If Europe is not for something then it is good for nothing. I propose that we think of Europe as being for flourishing...

...We do not need to be embarrassed at the simplicity of the notion that flourishing comes first. Few Americans would blush at the thought that at its core the United States is for freedom, no matter how complicated and problematic that idea turns out to be when concretely manifested, or how far we currently are from that regulative ideal. Perhaps Europeans need to shed some of their insecurity and cynicism and proclaim Europe to be for something. We don’t need to worry about over-simplification; politics always turns out complicated.  The self-proclaimed realists will scoff, but they always do.  Derision and over-complication are political weapons too – “we’d love to shut down these overseas tax havens, but it’s more complicated than that”. The question to ask is if Europe and the European project are not first and foremost about flourishing, then what on Earth could they be for?  (read more)

In the next couple of weeks we'll be launching our editorial partnership with the global commons openDemocracy.net. The post-Europe project will have a devoted partnership page in the oD commons with the title: EUROPE, THE VERY IDEA. Some of our contributors couldn't wait, so here's a little taster of the great debate to come.

Anya Topolski, "From the Idea of Europe, to a Europe of Ideas"
Contrary to the maxim popularised by political scientists that there is no political community without a political identity, what Europe most needs is a political community without identity... (read more)

Teresa Pullano, "Europe, A Concrete Idea"
The rise of the far-right parties and more generally of the anti-European or euro-sceptic ones, such as the British UKIP, is a clear sign that moderate solutions to the current crisis are not enough any more... (read more)

Darian Meacham writing in the openDemocracy digital commons on the boundaries of political solidarity: Europeans are getting poorer, do you care?

Is the nation-state still the most viable form of political community or have the pressures of globalization reduced its possibility to maintain the well-being of its citizens in such a manner that we should look to a larger community of reciprocal solidarity, namely Europe? ...

In the past month or so the Belgian Postal Service (Bpost) has lost two items of mine, one was a registered letter containing important documents that were costly to replace, and the other was a Christmas gift for my daughter. Let's just say, I am not exactly a believer in Bpost's new snappy motto: 'ready for tomorrow'. In fairness to Bpost, their customer service (both by phone and twitter) have been responsive, what they have not done is offer any apologies or regrets, nor have they been able to find any of my stuff! For the record, they have denied that Amazon ever shipped the gift for my daughter and just sort of shrugged about the lost registered letter. 

This got me thinking about the perils of moving important public services into the domain of the private sector (the Belgian government does still control 50% + 1 share of the public limited liability company Bpost). With the privatisation of the postal service there are no longer any (fully) publicly controlled means of communication between individuals, groups and public institutions. I think it is safe to say that nearly all of our communication, not done face to face, is mediated by private corporations. In a democratic society this seems highly problematic for a very simple reason. The very essence of democratic conduct is public communication in and on the interests of the common good. When this is to a very large extent mediated if not fully controlled by private companies whose primary directive is to generate profit and thus in potential conflict with the common good, there is good reason to believe that these private interests might not always be the neutral and transparent mechanisms of communication that we have come to see them as. In short, there is a risk that the capacity for public communication, one of the foundational aspects of a democratic society, is being eroded by privatisation. Of course today the telecoms are the most obvious example of this - to control an internet connection is more or less these days to control the flow of information and communication between citizens and institutional bodies. If I wish to contact even my local government (other than by spending a day waiting around at city hall) I must pass through a private telecoms company or postal service. 
 
On a more mundane level, when responsibility for running mechanisms of public communication like the postal service is passed into private hands it is seemingly always accompanied by drop in quality. To give a local example, according to the Dernier Heure (a Belgian Newspaper) 'En 2010, quelque 237.475 demandes de recherche d’envois postaux ont été adressées à bpost. C’est une hausse de… 70,5 % par rapport aux 139.246 demandes recensées en 2009 !' Truncated translation: that's a 70,5% increase in requests to find out where the heck my mail has gone in one year! Bpost contests accusations that the quality of their service has diminished, adding that according to their internal investigations 93% of domestic letters arrived within two days. But ask nearly anyone in Belgium what they think of the new privatised postal service and they'll tell to to avoid it to whatever extent possible. 

The basic questions surrounding the privatisation of the postal service are the same as those surrounding the privatisation of any essential public service. Can a private enterprise whose primary goal is to draw profit be expected to offer the same level of service as a public service whose only goal is to provide that service? In certain cases - privatisation of telecoms being an example - a liberalised market with sufficient competition may drive innovation leading to improvements in service and drop in price. But even in such cases major infrastructure investment is most often done by governments. In other sectors - rail in the UK, postal service in Belgium - a near monopoly is maintained by a sole provider with no discernable benefit to the service user. In other areas - water, energy - it is hard to see any rational for privatisation beyond an ideological attachement to the market. These are concrete and tangible day to day issues and they should certainly give us some pause.

But, beyond the frustration of wondering where the heck my mail has gone, or if I have set the privacy setting correctly for my gmail, or facebook account, it is the political question that worries me most: what is the risk of privatising the mechanisms of communication in a diminished public sphere, where communication between citizens is ever more reliant on internet and phone connections. Do we trust companies whose sole function is to generate a profit to be in effect the mediators and even arbitrators of the fundamentals of democratic society?     

According to Athens News, an English speaking Greek newspaper, Larissa, in the circled area above is home to the greatest concentration of Porsche Cayenne owners in Europe (From the FT). The full report by Nikolaos Artavanis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: Adair Morse, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, NBER; Margarita Tsoutsoura, University of Chicago Booth School of Business is below.

One of the major intellectual stumbling blocks in having a clear and honest debate about the Greek situation and by extension the situation throughout the entire European Union is an unrelenting and pure naïveté, if not stupidity, in the way that the situation is discussed: wide swathes of the European media talk about Greeks and Greece as though what we are dealing with was simply one monolithic entity. This kind of thinking seems to be the residue of the most naive form of ethno-national thinking and a desperate fear of returning to a class based analysis. Within any national population there will be a multitude of groups with different behaviours, and most importantly different interests, in Greece at the moment it makes sense to address this in terms of a straightforward class analysis. The free movement of capital in the EU has made this all the more the case. It is simply not coherent or honest to talk about the situation in Greece as though the rich, middle class and poor all behave in the same way, or have behaved in the same way or have the same interests. And yet this seems to be how the discourse in the European media is most often structured.

Wealthy Greeks who have never paid taxes in their lives and have long since moved their money abroad shrug at the thought of a hungry winter for their fellow citizens (as do wealthy technocrats and politicians in Brussels and Berlin); by contrast poor and an increasing number of middle class Greeks now sliding toward poverty are in a state of panic. There is no national unity and certainly no national solidarity spilling from the wealthy suburbs of northern Athens (nor any European unity spilling from the wealthy streets of Brussels’s European Quarter). The non tax-paying upper classes, oligarchs and generations of corrupt politicians who are at the root of the crisis are not one with those who will suffer as food prices rise and pensions and salaries are cut, and they no longer even pretend to represent the interests of those fellow Greek or European citizens who will go hungry and without adequate medical care or housing this winter simply as a result of ideological intransigence in Berlin and Brussels...and Paris, and den Haag and...perhaps worst of all Athens. They don't have to, no one calls them on it because the debate is too often framed in the most naive of terms: ‘Greeks are like this, Greece is like that, Greece must do this or that’.

Simply put, those who have brought about the crisis in Greece are ideologically aligned with the neo-liberals of Brussels and Berlin who as a way out of the crisis propose dismantling essential safeguards that have been established over the past 50 years (and much more recently in Greece) to protect European citizens from the harsh realities of unregulated free market capitalism. This will come at the expense of the quality of life of the middle and lower classes. Any yet, most of the European media remains shockingly blind or silent about this situation. Even the New York Times – hardly the mouthpiece of social democracy –is thoughtful enough to report that if there is violence in Athens this autumn and winter, it will in large part be because the government in Athens has done nothing to address the crimes of those who have ravaged the country for personal gain:

'unrest seems increasingly inevitable. After two and a half years of cutbacks, a fifth straight year of grinding recession, and a jobless rate that is now above 23 percent, many Greeks are livid at the prospect of more cuts. The public refrained from holding protests during the elections. But now that Mr. Samaras is trying to impose more cuts on average workers — but none on the oligarchs or on wealthy Greeks suspected of stashing their money in foreign accounts — many people have been taking to the streets in recent days, ahead of the troika’s visit.'

No big surprise there, the government in Athens is largely composed of and supported by the oligarchs or on wealthy Greeks suspected of stashing their money in foreign accounts.

As Vincente Navarro recently wrote in Social Europe Journal, the pleas of people like Greek PM Samaras for a bit more time do not issue from an understanding of the damage that the neo-liberal demands of the Troika (EU, IMF, ECB) are inflicting on the Greek population, especially the poor and middle classes. Rather any request for more time is for the sake of avoiding civil unrest and violence that may derail the drastic changes to the state that economic liberals like Samaras (and apparently his Pasok partners) fully endorse: cuts in all forms of public infrastructure (including health and education), lowering pensions below sustenance levels and the sale of state assets to private interests. 

What may be the most perverse aspect of the situation is that it is the poor and middle classes who are most often publicly blamed. It's time to change the frame of the debate by returning to a class based analysis that is blindingly obvious in its relevance and is not – as many liberal and social democratic politicians alike would like us to believe – a relic of another age. 

Addendum 10/09/2012: This is precisely the kind of thing that I am talking about outgoing Dutch PM 'Mark Rutte, declared in a TV debate that Greece is not getting another euro of Dutch taxpayers' money'. Does it make no difference to Rutte or to Dutch voters where in Greece that money is going?

Darian Meacham, Brussels

Here is a piece that I wrote for openDemocracy on austerity, political legitimacy and the current political crisis facing Europe:
'Severe austerity measures cause malnutrition, homelessness and suicides across southern Europe. European institutions that apparently fail to protect their citizens from harm lose their legitimacy. The pro-European left should defend the values, not the institutions, of Europe and the quality of life of all its inhabitants'

You can follow the link above or read and download the paper from Scribd below