The EU has won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Well now, what do we make of that? First of all that it is well deserved. The Coal and Steel Union was originally set up to tie the economies of France and Germany to reduce the likelihood of war between these two countries yet again. The Common Market of the six ensued from this, consisting of France, Germany, the Benelux countries and Italy of course, where the Treaty of Rome itself was signed.
For as long as the cold war was going strong, the Common Market which then changed into the European Union was indeed a staunch pillar for peace, tying the European Economies closer together and making war more and more a remote possibility in the area.
However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crumbling of the Soviet Bloc, the EU’s glitter did get a little tarnished with the wars of Yugoslav succession, taking sides in the Kossovo debacle with EU countries as key players and in fact the German Foreign Minister the Green Joshka Fischer being the most gung ho and sheepishly admitting he may have got the facts wrong years later.
Then came the introduction of the Euro and the reunification of the two Germanies back into one mighty entity under Helmut Kohl, with the help of all the EU members.
Well we know now what a few had said from the very beginning, that the Euro was badly designed, destined for failure, perhaps even grief and woe, but was only created for political reasons rather than economic ones. The result is what we are living through now. A United Europe of the Peoples (if ever it was, but that was the aspiration) has turned into a kind of Empire where the big bullies prevail over the weaker states.
The EU has turned into an experiment for the imposition of an extreme neo liberal project where welfare must be destroyed, where the only thing that matters is keeping the banks afloat at the expense of the people who are being violently pushed into unemployment, poverty, destitution.
This is being driven primarily but not exclusively by Germany. The other northern surplus states have joined the sanctimonious vilification of the southern deficit states in the push to establish this neo liberal paradise of theirs where the clock will be turned back to Dickensian times with no rights for workers and below subsistence wages.
This has resulted in animosity, the flaring up of old enmities and prejudices, where the northerners look down on the southerners as inferior, where stark images of the Nazis have come back to the fore with a vengeance. And perhaps worse of all where extreme right wing, nationalist, xenophobic, intolerant parties are rearing their ugly heads all over Europe, from Norway to Greece.
This European Austerity Madness as Paul Krugman has dubbed it, has lead to a disintegration of all the values the European Union was supposed to stand for. Welfare, which is now considered an unnecessary expense, Democracy, which is considered a bothersome impediment to implementing the neo liberal dogma, intellectual resilience, since now anyone daring to say that perhaps Keynes was right is booed down and ridiculed.
And the famous Thatcher dictum of “There Is No Alternative!” reigns supreme. All and any objections to this ludicrous, destructive policy are met with a taunting, “What do you propose? What do you propose? You have nothing else to propose, do you?” Always said without even bothering to listen to the miriad other far more sensible and workable proposals. It is a fascism of thought to which even the miserable little supposedly left wing party supporting Greece’s government has succumbed. Funny how they have all clean forgotten their Marxist analyses! (Let alone foregone all common sense.)
This does not augur well for the future of Europe. There is already deep social unrest which will probably lead to insurgency and internal clashes. Meanwhile, just as the IMF has had a moment of epiphany and realised that oh dear, perhaps austerity was not really the best way to go about solving this crisis, it is the EU apparatchicks like Olli Rehn and the German Minister of Finances who poo poo them and say that the IMF is wrong.
The arrogant Eurocrats want to keep running the show in their small minded little way, kow towing to the lead of the strongest nation, Germany, risking turning the EU or what may be left of it into a kind of German led Empire where none of the other states has any rights.
This Nobel Peace Prize could be just one more irony, like when Henry Kissinger was awarded the same prize in 1973, or even Barack Obama before he had even done anything. It would indeed be very sad if what follows this European Nobel Peace Prize award is at best its disintegration and at worse flare ups and conflicts as the big bullies insist on keeping their privileges at the expense of the weaker ones.
Perhaps someone on the Committee has a really warped sense of humour. Time will tell. And not before too long.