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Future of Europe: Lisbon and generational interval
Back in the good old days of the Lisbon Strategy (when the European Union (EU) was proclaimed to be the most competitive, knowledge-based economy of the world), the Prodi and Barroso Commissions have been both repeatedly stressing that: âat present, some of our world trading partners compete with primary resources, which we in the EU/Europe do not have
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ack in the good old days of the Lisbon Strategy (when the European Union (EU) was proclaimed to be the most competitive, knowledge-based economy of the world), the Prodi and Barroso Commissions have been both repeatedly stressing that: 'at present, some of our world trading partners compete with primary resources, which we in the EU/Europe do not have. Some compete with cheap labor, which we do not want. Some compete on the back of their environment, which we cannot accept'¦'
What has happened in the meantime?
The over-financialization and hyper-deregulations of the global (-ized) markets has brought the low-waged Chinese worker into the spotlight of European considerations. Thus, in the last two decades, the EU economic edifice has gradually but steadily departed from its traditional labor-centered base, to the overseas investment-centered construct.
This mega event, as we see now with the eurozone dithyramb, has multiple consequences on both the inner'European cultural, socioeconomic and political balance as well as on China's (overheated) growth.
That sparse, rarefied and compressed labor, which still resides in the aging EU is either bitterly competing with or is heavily leaning on the guest workers who are per definition underrepresented or silenced by the 'rightist' movements and otherwise disadvantaged and hindered in their elementary sociopolitical rights. That's how the world's last cosmopolitan ' Europe departed from the world of work, and that's why the Continent today cannot orient itself (both critically needed to identify a challenge, as well as to calibrate and jointly redefine the EU path). To orient, one need to center itself: Without left and right, there is no center, right?
The contemporary EU has helplessly lost its political 'left'. The grand historical achievement of Europe ' after the centuries'long and bloody class struggle ' was the final, lasting reconciliatory compromise between capital and labor. It resulted in a consolidation of economically entrepreneurial and vibrant but at the same time socially just and beneficial state. This colossal civilizational accomplishment is what brought about the international recognition, admiration, model attraction and its competitiveness as well as inner continuity, prosperity and stability to the post World War II Europe.
The present-day EU, aged but not restaged, is (in) a shadow of the grand taboo that the EU can produce everything but its own life. The Old Continent is demographically sinking, while economically contracting, yet only keeps afloat. Even the EU Commission, back in 2005, fairly diagnosed in its 'Green Paper Confronting Demographic Change' ' a new solidarity between generations that: '... Never in history has there been economic growth without population growth.'
The numbers of unemployed, underemployed or underpaid/working'poor are constantly growing. The average age of the first labor market entry is already over 30 in many member states. The middle-class is pauperized and a cross-generational social contract is silently abandoned, as one of its main operative instruments ' the Lisbon strategy ' has been eroded, and finally lost its coherence.
Is the subtle, unnoticed generational warfare, instead of the social welfare already going on?
Recent generational accounting figures illuminate a highly disturbing future prospect for the EU youth. Decades of here-us-now disheartened consumerism corroded the EU's community fabrics so much that, cross-generationally speaking, the present is the most socioeconomically egotistic European society of all times.
Elaborating on the known 'ageing argument', I stated nearly 10 years ago that: ' '¦ political, social and economic changes including very important technological breakthroughs, primarily occurred at generational intervals '¦ Presently, with demographically collapsing European societies, of three or more generations active and working at the same time, the young cohort (of go-getters) will never constitute more than a tiny minority. Hence, neither generational change nor technological breakthrough (which usually comes along) in future will ever be that of our past: full and decisive.'
Conclusively, many of the Third World countries are known by having predatory elites in power that continuously hinder the society at large and hijack their progress to its narrow ends. The EU might easily end up with the predatory generation in power.
On the other hand, Europe has never witnessed its own youth so apolitical, apathetic and disengaged in last 250 years ' as their larger front of realities has contracted into the sporadic and self-disfranchising protests over the alleged, but isolated cyber freedoms or over decontextualized gay-rights â la Lady Gaga, only.
Interestingly enough, in the times of a tacit generational warfare, any consolidated fight for a social and generational cause is completely absent. The only organized revolt of European youth comes as a lukewarm demand for a few more freedoms to download internet contents (Anonymous, Pirate party, Wiki-leaky, Snowden-picky, etc.) or through colorful sporadic campaigns for de-contextualized gay and other behavioristic rights. Despite their worsened conditions, the young Europeans didn't come even close to the core of representative democracy ' e.g. to request 20 percent seat- allocation for the below-30 age ohort in the European and national parliaments ' as one of the effective means to improve their future prospects.
Demographically, socioeconomically and politically marginalized, European youngsters are chronically underrepresented since exceptionally few MPs and MEPs are below age of 30. Or as Fukuyama noted in his recent essay ('The Future of History'): 'Something strange is going on in the world today. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 and the ongoing crisis of the euro are both products of the model of lightly regulated financial capitalism that emerged over the past three decades '¦ most dynamic recent populist movement to date has been the right-wing '¦ where the left is anemic and right-wing populist parties are on the move '¦ This absence of a plausible progressive counternarrative is unhealthy, because competition is good for intellectual debate just as it is for economic activity. And serious intellectual debate is urgently needed, since the current form of globalized capitalism is eroding the middle-class social base on which liberal democracy rests.'
Despite a constant media bombardment with cataclysmic headlines, the issue is not what will happen with the euro or any other socio-economic and political instrument. The right question is what will happen with us ' as means are always changeable and many, but the aim remains only one: the self-realization of society at large.
Indeed, the difference between a dialectic and cyclical history is a distance between success and fall: the later Lisbon (Treaty) should not replace but complement the previous Lisbon (Strategy). It is both a predictive and prescriptive wording: either a status quo of egoism, consumerism and escapism or a concept of social dynamism resting on a broad all-participatory base.
Restaging the Lisbon Strategy and reintroducing all of its contents is not just Europe's only strategic opportunity, but its grand generational/historic responsibility as well. Or as Monnet once explained this logic of necessity: 'Crises are the great unifier!'
The writer is a professor and chairperson for International Law and Global Political Studies, Austria. His recent book is Is There Life After Facebook.
