Condolences on European democracy
The Increasing Dominance of Extreme Neoliberalism in Europe
As Greece has signed up to a painful and humiliating agreement with Europe this week, European democracy has officially died. Sometime ago, you could still hear criticism on how Chinese ‘State Capitalism’ is undemocratic and unsustainable. Now the E.U. has sent out what is, technically, the same message: We don’t care about people. We only care about money.
Since the time of Reagan and Thatcher, extreme Neoliberalism has taken over both Europe and the U.S. But Europe had a tradition of welfare policies to prevent revolutions led by ‘a critical mass’ (Wallerstein). This reasonable redistribution of a (limited) part of social wealth symbolized European the welfare state and social democracy. But forcing austerity on Greece has confirmed the increasing dominance of the ideology of neoliberalism in today’s Europe no less than in the U.S. Rather than building the social economy from the bottom up by investing on the public, the central idea of neoliberalism is to centralize power, concentrate wealth, privatize the public assets and resources, invest in capitalist elites, and self-deceptively thinking (or pretending) that somehow, in the process, some limited amount of wealth will trickle down to the masses.
Of course that was never to work out. The sole purpose of neoliberal capitalism is self-expansion, maximizing profits. The greed at its root contradicts any idea of giving back without quick benefits. Neoliberalism had only resulted in creating larger social and economic gaps, extreme concentrations of power, and a privileged group — the so-called 1% — being situated above the law. They can define the regulations supposed to regulate them, they can influence politics, they can push back against the public will, they can corrupt democracy, they can ruin a nation, and do anything, and do so with impunity, as long as it suits their very own interests.
Europe was once still somewhat more discrete than the U.S. on this road, but now with the case of Greece, the E.U. has also revealed their teeth without even bothering to keep the ‘progressive’ veil of social democracy and rights-based values they once proudly used to mask themselves. Worse, when even the IMF and the U.S. called to stop the further imposition of austerity policies on Greece — policies that went too far, never worked, and never will — the E.U. still insisted. This is truly astonishing, disappointing and disturbing.
When compared to ‘State Capitalism’ in China, this looks like the same story of extreme power concentration and wealth accumulation, but in a different package. Yet the results are similar — widening social and economic gaps, undemocratic and non-rights-based rule. None of this, no matter how they apparently seek to dress it up, is going to be sustainable, and one cannot help wondering what is going to happen when it inevitably collapses.