Questions to Europe

The relentlessly progressing economic and financial crisis appears to defy political will, and most of all, it eludes common sense and the concept of the common good. Only recently (it would be useful to track down the exact date of the change) economic activity was still regulated by the balance between labour, financial investments, the success of production and commercialization. A company was considered successful when its production yielded profits. The system was regulated by those States that had introduced social protection regulations to protect workers and economic legislation to protect national production or, conversely, to trigger the circulation of goods. It was a real economy, based on work and production. Government control shaped the idea of social market economy, that was promoted in Europe in the 1950s by Christian-Democrat parties. Liberal ideology – that is no better than Marxist ideology – caused the collapse of mainstream positions, and a context of wild individualism paved the way to the era of virtual economy. Today, the value of a firm, of an entire nation, is no longer determined by its workforce, nor by its production. It is measured according to bizarre calculations: the so-called speculation that isn’t based on something concrete but on the quest for surreal profits by financial players. This approach is further encouraged by renowned rating agencies: self-proclaimed financial gurus, oracles of Mammon, of the deity of speculation. Nobody knows what they truly represent, nor on what it is that they ground their work. Nonetheless, as soon as they start ‘rating’, hundreds of thousands of people are in trouble without even knowing why. These rating agencies display an utmost contempt for democracy, as they don’t take into account national policies, nor parliamentary debates, or elections. The same happens in an articulated reality such as the European Union, which, however, is trying to react. It’s a new form of totalitarianism. A faceless totalitarianism since nobody – except for specialists – knows who chairs these agencies, nor their employees, nor is there information on the method they adopt, and even less is known their province, when they identify those who are called to pay or to survive; totalitarian because they are not legitimized, and because no body, whether public or private, controls their activity. And control is the foundation of democratic performance. But this evolution, also in Europe, took place with the complicity of politicians who have long since abandoned the political realm.