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Democracy may be an unfinished
project, but can its imperfections be an excuse for Euro zone
oligarchs to dismiss two elected governments?
In the case of Greece, they added extra pressure to deny people
their right to participate in a referendum. In Italy, at least,
there was no reason for sudden panic. It was embattled, but a
solvent country till speculation took over. Silvio Berlusconi may
have erred in governance, but it was the bankers and capitalists
who brought Italy to its knees. That gave the oligarchs a perfect
excuse to push Berlusconi over.
Spain seems to have avoided the embarrassment of an external
diktat by changing the government itself. Meanwhile, most other
parts of Europe are suspended between stagnation and disbelief.
How is it, the Europeans wonder, that they should have come to
such a pass?
Consequently the only growth industry in Euro zone today is that
of worry about its economy. Even more curiously, for a people who
were zealous about their democratic rights, they have hardly
noticed the triumph of market forces over people's power. The
removal, under external pressure, of two democratically elected
leaders has barely been commented upon. This is the kind of
treatment that they were expected to mete out to third world
potentates like Saddam Husein and Muammar Gaddafi, not to their
own.
What has happened in Italy and Greece isn't merely a knock on the
head for democracy. There is a more serious fallout. It may be the
beginning of a new assertion by the rich against the rest; by one
percent against 99 percent. At first, when Occupy Wall Street
movement had just started, it seemed the era of street protests
was once again upon us. For a brief Twitter like period there was
hope that, as in the case of Arab spring, in the West too the
social media would come into play to empower the 99 percent.
Although Occupy Wall Street protests haven't gathered sufficient
traction, yet the movement has caught the attention of people; the
debate of one percent versus 99 percent has been gaining strength.
The youth specially are motivated. They have a reason to be:
unemployment among the young in the US is bordering on 20 percent,
that in the European Union at 20.9 percent. In Spain, it is 46.2
percent, meaning that one in almost every two Spaniards is
unemployed. Unfortunately for the youth, there is no easy way out
of the current morass: there is no possibility of an economic
upturn in the foreseeable future, and the leadership is holding
out neither hope nor the promise of an innovative new approach to
create more jobs.
It is true that a part of the reason for the lack of fresh
employment opportunities is the shift away from the West to a
China of many industries. Under their present economic
difficulties, when they are making pilgrimages to China to attract
funds, a strong industrial revival in Europe is unlikely. Even if
a concerted effort were to be made by Western governments to set
up new industry in their countries, it might take up to a
generation for the Europeans to recover lost ground. By then many
of today's youth would have spent a lifetime doing nothing.
Moreover this shift of industry to China wasn't an act of force,
but that of greed by the one percent.
Some economists have tried to justify inequality by theories that
associate higher income with greater productivity and a greater
contribution to society. This may have been cherished by the rich,
but the evidence of its validity is thin. Rather, people are
questioning the reintroduction of fat compensation to bankers
whose productivity and whose contribution to society are being
seriously questioned.
Yet the oligarchs seem to have been motivated by other
considerations. The new prime minister of Greece is a former
banker. And the replacement for Berlusconi in Italy is an
economist. In the US too, the treasury secretary is a former
banker and many of his cabinet colleagues are from the private
sector.
Let us assume that the new appointments in Italy and Greece
somehow succeed in reversing the slide. After all there was a
glimmer of hope in America too last year when it seemed that the
worst effects of 2008 were behind it; that's when the executives
rushed to declare fat incentives for themselves. So if a similar
temporary mirage is seen in these two countries, will that be seen
as an endorsement of this new experiment? Will it presage a
situation where chief executives of private companies might begin
to run governments?
This is not unlikely. The political history of the world is
littered with the most improbable; East India Company did take
over the running of a large country. Businessmen like Berlusconi
have run their countries. Unlike Berlusconi, some other
businessmen have been moderately successful in their political
job. But a trend where market forces influence political decisions
may be fatally flawed as a practice.
Bankers are by training people risk averse; their ivory towers do
not prepare them for the rough and tumble of politics. It is
necessary to be in tune with the mood of the people if a leader
aims to judge and align himself with the temper of the times.
Moreover, corporate people do not create job opportunities; it is
the innovators and technology experts who do. Even more
importantly a situation such as the one facing the Euro zone can
best be tackled by collective action; society as a whole needs to
get into the act.
As Benjamin Franklin had said once, "People willing to trade their
freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose
both."
Rajiv Dogra is a
former ambassador to Italy. He can be reached at ambraja@gmail.com
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