and so forth. Ordinary Europeans dismiss
such talk for what it is: an irrelevant distraction.

As one whose family immigrated to Europe from Tunisia 40 years ago in search
of a strong civil society, a system where the voice of the people would really
count, I am distressed by the political autism of European leaders. Almost
every time a major question of European integration has been put to the people
in a popular vote, their answer has either been "no" (as previously in Denmark
and Ireland, and now in France and the Netherlands) or a tepid "yes" (as in
the French referendum on the 1992 Maastricht Treaty). Participation in Europe-
wide elections has steadily dwindled; polls show a growing alienation. Yet
political, business and opinion leaders are besotted by the notion that they,
the elites, somehow know best—and that ordinarpeople should just follow along.

Time to wake up. Europe today is paying for three major mistakes. The first
is that European integration has for too long been a top-down, one-way street.
The establishment has never listened to the people, let alone attempted to
involve them to such a degree as to make integration their project. Yes, in
the beginning Robert Schumann and Konrad Adenauer played for public support to
create the European project. Had they not, it would never have come to life.
But as Europe became a reality, over the decades, it also became more and more
remote. After the referendums I heard one of my friends who is part of this
establishment complain that "we have failed to sell Europe." Here in a
nutshell is the problem. It is not a question of "selling" Europe through some
well-rounded argument or PR gimmick. It is a question of creating a dream and
keeping it alive.

Because Europe has remained so much of a top-down, technocratic exercise, there
is no European dream. The American Dream is alive and kicking. A Chinese dream
is emerging, and an Indian dream. But a European dream? An abiding sense that
an individual can shape his future, that tomorrow will be better than today,
that opportunities are opening rather than closing? I don't hear this from
young people in Europe today. They are glad to have so-called diploma equivalence
so that they can spend a year in some other European university. They appreciate
being able to travel throughout Europe without having to show a passport. But
these are technicalities - not the stuff dreams are made of. Where are the will
and the way to reinvent the future? Where is the kind of unbridled optimism that
helps people think big, and achieve great things? Nothing is more alien to a
genuine dream than discussions about feta cheese or rules of origin.

Perhaps Europeans (or at least their leaders) have grown too complacent to
dream. New candidates for membership keep knocking on the European Union's
door, pleading for admittance - and reinforcing the sense in Brussels that we
have created a paradise on earth. Let's get real: of course East Europeans
and others aspire to join the EU. We're wealthier than they, and can confer
subsidies. (Or, in Eurocratese, "solidarity mechanisms.") And while we're at
it, let's stop congratulating ourselves that, thanks to the EU, Europe has
known 60 years without war. Yes, well, great. But this is the here and now.
Only ignorant people think history repeats itself.

Is it too late for Europe to create a genuine dream, suited to the considerable
demands of a fast-changing future? Presumably not. But it could be, if Europe's
leaders fail to see Europe as their people do - a perspective from which the
benefits of Europe have been dwindling steadily. To rekindle confidence in the
future, to build a new European dream, requires a wholly new political approach
to Europe. It means, among other things, launching a wide-ranging public
discussion about what Europe is and what it should become. It requires taking
account of the continent's hugely divergent social orientations, economic
capabilities and demographic prospects. This means also learning to speak in
real language, genuinely meaningful to real people—and abandoning the
declamatory mumbo jumbo of Eurospeak, which has come to clothe the hollowness
of Brussels's ambitions for itself.

Speaking from a clear-eyed sense of reality brings us to Europe's second big
mistake: failing to recognize how ordinary Europeans are poised to become the
big losers of globalization. By breaking the link between high technology,
high productivity and high quality on the one hand, and high salaries on the
other hand, globalization has deprived Europe's middle class of the comparative
advantage upon which the past five decades of prosperity were built. Of course,
the United States' middle class has also been largely deprived of its monopoly.
But there's a big difference: change and mobility are part of the American
culture. Americans do not share Europeans' sense of entitlement; they move
freely across a continent, without barriers of language or law. They are able
to adjust and reinvent themselves in a way that Europeans, by culture and
condition, find much more difficult.

Thus over the last 15 years most European countries have been fighting one
rear-guard battle after the other - and losing. Growth is anemic, structural
unemployment is rising, pensions are increasingly at risk. Across Europe,
people are disoriented, frustrated and deeply anxious about their lives and
the future of their children. They feel cheated. But instead of telling the
truth, and making a full and strong case for the need to completely review an
entitlements system that has outlived its day, their leaders spout bogus
reassurances about recovery around the corner. Whether in Germany or France
or Italy, official forecasts of economic growth have been relentlessly
readjusted downward. Fifteen years ago European and U.S. growth rates trended
along the same lines - about 2.5 percent a year. Now they've sharply
diverged: 3.8 percent for America versus 1.7 percent for Europe. Over time,
these small annual increments will produce staggering differences in living
standards.

The life-or-death question for Europe is how to regenerate high growth.
This presumes more far-reaching structural reforms in the labor market and
social welfare than most political leaders have been willing to contemplate.
To the extent they speak of reform, they do so while calculating their
chances of re-election. The relevant issue today is not how to protect the
European social model but, rather, which social model is compatible with
increasing Europe's economic growth.

At bottom, we're talking about the need for a genuine cultural revolution
here. Yet perversely, most Europeans prefer the easy fantasy that they can
somehow find a "third way." Europeans don't need to obsess over growth the
way Americans do, they say; Europeans know how to "balance" things. Why not
settle for much slower growth and maintain a nice European quality of life?
The only problem with this strategy is that it's a losing one. In the
winner-take-all environment of globalization, there is no "calibrated," half
way to economic leadership. The "so-so" approach to growth is just a recipe
for higher unemployment and economic mediocrity.

This links into the third historical mistake for which Europe is paying the
price today - enlarging the union to 25 before undertaking needed social and
economic restructuring. Most European leaders knew full well that the EU was
not ready to absorb the shock of new entrants representing a 20 percent increase
in population yet only a 3 percent increase in European GDP. But having promised
the former Soviet satellites that they could join, the EU's leaders had little
choice but to follow through. That's praiseworthy, perhaps - but it also went
against widespread public sentiment.

The upshot is that continental Europe's middle class is now squeezed between
its competitive new neighbors, on the one side, and the emerging global
titans of China and India on the other. That puts double pressure on Europe's
traditional labor markets, industrial productivity and fiscal resources. Yes,
enlargement is expanding the strategic reach of many large European
corporations, especially German ones. But at the same time it has strained
the link between the prosperity of a corporation and the well-being of its
employees. German companies are logging record exports and profits, for
instance - yet that does not guarantee the jobs of their employees in
Stuttgart or Frankfurt. No wonder then that EU enlargement is feeding into
this gnawing sense of anxiety about the future. One doesn't need treasures of
imagination to think about the kind of reactions the prospect of Romania's
and Bulgaria's admission in 2007 could provoke.

The high-handed way that Eurocrats have handled these matters only exacerbates
the anxieties of ordinary Europeans, who understandably feel that they are
losing control over their lives. It is no consolation that these worries are
as much linked to globalization as to the process of European integration. But
after so many unheard warning signals in the past, the events of the last two
weeks may well represent Europe's last chance to put things on the table - to
engage in a real discussion of its economic and social future, of what needs
to be done and its likely social and political costs. It's a last chance, too,
for Europe's leaders to connect genuinely with their people.

The failure, so far, to do that has created a vacuum into which the extreme
right and the extreme left have stepped with full force. They know an
opportunity when they see one. By its condescending attitude, the political
elite bears a major responsibility for the rise of populism. There is no
underestimating the deterioration of the political, social and psychological
climate in Europe and the major danger it represents. The situation has never
been so bad. Of course some political leaders in France or Germany might draw
the wrong lessons from the results of the referendum, and be tempted to slow
reforms even further. It would be foolish to think that this will solve
Europe's problems. The frog in the pot may decide that although the water is
becoming warmer it is still bearable, and it will continue like that until it
boils to death. Or it can jump out. Europe has a similar choice.

--------
(c) 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********