Europe's Catastrophe

The reason why Europe faces catastrophe is that the leadership of the Continent is rotten to the core.

One euro zone country is on the verge of collapse, offered some millions of Euros by Brussels to create a euro border against the effects of war while still having to pay back bankers billions in debt; the European economic leadership is hell bent on defending the wealthy's bunkers at the increasing cost to Europe's overwhelming majority - living for nearly a decade in insecurity and decline; a great wave of xenophobia and racism is rolling across European countries, led by some of their senior politicians; and Britain's exiteers are riding that crest in particular - remoulding Britain's traditional right wing politics for all that it is worth.

China's economic slowdown and the calamitous US flirtation with an entirely new type of right wing politics which means at least the worst Democratic Party hawk for decades as the next President, also adds to the growing nervousness for the future among the world's movers and shakers.

In the face of these active and impending crises not one of Europe's leaderships are rising to the mark.

First, European leaders should be denouncing the Syrian and Yemeni wars and forcing the issue with the bombers. Europe is the largest market in the world. It has the leverage. It was originally created as a bloc to make and use a voice independent of the US and later the Eastern mega-nations. Instead it has become the US's little brother.

Second it should throw out the dismal and failed litany provided by the Chicago school. (It would only have most of the world's - including half of the US's - most senior economists on its side.) Breaking austerity and developing strategic re-investment and growth would be the sole act in favour of Europes' peoples since the progressive parts of Schengen. A major part, perhaps a forward, to reconstructing Europe's economic policy would be a new debt conference that broke the chains forged by the psychopathic levels of greed allowed to the already super rich since the 1980s.

Third, while moving to end the world's current mini world war in the Middle East, Europe should cheer on the mass of people who want to escape. It is absurd to suggest that a continent of 500 million cannot absorb a million, or two, or four. It is absurd to denounce the young men who try and pull down fences. If only, if only, Europe would raise the roof with gratitude at the picture and prospect of thousands of young men who are refusing to go to war!

Who in Europe stands for elementary measures like these? Who could give Europe a future and a shape in the world?

A jigsaw of parties, movements and campaigns, emanating from major public actions by the youth against austerity and war in many cases, are now edging into mainstream politics in some key European countries - including, in a particularly curious way, Britain! Although the mixtures of movements and parties take on different national profiles there is little doubt that it is the same process of a new left emerging from action against austerity and war, underlining the utterly compromised position of social democracy (or its various stand ins.) In at least three countries so far this new left has its own sufficent base in the larger population to have a significant impact on the formation of governments - as the new social democrat leaders scrabble for the means to escape from their almost terminal record of collaboration with the neo-cons, and instead seek agreements to their left.

These formations are part of an evolving alternative to Europe's fearful and schlerotic leadership (whose only strength resides in the degree to which they will hang on to their own power, influence and wealth). There are no guarantees of course, but there is the definite sound of a worn out traditional political and economic system cracking and of history speeding up as new directions open out.

Next: more on Britain's referendum.