Another Europe is Needed

Details: Published on Sunday, 29 November -0001 16:00; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1539 ... January 12, 2018
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Another Europe is Needed

Ernesto Screpanti

Since the end of World War II, tribal rivalries and xenophobic sentiment in Europe have never been as strong as they are today. And this is but one of the European Union’s ‘successes’. Not to mention the resurrected warmongering vocation that led the Union to feed conflicts in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and, when the Union was still in the preparatory phase, to favor the explosion of devastating civil wars in Yugoslavia.

Another series of ‘successes’ has involved the social and economic sphere, with increases in unemployment, poverty, and inequality; the deterioration of labour conditions; reductions in workers’ rights; greater labour insecurity and precariousness; worsening welfare in the areas of education, health services, public utilities and social security; the... proletarianization of the middle classes; rising uncertainty and, last but not least, the threatening of household savings by a predatory financial sector.

Meanwhile, the process of convergence of the national economies, prophesied by the founding fathers as one of the most important effects of the Union, turned out to be precisely the opposite. The Northern European economies are growing faster than the average, being led by massive trade surpluses, while the Southern ones are growing more slowly, thus undergoing prolonged de-industrialization with high unemployment and public debt. Moreover, the average growth rate of the Eurozone GDP, which had been predicted to rise in comparison to that of the 1990s, has instead diminished.