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Slovakia rejects most recent round of bailouts, demonstrating exactly how rickety the 17 country ratification process is. It is unclear whether a new government there — the existing one fell as a result of the bailout ratification effort — will recant, and now EU officials are talking about a ‘workaround’: basically preparing to move ahead with the bailout without ratification by the Slovaks.
UAW uses Facebook and other social tools to open up and involve members in discussions with Ford leading to a new contract. Creating community through loose ties.
Zak talks about the ‘moral molecule’ — oxytocin.
Tim De Chant discusses the rise of the metabolic theory through the work of Kleiber, West, Brown, and Enquist.
A real time map of NY food trucks.
Spain’s government is considering a restriction on the free immigration of EU citizens into the country, specifically Romanians. This is just another sign that the EU’s collective solidarity is being unmade by a down economy, and pointing the way toward the future of Europe, which is to break apart into a hundred or so language-based regions, operating under a a common agreement, as a league.
It may also be the case that the boundaries of this league of autonomous regions will contract: perhaps Romania and other peripheral countries will be left out.
Perhaps other regions will find great common cause. For example, the Baltic countries — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland — may find that common cooperation in joint activities and agreements could be beneficial. That region might decide to supprt Schengen-style immigration rules, even when the EU Schengen agreement is in serious decline elsewhere. Note the recent decision by the Danish government to strengthen passport controls on its borders with Germany and Sweden.
I also anticipate that the debt burdens of some countries might accelerate their dissolution. For example, Catalonia is already a semi-autonomous region of Spain, but in the future — when the European Union falls apart — Catalonia may want even more autonomy.
Catalonia is a great example of what the future of Europe might be like. A region dominated my a large metropolitan area — Barcelona — where the great majority of commercial, governmental, and cultural innovation occurs, and around which the outlying areas provide food, materials, and resources for the growing urban population of the urban center.
A similar model is found in the UK — a country dominated by London, and where Scotland may break off independently, while Wales may find itself too closely integrated to split. Denmark and Copenhagen is another example.
The break up of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia showed that even mini-unions composed of discordant language and cultural groups had no place in the modern world. Belgium is likely to break into two regions, of French and Flemish speaking peoples. The Basque might finally get their homeland, and the breakaway interstitial country of Transnistria could get official blessing. Why aren’t Corsica and Sardina independent, again?
Yes, German reconnected East Germany after the fall of the USSR, but that stands out as an exception to the trend. And many West Germans may regret having done it, now.
The borders of European countries are largely holdovers from wars fought generations, if not centuries, ago, or the deals struck between long-dead kings. They often have no more utility than the court dress of ceremonial guards.
But for a real change of this sort to occur, the cult of the EU will have to die out. And a different set of beliefs will have to come to the fore. Or perhaps the rise of a common set of disbeliefs. Why should anyone living in Europe trust their leaders to make the right decisions, after the mess the continent’s finances are in? I bet the younger generation don’t buy into the old dreams. They aren’t haunted by WWII.
The Eurozone is failing, and debt-burdened countries will defect, opting to have their own currencies, which they can manipulate to better resolve regional financial difficulties.
We can anticipate the desire of Catalonia to create and use its own currency, once Spain falls out of the Eurozone. Catalonia will opt out of the peseta-zone.
What to expect, then, ten years or more in the future? A Europe of loosely-connected, cooperating regions, regions dominated by regional urban centers, or ‘metros’. Not a unified EU with a single unified identity, currency, and set of laws. Instead, a network of metros agreeing to cooperate in various ways, but not to cede control of local issues to the whole. Europe will be a connective, not a collective.
Connectives cooperate: members support each other because they are drifting in the same general direction, most of the time. Collectives share a single common set of goals, and operate in a lock-step fashion.
Europe today is neither: it is caught between two chairs, and has no place to sit, as a result.
[Note that I believe than the US is naturally trending toward more of a connective approach to government, where major urban centers will become even more important as we become a more urban society. But the US is a federation, already, and has been for hundreds of years. I wouldn’t imagine we will see the dissolution of the union. However, we might see a reorganization of government, so that metro NY, for example, would not be (mis)governed by four different states.]
A connected Europe of the sort I envision is messy: it has no single head, no easy handle to grab. It is a heterogeneous crowd of small metros, pursuing their own ends, and part of the time in direct competition with each other. It’s not a state, not a collective union marching in unison toward a single shared tomorrow.
But then, that is the lay of the future world, if we are lucky. Thousands of metros, cooperating with their neighbors and others, perhaps far away, but acting in limited and local ways to make their citizens happy and healthy. And from the viewpoint of building a sustainable and resilient world, a better bet for our future on earth.
That’s why I think the groundswell in Europe is away from union, and toward a connective of hundreds of increasingly autonomous metros. There is a common disbelief in the value of being big and tight, at the expense of the autonomy from remaining small and loose. So expect a European League of metros to replace a European Union of countries.
Competition over scarce water and land, exacerbated by regional changes in climate, are already a key factor in local-level conflicts in Darfur, the Central African Republic, northern Kenya, and Chad, for example — when livelihoods are threatened by declining natural resources, people either innovate, flee or can be brought into conflict.
In total, 145 countries share one or more international river basins. Changes in water flows, amplified by climate change, could be a major source of tension between states, especially those that lack the capacity for co-management and cooperation.
Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, speaking about water’s importance in regional conflict, UN official: Climate change could lead to conflicts
Guillermo Sullings via
Today most of the world works under the rules of globalised capitalism, and this is set up around Darwinian social behaviour, individualism and an eagerness for consumerism. Although there are many people who are starting to have a different type of sensitivity, the mechanism continues to work, and continues to feed the materialist culture. However, this new sensitivity, which is gradually appearing in many people, though not enough to change the system yet; helps highlight the contradictions and it is there that room is made for a ray of hope.
So we could say that as an initial basis for the economy of a new civilization, there needs to be a deepening of the sensitisation in terms of the need for a deep rooted change of paradigms. And although the image of how this new economy that we are striving towards would be does need to be traced, to be as close as possible to the collective image, what is essential is that through this image new cultural values are born, in harmony with the new born sensitivity, to the point that a new social mysticism is developed.
The valuing of reciprocity as a mode of relations between people, and therefore also of economic relationships, could be encouraged as a certain attitude to life, and this would bring a transforming dynamic to relationships. Unlike simple humanitarian solidarity which not only tends to naturalize the system of relationships between the “helpers” and the “helped” but also it is unlikely to establish itself in most people outside of formal rhetoric.
A critical and self-critical attitude towards irrational consumerism should incorporate itself in this new society as a code of social worth. In the decadent culture of materialism, having and exhibiting objects are synonymous with “being a winner”; in a new culture it could start to be synonymous with “being an idiot”.
Selfishness, lack of social responsibility and animosity against taking part in all things collective, an indifference to the pain of others, and many other tendencies, which today are common currency, allow individualists to justify themselves and pass unnoticed; in future this will be recognised as more and more obviously appalling behaviour.
[…]
It will be necessary, a foundation of an economic science at the service of the human being, to modify the current conception of the economy as “an exact science, with some social interferences”, and to move onto the conception of the economy as a social science, which uses technical instruments. It would no longer be necessary to look for the balance of the market at the cost of social sacrifice but to achieve a social balance based on the principle of equal opportunities and adapting the techniques to such a principle. And it will no longer be possible to gauge growth and development with money as the unit of measure, but to weigh up the indices of human development, putting the economy at the service of such indicators.
Finally, we should say that as global problems need global solutions, and it will not necessarily be the powers which generate them which will take care of solving them, it will be fundamental to be able to count on a level of world resolution for such problems. The extreme poverty of many countries, global warming, the collapse of energy and food supply, and other world scale scourges, cannot be solved country by country, but rather as a whole. The nations which maintain and respect their cultural diversity and independence, should work as a great Universal Human Nation, to coordinate the solving of world problems.
[Sullings, an Argentinean Economist, presented his work in the Punta de Vacas Park of Study and Reflection, Mendoza, Argentina.]
There can be no solution of world problems in the small, but our actions must occupy social scale: we need to fix the cities, to make them work on new principles, but we need to fix all the cities in the world.
Sullings offers a sort of prolegomena to the economy we must build if we are not to perish.
