Re: Voters in "old Europe" - France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy - seem to be saying to their leaders: stop the world, we want to get off;
I've debunked that "Rumsfeldian slip" long ago... Old Europe is actually made up of Poland, Estonia, Transmoldavia, etc. Those Eastern and Central European countries still nurse a worldview that's hopelessly stuck in the 1950s... They indulge in a dreamy vision of the US as a perennial liberator --as if the world hasn't budged nor changed since 1945.... All their cities and polities are lily-white, with no black people, no Arabs, no Chinese, no Pakistanis, no swarthies whatever. Oh, of course, they've got gypsies! For the latter too, life hasn't changed since the 1950s: harassed, brutalized, segretated everywhere, in school, housing, and workplace... Somehow, Eastern Europe is but a gothic, eerily anachronistic replica of Eisenhower America, a lily-white pseutopia....
The truth, however, is that New Europe is Western Europe: France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Spain (who just regularized 700,000 illegals) with their multicultural, multiracial polities have all greatly, if painfully, evolved since the 1950s.
Re: I feel sorry for Western European blue collar workers. A world of benefits they have known for 50 years is coming apart, and their governments don't seem to have a strategy for coping.
Why is Friedman --that spoiled kid born with a silver spoon up his ass-- feeling sorry about "Western European BLUE collars" only? Every job and trade, whether white- or blue-collar, is threatened nowadays! White-collar sweatshops like call-centers and paperwork processing have been outsourced as well....
"A world of benefits they have known for 50 years is coming apart," indeed. Well, I've personally been pondering that notion lately... 50 years only? Make that 200 years, that is, the whole span of European colonization worldwide.
Up until the 1950s, Europe's colonial powers shaped, molded, and turned the international/global division of labor to their exclusive interests, reaping and hoarding all the profits. Asian, African, Middle Eastern and even South American countries were each assigned a subordinate, limited role in the whole capitalist scheme, a role that didn't conflict with nor jeopardize the status of first-world workers in Europe --and later, in the US as well. So, my point is that living standards enjoyed by Europeans for most of the past 200 years, somehow, resulted from the merciless exploitation of the Third World's workforce. Hence it was an anomaly. The profits and added value resulting from the European colonies were all allocated to the European metropoles' welfare, allowing Europe to live off her own productive effort AND that of her colonies. But times have changed and today Europe must adjust and learn to live off her own production/economy ONLY. Europeans must increasingly accept the fact that there won't be some "extra bonus" coming from African plantations, Indian sweatshops, Brazilian drudgemills, and so forth... The reason for such an adjustment is twofold: First, colonial enterprises that mostly rely on the processing of commodities (African ores, coffee, cocoa,...) have fallen down Capitalism's food-chain. For instance, back in the 1880s, the Belgian King Leopold II could build lavish palaces and monuments with his revenues from Congo rubber and ivory. Today, however, he'd have to kill all of Africa's elephants to build a single chateau....
Second, Asia --mostly China-- has climbed up the food chain and, at the same time, kept her economic sovereignty, that is, the means to profit both financially and socially from her own work. Chinese workers are no longer merely toiling away for European and American capitalists... They no longer wait for Paris, London and New York to tell them what best suits their productive skills.... A whole new ball game, isn't it?
Gus |
