{"id":235965,"date":"2023-05-29T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2023-05-29T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=235965"},"modified":"2024-09-23T14:36:52","modified_gmt":"2024-09-23T13:36:52","slug":"rearmament-europes-welfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/05\/rearmament-europes-welfare\/","title":{"rendered":"Rearmament & Europe\u2019s Welfare"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Farewell to the Welfare State? Not Just Yet.<\/h3>\n

Let\u2019s see how Europeans respond when they are told their peace dividend is henceforth to be spent on the machinery of war \u2014 when it\u2019s \u201chowitzers instead of hospitals\u201d now, as a <\/em>New York Times article puts it.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Flickr \u2013 NewsPhoto! \u2013 NATO protest Strasbourg 4-4-09. Jos van Zetten from Amsterdam, the Netherlands,
CC BY 2.0 https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

17 May 2023 – <\/em>Maybe you recall all the post\u2013Cold War talk of a \u201cpeace dividend\u201d and maybe you don\u2019t: It depends on when you took up residence on this mortal coil. The term arose as the Soviet Union disintegrated and was commonly mentioned during George H.W. Bush\u2019s presidency, 1989\u20131993. A dramatic reduction in defense spending, and a corresponding increase in expenditures on education, health care, and so on, was put around as one of Bush I\u2019s outstanding achievements. That was the peace dividend.<\/p>\n

The thing you need to know about all the talk of a peace dividend back then is that it was all talk. And the thing you need to know now, with Cold War II in more or less full swing and the proxy war against Russia raging in Ukraine, is that there is no longer any need to know anything about the peace dividend: As we speak, it takes its place as an artifact of another time, a curiosity in the way of \u2026 what? \u2026 maybe Eisenhower\u2019s promise of free electricity in his \u201cAtoms for Peace\u201d speech, delivered at the United Nations in 1953.<\/p>\n

The New York Times published a remarkable piece on this topic<\/a> last week under the headline, \u201cThe \u2018Peace Dividend\u2019 Is Over in Europe. Now Come the Hard Tradeoffs.\u201d There are two ways to read this lengthy report, text and subtext.<\/p>\n

On one hand, it tells us exactly what the headline promises: European leaders, in response to the Ukraine crisis, now plan to dump a lot more money into the weapons of war and a lot less into the social-democratic apparatus\u2014welfare programs, social programs, cultural programs\u2014in which European citizens have long taken pride.<\/p>\n

On the other, this piece has a special message for Americans: There shall be no more daydreaming about how good the Danes or the French have it. The military-industrial complex has crossed the Atlantic. Neoliberalism has won. It is indeed the end of history. It is \u201cTINA\u201d time: \u201cThere is no alternative,\u201d as Margaret Thatcher famously used to say. The future will be no different from the present.<\/p>\n

The equation seemed neat back in the early 1990s, ready made for newspaper headlines: The Cold War\u2019s end meant there would be no more need for all those missiles, lethal warheads, fighter jets, and naval vessels. It would be fewer guns and more butter, to put the point simply. I well recall some of those headlines, as I do the raised expectations of the many, many, many Americans who understood the price paid for the wild wastage of the Pentagon\u2019s Cold War defense budgets.<\/p>\n

The peace dividend never arrived in America. This was fated to be, as the simple, guns-to-butter equation could not possibly have held. The base assumption was wrong. The Pentagon\u2019s disgraceful bloat did not reflect security imperatives alone: If it did it would have had a greater degree of elasticity, growing or shrinking according to geopolitical conditions.<\/p>\n

Missing in the equation is the place of defense spending in America\u2019s political economy. It has long been a way to finance various kinds of technological innovation and keep defense contractors and the thousands of satellite companies supplying them profitable. This has never been at all elastic. Remember, by the Cold War\u2019s end all 435 congressional districts\u2014this by design\u2014had an interest of one or another kind in keeping the money flowing to the defense sector.<\/p>\n

At first, the Bush I administration simply stopped talking about the peace dividend. Bill \u201cTriangulate\u201d Clinton then made his mark as president by gutting a great deal of our republic\u2019s already pitiful social welfare provisions. And then, another memory: It fell to Colin Powell, Bush II\u2019s secretary of state, to announce that the peace dividend was not to be and Americans should forget all about it.<\/p>\n

That was soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Bush II\u2019s declaration of the war on terror. I can still see the headline on the Powell story on the front of The New York Times, lead of the paper that day. It put peace dividend in single quotation marks\u2014\u2018Peace Dividend\u2019\u2014as if it were some strange, foolish idea.<\/p>\n

In the best of the post\u2013Cold War years, 1993 to 1999, the American defense budget flattened, no more. And flattened, given the immoral size of the Pentagon\u2019s annual expenditures, did not do much for anybody. But here\u2019s the thing. There were quite impressive peace dividends in two other places. One was post\u2013Soviet Russia, where defense spending collapsed. The other was Western Europe, where it did pretty much the same.<\/p>\n

Public-sector expenditures rose precipitously\u2014in many cases doubling\u2014after Germans dismantled the Berlin Wall in November 1989. I was not at the time surprised, given Europeans\u2019 reluctance to participate in America\u2019s Cold War crusade in the first place. These increases were sustained until last year. By 2014, meantime, military budgets reached what The Times calls a record low among NATO\u2019s European members, although it does not make clear how this is measured.<\/p>\n

And so to the current turn, the end of the party as described in last week\u2019s New York Times piece.<\/p>\n

\u25a0<\/p>\n

Europeans\u2014well, some Europeans, no, make that a lot of Europeans\u2014have been grousing about the Americanization of their way of life for decades, especially since America\u2019s triumphalist 1990s: McDonald\u2019s and Domino\u2019s Pizza parlors all over the place, that vulgar Disney World outside of Paris, Costco and the other \u201cbig box stores,\u201d all those infantilizing films coming over from Hollywood, the slobification of the Continent as standards of dress declined.<\/p>\n

On the face of it, these seemed to be matters of mere taste. But more than taste has been at issue all these years. Behind all the demotic junk of America\u2019s corporatized popular culture has been the creep of neoliberal austerity policies in finance ministries and among the technocrats in Brussels. One of the remarkable features of America\u2019s post\u2013Cold War rendition of neoliberalism is that it can brook no deviation. If America worships markets, everybody must worship markets. If we let a lust for profit destroy everything that gets in its way\u2014culture, community, human dignity\u2014everyone else must do the same.<\/p>\n

Europeans are not inattentive to these questions. Remember Jos\u00e9 Bov\u00e9, the Roquefort farmer who destroyed a McDonald\u2019s in the Aveyron region of France at the end of the 1990s? He did that in the name of \u201cslow food,\u201d but, as Bov\u00e9\u2019s long record of activism attests, he is also a vigorous opponent of \u201cglobalization,\u201d another term for neoliberalism in the American mode. This same point applies to the recent protests against the Macron government\u2019s pension reforms. The popular defense of French pensions stood for a defense against something much broader.<\/p>\n

These controversies, these heat-producing frictions, have long been a defining feature of European political culture. Will Europe cave to America\u2019s post\u2013Cold imperatives? This has been the question. And America\u2019s neoliberal cliques, needless to say, have been heavily invested in this question.<\/p>\n

How many times, I used to wonder in years gone by, do I have to read New York Times stories\u2014the Times carried the spears on this front\u2014telling me Sweden no longer works, or the French healthcare system\u2014which the U.N. rates the world\u2019s best, along with Japan\u2019s\u2014is falling apart? After a time, this reader\u2019s irritation gave way to sheer derision as the clerks who serve the reigning ideology, known euphemistically as correspondents, discredited themselves.<\/p>\n

I read this just-published Times piece as the latest installment in this long story. It tells us that the \u201cthe peace dividend\u201d\u2014again it gets the quotation marks\u2014was nothing more than an irresponsible holiday for the Europeans. The long war is over (because another one has begun). Europe will no longer count as a worrisome alternative to America\u2019s grim neoliberal realities, poisoning our minds with the thought that there are other ways to live. The danger\u2014that European social democracy, in all its various stripes, actually works\u2014has passed. The Continent is now in for the whole nine, a war economy and the destruction of social-democratic programs being of a piece.<\/p>\n

Until the Russian intervention in Ukraine last year, The Times reports, NATO\u2019s European members planned to increase defense outlays by a modest 14 percent, to $1.8 trillion. \u201cNow, spending is estimated to rise between 53 and 65 percent,\u201d we read. \u201cThat means hundreds of billions of dollars that otherwise could have been used to, say, invest in bridge and highway repairs, child care, cancer research, refugee resettlement or public orchestras is expected to be redirected to the military.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bingo, Patricia Cohen and Liz Alderman, who share the byline on this report, may as well have written. The two then indulge a weird, post\u2013Cold War habit among American correspondents abroad. You may be in Paris or Berlin or wherever, but when you need a quotation to support your case, call an American who will tell you all about what is going on where you are, across one or another ocean.<\/p>\n

So to a reliable neolib ideologue from way back, who professes at a reliable neolib institution. Cohen and Alderman write: \u201c\u2018The spending pressures on Europe will be huge, and that\u2019s not even taking into account the green transition,\u2019\u201d said Kenneth Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard. \u201cThe whole European social safety net is very vulnerable to these big needs.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is impossible to miss the triumphalist gloat coursing through Cohen and Alderman\u2019s prose. Read the piece. This caught my eye from the first paragraphs onward. It\u2019s the military-industrial complex \u00fcber alles<\/em>\u2014finally, thank goodness, etc.: \u201cBut in most of Europe,\u201d the two write toward the end, \u201cthe painful budgetary trade-offs or tax increases that will be required have not yet trickled down to daily life.\u201d This is an important point. What is going to happen when this case of \u201ctrickle down\u201d finally trickles down?<\/p>\n

There is no question that those purporting to represent Europeans are now quite strongly committed to \u201cthe American way\u201d (if not necessarily truth and justice). The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI, issued a report late last month indicating that Europe\u2019s defense spending rose in 2022 by the most in 30 years. Cohen and Alderman call this a \u201cspendathon,\u201d with evident approval.<\/p>\n

But I am not so sure how Europeans will respond when they finally get their Colin Powell moment, when those running the show tell them their peace dividend is henceforth to be spent on the machinery of war and it is howitzers instead of hospitals, as the Times reporters put it. Let us not forget: European societies are not so atomized as America\u2019s, as I have noted previously<\/a> in this space. Their political cultures still have some warp and woof to them.<\/p>\n

John Pilger recently sent me a video of an interview<\/a> he conducted with Martha Gellhorn late in her life. In it the late, great Gellhorn remarked, \u201cI used to think people got the leaders they deserved. I no longer do.\u201d This is the case in Europe today\u2014if not, maybe, in politically somnambulant America.<\/p>\n

The near term for Europeans is clear, set: They have been conscripted into Cold War II, like it or not. Nothing beyond this seems so certain to me. Let us hope Europeans prove able to keep a certain flame alive, the flame of possibility, and the piece I parse here turns out to be nothing more than another Sweden-doesn\u2019t-work story.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the <\/em>International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is\u00a0<\/em>Time No Longer: Americans after the American Century.\u00a0His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.\u00a0His website: Patrick\u00a0Lawrence<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 scheerpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

17 May 2023 – Farewell to the Welfare State? Not Just Yet. Let\u2019s see how Europeans respond when they are told their peace dividend is to be spent on the machinery of war \u2014 when it\u2019s \u201chowitzers instead of hospitals\u201d now, as a New York Times article puts it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":235967,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[2914,2009,1161,1104,1268,450,2433,112,70,1594,481],"class_list":["post-235965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe","tag-anti-nato","tag-anti-war","tag-arms-industry","tag-arms-trade","tag-european-union","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-peacebuilding","tag-pentagon","tag-usa","tag-war-economy","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235965"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":235969,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235965\/revisions\/235969"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}