There are some titles that really hit the mark and refuse to cover up by pretending to look elsewhere. Whoever it was who was responsible for the article from a special envoy in the Le Monde newspaper in Italy for the recent general election, is of this ilk: “The 5-Star Movement or the Revenge of Generation Unemployment”, with the subtitle explaining that the “movement has benefitted from youth frustration” (6 March) says everything or almost.
Almost - because the malaise is not just restricted to Italy. In the latter, the unknown is represented by the movement created by Beppe Grillo, but elsewhere it takes the shape of political parties that quite rightly provoke fear. Would the Alternative For Deutschland (AfD) have managed to democratically win 93 parliamentary seats at the Bundestag if the economic flagship force in the European Union were not also the country where, according to Eurostat, the highest number of the unemployed, 70.8% of them, are at risk of falling into poverty?
By posing the question we obviously also answer it but this has not prevented former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the man behind their Hartz reforms, which led to an explosion in the numbers of “poor workers" in Germany, from enjoying the lavish, striking and staggering dividends of a political career sold out to Russian gas interests.
Everything is contained within this dichotomy: whether you are “powerful or poor” the fate reserved for you today in the countries of the Union is to be all or nothing. It is, in any case, a feeling experienced by an increasingly large number of citizens and this is why the protest parties are prospering.
It is true to say that it is difficult to find disagreement with solidly backed up arguments from citizens who are expressing their discontent, frustration and/or anger. It is even tempting to fall into step with the disoriented who, without any premeditated malicious intentions, resume the same old song again that the selfish and corrupt “elites” are scheming. In reality, they are undoubtedly right or at least partly so: certain “elites” have always tended to sin due to their blindness and refusal to see what is happening outside their "bubble" and to not tolerate any intruders or foreign bodies, which are, by their very nature, always disruptive and who come to pry and criticise. The way in which the Commission is currently attempting to apply a sticking plaster to the “Selmayr affair” currently burning its fingers is testimony to this regrettable tendency not to tolerate any outside criticism (see EUROPE 11979).
Nonetheless, the malcontents are still unfortunately running the risk of seeing their legitimate denunciations falling into the nets of fishermen in very troubled waters. Everything would suggest that the reflex to barricade oneself behind hermetically sealed national borders (is this really possible in our world?) and to cheerfully resort to protectionism, will not bring any benefits to those who are suffering. Quite the contrary.
No, the problem can be located elsewhere. Its locus is certainly where some people believed that they had identified it in the 1930s: the indefatigable critics of the politico-economic disorder of the epoch, the personalists - and radical federalists - would, in the extremely misnamed New Order journal, express ideas that resonate with the present. In the Europe en formation publication (No. 381, autumn 2016) the researcher, Christian Roy, exhumes a number of examples, such as the following witticism by Daniel-Rops on liberalism in 1935: “this freedom that it theatrically reclaims for abstract economic forces, produces for millions of people of flesh and blood, the freedom to die of hunger”. The connection is perhaps too dark for today but would it not be judicious to listen to the champion of fully fledged federalism, Alexandre Marc, when he exclaims, “It is exactly in the here and now and immediately within this very disorder but we need to build an economy and institutions at the service of humanity or in other words, at the service of its freedom”. Would this not be the best way to pull the rug up from beneath the feet of all these examples of populism and extremism?
These personalists turned their backs on both the fascists, communists and the dictators in power at the time. As free and independent minds they spared nothing and no one. This is expressed so forcefully by the Swiss thinker Denis de Rougemont’s in 1938, “The reflex of the liberal to danger is to develop a kind of fascism. Even if this is to defend himself from fascism”. His French fellow traveller Jacques Ellul hit the nail on the head when he described in the Esprit publication that, “fascism is the son of liberalism”. What would they say about neo-liberalism today and the grip exerted by the GAFA and the other multinationals that are playing the states along?
Some would react to these few quotations by pointing out that history does not just keep stuttering along or at least it never does in perfectly identical conditions. We do, however, have to at least accept its inherent warning. It is, notwithstanding, in these troubled times of ours more imperative than ever to remember, together with the writer Marek Halter, that, “The greatest danger is not so much the forgetting of what happened in the past but forgetting what is essential: how did the past happen”.
The conviction of these men of the past and their exemplary contemporary voice is that nothing good could be expected of the states (in their journal, they reduced this to a simple “state”) and that only the transition to a united Europe and European federation would be capable of countering totalitarianism. They were not listened to and the world got war.
Is it misplaced to think that the alternative is still the same today and is indeed completely identical?
Michel Theys