User:65.54.154.45/Prognosis for Europe
December 15, 2005
A PROGNOSIS FOR EUROPE
The inauguration of a Grand Coalition government in Germany today inspired me to make a commentary on what I think is likely to happen to Europe in the next ten to twenty years and what that will mean for the rest of the world.
The old men who got together and fashioned Europe after World War II were an inspired bunch who had learned from Europe’s ghastly history from 1914 until 1945 that having a European civil war every generation was a recipe for disaster. So people like Robert Schumann, Conrad Adenauer, Alcide Di Gasperi, Ernest Bevin and Paul Henri Spaak got together and fashioned a Europe which could become economically strong and socially fair. With a bit of help from us in the form of Marshall Plan aid they created the “economic miracle” which remade Western Europe and took the wind out of the sails of the Communists. And it worked wonderfully for a bit more than thirty years. The deal was: you workers let us make money and we owners will cut you in on the ensuing prosperity. So all the countries of Western Europe created generous systems of social welfare which protected the working class and the owners got very wealthy.
A very curious thing happened starting in the late 1960’s. Good Catholic European women learned about the pill, disregarded the teachings of the Church on birth control and stopped having babies. This happened for a number of reasons. Newly emancipated women had better things to do than stay at home changing diapers. Young couples had ambitions for their children and were living in urban apartments which would not accommodate more than one or two children. A second rather nice thing happened. With good public health systems, better accommodations, better nutrition and a lot less angst, people started to live longer. So began a demographic change of revolutionary significance which politicians and all the rest of us took too long to recognize.
At the same time, first as a trickle, then as a flow and finally as a flood Europe lost a lot of high paying manufacturing jobs. Three things contributed to this development. The first was that countries in Asia recovered and competed with Europe for things like producing automobiles, ships and low tech things like textiles. The second was that we introduced improved production methods and tools which cut down on the amount of human labor which was necessary to produce a widget. Third was the fact that European producer costs were so high that they could not compete with first, the Asian Tigers and then China and India.
The result of all this is that most European countries now face an immediate problem of high unemployment and a longer range problem of not being able to pay for their generous social welfare systems unless they open the immigration gates to black and brown people who will be willing (1) to do the dirty work that is left in an economy in which most work is in services and (2) pay the taxes to support the social welfare system for the original settlers. It is a terrible “Hobson’s Choice” and all the European countries are going to be forced to make it at a time when they are terrified of Islamic terrorists.
One of the worst things about democratic governments is that, in times of peace, prosperity and relative tranquility they produce very mediocre political leaders. We live in such a time. There is no chance that M. Chirac and his people will be able to undertake the structural changes in the economy which might bring unemployment down to acceptable levels and they seem to have no clue how to deal with their minorities. Mr. Blair is on his way out and did not really do much when he was in. Berlusconi is a Mafiosi but the Italians never expect much from their governments and do not pay them much mind or pay their taxes if they can possibly avoid it. Germany has a Grand Coalition at a time when it needs a Margaret Thatcher to “kick ass and take names“.
At the present time I see little hope that the Europeans will get their act together. It is imperative that all the West European governments make fundamental changes in their social welfare systems and labor markets to make it more attractive for entrepreneurs to create jobs. This is a major tragedy because, as long as Europe sits immobile licking its wounds, it will not be willing to play a proper role in world governance. This leaves it up to my country and our record as top nation is decidedly mixed. Europe is missed.
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