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NYTimes | The fury in British cities follows huge social protests this year in Greece, where violence also flared, and in Spain, where tens of thousands have camped out from Madrid to Barcelona. Other nations, including Portugal, have seen a diffuse anger rooted in a shared conviction: things can’t go on like this. This European malaise is no stranger to a United States of high unemployment, economic bafflement, ideological radicalization and political pettiness.
Numbers tell part of the story. Youth unemployment in the 27-nation European Union stands at just over 20 percent, ranging as high as 45.7 percent in Spain. In Britain youth unemployment has risen from 14 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to 20 percent. About one in every five young Europeans and young Americans is wondering how to get any sort of working life on track. Britain’s NEETS (not in education, employment or training) meet U.S. boomerang kids in the anxiety of waiting.
The anxiety grows when governments are slashing benefits and pushing back retirement ages in an attempt to deal with spiraling deficits. A working gerontocracy hardly helps the young. Brits from Tottenham to Teesside have watched the most patrician cabinet since Macmillan cutting everything from libraries to youth counseling services. Theirs is a “No Future” revolt.
A feeling has grown in Western societies that uncontrollable forces are at work shrinking possibility. History has never seen a global power shift as radical as the current one that managed to be peaceful.
The united Europe of today is built on the ashes of successive empires — from the Roman to the British — that ended in one form or other of violent convulsion. Now the American quasi-imperium, and more generally the dominion of the West, is ending, not rapidly but steadily.
Growth, jobs, expansion, excitement — and, yes, possibility — lie in the great non-Western arc from China through India to South Africa and Brazil. Go South! Go East! That’s the dictum of the age but not always practicable in Peckham or Peoria. The world has been turned upside-down. What we are witnessing is how shaken Western societies are by such inversion.
As new powers emerge, globalization has altered the relationship between capital and labor in the former’s favor. Many more cheap workers have become available outside the West as technology has eliminated distance. Returns on capital have proved higher relative to wages. That’s the story of the post-cold-war period. The gap between rich and poor has become a gulf.
The only people who walked away unscathed from the great financial binge that preceded this mess were its main architects and greatest beneficiaries: bankers, financiers and hedge-fund honchos.
This, too, is fueling a time of outrage that has left Western politicians chasing shadows.
Numbers tell part of the story. Youth unemployment in the 27-nation European Union stands at just over 20 percent, ranging as high as 45.7 percent in Spain. In Britain youth unemployment has risen from 14 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to 20 percent. About one in every five young Europeans and young Americans is wondering how to get any sort of working life on track. Britain’s NEETS (not in education, employment or training) meet U.S. boomerang kids in the anxiety of waiting.
The anxiety grows when governments are slashing benefits and pushing back retirement ages in an attempt to deal with spiraling deficits. A working gerontocracy hardly helps the young. Brits from Tottenham to Teesside have watched the most patrician cabinet since Macmillan cutting everything from libraries to youth counseling services. Theirs is a “No Future” revolt.
A feeling has grown in Western societies that uncontrollable forces are at work shrinking possibility. History has never seen a global power shift as radical as the current one that managed to be peaceful.
The united Europe of today is built on the ashes of successive empires — from the Roman to the British — that ended in one form or other of violent convulsion. Now the American quasi-imperium, and more generally the dominion of the West, is ending, not rapidly but steadily.
Growth, jobs, expansion, excitement — and, yes, possibility — lie in the great non-Western arc from China through India to South Africa and Brazil. Go South! Go East! That’s the dictum of the age but not always practicable in Peckham or Peoria. The world has been turned upside-down. What we are witnessing is how shaken Western societies are by such inversion.
As new powers emerge, globalization has altered the relationship between capital and labor in the former’s favor. Many more cheap workers have become available outside the West as technology has eliminated distance. Returns on capital have proved higher relative to wages. That’s the story of the post-cold-war period. The gap between rich and poor has become a gulf.
The only people who walked away unscathed from the great financial binge that preceded this mess were its main architects and greatest beneficiaries: bankers, financiers and hedge-fund honchos.
This, too, is fueling a time of outrage that has left Western politicians chasing shadows.
