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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (12520)	6/23/1999 3:19:00 PM
From: MNI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Only socialist country in South Europe? Are you nuts? Have you never heard of Christian Democratic Party, or the British Labor Party, or the German Green Party, etc etc etc. Guess what? All of Europe is socialized... Derek Actually I was quite surprised you cited as the first (maybe strongest?) example of a socialist party in continental Europe the Christian Democratic Party. O.k., there are Parties of that name also in countries different from Germany but I assume you thought of the Germans in this post. So I would wonder where your information came from? There was a party program in 1948 that had many socialist ideas in it, so maybe you took from school history lessons? Be assured nowadays, in the major parties of Germany you won't find much more socialism than in the British Conservatives. That old sheet of paper wasn't valid for much more than a year. The ratio of socialized industries was traditionally higher in Europe than in US, true. But ever since Thatcher/Reagan started that movement, privatization was reigning, and was quite effectively carried out. France, however is a special case, they haven't moved and have now by far the highest rate of employees in the public sector compared to other European countries. The currently governing coalition of Sozialdemokratische Partei and Greens have promised they will go on privatizing and will speed up the process until the last possibilities of market influence by the state are lost. For myself, although not a socialist in my understanding, I am an opponent of further privatization. The process of privatization should go, above all, slowly and smoothly. I think there is good reason to burden the state with a duty to build infrastructure. This weight can be carried partly by a state-owned Railway company, for example. Ineffectiveness of state-owned companies is not always a striking argument for privatization. Ineffective companies are very difficult to privatize, by the way, for lack of buyers. This situation is effectively urging the state to take all the debts from the company that should be sold, before it is done. Also the companies were split and the ineffective parts remained with the state while the effective parts were sold, leading to an acclaimed success for the government. Is this your concept of a socialist society? Anyway, in your reprisal to yiwu and hui zhu you were dead right. There has never been any public interest in the economical definition of Serbia's society (socialistic or capitalistic or some mixture?) in the years after the Bosnia war. Nationalism, racism, chauvinism, hatred, these were the points of concern. Regards, MNI.