Being of a certain age, but not that old, in that I am at the tail end of the baby boomers, I can remember living in an age of certainties. The world was organized. In two blocks, but organized. Despite occasional flutters, it was just about certain there would not be a war in Europe of the kind that has torn it apart twice in a little over half a century.
There were always worries of course, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, but still there remained the certainty, I dare say, that there would be a climb down. Nuclear war was too terrible to contemplate. As it was. The Nuclear Deterrent was just that. A certainty.
There was also a certainty in the economy in that nobody needed to talk about it much. It functioned. It had been set up after the war in Breton Woods, but even those who hadn’t a clue what Breton Woods was still less where on earth it was, there was a certainty in the western world that, never again would unemployment be allowed to reach the disastrous 10% level.
Yes indeed. We grew up in the age of Never Again. Never again would there be a war of the kind the world had just experienced. Never again would people be allowed to suffer through unemployment and economic hardship. A state of affairs that bred wars.
These certainties we grew up with and lived with throughout most of our adult lives have been blown to smithereens. Not through malice, but through corruption, in the broadest sense and erosion and a complete loss of perspective.
The great Thatcher/Reagan juggernaut of the shrill “There Is No Alternative” turned our values on their head. “There is no such thing as society” the woman proclaimed and indeed set the western world on this course. Nothing mattered any more other than making money. Preferably with ease in a casino fashion on the stock market.
Everything had to be deregulated to facilitate the only sacred thing in the world, making money. Society, welfare for the weakest, concern, inclusion were all blown to the wind through the mentality this lady represented. The idealistic hippies were replaced by the amoral yuppies. And everything was on the up and up, blowing hot, toxic air into the bubble that eventually burst.
All our certainties that had been rapidly eroding from the 1980s onwards, were completely blown away as this bubble burst in our faces. And now, the nonentities pretending to “lead” Europe are trying to patch up this mess in an ad hoc, myopic way. They are of course imbued with the values, or lack thereof that brought them to power in the first place.
All that matters is that the privileged few, the financiers (aka gamblers) should continue to make money at the expense of society. Which anyway Margaret Thatcher had already abolished as a concept. Unemployment? No longer a taboo. Indeed not. Unemployment has reached the dizzy heights of 25% in Spain and Greece and the EU average is over what used to be the abhorrent 10%.
But does it matter? No. This is necessary to get the economy right. In what way? Well, the way it was just before the crash. But better. That is a casino economy but now with no welfare, no healthcare and no social services. However, despite the clarity of this ideal, implementation is proving difficult.
European leadership is exhibiting confusion, narrow mindedness, an inability to see any further than the narrow, short term interests of the more powerful, to the detriment not only of all the rest but also of the very future of Europe.
I was going to say there are no certainties left, but in actual fact there is one predominant certainty. And that is that European leadership is incompetent, blinkered and can only be trusted to make the whole mess worse and worse before it explodes. Their nice little scheme for an extreme neo liberal Europe will not come to fruition. But what will? We have no idea. Neither do they.
Not only do they have no idea what to do they have no idea how to handle things in anything but a destructive way. After the fall of Napoleon and the return of the Ancien Regime (for a while), it was said of them that “they forgot nothing and they learnt nothing.” This is precisely what the Merkel led European leadership is suffering from now.
Perhaps we can take comfort from this. The restored Ancien Regime did not last long. Precisely because of this attitude. The neo liberal monster preparing to gobble us all up whole and undigested will not succeed. For the same reasons. The “leadership” may have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing, but the people, the “sans cullottes” of the time, the great unwashed, the descamisados, have learnt more than enough. As they had then too.