Europe is Divided Again: This Time Between Creditors and Debtors

The future of the European Union has never been more in doubt than at the very moment it has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its historical accomplishments. When the heads of Europe's weakest institutions—the Commission, the Council and the Parliament—collected the prize in Oslo on December 10, 2012 they spotlighted the nub of the problem. Unless these institutions can garner the legitimacy of European citizens and transform into a real federal union with common fiscal and economic policies to complement the single currency, Europe will remain at the mercy of global financial markets and the fiscally authoritarian dictates of its strongest state, Germany. Moving beyond this state of affairs was the focus of a recent “town hall” gathering in Berlin sponsored by the Berggruen Institute on Governance. The meeting brought together current power brokers—such as the contending voices of German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, who rarely appear in public together—as well as Europe's top former leaders, key thinkers and young people who will govern in the future. The peace‐building project of the European Union was born out of the ashes of World War II and the anguish of the Cold War. Yet, as George Soros points out, its current inability to resolve the eurocrisis by forging greater union is dividing Europe once again, this time between creditors and debtors. Former Greek premier George Papandreou has warned that this division is fomenting a new politics of fear that is giving rise to the same kind of xenophobic movements that fueled the extreme politics of the Nazi era. To avoid a repeat of the last calamitous century, Europe first of all needs a growth strategy both to escape the “debt trap” it is in—and which austerity alone will only deepen—and to create breathing space for the tough structural reforms that can make Europe as a whole competitive again in a globalized world. To sustain reform, it needs a clear path to legitimacy for the institutions that must govern a federal Europe. The proof that Europe can escape its crisis through a combination of growth, fiscal discipline and structural reform comes from the one country so many want to keep out of the union: Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan rightfully boasts of Turkey's accomplishments that resulted from the difficult changes carried out after its crisis in 2001—ranging from quickly cleaning up the banks to liberalizing markets to trimming social benefits to make them more affordable in the long run. As a result, Turkey today is the fastest growing economy in the world alongside China with diminished deficit and debt levels that meet the eurozone criteria that many members states themselves cannot today meet. Turkey has even offered a 5 billion euro credit through the IMF for financial aid to Europe. Germany itself also provides some lessons for the rest of Europe. The obvious reason Germany rules today is because it is the most globally competitive country in the European Union. That is the result of a series of reforms that were implemented starting in 2003 under the leadership of then‐chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Aimed a bolstering Germany's industrial base and its collateral small and medium enterprises which are the foundation of its middle class society, those reforms introduced more labor flexibility and trimmed benefits to make them sustainably affordable while investing in training, maintaining skills and research and development. Even if Europe's individual nation states can shrink imbalances by following Turkey and Germany in getting their act together, the only ultimate way to save the euro, and thus Europe itself, is to build the complementary governing institutions at the European level. For those institutions to become effective, they must be empowered and legitimated by European citizens themselves. To this end, Tony Blair has suggested a bold move: the direct election of a European president. Symbolically, the Oslo ceremonies were a historical turning point for Europe. By recognizing the European Union's peace‐making past, the Nobel Prize challenged Europe to escape once and for all the destructive pull of narrow national interests and passions.     

Austerity is Strangling Europe

Because they have failed to address the fundamental economic imbalances within Europe obscured by the single currency, each effort by European leaders so far to resolve the euro crisis has only deepened it. Without a decisive move toward fiscal and political union, accompanied by policies that push productivity and competitiveness toward convergence while closing the democratic deficit, the Eurozone will disintegrate. To discuss the way forward, the Nicolas Berggruen Institute's Council on the Future of Europe met in Rome on May 28 with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti. In this section we publish the contributions from that meeting by the former European leaders, scholars and Nobel laureates who are members of the Council.     

对东欧、中欧和东南欧国家社会转型的考察和思索

中东欧、东南欧地处三大文明的交汇处,社会发展受制于各种文明以及承载这些文明的东西方大国.这里的国家近二十年的社会转轨从本质上说就是从东方文明向西方文明位移的过程.但是,由于受不同文明和不同大国的影响程度不同,还由于国家大小、民族宗教构成和经济发展程度不同,中东欧、东南欧国家的社会转型也更加丰富多彩.近距离地接触这些国家,可以清楚看到它们社会转轨程度的不同梯度,还可以感受到这种转型背后的影响因素.     

“新、老欧洲”与美欧关系

“新、老欧洲”的概念，是美国前国防部长拉姆斯菲尔德在伊拉克战争期间提出的，他把法、德等反对美对伊动武的欧洲国家称为“老欧洲”，把积极支持美国对伊政策的中东欧国家称为“新欧洲”，并称“北约欧洲的重心已经转移到了新欧洲”。在伊拉克战争问题上严重的政策分歧不仅使欧盟在共同外交政策上陷入了“空前的危机”，也使美国和欧洲大陆主要大国的关系滑入了二战以来最深的谷底。2004年5月欧盟正式接纳10个中东欧新成员国后，“新欧洲”成为了美国在欧洲保持影响的首要依托。     

A Reassessment of the Burden of Eastern Europe on the USSR

A comprehensive accounting of the contributions and costs of East European satellite states to Soviet foreign and defence policy indicates that they were hardly ever a ‘burden’ to the USSR, even at their most costly in 1982, and therefore Gorbachev's decisions later in the decade to allow those regimes to distance themselves from Moscow must be interpreted as part of the Soviet leader's overall political strategy, not a result of material inability to maintain the status quo.     

“Time is money,efficiency is life”: The transformation of labor relations in China

The past twenty-five years of economic reform have seen the transformation of labor relations in China, with the widespread adoption of capitalist labor practices by firms of all ownership types. This transformation has occurred in the absence of both large-scale privatization and political change, but was part of a gradual yet dynamic liberalization and “opening up” to foreign trade and investment that occurred across both regions and across types of firms. The first half of this paper details this process of dynamic liberalization that has spawned competition and change in labor practices, including marked increases in managerial autonomy and labor flexibility. This explanation goes beyond the regional emphasis to also examine changes across types of ownership; the gradual liberalization of labor policies and convergence with capitalist practices can only be understood as part of a more general trend ofownership expansion, through the introduction of new types of firms, andownership recombination, which is the fusing of the public and non-state sectors through novel forms of organization. The much-needed panacea to this shift to capitalism—a state regulatory and legal regime that is capable of mitigating its excesses and effective organizations to represent labor—is not yet well established. The second half of this paper explores two institutions, the labor contract system and the official trade union organization, to show how labor relations have shifted dramatically toward flexibility, insecurity, and managerial control. The author would like to thank those who offered comments and criticisms, including Mark Frazier, Jaeyoun Won, Bill Hurst, Jacob Eyferth, Elizabeth Remick, Mark Selden, Ruth Collier, and two anonymous reviewers.     

Jihadism in Western Europe After the Invasion of Iraq: Tracing Motivational Influences from the Iraq War on Jihadist Terrorism in Western Europe

Abstract

This article investigates the importance of the invasion and occupation of Iraq as motivation for recent acts of jihadist terrorism in Western Europe. It analyses the mass casualty terrorist attack attributed to a group of Islamist militants in Madrid on 11 March 2004, and the killing of a Dutch filmmaker on the streets of Amsterdam by an Al Qaeda–inspired terrorist network. The first case has been assumed to be mainly motivated by the Iraq war, whereas the other case has been perceived as an act by an individual, motivated by domestic factors in Holland. The article situates these acts of terrorism within the theory of so-called spillover effects from armed conflicts to international terrorism. It argues that the Iraq war was a significant motivational factor for the terrorists in both cases, but that the terrorists linked the Iraq issue with perceived injustices against Muslims in Europe and globally.     

East Central Europe on the eve of the changeover: the case of Poland

In contrast to the voluminous literature dealing with the post-communist transformation, much less attention has been paid to the circumstances that led to the communist collapse. The purpose of this paper is to redress the imbalance by trying to examine the socio-political and economic situation on the eve of the changeover and to determine which factors, taken collectively, produced a trigger which ignited the implosion of 1989. The focus will be on Poland, the country which—it is generally agreed—was the first one to launch the process of change and to initiate the “domino effect” which ultimately affected the entire region.