European Union

politics > corporate > european
By Robin Blackburn; Le Monde diplomatique February 2004:

"European social institutions and aspirations for an independent role in world affairs are threatened by rampant United States' power, Anglo-Saxon economics and European Union enlargement. These are all long-term forces, but already have enough strength to paralyse European institutions and subject the continent internally to corporate-led globalisation and externally to US leadership, as the White House now calls its imperial role. This is not the Europe that the world needs.

Because the EU is now the only global entity with an economic weight and political potential equal to that of the US, it has in principle the best possibility of defying the US. This should not be a question of making Europe more like the US (a process that has already gone too far) but ensuring that Europe represents a different model, based on social justice, and that on the international stage it frees itself from the chariot wheels of President George Bush's policies of conquest..."

A voice in defense of the welfare state. Commendable - but can't we be more imaginative and ask for something beyond this? Something qualitatively more substantial is in order. The problem of course is that even this eminently reasonable and moderate Keynsianism is considered "radical" in the current political climate of malignant neoliberalism, that is plaguing this old fart of a continent.

This might be a tentative first step.