by
Serge Halimi
The
European utopia is turning into a system for delivering punishment.
As Europe’s regime gets tougher, there is a growing sense that
interchangeable elites are taking advantage of each crisis to tighten
their austerity policies and impose their federal fantasy. This twin
objective has the support of boardrooms and newsrooms. But even if
you boost their ranks with German rentiers, a few Luxembourgers
specialising in tax evasion and most of France’s Socialist leaders,
popular backing for the present “European project” isn’t much
greater.
The
European Union does not stop chiding states that fail to be concerned
first with reducing their budget deficit, even when unemployment is
rife. As they usually fall into line without further persuasion, the
EU immediately imposes a programme of corrective measures, with
objectives worked out to the last decimal point and a timetable for
completion. But when a growing number of sick Europeans have to forgo
treatment because they cannot afford it, when infant mortality shoots
up and malaria returns, as it has done in Greece, national
governments do not have to fear flak from the European Commission.
For the convergence criteria, so strictly applied to deficits and
debt, do not apply to employment, education and health. Yet
everything is connected: cutting state spending almost always means
reducing the number of hospital doctors and rationing healthcare.
Brussels
is the usual target for all discontent, but two political forces, the
Socialists and Liberals, have done more to promote the transformation
of monetarist dogma into voluntary servitude; they have for decades
shared power and positions in the European Parliament and Commission,
and most of Europe’s capitals. Five years ago José
Manuel Barroso, an ultraliberal who supported the Iraq war, was
re-elected president of the Commission at the unanimous demand of the
27 EU heads of state and government, including the Socialists, even
though all were aware of his astonishingly mediocre record.
Candidates
to succeed him are currently a German Social Democrat, Martin Schulz,
and a Christian Democrat from Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker. They
expressed their “opposing” views in a television debate on 9
April. And who do you think said “strict measures are essential to
restore confidence” and who replied with “budgetary discipline is
unavoidable”? Schulz, who thinks his comrade Gerhard Schröder’s
pitiless “reforms” are “exactly the model” to follow, even
said: “I don’t know what distinguishes us.” It certainly
wouldn’t be a wish to shut down Europe’s economic boot camp.
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