Quoth Dennis Redmond, in part, rebutting Doug:
> [..T]he resistance to Maastricht monetarism in Europe is several hundred
> million degrees hotter than the feeble, disorganized sparks of resistance
> in America to the rule of Wall Street. Practically every Germany
> university was rocked by humongous student strikes last December; the DGB,
> the German version of the AFL-CIO, has been getting uppity recently, doing
> protest demos and doing some active politicking (mostly to make the
> Conservatives look bad, but there are some interesting new initiatives in
> the field of reducing work-time and shifting to ecological production).
> The disconnect between Europe's elites and their citizens is certainly as
> great as the one between US elites and ordinary folk, it's just that those
> socialist traditions are stronger and the working class more organized.
I generally agree with Dennis's points here, but he's also skating around
a paradox. In the struggle of America and other states against the forces
of globalization, suddenly we find that nationalism - a phenomenon with such
a bad historical odor - can become a highly progressive stance. Indeed,
unless we dare to acknowledge this we fail to be sufficiently dialectical.
By restricting social conflict to straightforward class dynamics,
the ethnic uniformity of European states helps to bring forth the political
conditions that Dennis so admires; I wonder, however, whether European
integration will ultimately falter by the same token. Perhaps it will
require more external demons of just the sort globalization provides.
valis
