FORWARD TO EUROPE: A DECLARATION FOR A NEW EUROPEAN LEFT
Glotz, Peter
Peter Glotz is the national secretary of the German Social Democratic party, a member of the Bundestag, and author of the recent book Manifest fur eine Neue Europdische Linke (Berlin: Siedler,...
...We still occupy top spots in the rankings...
...IV: Social Democracy as a European Idea The time is past for the self-perpetuation of the European nations, despite what a few intellectuals who are perplexed by the current economic situation—or a few European politicians who want to play de Gaulle in the '80s—may say...
...The most probable development within the core sectors of industry (automobiles, chemicals, machine tools) will mean ever more highly skilled workers and more uniformly patterned tasks...
...increased yield on invested European capital...
...The architectural monuments, paintings, and the master designs from its past must not be destroyed...
...Even if it fails, almost any configuration leading to supranational institutions that could make structural decisions and adjust tariffs would be better than ineffectual summit conferences with their demagoguery, theatrics, pomposity, and helplessness...
...After that, growth was achievable only by increasing the money supply still further...
...4. A unified European currency...
...The political danger is that neoconservative leaders may get caught up in a con333 flict with the labor movement that could lead to the decline of Europe...
...We will be as the Greeks were to the Romans, graeculi (little Greeks), so to speak: private tutors, actors, kept boys, wandering philosophers, and orators, several of whom by the way have had stunning successes...
...Will that power drive minorities to despair and violence...
...This article has been translated into a number of European languages and has provoked a good deal of discussion within the European left community.—Ens...
...An electronic civilization will eliminate millions of jobs in existence today...
...At the same time, bound as it is to its own social history and high standard of social benefits, it will be unable to maintain social equilibrium—certainly not with "low-cost" service jobs...
...The old structures will break...
...A program, for instance, that—for the first time in history—includes the possibility of equality of the sexes...
...Whoever wants to help the weak must be strong with the strong...
...SIXTH • If Europe's right wing is stumbling into the debilitating quicksand of social conflict, then the decisive question is: Can the European left—with all its fragmentation— overcome the intellectual and moral suffocation we suffer from...
...This second Ostpolitik must: (a) operate on the basis of the Western alliance and (b) not attempt to destroy or fragment the Eastern alliance...
...This changed the situation completely...
...Capitalist civilization has always been antiheroic, although it has also unloosed a dreadful and untamed armaments industry...
...For those who are uncompromising in their condemnation of capitalism, the Communist Manifesto is suggested reading...
...3. Industrial and structural policies that are coordinated and goal-directed...
...and 300 of the 2,500 largest American corporations are associated with dependent firms in more than 20 countries...
...Those who are already in the system remain in it, and if they accept the norms of the firm, they will even get promoted...
...The question is: Will the European labor movement be able to organize these new workers...
...If Europeans want to emerge as producers, not just consumers of microelectronics, telecommunications, and biotechnology, they must conduct joint scientific research and forge a common industrial policy...
...Robert Musil called it "clique collectivism" or "an urge for metaphysical hullabaloo...
...Only one thing will not be achievable with a two-thirds society: the ability of Europe to hold its own in economic competition with its overseas rivals and so to preserve a unique historic role for older nations—let alone the achievement of a new impulse for Europe...
...More education gives each individual the opportunity to go his or her own way, but with new opportunities come new restrictions...
...The American "employment miracle" of the last few years occurred in the service sector...
...Europe is a region in which the welfare state and the infrastructure state (not the state that acts as industrial planner) claim the greatest portion of the gross national product...
...Its citizens—for a thousand historical reasons— are more easily disturbed by nightmares of global destruction...
...The last true conservatives left the bridge with de Gaulle, Adenauer, and Macmillan...
...7. Ecological modernization by means of thoughtful, systematic augmentation of the 337 environmental demands, when necessary, on the part of both producers and consumers...
...They want to treat the laws of the marketplace as if they were laws of nature, and in so doing they have made an unhistorical retreat to a time before the European socialized state...
...Once this development reaches its high point, Europe—if it remains passive—will be colonial terrain, important and lucrative as a proving ground for young talent, a reservoir of recruits for American and Soviet science, but with no history, and so no future, of its own...
...All this is uncertain...
...0 WHAT, THEN, DOES SOCIAL DEMOCRACY MEAN as a program for a new Europe...
...No doubt about it—as the debate lingered on, sucking everincreasing numbers of European nations into stagflation, the tone of leading politicians became ever more petulant, the possibility of antagonistic cooperation between social classes ever less likely...
...In a word, to develop capitalism, itself a product of Western rationalism, further toward social democracy...
...The most likely thing, of course, is always the continuation of present miseries...
...But as Josef Schumpeter already pointed out, modern pacifism and even modern international morality are nonetheless products of capitalism...
...And that would come as the result of neoconservative politics...
...Until now there has been no historical example from which we might learn how to deal with the geriatrification of an entire society...
...There are no rootless soldiers returning from the Great War and unable to find a place in acquisitive bourgeois society—to form the core of fascist militias...
...They will achieve none of their secret goals: neither the rebirth of the virtues of the workingman, nor the reinstatement of the subordination of those below to those above, nor the restoration of England or France as a world power—not to speak of Germany...
...Today 4,534 multinational corporations with headquarters in 9 countries of the European Community control about 50,000 factories outside their home countries...
...not innocent but eager to learn...
...Europe must move beyond the idea of quantitative progress and replace it with qualitative progress...
...The achievements of European culture must not be repressed or forgotten...
...Militarily old Europe is a deployment zone for the superpowers...
...they are over...
...The left has to bring together a coalition in which the greatest possible number of the strong identify with the weak—against their own interests...
...The '70s were the "contagious stage...
...dollar—though it must be kept in mind that at the close of the '40s the United States controlled about 70 percent of the world's gold reserves...
...The only question is whether the political culture of Europe is stable enough to deal with this challenge or if it will drown a melancholy death in the pool of conflicts now welling up...
...For no matter what, the labor movements of Europe (with the exception perhaps of a few countries on its southern rim) are strong enough for trench warfare, which will decisively impair the results of all economic and political competition with the Americans or Japanese...
...It is patently clear: the far-flung Soviet Union has not truly "digested" the expansion of its zone of influence to the middle of Germany...
...That means an end to the idylls of Europe...
...Now they are here, and we're gasping for air...
...the labor market is characterized by increasingly ugly competition between marginal and core employees, between those who are profiting from these changes and those tolerating them...
...In Europe, and in every industrial society, single-person households are growing at an explosive rate (in the United States 25 percent of all children do not live in nuclear families but in new forms of family groupings)—and no one knows how families of the future—these new variations of the family— will process the signals impacting on them...
...Europe could be 328 powerful, if it did not see power in MIRVed rockets—and if it roused itself to a new selfawareness...
...In typical fashion, the European labor movement is more poorly prepared for this development than a bourgeoisie ostensibly so shy of central planning...
...In it Marx and Engels 336 have high praise for the achievements of capitalism— for instance, that it has rescued a significant portion of the population from "the idiocy of rural life...
...Whoever wants to overcome a social structure must first have understood its achievements...
...And capitalism has also been the first social structure to create the economic prerequisites for the emancipation of women...
...Some of them apply globally, some only to Europe...
...German-German relations are proving especially malleable...
...Western civilization finally laid aside its Christian garb...
...Whoever refuses becomes a case for the department of social services...
...The division between blue- and whitecollar workers has long since grown too permeable...
...The most important change, however, will be in employment and work...
...And the attempt to acquire one would end disastrously...
...1. A policy of detente created by and for Europe with the goal of radically reducing the cost of armaments in both Eastern and Western Europe...
...with no imperial ambitions but with a certain appeal for its East European brothers...
...For a very simple reason, say capitalist editorializers: wages are lower in America...
...This means that the leadership is more or less consciously engaged in mobilizing the forces of individual ownership, including a "workers' aristocracy," in mobilizing core employees against marginal ones...
...Social democracy can build upon all these elements, which grew out of a grueling 400year process...
...As THE 20TH CENTURY DRAWS TO A CLOSE, however, profound changes in certain of its biases must occur if this form of civilization is to survive—especially in four areas: FIRST • Now that humanity has created the means by which the entire enterprise of civilization can be undone in mass destruction, the idea of mutual security, born out of the precarious state of European borders, has become inescapable...
...The result...
...Above all, in both West and East European societies a new kind of cultural self-affirmation is emerging—including aggressive disassociation from one's own superpower...
...It isn't likely...
...Is it inevitable that equality in living conditions gives birth to an omnipresent state that, even when it does not employ force, ends in a dogged and petty despotism...
...and both its workers' and its capitalists' kids have begun to suffer from a disease that by a strange circuitous route has come to be ironically tagged with the name of one of the great German capitalists: pseudoKrupp...
...The economic development of industrial capitalism, which leaves neither the socialist states nor the countries of the Third World unaffected, can be discussed under a few headings...
...During the great economic expansion from 1875 to 1913 (a period 330 of almost 40 years), not even one-third of the real increase in income of the '50s and '60s was achieved...
...The easiest thing will be for everyone to keep dragging on—the French and English dreaming of their own past and playing at being world powers, the Germans fantasizing half-heartedly about reunification, the Italians leaving the rest of the world behind while struggling with their pathetically powerless state—and on and on...
...On the one hand there were restrictions on credit volume and on margins allowed banks for increasing the money supply, and on the other hand public employment programs, investment allowances, and better tax breaks —all this accompanied by singsong debate chanted to ideas dredged up from the great Lord Keynes...
...But ever more powerful influences are suddenly coming from totally new directions...
...The stuff of the dreams is real, only the staging is fantastic...
...And can it summon the charisma and talent to excite the thoughts and emotions of European youth...
...The modernization of industrial production will bring with it a net loss of jobs, but at the same time it could mean not only a reduction in jobs but also in raw materials, energy, and capital...
...Video recorders, CB radios, new radio networks with special programming for diverse groups, video games, local newspapers instead of mass-circulation dailies—information structures will be upended...
...Peter Glotz is the national secretary of the German Social Democratic party, a member of the Bundestag, and author of the recent book Manifest fur eine Neue Europdische Linke (Berlin: Siedler, 1985...
...Responding to free rates of exchange and variable rates of interest, internationally mobile capital produced not only gargantuan loans to developing nations—which, should they collapse, could pull down millions of German and American investors with them—but also the destruction of every nationally directed Keynesian system...
...Ships and mass-produced steel can simply be produced more cheaply over the long run in Taiwan, South Korea, or any other emerging nation around the Pacific basin than in Hamburg, Kiel, Bremen, Tokyo, or New York...
...Moreover, in planning for and providing energy and raw materials, no single country alone can bear the risks involved...
...Crusades are passé in the 20th century...
...And everyone knows that can mean two possibilities: a new mobility or a new isolation, the multiplication of opportunity or a barrier to every kind of cooperation...
...In other words: Will we be strong enough to pursue policies that are without illusions, do not disavow genuine contradictions, do not fear a break with our own past, and stand firm against the hatred of our opponents, so that we can win over a European youth that now—as it swings back and forth between idealism and apathy—is on its way to settle for a world without history...
...Of course, a new European self-awareness is unlikely, since it demands of Europe a new ability to cooperate...
...Their influence on economic events is at best marginal...
...Even now we can coolly predict: the political leaders of the European bourgeoisie, aided by a notion of "leadership" imported from the United States, are about to toss their penultimate reservations overboard (for instance, Margaret Thatcher's battle against the "wets" or the mud slung by economic liberals at the labor wing of the German Christian Democrats...
...But the left will not really have grasped that even with 20 percent unemployment, and 80 percent of the gainfully employable employed, a great number of these employed (in the core sectors and as a result of greater seniority) still have faith in their own job security, and that in those crisis sectors that do not have to be shut down totally, the old game of divide-and-conquer has a good chance of success...
...True, work 334 remains an important sphere of action shaping people's identities...
...What does this mean: "social democracy as a European idea...
...Increased competition, previously unknown between the children of different classes, can lead to isolation and personal breakdown...
...Then came a decade of "stop-and-go" economic policies, a dreary, enervating wobble— first putting on the brakes and then stepping on the gas...
...We can see no further mission for Europe, we formulate no policies, we mirror the conflicts of superpowers that emerged from our two damnable wars in half a century...
...Europe has no rapid deployment force that can intervene in the Near East or Africa to insure the flow of raw materials...
...The absorption of cheap new labor from the traditional sectors (in large parts of Western Europe) and a flood of refugees from the East (especially in the German Federal Republic) were also a tremendous impetus for growth...
...FIFTH • Europe will only be able to play a more self-assured role if it can bring about a new partnership between Western and Eastern Europe...
...not a third superpower but capable of defending itself...
...Can it overcome its deep-rooted prejudices against what it considers dangerous entrepreneurial fantasies and against the creative havoc unleashed by new ideas and products...
...332 • The third worldwide trend is the normal but painful necessity for restructuring industrial capital investment...
...The flat map of Europe on the wall is regaining its contours" (Willy Brandt...
...There is a name for this: the collapse of a central pillar of nationhood, the Lebanonization of the economic function of the modern industrial state...
...Will it be able to hold onto its influence in the factories, in the centers of production, and extend it into the tangled world of modern communications and the world of leisure time...
...To reiterate: the second standstill of capitalist economies in the 20th century will not end in fascism...
...2. Institutional reform of the European Community by strengthening the powers of the European Parliament, particularly by enlarging its legislative competence and establishing majority rule in the Cabinet...
...Can the old continent convert these weaknesses into strength or will it slowly fall apart in the vain attempt to wear Texas-sized boots or to play Japan...
...When they are in opposition, they promise to end unemployment, lower the inflation rate, or promote robust economic growth, and once in power they can often effect none of it...
...They simply can't "picture it...
...338 The utopian goal would be a new Europe in high relief a Western Europe of social democracies that plucks up its courage to act on its own...
...We have not merely been dreaming our nightmares for a long time now, we have had them analyzed as well: technological mass-unemployment, a glassy-eyed and manipulated humankind, the disintegration of the labor movement, a starved Third World, nuclear holocaust...
...Individualization brings with it the opportunity for freedom from the constraints of workplace, family, and workaday culture, but also the danger of estrangement, loneliness, and shattered solidarity...
...It is, in fact, the result of a broad redistribution of property within major industrial societies that has brought about a merging of minds of the petite and grande parts of the bourgeoisie...
...Here is an almost inexhaustible source for making democratic governments—whether of the left or the right—lose credibility...
...Behind their barricades, the planning systems of the East lay unawakened by these dynamics—both to their advantage and disadvantage...
...The thrust toward individualization—whether as a form of liberation or isolation—is at full throttle, and no one is ready for it, neither the employers nor the unions, nor the state bureaucracies—and certainly not those affected by it...
...Will we have the nerve to learn just as much from the collapse of the confrontational socialism of Salvador Allende as from the volleys fired by the Soviets, Hungarians, East Germans, and Bulgarians—or from the tanks in Prague in 1968 and the compromises the Communist General Jaruzelski has made with the Catholic church of Poland in the '80s...
...At first glance, such an impulse to maintain qualified and disciplined skilled workers as the backbone of the labor movement is understandable...
...The foundations of our much admired and much sung postwar prosperity were an "interior colonization," by which traditional sectors (farming, handicrafts, family retail trade, services, domestic work) were displaced as routine providers for the majority of the population, and— above all in the '70s—we've had a creeping inflation...
...At the same time, this state—though the left denies it—is all too frequently quite clumsy in using productive resources...
...High inflation rates over a long term during the '70s meant a loss in net interest earned...
...But how would it be if Europeans could boast of having maintained the greatest variety of plant life, the liveliest market for books, the most rational system of social security...
...The civil servants are powerful, the civil services often overpriced...
...And the left should not dupe itself into believing that this is only the result of the evil machinations of high finance...
...When it comes to matters of raw materials, ecological devastation, and the treatment of industrial waste products, Europe's position is profoundly different from that of the superpowers...
...1. All this is as true now as it was 40 years ago...
...But what is "likely" is not the only possibility...
...And he continues, We have lost our peace of soul by becoming modern men...
...Or will democracy suffocate beneath the "power of the majority" (de Tocqueville...
...It would be irresponsible to ignore the fact that the dreams dreamed by an endangered culture mirror reality...
...5. Control over investment and speculative capital...
...But it is the chance for a left that clearly understands that no retreat is possible and that the promise made to each individual with the slogan of liberty, equality, and fraternity must be fulfilled...
...As this process came to a halt, continued growth could be achieved only by large investments of capital...
...In two-thirds societies, the leadership is willing to accept the social decline (not the absolute pauperization) of the weakest third of the society—the unemployed, the odd-jobbers, the elderly of the lower classes, the migrant workers, the physically and mentally handicapped, the teenagers who cannot find their way into the job market, and so on...
...Its message is: Europe is going down the drain...
...Moreover, the welfare state, in particular its unemployment insurance, is too well established...
...Without a doubt, the concept of a two-thirds society can become a reality...
...The major industrial powers must convert from production industries to design and information industries...
...Second, with lightning swiftness there arose transnational financial markets (for instance, the European Credit Market), independent of the control of national banks of issue...
...SEVENTH • Europe can only become a viable political power if the European left and its coalition partners assimilate the great historical lessons of the last few decades...
...The process of individualization is a radical one...
...A new mobility is churning up people's lives and forcing them to leave familiar roots, their neighborhoods and towns...
...Others are considering policies of legal proscription: prohibition of cottage-industry jobs, delaying tactics for part-time work, blocking staggered shifts and other such innovations...
...And because that cannot be realized in the broken vessels of Europe's nation-states, we must make the leap toward Europe...
...it need not in any way interrupt the ideological debate with communism, but it must not play the ceremonious, huffy renegade and confuse ideology with policy...
...Statesmen can still make a great many "meaningful gestures," but it is all more theater than politics...
...This must be made clear to the left once and for all...
...Later the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was added, making protectionist measures more difficult for poorer, less technologically developed countries, insuring somewhat more liberalized world trade, and releasing the energies of modernization...
...In the public's perception there is an apparently indissolvable union of very different interests, so that the skilled worker who is paying off his home and whose financial reserves consist of three months' wages, the merchant's widow with her fixed-rate bonds and apartment building, and the small number of truly moneyed folk all scream bloody murder in concert whenever a tax on basic sources of income is about to be introduced...
...Every third gainfully employed person—in total, 12.5 million people in the German Federal Republic—was unemployed at least once during the years of the current recession...
...Whoever is working in sectors subject to recession, however—in the shipyards, for instance, or as an odd-jobber (as a manual laborer with no qualifications, a packer, for example) leads a risky life...
...Of course, let us not exaggerate: Europe is still an important economic factor...
...This is the root of European constraints, particularities, and insecurities...
...At the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, the United States had created a marvelous system both trimmed to fit its own interests and at the same useful to other capitalist countries...
...This is, after all, simply the relative equilibrium of the social classes that Otto Bauer, the great Austrian labor leader, diagnosed for Europe as far back as the 1930s...
...That is true for individuals, for groups, and for whole peoples...
...Those parts of town that over the years have become familiar landscapes, the turf of working people, are being destroyed...
...THIRD • Europe, with its history to back it up, can only then become a political rather than a geographical concept if Europeans respect an incontrovertible minima moralia: social justice...
...The '50s and '60s saw the yearly gross income of the average West German worker increase in real D-marks by 250 percent, a season of growth far outdistancing all other periods of prosperity...
...The result is the Arthur Scargill effect: What do we need the Americans for?—we're strong enough to enfeeble ourselves...
...But these dangers are unavoidable if Europe now gets dizzy, as it spins around quibbling about its own apocalypse...
...That means a social and ecological revision of our understanding of progress...
...To be frank: never in history was it so clear that major societies are perfectly willing to accept 10 percent unemployment, but under no circumstances 10 percent inflation...
...Or will we find the strength for a healthy lack of illusions, through which a vision for Europe really becomes possible...
...The maneuvering room of the national governments and banks of issue has not been eliminated, but is infuriatingly small...
...Will we have the decency toward those involved, the victims, to stifle all our "I-told-you-sos"—and then pursue our own political course...
...This is not an indictment of the superpowers...
...More profound and surprising, however, were the developments in financial markets...
...Cracks were also increasingly evident in the superstructure...
...Modernity has incorporated all this...
...These changes have been coming for a good while—and they are earth-shaking...
...In the Middle Ages, Western culture went on crusades to demonstrate an awareness of its unity...
...The goal is clear: don't look down, look ahead...
...Can it create a new basis for prosperity, a new set of goals, a new system of priorities, which will finally get us out of the trough of economic standstill and underemployment...
...Europe has no deserts, no Texas, no Siberia, where the trash of a new period of growth can be shoveled under...
...Anyone who has worked only a few days in a government bureaucracy knows that many of these corporations can plan and act more easily than the average ministry of economics or social services...
...And can it also get capitalism, which by no means is at the end of its tether, to commit itself to a new formula for investment, a strategy for qualitative growth, and a balanced ecological account book...
...But intellectual and moral asphyxiation is certainly no sudden development for Europe's elites...
...Therefore: individualism— from the left...
...The boundless optimism of the right may keep it in power for a while yet...
...and "real socialism" is spared nothing of what transpires in "socialized free-market economies...
...To quantify all this: whereas between 1970 and 1984 total employment in the United States grew from 80.1 million to 106 million, in the European Community it fell from 107 million to 106 million...
...This continent is smaller, more vulnerable, and—because it bears the burden of the first and earliest industrialization —also more badly defaced than the others...
...It means adopting an enlightened, antiheroical, unwarlike program based on the intellectual foundation of experimental science...
...Walter Dirks, "Die Zweite Republik," Frankfurter Hefte, 1946, no...
...What now...
...We can regain our balance if we become more modern still—and to be sure if, and only if, the entire process is in our own hands and subject to our will...
...To put it another way: right now, as the great postwar prosperity runs down, an immense process of liberation has fragmented social milieus, put class solidarity in question, and forced politicians to toil at merging discrete groups into temporary "majorities...
...Since 1798 too many people in Europe have died for the unity of liberty, equality, and fraternity...
...Even the international network of high finance has had dubious success with fascist and semifascist oligarchies—from Chile to Greece to Turkey...
...Microelectronics, communications engineering, and integrated optics will either make 327 millions of jobs obsolete or will make radically shortened workweeks possible...
...A sleeping giant, but one that is shrinking as it dozes...
...Europe, the poor continent"—as Walter Dirks put it in 1946 after a bloody war—"will only find its place and maintain it if it pulls itself together and systematically organizes its natural resources, its means of production, and its labor force...
...European freedom and independence will not be preserved by an insistence on their right to exist, but by voluntary limitations of their scope...
...But a phase-two 329 Ostpolitik can originate only in Western Europe...
...The blueprint has been drawn for a society with disparate ways of life and living conditions...
...Therefore social democracy is inseparable from the idea of historicity and identity...
...Inflation...
...Once in power, right-wing liberalism is incapable of such a revision...
...Through councils, monastic orders, universities, and far-reaching judicial codes, the Catholic church created a supranational ideology...
...And the petite bourgeoisie that rules the conservative apparatus these days—with Margaret Thatcher as figurehead— is historically sterile...
...Never have the differences of status within the working class been so great as they are 335 today...
...The result of flexible rates of exchange was, first of all, the loss by governments of a thick, juicy chunk of power to the central banks...
...Translated from the German by JOHN E. WOODS 339...
...FOURTH • Several developments over the last few decades—such as the pollution of air and water, real estate speculation and its destructive effect on our cities, the unchecked exercise of the profit motive for every form of land and property, and the recent commercialization of new forms of media—endanger Europe's most important possession: its cultural heritage...
...Only if that system of insurance were to collapse, and once again masses of impoverished petit bourgeois and laid-off workers found themselves out on the street, would we need to fear fascist tendencies...
...In addition, the civil service in several European states employs so many true democrats that a repetition of the Italian and German developments of the '20s and '30s is unlikely...
...As time on the job decreases, while part-time work, flextime, shift work, and decentralization of spheres of employment (for instance, cottage industries in the service sector) increase, the push toward individualization grows, destroying traditional workers' virtues and introducing a new form of industrialization...
...I: The Helpless Continent The 40th anniversary of the Yalta and Potsdam conferences has left us with a hard, cold bottom line: Europe is going down the drain...
...and while the rising star of the computer world, Apple, created around 4,000 (well-paid) jobs, Godfather's Pizza created 14,000—poorly paid and with no job security, naturally...
...And now that it is possible to free individuals from difficult, onerous labor, to give them sovereignty over their own time, to make wide knowledge available to many, and to make use of the possibilities of the explosion in richly diversified communications— is Europe now to cast aside the idea of progress and take up Eastern meditation...
...What a prospect—and who can say if our children may not relish it...
...0 No ONE CAN DENY THE DANGERS inherent in the project of modernity...
...The region's economy, during this second great standstill of the 20th century, is one of falling employment and rising protectionism...
...The only interesting question is: Have we—as actors in history—truly and irrevocably made our final exit or can we still assume a historic role...
...Theoretically, the individual will be able to evade the standardized visual tidal wave of manipulative mass media—but also every tremor of reality...
...Either we build a new, historically viable European leadership that vaults old national borders and camps, or we shall end in pandemic disgust at our own survival, touchy and demoralized—at best a satirical resistance movement...
...Western Europe must, and can, build on the foundations of capitalist civilization...
...0 IN THIS ESSAY, I will attempt to justify the following demands and answer the following questions: FIRST • The old continent must make yet another contribution as a supplier of ideas to global politics: to appropriate, consolidate, and revitalize what has developed on European soil over the last four centuries—since Hume and Locke, Kepler and Galileo, Descartes and Kant—out of the loam of 3,000 years and terrible sacrifices...
...Many trade unionists are asking themselves if it may not be possible simply to block these technical innovations—at least for a few decades—much as East European industrial societies have done thanks to their closed-off economies...
...Italy owes its economic success of the last 35 years not so much to technology and science, to the cleverness of its entrepreneurs or to the fighting spirit and solidarity of its trade unions, as to design—that wonderful ability, nourished by centuries of experience, to shape industrial products according to aesthetic standards...
...But rather a Europe of decreased armaments and increased multiple contacts, a Europe of ecological precautions and humanized work, a Europe of free, urbane traditions and ironic individualism—and perhaps, as the utopian impulse demands, a Europe of free travel from West to East and East to West, a Europe with little barbwire...
...When Chancellor Helmut Schmidt regularly pointed out that even if he could apply the instruments of national economic policy all on his own and with no need for compromise, he would still be able to control at best merely 30 percent of economic events, he was not being too selfeffacing...
...This means that although in all major European nations (with the exception of Austria and Sweden) the forces of capital are far better organized and more powerful socially than the unions and other bastions of worker power, every European welfare state (and not just the German Federal Republic) has a tighter, more integrated structure than its competitors among the world powers...
...Must we be sucked under by the impotent pessimism of many leftists...
...If things continue as they are now, by the 50th anniversary of Yalta we will be nothing but a museum of shades visited by groups of American, Soviet, Japanese, and, in due time perhaps, Chinese tourists whose package includes the Italian Renaissance, the Giudecca of Venice, Paris as Europe's metropolis, Prague's Mali strana (Lesser Quarter), Auschwitz, and Rothenburg ob der Tauber...
...But the chances are remote that a national labor movement in one of the large West European industrial nations could successfully make a defensive circle of its wagon train...
...Europe's chance for life depends on its thread of memory not being broken...
...III: Individualization and Segmentation nto such a world, the third industrial revolution has broken...
...That experience has now made it impossible to expect another generation of savers to hand over capital at negative net interest under the illusion of "seeing their money grow...
...The disease struck like a sudden choking fit...
...SECOND • Within the capitalist civilization we have inherited, there is a penchant for abusing nature and exploiting raw materials, energy, and other resources, which in the foreseeable future will inevitably wreck or ruin the European continent, unless economic structures adapted to ecological realities can be developed...
...In addition, there exists in Europe—in contrast to the United States, or even to Japan with its single-firm unions—a relative equilibrium of the classes...
...The only form in which Europe can flourish as a politically viable unit is as a social democracy...
...Many East European nations are gaining political clout of their own...
...Europeans ought to squander at least one thought on the question of where we would be if that thug Hitler and his henchmen had not cast the Jewish culture of Europe to the four winds, if Albert Einstein, Paul Lazarsfeld, Leo LOwenthal, and Paul Carnap, if psychoanalysis, logical positivism, quantum physics, and so many other movements of European science had not been driven out of Europe...
...The left will then be amazed that its passionate scolding about 10, 15, or 20 percent unemployment does not mobilize the masses...
...the central banks of countries that were not part of the dollar bloc broke their leash and refused to continue to buy dollars inflated by the Vietnam War at a fixed price...
...ecologically it is a small, exhausted region where forests are browning out before the eyes of its horrified or indifferent citizens...
...It remains unclear what messages and pictures will penetrate the minds of Europe's workers via the intricate networkings of the future...
...SECOND • This does not imply a pointless attempt at matching the big boys inch for inch, at making a superpower out of Europe...
...But it must try to change both alliances...
...The consequences are: disparate paths of development for the industrial core and those sectors subject to crisis, the decline of entire regions, and the rise of others (for instance, the shift to the Sunbelt in the United States and, to a lesser extent, from the North to the South in Germany), and the development of ever more disparate living conditions...
...we know only too well how to do that and have all the solemn trappings on hand for the ceremonies...
...In the Western scheme of things it was clear who was in the driver's seat, but there were certain mechanisms for control and a reasonable confidence in economic prognoses...
...Here lies the starting point for the growing cleft between social and cultural groups within the population...
...Meaningful debates, for instance concerning the relationship between what is technically achievable and ethically desirable, hardly begin— and poor...
...To be sure, effective and creative labor movements can mobilize a counterforce to such coalitions of fear, as shown by the successful Swedish battle for a workers' fund (in effect, a "socialization of the investment function...
...The development of the individual is an ancient European tradition —ever since Greece countered the theocracies of the East (Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia) with the polis, where social classes and cities competed among themselves...
...If not—the mourning and the feast at the wake can be postponed...
...Globally, individual ownership has won a structural triumph...
...It is totally absurd to vie for glory on every possible battlefield, contesting the overwhelming superiority of the Americans and the Soviets—to be first, for instance, in space technology...
...But it also means—and the left had best chisel this in stone—that, in pursuing inflationary policies, high finance and central banks can depend upon a coalition spanning virtually all social classes, even if the result of those policies, though not their goal, is a high rate of unemployment...
...European colonialism had lost its punch, the nations providing raw materials struck back— and Europeans experienced as a "shock" something socialists had been prophesying for decades as a coming crisis...
...Even the most passionate clinging to yesterday's and the day-before-yesterday's analysis of class structure and the most touching invocation of the common interests of "all wage earners" cannot gloss over the fact: modern industrial society is following a path of segmentation...
...And the situation is perplexing...
...Can the European left overcome the old bunker mentality and ally itself with both new social movements and the core leadership of Europe's productive working capital...
...It is unhistorical to reproach the Soviet Union, because Hitler forced upon them a "war for the fatherland" out of which even the Stalinist regime could catch fire and enkindle patriotism...
...This is the issue now before us: Is the patient still twitching or is the matter settled...
...We have problems enough...
...Will the left manage to modernize such a state...
...We need a phase-two Ostpolitik that for the first time will give Europeans breathing space by reducing the cost of arms in both East and West...
...For strict materialists, who believe self-interest is a more effective tool than ideals, this is a paradoxical task...
...The economic danger is that in developing new products and laying the foundations for new industries, Europe will find itself, even more often than in the past, lagging behind in the inventive, creative utilization of new technologies...
...9. A campaign against the domestic colonialization of Europe, if necessary by measures protecting Europe's culture and media...
...More than the battle between left and right, labor and capital, the survival of European society is threatened by the superannuation of its citizens...
...That is the dark side of individualization— the freezing of social movement and formation of new quasi-classes...
...That touches a sore spot: the result of our deeds and misdeeds is a "European neurosis...
...It would be difficult for it to execute a military operation that included armies of Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians...
...FOURTH • The powers of old Europe will lose even their third- or fourth-place role in world politics if they do not succeed in building an industrial Europe...
...No European will-to-live can be founded on new poverty and broken social contracts...
...II: Recent Developments in Capitalism So what is the situation today...
...But that means: not to run away from the spirit of rational individualism, at precisely the moment when a new electronic phase of civilization has begun to revolutionize human labor, but rather to further the modern enterprise...
...All of this came to an end in the early '70s...
...Here precisely is the chance for the European left...
...What is certain is: Europe is at present the helpless and mute continent, without social vision and without a historical mission...
...8. Equal rights for women, by affirmative action and quotas if necessary...
...Against the background of European history, it is impossible to allow 35 million people to live below the poverty line, as is the case in the United States...
...The basis for such a partnership is: guaranteeing existing borders, with no ifs, ands, or buts, and abandoning the notion of restoring capitalism in Eastern Europe, while at the same time realizing that the desire of its peoples for freedom and dignity has not been extinguished...
...Its motto: Freedom and Mobility for Everyone—with Social Responsibility...
...They wanted to protect their own investors and allow for national antiinflationary policies...
...And since the governments have proved in every instance too weak to guarantee the unions something in return for even the most cautious policy of concessions, the danger is great that the European continent could bleed to death in the trenches of a war presaged by the massive strikes of German workers for a 35-hour workweek, the dispute between the socialist government of France and the CGT, and the English coal-miner strike...
...Whoever would attempt, given current economic pressures, to undo the social rights won only in a long, painful social process (such as offices to aid the unemployed, and unemployment benefits, and disability insurance) will drag Europe into enervating, murderous trench warfare...
...The task is to reshape this unconscious cultural trend into conscious policies...
...Yet Marx predicted it long ago...
...If our low birthrates do not rise, Europe will become the world's half-vacant old folks' home...
...But must we go bankrupt under the banner of "concocted optimism" carried by the right...
...Capitalist civilization erected its edifice in the spirit of rationalist individualism and as a systematic plan for the economic utilization of the world's resources...
...No doubt, by now there are cautious partners for such a policy within the Communist parties of Eastern Europe...
...And in the wider world it will mean: to the tune of all the old hymns, Europe will totally decline...
...The first step toward creating a supranational organization for Europe's science and industry must be attempted within the European Community...
...We have inventive engineers, highly skilled workers, creative entrepreneurs (in both capitalist and socialist guises...
...To put it simply: Europe must remain this endangered world's memory...
...6. A coordinated policy for reducing the workweek to 30 hours...
...The second worldwide development has been a loss of power by individual nations— that is, their political bureaucracies have lost out to central banks, banks operating interna331 tionally, transnational finance markets, and multinational corporations...
...And there was the motor that drove the long postwar "recovery"—low prices for raw materials and almost laughable prices for energy...
...The appeal that Europeans can still create is the appeal of persuasive patterns of social life...
...They use the words "more flexible...
...But in answering the challenge of structural change, the situation is different for Europeans than for their American or Japanese competitors...
...The neoconservative leadership of West European states has handed Western Europe over to American hegemony, not because those leaders are in any sense foreign agents, but because they could not picture the design of a functioning political economy for Europe...
...This is not intended as a fair, impartial analysis but rather a bitter message, born of disappointment and designed in part to proyoke friends and adversaries in Eastern and Western Europe alike...
...In fact, the least surprising cause for national governments' loss of power is the concentration of international capital and the resulting economic interdependence, which, as goods, services, information, and technology were exchanged during the period of prosperity following World War II, expanded beyond anything previously considered possible...
...But how all this will look after the third industrial revolution will hardly be decided in Europe...
...But it is also possible to lose the fight against such coalitions—as Margaret Thatcher's second electoral victory in England made clear in 1983...
...What objection can there be to this "Italian strategy...
...Hofmannsthal, Musil, and Paul Valêry, or Ernst Bloch and George Orwell for that matter, saw the spasms coming decades ago...
...In 1973 this arrangement collapsed...
...Can it free itself from the tragic insight that thus far democracy and "strict socialism" have not been realized together...
...We Europeans are complacently wearing ourselves out in the intricacies of our constitutions and traditions...
...And from year to year it sounded more like Pavlov than Keynes—an argument with Pavlovian sound effects...
...But, beyond optimism or pessimism, for one last time the question is posed: Can Europe use its rich experience to master the challenges of a third industrial revolution...
...The most likely development will be the formation of a two-thirds society...
...Europe as a partner of the Third World—out of self-interest, not philanthropy...
...Or will it be paralyzed by fright and be gobbled up like a rabbit staring at a snake...
...From the very beginning capitalists, in contrast to aristocrats, have done without a mystical and lordly air...
...It will demand one thing above all else: individualization...
...The minimum yield offered for inducing investors even to consider productive investment of capital—and with it the creation of job opportunities—is now influenced less than ever before in economic history by the policies of individual nation-states...
...European culture, from Niccolo Pisano to Goethe to Soren Kierkegaard, from Fritz Lang to Niels Bohr, has often emerged from political states that were second-class powers...
...our strongest glue may be our classical European culture...
...Americans consider us Europeans "tragic" and "cynical...
...Foreign policy of the Reagan/ Weinberger ilk—which has sacrificed all sensibility for the interests of the old continent in favor of a new American self-confidence—is anti-European precisely because it robs East European states within the Soviet fold of all freedom of movement...
...Only psychologists can rejoice at the prospect of full coffers...
...And it means incorporating what we have learned from the agonizing experience of recent decades: the struggle against destructive growth, against power-conscious, international oligarchies and other new forms of caesarism that can arise out of economic collapse...
...At the time 44 nations agreed to create an International Monetary Fund and a World Bank...
...They will achieve what is already within view: at home, a touchier, more irascible public climate, new forms of class struggle, an atmosphere of small, uncontrolled aggression, and a worsening of conditions for capital growth for their own people...
...THIRD • European history—from the Thirty Years' War to the waves of refugees that Hitler's war set into motion—leads inevitably to the ideas of social peace and the pattern of a European socialized state...
...What remains is the dubious tolerance well-trained spouses show for one another's habits—trench warfare...
...It is stupid to reproach Americans for being more vital than we are or for having a social order that in all its simplicity is more adaptable than that of socialized European states...
...whoever hopes to dissolve that formula, and dump equality as a goal, will find himself dumped into a nameless grave of social trench warfare...
...Glory, glory, hallelujah...
...To put it more pointedly: Will a self-confident European left be capable of giving social direction to the process of innovation...
...Workers whose lives today are determined by the rhythm of work, and for whom free time is nothing more than "recreation" time, relaxation and amusement time, could find a new sovereignty over their lives that they have never known before, and without the prologue of revolution and counterrevolution, when hate sinks its fangs in deep and compulsion becomes permanent...
...Member states obligated themselves to tie their own currency to gold or to the U.S...
...Only rather unimaginative prophets consider history to be a Xerox machine...
...at any rate, knee-jerk pessimism is no answer to the current gung-ho mood...
...THE EUROPEAN LEFT can blast apart the bulwark of the longtime propertied and upwardly mobile, if it puts new technology at the service of an individualization that balances social, ecological and economic interests...
...Hundreds of thousands of workers now demand individualized work time...
...The industrial nations are under the whip of structural change...
...While at present the citizens of most parts of Europe are still being reached by three or four television channels—or, put another way, a politician can reach these citizens by appearing on three or four channels—the next decade will see a Babel-like profusion of voices clamoring for citizens' attention...
...Therefore no Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, no "Silesia still is ours," no dreams of reparations for lost Thuringian industries...
...The modernization of industrial production offers us a chance to overcome a system of production for the sake of production, to transfer hard, dehumanizing work to machines, and to set ever-expanding amounts of time free and available for workers...
...but it is our present task, nevertheless...
...The hour of technological fever is upon us...
...Such realism during elections and before assuming power is rare, however, and unpopular...
...Whoever hopes to prevent the strangulation of minorities (the segmentation of European industrial society) must bring about an alliance for enlightenment, right across the old classes...
...The upshot can be read in Marx or Hilferding, and in the works of the great bourgeois economists as well: When the time it takes for capital to turn over grows and when additional investments lead at once to surplus income and thus to additional demand while the economic capacity created by those investments develops more slowly, then increased demand meets head-on with stable supplies—and prices soar...
Vol. 33 • July 1986 • No. 3
