Two types of Europe. Demotix/S. Struck. All rights reserved.Sometimes the European Central Bank dares speak truth to power. The
recent flagship annual meeting in Sintra, Portugal, was one such occasion. The
bank’s economists presented a very serious projection, claiming eurozone
unemployment is to remain in the double-digits even once the recovery cycle
completes and demand returns to normal.
Indeed, projections of eurozone GDP growth predict an
abysmal average of 1.6% in the period through 2019. And even that, with the
optimistic assumption that Ukraine, ISIS, or Grexit- and Brexit-induced
financial chaos do not worsen the scenario.
This pairs up with recent worries of secular
stagnation, or the idea of a future marked by neglegible growth
unable to create jobs and to support the economic redistribution at the basis
of a social market economy.
This much for the future. The present we know well. In different
parts of Europe it is a mixed bag of mass unemployment, a lost generation,
pauperisation of the middle classes, retrenching welfare, and rising xenophobic
and anti-European forces, which now include France’s second party and the new
President of Poland.
What would serious leadership be in such worrying scenario? It would
be to show a credible way out and to build the political alliances necessary to
reach it.
But our established leaders seem otherwise occupied. On the one
hand, they trump up a narrative of a miracolous recovery to come, a narrative
that is undone by their own economic projections and that citizens increasingly
refuse to believe.
On the other, they muddle through.
The leaders of France, Germany and Italy have just advanced
proposals to improve the functioning of the eurozone. There is much to be done.
The divergence between so-called central and peripheral countries cries out for
more effective and radically different social and economic policies. Huge
democratic gaps wait to be filled, fuelling angst with the EU amongst a
majority of its citizens. Decision-making no longer delivers: the paralysis over the hecatombe in the
Mediterranean is just the latest example of a system that is institutionally,
as well as morally, bankrupt.
But the proposals they have come up with are
insulting in their timidity and detachment from reality. They include
completing some of the left-overs from last year’s banking union, focussing the
work of the European Commission on a more limited number of priorities and
challenges, or streamlining the European sememster by which the Commission
sends recommendations on the budgets of member states. The Italians came up
with the only reasonable proposal of the package: phasing in a European unemployment
insurance. Watch it get shot down.
This is the vision that eurozone leaders outline, and this is their
plan to emerge from the greatest threat to collective wellbeing in Europe since
the second world war.
It would be a farce, if it were not still a tragedy.
And so it is that insurgent parties appear more reasonable than our
traditional leaderships. Syriza may be inexperienced, the new mayors of
Barcelona or Madrid may have radical backers, social movements may be
economically illiterate. But they are able to mobilise citizens for a positive
cause of change, recuperating trust in the transformational power of politics
and resisting the emergence of xenophobic
shortcuts. That’s what good politics looks like.
Most importantly, they are aware of the gravitiy of the situation
Europe is in, they are not afraid to outline it publicly, and they show an
alternative direction forwards. That is what leadership looks like.
One may agree or disagree with the exact prescriptions that such
parties advance. But one thing is certain: they introduce a generational change
and ask Europe to face reality. Europe, and its old leaders, badly need to
listen.
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