Lo pagaremos todos

La deriva de la UE a cada vez más distancia entre "pueblo" y "élites" lo pagaremos con  una gran explosión desordenada de cabreo general. Entiéndaseme bien: yo soy elitista, en el sentido que creo que debe haber un proceso de selección de los más competentes para dirigir una sociedad. Pero esa élite debe estar en consonancia con las masas que guía. Ese es el sentido de la democracia: no él gobierno asamblea tío, sino le gobierno de los mejores vigilados desde abajo. Si los gobernantes comunistas de la URSS hubieran tenido un mínimo sentido de oído al tam tam, quizás no hubiera fracasado tan estrepitosamente. 

 Jayati Gosh, en RWE, nos ofrece un análisis prospectivo, que vale la pena leer y del que destaco algunos párrafos, los relativos a la historia:

A little history is in order first. The formation of the union itself, from its genesis in the Treaty of Rome in 1957, was as much a result of geopolitical pressure from the US as it was of the grand visions of those who led it. The six founding countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) built on the hope of the European Coal and Steel Community that was established in 1950, that greater economic relations would secure lasting peace and prosperity. Somewhat ironically, they were egged on by the United States, which in the post Second World War period not only provided huge amounts of Marshall Plan aid to western Europe, but urged the reduction of trade barriers between them to encourage more intra-regional economic activity and provide an effective counter to eastern Europe during the Cold War. 

Subsequent expansion of membership (the UK joined the EU in 1973, along with Ireland and Denmark, followed in the 1980s by Greece, Spain and Portugal, and then by Austria, Finland and Sweden in the 1990s and then some years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a large intake of 12 central and eastern European countries in the 2000s, with the most recent member being Croatia in 2013) has brought the number of member countries in the EU to 28. Over the years, expansion has been accompanied by the push for “ever greater union”: the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 that laid down the ground rules for economic engagement and strengthened the institutional structure of the European Commission and the European Parliament; the creation of the Single Market of free movement of goods, services and people starting from 1994; the Treaty of Amsterdam that devolved some powers from national governments to the European Parliament, including legislating on immigration, adopting civil and criminal laws, and enacting the common foreign and security policy; and even a common currency, the euro, shared by a subgroup of 19 members from 1 January 1999.

Some would say that it is remarkable that a continent with a fairly recent history of wars and extreme regional conflicts could have achieved such a combination of expansion and integration. There is no doubt that, from the start, this was a project of the political and corporate elite of Europe, and the “voice of the people” was not really taken into account. Yet in many ways it was also a visionary, even romantic, project that could only go as far as it has gone because, even as it increasingly furthered the goals of globalised finance and large corporations, it still contained the (inadequately utilised) potential for ensuring some citizens’ rights across the region.

However, as the EU bureaucracy expanded and as the rules–particularly the economic ones – became ever more rigid and inflexible, with the forceful imposition of fiscal austerity measures in countries with deficits and even in countries where there was no real need to do so, the Commission itself and the entire process came to be seen as distant, tone-deaf to people’s concerns and impervious to genuine pleas for help and a degree of empathy.

Germany, the undisputed leader of the bloc, epitomised this sense of rigid adherence to (often nonsensical and contradictory) rules. The lack of consistency in creating a monetary union without a genuine banking union or any solidarity with fiscal federalism has created years of economic depression in some countries and deflationary pressures across the Eurozone and most of the EU. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the tragic case of the Greek economy, but this is also true of other countries in the periphery that have been forced into austerity measures with little to show in terms of benefit for more than five years now.

So in the expanding but unfinished project that is the European Union, corporate elites have basically achieved their goals and won – as indeed they have been winning in pretty much every region of the world over the past three decades.

No soy de izquierdas ni de casualidad. Es más, creo que la izquierda ha jugado a un entreguismo europeo del que espero que la historia le exija cuentas. Cuando el autor habla de élites, se refiere a unas élites que son de derechas (Junker) como de izquierdas (Schultz), una plasta burocrática que se reparte las prebendas logradas esquilmando al pueblo con una economía sin pies ni cabeza. 

Un día lo pagaremos todos, porque los problemas y tensiones van aumentando mientras estos incompetentes se llaman a andana.