First round of French elections today. Second round in a fortnight. The same day as the Greek elections. In an excellent article on the French elections in the Guardian today, Lucy Wadham explains that the French have a bleak outlook for the future, traditionally, because “Change for them comes from convulsion and upheaval.” The violence of revolution, rather than continuity and reform (favoured by British thinking and historical chance of course.*)
But this European, perhaps global, crisis triggered off by the bursting of the financial bubble, is not an economic crisis, if ever it was one. It is a crisis of civilization, a deep social and human crisis that erupted with the 2008 crash, and laid bare the underlying inequalities, hypocrisy, and all the failures of what our Western Society has become. A world that carried on the pretence of living in a world governed by the values of the enlightenment and subsequent French Revolution.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.
None of which exists in today’s modern world, though we are living under a blatant lie that they do. This lie was exposed by the financial crisis but it is the real cause of today’s crisis rather than the bankrupt banks which merely laid it bare. Any vestiges of our Liberte has been completely eroded by the terrible bogey man of The Markets, a fictional man-made entity like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that must always get its way, or else it will destroy us!!!
Egalite? Well George Orwell answered that one for us a long time ago in Animal Farm. “All Animals Are Equal, But Some Animals Are Equaller Than Others.” Today the pigs are not the wretched countries of the European Union being victimised and bullied, but the infamous 1%, or even, as Paul Krugman puts it (in Taxing Job Creators), the 0.1%.
As to Fraternite… well, the best example of this is the current European Union. Although supposedly a union, an alliance based on equality, democracy, interdependence and solidarity, current policy towards the weaker states is not only cruel and vicious but utterly destructive and even vindictive. And is being as undemocratically imposed as the worse excesses against people in our history.
The way things are at the moment in Greece: Utter despair and destruction all around while the IMF/EU only want to see pay slashed or preferably abolished altogether, (and joblessness increased?) I would reiterate Lucy Wadham. Change, real radical change, rather than painting over the cracks, can only come from convulsion and upheaval. The elections in Greece, as opposed to those in France, are likely to be the first step towards change through convulsion and upheaval. Perhaps even inevitably so.
But change is coming. Whether it will be through pain and even violence, in the tradition of the French Revolution, or more mildly as in a Burkian sense of reform through common sense, remains to be seen. But as Lord Tennyson put it in the mouth of the dying and defeated King Arthur, in his poem “Morte D’Arthur”
“The older order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfills himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the World.”
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*I hear you! Don’t forget Cromwell and the Roundheads! And they beheaded their King long before the French did! Yes. Okay. But Edmund Burke created the British norm on this in his “Reflections on the Revolution in France“. And they have never beheaded a monarch since. Not even the questionable Duke of Windsor.