BELGIUM" "
Participatory democracy, solidarity, relinquishment of particular interests, integration: these are the key words that recur in the document: “Which political control of world business and financial activities? Issued a few days ago by Belgium’s Justice and Peace Commission (which can be consulted at www.justicepaix.be) The document examines the global economic crisis inverting the prevailing position of technocracy and placing the human person at the centre, thus providing an ethical understanding of the situation with the proposal of a reform of the international financial system based on an authority that will secure the common good through the tool of collective deliberation, i.e. an “truly political authority”. Austerity measures. The Justice and Peace Commission, in the light of the fact that financial, economic and social and human orders are interdependent, analyses the latest financial crisis, broke out in 2008 and still lingering on. The document points out that world crises occurred since the end of WW2, although different in nature, have all been addressed with austerity plans. These measures are deemed “suicidal”: having been adopted year after year in radical terms, “thereby leading countries to mutually neutralize one another with the reduction of purchasing power”, prompting the adoption of a “utilitarian form of liberalism imposed on a global society that has never chosen it”. The report also focuses on the division between financial and political powers: “central banks have decided to be independent from policymakers”. This decision, state the authors of the document, leads to “administrating things instead of people. In fact, the social and human elements are cut out”. The problem of equality and justice. Austerity measures have affected citizens in a discriminatory, non-egalitarian manner, with inevitable anti-social consequences, which violate human rights, such as unemployment, violence and forced immigration. For Christians – and not only for them – recall the authors of the document, the purpose of economy, quoting from Paul VI, is “the development of the individual and of the human race as a whole”, i.e., a principle of equality, which encompasses non-material values such as freedom, security and religious identity. “None of these objectives – the document underlines – is unconnected to the economy, which is inextricably bound to human finalities, and to legally recognized human rights”. The moral implications of political decisions, thus justify the intervention in the Churches’ democratic debate, provided that “the principle of the ecclesia semper reformanda is adopted, namely, that of a Church that is near the thought of contemporary men and women”, states the document. Politics as a guarantor. The question is therefore “authentically political”, as it involves collective decisions for the common good. Unfortunately though – the authors of the document denounce – private interests guide political decisions disguised as ‘scientific'”. The implementation “of authentic participatory democracy procedures, thus recovering local solidarity undermined by crisis and austerity”, is the “only feasible option”. The establishment of a “new institutional and juridical architecture” tasked with realizing social justice through democratic and participatory tools, should be coupled by “a value system and by political supervision, so as to ensure that the final goal of all policies is always the common good”. That’s why the political realm “must recover its primacy on the economy, on nationalisms and their egoisms”, thus “inverting the hierarchy of finance, giving priority to the human person”. A change that people can make. What is mostly needed, the document underlines, is “the recovery of an integral reason, which is the foundation of an ethics that is near the human person and his/her wellbeing, open to transcendence”. This requires “educating citizens to distance themselves from personal interests, however legitimate, and help them overcome their fears”. Immediate actions ought to be coupled by long-term actions, aimed at the “recovery of democracy and solidarity”, “enabling organizations and societal movements, the Church and other communities of thought, to have a say in the decisions of the technical-bureaucratic European Commission. Only in this way will it be possible to carry out an “ethical awakening”, capable of “bringing humanity back on the right tracks”. The human person is the primary recipient of this awakening, the sole promoter of “European and international cohesion, marked by less technocracy and more solidarity”. The document concludes: only “by making citizens and policymakers more concerned of social cohesion than of immediate profit, will austerity measures be accepted, whereby sacrifice is equally shared, in the respect of everyone’s dignity”.
