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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 March 1999 Issue No. 422 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 March 1999 Issue No. 422
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters European surprises
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
Only a few days apart, Europe was shaken by two momentous events. The first was the unexpected resignation of Germany's finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine, who also resigned his post as chairman of the ruling Socialist-Democratic Party. The second was the collective resignation of the European Commission, the European Union's executive body, including its president, Jacques Santer, in response to a devastating report on corruption.
Though apparently unrelated, the two events nevertheless have something in common, namely, the potential to slow down the impetus towards a united Europe, an issue all the more critical in the immediate aftermath of the launching of Europe's common currency, the euro, and on the eve of a new century in which the EU dreams of becoming no less important than the US in determinating the features of globalisation now in the making.
One of the most striking features of the resignations is their 'personal' character, i.e. the case of Lafontaine in Germany and that of Edith Cresson, the commissioner for scientific research and education in the Commission (previously the only woman to have become France's prime minister). Both are disliked by wide constituencies in their respective countries, Lafontaine by the European business community for his opposition to unbridled neo-liberalism and because of his strong defence of the State in face of a variety of manifestations of inequity and inequality, in a word, because he is perceived as a staunch supporter of an obsolete form of Socialism; Cresson because of her reputation for cronyism and arrogance. The latter was accused of giving a $160,000 contract to a dentist friend to write scientific reports that an investigating committee found to be worthless.
Actually, accusations of nepotism and corruption addressed to the European Commission have not been limited to Santer's steermanship, but extend even to Jacques Delors' presidency before him. Allegations of misdoing recently reached a point where a thorough investigation could no longer be avoided, and a committee of 'wise men' was created to undertake the job. The conclusions they reached made it clear that the condemnations should go beyond the personal responsibility of this or that commissioner to the Commission as a collective body. This left the commissioners with no choice but to resign en masse.
The commissioners might be well-known personalities in their own right but, at the end of the day, they are appointees, holding their post by the grace of their national governments, not elected politicians accountable to a constituency. As such, they are bureaucrats (earning themselves the sobriquet of 'Eurocrats') who consider themselves immune to the threat of being dislodged. As long as the sovereignty of the individual states making up the EU continues to take precedence over the power vested in Brussels, constraints on misbehaviour will remain shaky.
Moreover, the EU is still in a transitional stage. Its component elements, Europe's sovereign states, hold immeasurably more power than their overall resultant, the EU. Power in the EU's capital is still more illusory than real. This is an invitation to nepotism and corruption. Such misconduct will not go away as long as the EU does not acquire a status transcending the sovereignty of its constituent states.
Lafontaine's resignation, on the other hand, reflects shortcomings not only in the EU's institutions but also in its very substance, on the meaning of a unified Europe in our globalising world. Since Gerhard Shröder replaced Helmut Kohl as Germany's chancellor, i.e., since the displacement of state power in Germany from a clear-cut Right to a Left still to be defined, many question marks have surfaced. First within Germany's ruling Social-Democratic Party itself, then in its relationship with the minority Green Party partner in the ruling coalition, one of whose leading figures, Joshka Fischer, is the foreign minister.
The resignation also highlighted the fact that tensions within the SDP ran higher than those between the two parties in the government coalition. Tensions had already emerged between the Greens and the so-called Reds (the left-wing faction in the coalition) when Shröder bowed to Germany's business community and retracted his electoral promise to dismantle Germany's civilian nuclear-powered plants. Both Fischer and Lafontaine opposed this concession to German business. The latter's resignation has cast a different light on Shröder's leadership. While business applauded Lafontaine's pullout, the news was received by Germany's trade-unions with obvious discontent.
The leftward shift in eleven out of the fifteen states constituting the EU has been interpreted as a rebuttal of the contention that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented a historical and irreversible victory for the neo-liberal Right over communism, a victory celebrated in the 'end-of-history' slogan raised with much fanfare at the time. Today, Social-Democracy, which is calling for restrictions on the market economy, is occupying centre stage. In the light of the economic crises which have hit the Tigers of Southeast Asia, followed by Russia and now by Brazil, Social-Democracy has been rehabilitated as a viable alternative to contemporary capitalism, which has proved unfit to cope with human requirements on the eve of the third millennium. Now that communism can no longer be presented as the only source of crisis in our present world situation, it is obvious that history has by no means come to an end.
The election of Gerhard Shröder in Germany after Tony Blair in England has been portrayed as the advent of a new type of Left after two decades of the neo-Liberal rule of the right, personified by leaders like Reagan in America, Thatcher in Britain and Kohl in Germany. The new Left is not calling for a return to the bipolar world game of the Cold War, but for what Anthony Giddens, Blair's theoretician and director of the London School of Economic and Political Science, has coined the Third Way. However, it is still not clear whether the Third Way's left-of-centre police aims at preempting any further drift to the Left, thus ensuring capitalism's survival at this particular moment of economic failure, or whether the path of moderation it has chosen is a stratagem to check Right-wing backlashes and improve chances for reaching beyond capitalism in the longer run.
This question remains unanswered, but if Lafontaine's surprise resignation carries any specific meaning, it could be signalling what neither France nor Britain is in a position to clarify. In France, the line of demarcation between Right and Left is clearly delineated: the Right occupies the seat of the presidency, the Left that of the premiership. In England, Blair's Third Way has been built gradually and systematically, making surprise resignations à la Lafontaine unlikely. British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has been compared to Oskar Lafontaine, but nobody has suggested that he might resign. That is why Germany remains the best place to look for answers to our question -- an issue of crucial importance at a time when the world economy is suffering from crippling crises and European institutions are threatened with erosion from within.
