Before he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease last year, the historian Tony Judt recalled childhood days just after World War II in a debilitated Britain that was slowly ceding its empire and its pre-eminence.
“Clothes were rationed until 1949, cheap and simple ‘utility furniture’ until 1952, food until 1954,” he wrote in a memoir, concluding that austerity in “that bare-bones age” was “not just an economic condition: it aspired to a public ethic.”
It was not just in Britain.
A continent was reeling, its cities and industries ruined. As Soviet communism threatened to encroach and the Cold War loomed, Western Europe awaited the salvation of the US Marshall Plan. Cars were few and small, vacations modest and belts tight.
As it confronts its massive debt problem, though, and a new austerity threatens to become its default setting, Europe seems to have lost sight of the fact that it has been there before; that the baby boom generation found its roots in postwar hardship; that, as Judt suggested, the huge affluence of more recent years could barely have been imagined as people struggled to shake off the gloom of war.
The difference now is that the taste for wealth, the aspiration to automatic betterment and the assumption of ever-expanding horizons have become universal, cemented by the growth of the EU and the adoption of a single currency, the euro, that has spread a leavening of prosperity among the 17 countries in the union that use it.
In Judt’s early days, after the grinding deprivation of a world war, austerity trumped global conflict. Now, the point of departure is prosperity, a fool’s paradise in which Europeans came to see affluence as a state of being and a birthright.
As politicians slowly and reluctantly confront the reality that the bounty days are over, what makes the challenge so explosive is not simply a question of economics; it is one of expectations and cultural divides.
In the lands of southern Europe, used to getting by with wile and guile, the prospect of hardship seems all the more bitter, illuminating, as it does, what outsiders cast as an all-too--predictable national failure to live up to the membership rules of the euro club devised and watched over by hard-nosed Germany in particular.
Modern austerity could never be described as an ethic; for southern European nations squirming under pressure from the continent’s wealthier northern lands, it is an affront to come to grips with the legacies of economic ill-discipline, and in the north, it is a high price to pay to rescue the profligate south.
Austerity is a time-bomb ticking ever louder.
“Now the dominoes will move west,” Costas Douzinas, a professor of law in London, wrote in the Guardian newspaper after the fall of former Greek prime minister George Papandreou, depicting the implosion of the Athens government as a result of popular anger that the elites “are unable to comprehend or contain.”
“The elite’s fear of ‘contagion’ should not be just about the euro,” he said. “They should also fear Greek resistance spreading across Europe.”
In a way, that could already be happening.
Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi promised to go on Nov. 8 and did so on Saturday last week.
In London, where demonstrators have taken up residence in an encampment outside St Paul’s Cathedral, emulating the occupations that have spread in New York and other US cities, students took to the streets to protest increased college tuition fees; disgruntled electricians and disconsolate cab drivers staged demonstrations of their own.
As the riots in London and elsewhere in August seemed to show, the profound gulf between the haves and have-nots has been magnified by the inequalities and envies of a society that has built its newest altars to consumption and greed.
If there is discontent now at the prospect of a modern austerity far less onerous than the hardships evoked by Judt, then there is also a sense of uneven payback for years of prosperity when, in Britain, well-being exploded on levels of credit and consumption that now seem inconceivable.
Just two weeks ago, as the St Paul’s protesters railed against capitalism, the Royal Bank of Scotland — majority-owned by British taxpayers, who bailed it out after the meltdown of 2008 — was reported to be planning to set aside US$800 million in bonuses for bankers seen by many as authors of the nation’s malaise.
Yet the lesson for Europe’s elites is not so much that they are threatened by popular dissent. Papandreou and Berlusconi both survived anger and denunciation on the cobblestones of their capitals. What brought them down was a global debt market that pushed the cost of borrowing beyond affordable levels: markets made the bad habit of living beyond one’s means simply too expensive.
In Greece and Italy, as in Ireland and Portugal before them, unelected bond traders defined the destiny of elected leaders. By the end of last week the market jitters had spread to Spain and France.
“If the leaders of the eurozone want to save their currency, then they, together with the institutions of the eurozone, must act now,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose country does not use the common currency of its major trading partners, but shares their fears of protracted decline. “The longer the delay, the greater the danger.”
In Judt’s day, austerity guaranteed a minimum level of access to basic supplies, the harbinger of better days; now, austerity is about the removal or diminution of jobs, pensions, comforts and benefits that have accrued since then — the herald, thus, of much darker times.
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