A view of the main conference hall. (Credit: Egmont Institute)

Last week’s high-level Belgo-German Dialogue took place far from your typical dour Brussels conference rooms, but rather was held in the elegant and beautiful Egmont Palace, built by an 16^th Century noble and statesman, and the current home of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

It was also novel in that there was no English interpretation but all was said in the countries’ national languages of French, Dutch or German. The participants were also representatives of national organizations rather than veteran EU insiders. There was more authenticity, more character to the speeches and exchanges than the sometimes robotic, buzzword-laden Euro-English one hears from EU officials and Brussels lobbying groups.

It can seem a small thing, but it contributed to the frankness of the discussions even if the debate – on the “Agenda 2010” economic reforms passed in Germany in the early 2000s, credited for that country’s economic success but also for increasing social insecurity and imbalances in the eurozone – led to the most part to a fairly predictable Belgo-German split.

Orwell in Brussels

As George Orwell noted long ago, the use of language in politics is no minor concern. The lack of democracy at European level, that we can all see, is above all due to the need to respect national sensibilities. EU officials in Frankfurt and Brussels couch their speech in bureaucratic jargon, consensual platitudes and sheer verbosity so that, insofar as it is possible, no waves are made in any country.

This is because one country, especially a large one, can block a policy for the entire Union so as to protect its particular national sacred cow (say farm policy for France, financial services for the United Kingdom, monetary policy for Germany). As the editor of EUobserver, Honor Mahony, noted in a recent blog post lamenting the absence of “straight talk” at EU summits:

The EU leaders at the March summit “endorse” certain broad stroke “priorities” such as promoting “growth” or tackling “unemployment”. They reader thinks ‘déjà vu’ and ‘blindingly obvious’ in equal measure. […]

This [kind of empty talk] is partly due to having 27 people sitting around the table and partly due to a tacit agreement nobody should ruffle anybody else’s feathers.

It is by this kind of reasoning that the European Commission decided to reorganize its previous budgetary policies – the rather appropriately-named “Common Agricultural Policy” (farm subsidies) and “Regional Policy” (redistribution to poorer regions)  take up the overwhelming majority of the EU budget – under the new indecipherable headings “Sustainable Growth” and “Preservation and management of natural resources”.

This may help to push policy forward but it also leads to a citizenry that is confused and cynical for not being spoken to plainly and clearly. It also undermines clear democratic debate on these policies.

The question of democracy and international understanding is important because, now that we are living with a common currency, the actions of one affect all with far greater intensity than before. If the eurozone is to exist (not a given these days!), there needs to be a massive strengthening of European power.

As former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who gave the conference’s keynote speech, said “one cannot have a common monetary zone without common finance, economic and social policies. […] This, for example, applies to growth initiatives, structural reforms, and proposals to strengthen the European institutions at the expense of the nation-states.”

Towards a European democracy?

The question then becomes: Who is to determine these common policies, who is to wield this European power? How can this power be democratic and transparent given the decidedly mixed record of EU government?

We are seeing democracy at work in France, where incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy looks to be heading towards defeat in the face of Socialist candidate François Hollande. Should the latter win, the Fiscal Pact – mandates balanced budgets over the medium term by national governments – will have to be reformed, and its legitimacy will be greatly strengthened by having the bipartisan backing of both Europe’s Christian Democratic and Social Democratic traditions.

Europe’s leaders are also looking ahead. EU foreign ministers at a recent “reflection group” meeting reportedly considered the creation of a merged European Commission and Council presidency who will be chosen by the victors of the 2014 elections to the European Parliament. Surely the replacement of the current occupants – the unknown Herman Van Rompuy and José Manuel Barroso – by a common president, whose face would be known across Europe, benefiting from the legitimacy of an electoral mandate, would be a vast improvement on the current situation.

It would hardly be a silver bullet however. The power of national government to block things and rule by power would remain, as would the risk that the European Union become a dysfunctional “vetocracy”. As such the incentives to resort to Brussels Blahblah will remain. Beyond political and institutional changes, there needs to be a revolution in the entire working culture of national governments and Europeans institutions in Brussels and Frankfurt, to not portray every initiative as apolitical, self-evident and innocuous. But to genuinely debate and attack, as they would in national politics. Otherwise, the new Europe will simply be made without the citizen, and we’ve seen how costly this can be.

This would be an experiment and there is no telling if it would succeed. Many multinational unions have failed or, like Belgium or Canada, face recurring crises because of their ethnic tensions. But there are counterexamples too: India – for all its poverty, linguistic diversity, religious tensions and 28 states – is by most measures a successful democracy. And if the Indians can do it, why not us? There is no telling if a democratic Europe will succeed, but a bureaucratic one will surely fail.

François Mitterrand, Socialist French President and one of the fathers of the euro. (Credit: Institut François Mitterrand)

“Europe will be Socialist or it will not be.” Such were the words of François Mitterrand in 1978, the man who would go on to serve as the French Fifth Republic’s first and thus far only Socialist President. Over three decades later, Mitterrand is dead, and there’s not much left of Socialism either. The “really existing Socialism” of Soviet Europe is gone but, more troubling, so is democratic Europe’s tradition of social democracy.

Centre-left leaders govern a tiny minority of EU citizens, being limited to Austria, Belgium and Denmark, often within fragile coalitions. As a result, Europe’s conservatives have been left to manage the eurozone crisis virtually unchallenged and, as it has turned out, they have proven incapable of preventing economic disaster. Europeans face permanent crisis on the financial markets, a double-dip recession that no other region has, and rapidly-rising record unemployment of 10.8%.

But if the right has failed, why is the left non-existent? It was not so long ago that socialist and social democratic premiers such as Lionel Jospin, Romano Prodi and Gerhard Schröder ruled in Europe.

Schröder, Germany’s last social democratic Chancellor, was present at last week’s high-level Belgo-German Dialogue held in Brussels. The debate that was held on his signature “Agenda 2010” reforms (started in 2003) illustrated as well as anything the incoherence of the European Left and, in particular, the near-irreconcilable differences between the French and German approaches to social democracy.

Economic success at social cost

The French Left had always criticized Agenda 2010 for being against the values of social democracy: the ambitious and complex package after all included tax cuts (including a 6.5% point reduction for the wealthiest), labor liberalization, welfare reforms, and an increase in the retirement age from 65 to 67 years.

It was not surprising to hear the Belgian liberal and current Foreign Minister Didier Reynders praise the reforms, congratulating Schröder for, “the joy of seeing, many years later, one’s country becoming a model.” Indeed, Germany’s economic success has made it the mistress of the eurozone and the envy of many other European governments.

However Schröder’s own speech was not without self-criticism. He said the reforms to encourage a shift of the unemployed to the “low-wage sector” were “being abused by employers who are trying to reduce their labor costs.”

Similarly, the facilitation of temporary contracts had led to the replacement of permanent contracts and a more economically insecure workforce. “With this part of the reform agenda we wanted to make it easier for companies to cope with peak workloads. But if companies are going to use the law in order to replace parts of the core workforce, then that is an abuse which must be stopped,” he said.

Philippe Van Parijs, a professor at the Université Catholique de Louvain and Oxford University, painted an even less attractive picture of a country which had gone from being one of the most egalitarian and economically secure to simply mediocre.

He pointed to the OECD’s “Divided We Stand Report” report showing that inequality in Germany had risen from almost Nordic lows to the average among developed countries following Agenda 2010. In addition, both economic insecurity and poverty in the country increased. Another OECD report points to a sharp rise in the poverty rate from 9% to 11% during the early-mid 2000s, making wealthy Germany actually worse in this respect than the average.

Economic success at Europe’s expense

All these, by any measure, must be deemed serious failures for any leader who claims to be the heir of German Social Democracy’s venerable tradition. However, they might be tolerable if they were absolutely necessary to the country’s economic success, without which there can be neither job-creation nor growth to fund the welfare state.

The trouble is that many economists believe this economic success came at the expense of other European countries. In this analysis, labor costs in Germany no longer rose in line with the European average, so investment moved from other eurozone countries to Germany, and German growth was driven by exports to the peripheral countries’ unsustainable deficits and economic bubbles. For critics, the Schröder model of growth has something of the appearance vast trans-European Ponzi scheme.

A largely positive article on the German model in The Economist (no bleeding-heart leftists, they), had this to say about its pernicious effect on Europe:

Above all, the country’s hair-shirt philosophy that favors austerity over growth, saving over spending, and foreign over domestic demand has often been damaging. It has held down Germans’ living standards (despite faster growth, personal consumption has risen by less than in the rest of Europe over the past decade). And it has been catastrophic for the rest of the eurozone as Germany has acted, in effect, as a drag on demand.

The worst part however is that now that countries are locked in the eurozone, there are no simple ways of rebalancing trade. They can no longer devalue their currencies to regain competitiveness relative to Germany, nor can the non-existent Deutschmark appreciate. The only possibility is to  pursue what is called “internal devaluation” in the peripheral countries – across the board cuts to wages and prices of 20-30% (which whatever one thinks about it in theory, it is basically politically and socially impossible).

Professor Van Parijs made a damning assessment of how deadly the combination of Agenda 2010 and the euro are for the European social model: There is a “race to the bottom,” as the peripheral countries implement similar inegalitarian cuts to social protections and welfare to again become competitive with Germany, so Germany will want to regain its position through “another turn of the screw” by further weakening its social model.

“Without a major change we are going to stay in this vicious circle,” Van Parijs concluded.

Schröder himself recognized and embraced this logic in his speech, when he urged further Agenda 2010-style reforms for his country “because other European states are now adopting painful reforms and thus improving their competitiveness to the detriment of Germany.”

Towards a new consensus of the European Left?

The European Left’s coherence is becoming an important now that Socialist François Hollande looks likely to win the French presidential elections on 6 May and the “austerity coalition” further weakens with the fall of the Dutch government. Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition will hold election in 2013 where it looks her unpopular free-market allies, the Free Democrats, will be purely and simply eliminated (admittedly much can occur between now and then).

But while it is clear the existing management is failing, what alternative vision, if any, there could be is unclear. There is clearly a new European majority forming against austerity alone. Schröder, albeit no longer in politics, shared part of Hollande’s criticism of the eurozone’s new fiscal discipline treaty saying, “So we need to add a growth component to the thoroughly sensible fiscal compact. And for this purpose we could, for example, use the revenues from a financial transaction tax, which is something that I am in favor of.”

But in other respects, the chasm between governments is as wide as ever. Agenda 2010 shows how great the differences between the French and German centre-lefts can be. But it is hardly the only issue. Indeed, Hollande’s ideas about central banking have more in common with Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative David Cameron, or indeed Barack Obama, than with Social Democrats across the Rhine.

Hollande has called on the European Central Bank to directly finance states – the way the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan do – but this will never be accepted by Germany. The Germans can quite rightly, point out that this is explicitly forbidden by the European Treaties the rules of which were, not incidentally, negotiated by the Socialist Mitterrand and ratified by the French people by referendum in 1992.

Europe is necessarily about give-and-take and compromise. Germany has given a great deal over the years, above all financially, but it is also true that the costs of the crisis borne by some countries have been not simply disproportional, but inhuman. One cannot declare that entire nations are doomed to 30 or 50% youth unemployment for a decade without first doing all within one’s power to prevent it. The way forward will require a new European consensus. But if this consensus cannot first be made, between French and Germans within the European Left, then it cannot exist for Europe as a whole.

While the Indian city of Pune boasts of being one of the IT hubs in the country, the plight of the poor has not changed a bit. As authorities pay a deaf ear to these problems, only a God’s home can home the homeless like this one, who is finding a place in a temple on the lane where I stay, to save himself from the scorching heat on a Sunday afternoon.

This picture reflects the most urban part of Skardu town situated in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan. This part is known for its natural beauty but this view is the inside of a huge market known as New Bazaar (Naya Bazaar). It has hundreds of shops that offer almost everything from trekking supplies, souvenirs, local goods, and eatables. Skardu is technologically way behind the idea of urban cities but it has its own definition of urbanness as reflected in the picture!

Preserving the Forts – in this mountainous area – to increase sustainability of Skardu as the people here generate a huge amount of budget through its tourist resorts.

Like any other metropolitan city, Santiago, in Chile is also highly over populated. Traffic is such a serious issue in the valley of Santiago that the government has to regulate the number of vehicles on the road. The use of bicycles could be a perfect solution to control the traffic and pollution in this city which holds one third of the Chilean population, but the authorities are negligent and infrastructure like track ways, necessary for the use of bicycles, are in bad shape or missing in most of the roads. For bicycle enthusiasts like my brother (in the picture) and his friends; it is hard to find a place to ride their bicycles.

In winter everybody talks about Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution and it has often been mentioned that our home city has become the most air-polluted city of the world.

As written in  UB post Mongolia’s capital suffers from air pollution that harms health and that even causes the death of some of its dwellers. People living downtown are breathing six times more toxic air than normal and those who live in ger districts of Ulaanbaatar are breathing air that is 18 times worse than normal.

Photo by D.Tserennadmid

But my home town Ulaanbaatar does not always have such dirty air as mentioned. It’s only in winter when outside temperatures fall below minus 30 -40 degrees Celsius.

Photo by J.Otgo, suburb of Ulanbaatar, Gher area

This is how it looks like at eastern side of Bratislava, Slovak capital, just nearby the shopping center. It is necessary to note that this area was cleaned just few weeks ago. And that EU unfortunately does not push for plastic bags ban in its countries (also) because of possible loss of over 15 000 related jobs. Planned reduction of bags usage is not threat for them?

Right next to the State Library of Queensland, in its Capital city Brisbane (Australia), an exercise in urban sustainable living is underway! The Urban Garden is about knowing where the food we eat comes from, sharing the agricultural experiences and using the spaces in our city better.

Brisbane's Urban Garden

The Prinzessinnengarten is an open garden in the middle of Berlin, were anyone can lend a hand, plant vegetables, learn about ecological agriculture and foster biodiversity.

The garden was opened in 2009 on a 6000 m² vacant lot. Today the garden brings together hundreds of neighbours and friends. It consists of mobile beets where anyone can plant something or take care of a plant. The beets don’t belong to anybody, they are the result of common work. People who lend a hand can purchase the produced bio vegetable to a price lower than in the low cost supermarkets. Others will have to pay some more.

The Prinzessinnengarten is an interesting way of making quality products accessible to a wider public, fostering knowledge about nature and relations between neighbours. And in a sense, it enables the people to reappropriate the city.

The “Independence Angel” is a monument that symbolizes the Mexican nation. In this street called “Reforma” you can find some of the tallest buildings, lots of vehicles and a great place to walk for a while. Also when the Mexican football team plays you can go there and get crazy.