Can Europe Return to Reason & Reverse Its Decline?
Jeffrey Sachs, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
I had a conversation with Jeffrey Sachs and Alexander Mercouris about the political changes in Europe. The optimism of the European project as a region of peace and prosperity is long gone. The objective had been to resolve conflicts on the continent peacefully and use collective bargaining power to establish greater economic and political independence. Instead, the continent is experiencing war, de-industrialisation, socio-economic and political instability, excessive dependence on the US, and growing irrelevance in the wider world. What went wrong and can the decline be reversed?
The rest of the world adjusts to the emerging multipolarity with a multivector foreign policy by diversifying economic connectivity to improve economic competitiveness and enhance political autonomy. In contrast, the Europeans have subordinated themselves completely to the US and thus suffer from economic decline and political subordination. Declining rationality is also a clear problem as the Europeans pursued policies towards Russia that they knew would put them on a collision course with Russia. Instead of pursuing course correction, the proxy war with Russia increased the security dependence on the US, which enabled Washington to impose bloc discipline. The recovery of Europe requires reversing the militarisation of dividing lines in Europe, and diversifying economic ties to avoid excessive dependence on any one state or region.
Jeffrey Sachs' comments highlighted the USA's subordination of Europe, and the lingering effect of the American 'Partition of Eurasia' after 1945, as the historian John Darwin put it. But he did not talk much about the institutions and people in Europe that might at last end the USA's de facto occupation of Europe. Emmanuel Todd recently said peace will return to Eurasia when ultimately American power is destroyed and the USA leaves or is thrown out of Eurasia. Here again Europe is a natural partner of Russia and China, and Japan and India. Could you interview Emmanuel Todd?
The wider shared context here is the historical failure of social democracy as a policy brainchild of the 1930s, in the US and Europe. The impulsive instinct today e.g. in Germany or Pennsylvania is nationalist industrial policy. But the political base of social democracy no longer exists, the old industrial proletariat is now one among many interest groups defending their place in national society. Most of the world today is petit-bourgeois in orientation, nobody aspires to be a proletarian as they did in the 1930s. The cult of the small business entrepreneur is what fires people up in places like America or Brazil, because that's the main engine of economic betterment at the scale of the family. Europe needs an economic miracle, but so does America and so does China. Economic growth miracles are not so easy to come by. What worked for America and Europe in the 1990s no longer works. But these national political economies are still based on the social democratic settlement of the 1930s. Remember the Meiji restoration in Japan, that's the kind of bold transformation that's needed if America or Europe want to reinvent themselves. Otherwise things will go on as they are now and as they have been since the 1930s. At least until until the Boomers and their children die off.