SP International :: Publications

Chapter 12

2006: Another world is possible

‘This isn't economics, it's ideology’ – Joseph Stiglitz, World Bank Economist

The rise of neoliberalism…

In the ten years which have passed since I first formulated my opinions on neoliberalism, the world has changed fundamentally. Neoliberal globalisation has transformed relations among citizens, countries and continents. From the bipolar world which still dominated global politics in 1990, we have evolved into a unipolar world, one dominated politically, economically and militarily by the American superpower. Cooperation between European countries has advanced step by step in the direction of a European superstate, whose member countries find themselves increasingly in the position not of national states, but of 'states' in the sense it is used in 'United States', and whose territory now stretches as far as the borders of Russia, the Ukraine and Turkey. America, Europe and countries such as Japan and Korea control the world economy. They consume what the world produces and are home to the Fortune 500. They are the places on the globe where wealth accumulates. They rule supreme, seemingly on every front.

…and

And yet while all this was happening America and Europe faced the brutal challenge of forms of international terrorism that claim inspiration from Islam – a claim with which most Muslims were fundamentally at odds but one which nevertheless has led to a situation in which western politicians and the western media in particular have fallen under the spell of ‘Islamicist fundamentalist terrorism’. The most important enemy of US President George W. Bush appears to be the Saudi multimillionaire Osama bin Laden, presently lodged in one deep-lying cave or another in the inaccessible region on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. His base has been bombed by an American-led military coalition, for the most part at the cost of many innocent victims and with little success. A similar coalition has now for several years occupied Iraq, following the removal from power of the dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have during this time lost their lives, victims of American violence and the violence of a curious alliance of resistants, in which supporters of the ex-dictator have evidently come to an agreement with supporters of Al-Qaida, which had never been the case before 2003. Under pressure from the foreign invader the most unlikely coalitions develop, as we know from the past. None of this has made the world of 2006 a safer place. In international politics, the need for an alternative becomes ever more urgent.

Superstate Europe

One government after another, coming into office since the Treaty of Maastricht was signed in December 1991 has brought 'Europe' to power in the Netherlands, a process in which the country's citizens have had no say. As far as Europe is concerned, these citizens have no vote. We were not given the opportunity to say yes or no to the euro, or to the enlargement of the European Union through the admission of ten new countries in 2004. It is no surprise that many Dutch people have ever greater doubts about the form which European integration is taking. When at last for the first time they were given the chance to vote on the European adventure of consecutive governments, it was put to immediate good use. Contrary to the opinion of the government and almost all political parties, two out of three Dutch voters said ‘no’ to the proposed European Constitution. As the French people had, only days earlier, given voice to a similar verdict, the European Union landed promptly, according to its supporters, in an existential crisis.

The rejection of the European Constitution by the citizens of the Netherlands and France was an important step for those who believe that an alternative to this neoliberal Europe is possible. In the Netherlands the SP was the leading force in the progressive campaign for a 'no' to the European Constitution, alone in parliament, but with a great deal of support outside. While we fought passionately for a 'no', the government, with support from most other political parties, took the lead in the campaign for a 'yes'. They could count on mass support from parliament, but outside parliament found themselves further isolated.

During the referendum campaign of 2005 the Dutch government did everything it could to terrify the public. A 'no' to the European Constitution could lead to economic chaos and political breakdown. One minister went so far as to speak of ‘war’, while another declared that 'the lights would go out in Europe’. The suggested consequences were so laughable that this sort of utterance rebounded on the government, becoming grist to the 'no' campaign's mill. Now and again supporters did try to have recourse to real arguments instead of the usual scare stories. Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, writing in a national newspaper shortly before the referendum, claimed that the Constitution would give the citizen a louder voice. Yet the reasoning behind his argument demonstrated just how meagre were the advantages to which he referred, as I shall show by going through it point by point.

The premier stated that the voice of the European citizen would resonate in Brussels with more force, pointing to small steps which the European Constitution would take in favour of the European Parliament. And there are indeed such measures to be found in its text. The result, however, remains a long way short of anything which would enable us to describe the European Union as democratic. Because this small amount of additional influence would go, according to this Constitution, to upwards of seven hundred Euro-MPs with whom the population of the member states has no relationship, in whom they place no trust, and who are not divided into a ruling coalition which can be called to account and an opposition group. They have, moreover, no real say when it comes to such important matters as defence and foreign policy. Small steps forward for this institution can thus hardly be called gains for democracy.

The second advantage to be gained from the Constitution according to the Dutch Prime Minister was the clear demarcation of those areas with which Brussels might concern itself from those with which it was not permitted to meddle. This argument is, alas, also wafer thin. The European Parliament would, it's true, have acquired a few more competences, but what the Prime Minister forgot was how weak the national parliaments of the member states would remain in relation to the unelected institutions in Brussels. This constitution would have made resistance to undesirable interference extremely difficult. The 'yellow card' supposedly intended for this purpose offered hardly anything. If a member state believes that the European Commission is interfering in matters which it should have nothing to do with, its national parliament can only reject and return a proposed measure if eight other countries, within a short period of a few weeks, declare themselves of the same opinion. And if this small miracle of agreement between nine countries to offer resistance to the powerful European Commission should occur, then and only then can the proposal be returned to the Commission for reconsideration. And even then, if the Commission, following such reconsideration, decided to stick to its guns, the national parliaments have no instrument at their disposal further to resist such unwanted interference. Reckon up the gains...

The third advantage on the basis of which our premier commended this constitution to us was that it would make Europe more transparent. Meetings of the Council of Ministers would henceforth be held in public. Yet it would be something of an illusion to imagine that differences of opinion would now all of a sudden be fought over out in the open. The most important processes will take place behind closed doors and the Council will take decisions during ritual meetings only when these have already been cooked up some time previously. This is logical enough and moreover the reason why nobody has ever proposed making meetings of the Council of Ministers of the Netherlands, the main instrument of our system of government (analogous to a British Prime Minister's or US President's cabinet) public. Such a proposal could lead to nothing more than an appearance of transparency.

The new transparency would also help to combat bureaucracy, the premier asserted. Yet anyone who does not recognise that this bureaucracy is of a peculiarly disgusting variety is in no position to counter it effectively. We should not forget that the Brussels politicians who have shaped this bureaucracy were the same ones who authored this European Constitution. It is therefore no wonder that they did not come up with a clear and well-organised collection of the rights of citizens and their relationship to the institutions, but instead produced 500 pages containing 448 unreadable articles, two preambles, thirty-six protocols, two annexes and forty-eight declarations; in which, you may note, can even be found details such as the closing date of the Czech steel mill Duo. In short, the proposed European Constitution, far from being a potential weapon in the struggle against bureaucracy, is a product of it.

The Constitution would, according to Prime Minister Balkenende, present no threat to our identity but would, on the contrary, strengthen it. “With this constitution the Netherlands would not be giving itself over to Europe,” he said on the eve of the referendum on 1st June 2005: “We would in fact take a firmer grip. This constitution offers an opportunity to a middle-sized country such as the Netherlands.” Here he seems to have lost all sense of proportion. We are talking, after all, about a European Union of twenty-five countries with around 450 million inhabitants. The Netherlands is indeed perhaps the biggest of what might be termed the smaller member states, yet our population adds up to only around 3% of the EU total. Given that the European Constitution lays down new rules on the weighting of votes, whereby the number of inhabitants has a greater role in determining the number of votes a member states can cast at Council, and the number of seats it has in the European Parliament, even a child could work out that our influence will diminish. If in the near future big countries such as Turkey and perhaps also the Ukraine join, this influence would become truly negligible. With the best will in the world I cannot fathom how this can be called a strengthening of the Netherlands' position within Europe.

One of my biggest objections to this constitution was unfortunately not touched upon by the Prime Minister. I'm referring to the fact that the EU is developing ever further and with increasing rapidity into a European state. This was vociferously denied by Dutch supporters of this constitution. The premier and his ministers asserted that this document in fact drew a line under any such process. The social democrat leader Wouter Bos stated that with this constitution “Superstate Europe” would be kept at bay. Yet a considerable number of their fellow supporters, including some of the most important, turned out to have an entirely different view of the matter. Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, for example, said that: “In all these initiatives we observe that the European Union acquires all the instruments of a federal state...The capstone is the Constitutional Treaty..." (Wall Street Journal Europe, 26 November 2003). Or witness the pronouncement of German Minister for European Affairs Martin Bury, a statement which left no room for complaints about lack of clarity: “The European Constitution is the birth certificate of the United States of Europe.” (Die Welt, 25 February 2005) With such frankness from their colleagues in the yes camp internationally it was of course difficult to maintain the insistence that opponents were spreading scare stories. If the rejection of the European Constitution was a nightmare for the politicians of the yes camp, it was a blessing for our country and for the European Union itself, which is now forced to offer space for alternatives which had heretofore seemed taboo.

The roots of terrorism

New York, Istanbul, Bali, Madrid, London – these are taken from what is in fact a much longer list of terrorist attacks, committed by people who claim inspiration from Islam. With the murder in November 2004 of the Dutch cinematographer, the intractably provocative Theo van Gogh, coming as it did just two and a half years after the slaying of Pim Fortuyn, it became clear that terrorism had arrived in our country. In response, a wave of horror swept through Dutch society. Where must our country be headed, if here also political conflicts were no longer fought out with words but with violence and murder? The murder, committed by a fanatic whose beliefs were based on Islam, a man of Moroccan origin but born and bred in the Netherlands, was followed by a number of attacks on mosques and other places where Dutch Muslims gathered. Numerous young people were arrested in possession of plans, motivated by a fundamentalist fanaticism, to carry out attacks, murder people and disrupt society. My name was amongst those appearing as a potential target on this sort of senseless list. So in my street, too, in front of my own door, there appeared a police presence which vividly demonstrated that the climate in the Netherlands was not improving.

Theo van Gogh's murderer – known, following our national practice of not revealing the full names of people implicated in such crimes, only as Mohammed B – was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2005. This was just, as had been the lengthy sentence handed out some months before to the murderer of Pim Fortuyn, known as Volkert van der G. People who attack the rule of law in this way forfeit their right to take any part in society. Pursuit, conviction and sentencing of those who commit terrorist attacks are certainly badly needed. But an answer to the hatred and aggression which are revealed in such attacks demands more. It is for this reason that we must go in search of the roots of present-day terrorism.

Draining the pond

The grouplets which are responsible worldwide for the growing number of terrorist attacks have much in common with terrorist organisations of the past such as the Red Army Fraction and the Red Brigades. They consist of sectarians whose beliefs tell them that the ‘higher’ goal justifies the means and in this way justify their violent and antidemocratic acts. Members have in the main a distorted image of humanity and society and as dissidents cut themselves off. Ideology or religion are called on as justification for their crimes. In the case of Muslim extremists a cultural component is also evident: theocracy versus democracy and rural versus urban, western values. The Vietnamese, who for many years had to deal with American terror in the form of bombs, napalm and Agent Orange, never, despite this, opted for an approach which, under the slogan ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, based itself on blowing up innocent American citizens, bringing the war home to the US. Muslim terrorists, on the other hand, appear to have indeed chosen such a course. We are therefore dealing with groups who in thought and deed stand in many cases isolated from the community which produced them. That does not mean that they have no recourse to a support network. They are fish with sufficient water in which to swim, albeit in a small pond. We, who find terrorism unacceptable, are faced with the question of how this pond might be drained dry. In order to have sufficient ‘water’ available to them, terrorists are capable of exploiting frustrations even were these unjustified by real circumstances. Hatred thrives in an environment in which existence is characterised by injustice, inequality, oppression, poverty and above all hopelessness. Combined with the principle that “the end justifies the means”, this produces dynamite.

The hypocritical West

Take the Middle East. The Arab world has for a very long time lagged, in economic terms, far behind the West and increasingly the same applies to its relationship to the emerging countries of South East Asia. No shadow remains of the days of the Arab world's cultural superiority, though its historical existence remains a visible presence in southern Spain. Of what we can see today, very little makes us feel beholden to the people who invented writing, algebra and astronomy. This comes in part from the legacy of colonialism and the still unhealthily single-minded interested that the West has in this region (oil!), and in part from the dictatorial character of most of its regimes: regimes moreover, which even where they were not helped into power by the West, are always treated with great consideration. It is therefore also no wonder that the West is accused of conspiring with the oppressor. Nor is it strange if the West's double-talk about democracy and human rights, combined as it is with active support for the oppressor, is characterised as hypocrisy. The hard and often violent oppression of the political opposition has in numerous Arab countries led to a radicalisation within the relatively safe walls of the mosque and within the Islamic faith. The breeding grounds of terrorism are the oppression of the Palestinians who have now had to endure this for fifty years and the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan en Iraq. The defamation of Islam, a faith to which many people cling as a source of identity and as something which gives their lives meaning, also fertilises the soil upon which evil thrives.

Wanting to understand the background to terrorism is entirely different to showing an understanding for terrorism itself. Tony Blair and many other western leaders close their eyes to the context within which extremism flourishes and play down the relationship between terrorism and the political position of the west regarding the Middle East. This is a standpoint which is wrong not only from a moral point of view, or even from simple realism, but which is also completely politically irresponsible, feeding the hatred of millions of people and increasing global insecurity.

Within the Netherlands, inadequate integration, and discrimination against people 'from outside' provide the breeding ground for terrorism. People who do not function fully within a society are more readily discriminated against. Unknown, unloved, mistrusted, discriminated against. Two sides of the same coin, both producing losers. That is precisely the reason why the SP has, since the beginning of the 1980s, made efforts in support of common schools and integrated housing. Politicians who assert that 'in time' the problem of segregation would eventually resolve itself, made a terrible mess of things. Time can of course do a great deal, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't help it along through the implementation of sensible policies. By allowing the creation of black and white schools and neighbourhoods, ethnic and communal conflicts were also brought into being. Anyone who has ever taken the trouble to discuss this with those people most directly involved, whether of Dutch or foreign origin knows that a massive majority find this segregation undesirable. What armchair experts and smartaleck politicians could not see, had for those involved been crystal clear for decades: you cannot live together by splitting apart.

The fish in water

The fish in water must be separated from each other. They must be caught, brought to trial and sternly though justly punished. The trial of Mohammed B. was from this point of view a good start. Any kind of tolerance of those who have shown themselves to be violently intolerant towards a society which tries to make concrete the ideals of democracy and freedom is misguided. Those who have declared war on our values, achievements and civilisation must take into account that the iron fist which they have wielded will eventually recoil upon themselves. For this reason, everyone's energy and vigilance are needed. A democracy cannot survive without active citizenship and what might be termed 'civil courage'. A special responsibility lies with those who are closest to those who seem vulnerable to falling under the spell of the mirage of so-called martyrdom. At the same time we must not avoid talking about 'the water’, the environment which can produce such feelings. Nationally and internationally we must try to get rid of the breeding grounds of blind hatred and violence. If we cannot persuade people, wherever they may be, of the justice of our intentions and policies, and that means of course those of our political leaders, all our efforts to do so will come to nothing. This must begin with a transformation of those policies, for we will only be able to win the hearts and minds of the oppressed, we will only be able to win them to the idea of a future based on freedom, democracy and solidarity, when we give these three elements real and practical content. This can be achieved through ending the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan with all possible haste, dismantling the prison camp at Guantànamo Bay, resolving the question of Palestine-Israel through means of a two-state solution, and tackling all of the dictatorial regimes of the Middle East.

No simple solution

The catastrophe which terrorism brings in its wake has shown us just how vulnerable we are. Yet, even if there are already six billion of us, and the earth has an enormous surface area, rapidly progressing technology makes possible a rapid and effective supply of news, and when terrorist attacks occur the response is an exceptional feeling of solidarity and sympathy. We have become each others' neighbours. The question is whether there will ever come a time when we will to the same degree take to heart the lot of all victims of terror, oppression and exploitation without regard to nationality, race or religion. However negative may be the occasion for such reflection, it seems to me no less valuable. Threats and opportunities are closely connected in a world which may appear to be torn apart but which is also in constant and rapid development. In the meantime we should be on our guard for those who come to us with simple answers to this complex problem. Taking advantage of the prevailing anxiety, they stigmatise entire groups of the population and the remedies in time could become in the end worse than the disease. Dismantling of a legal order built up over generations is no answer to terrorism. A ban on thinking something or holding a certain opinion, restricting the rights of suspects, of the accused and of prisoners and the limitation of the freedom of expression offers no real help. Only policies which both tackle the terrorists and are directed at draining the pond in which the terrorists swim can hope to be successful.

Better than bombs

Our stand against military interventions in the former Yugoslavia and later in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as our general opposition to the deployment of military forces has been interpreted by some as advocating turning our backs on the outside world. This is an unjust accusation. It's true that we do not go along with the idea that if a country does not do what we say we should drop bombs on it. We say that there are better answers than bombs. The fact that you are appalled by what's happening in the world leads often to the idea that really 'something' must be done about it. There comes a moment when politicians think “we can surely not sit back and do nothing?” That mechanism clearly played a role at the time of the Balkan war. Added to this was the fact that we had at that time in the Netherlands recently established a special airborne military force, the 'luchtmobiele brigade', which was intended to provide the means for rapid intervention; this meant that in the army top brass there was considerable interest in the deployment of Dutch soldiers in Bosnia. It was said that here was a unique opportunity to underline the right of the brigade to exist. The combination of an enthusiastic public opinion, senior army officers who were keen to see it happen, and numerous members of parliament who were sincerely alarmed by the course of events, but just as sincerely believed naively in military intervention, led in 1993 to the first Dutch involvement in a war since 1945. And things didn't stop there.

In itself I find it praiseworthy that people are not willing to sit by as neutral observers when such terrible things are happening as the events in Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, it is hard to see throwing bombs at a powder keg as a sensible response. You might indeed later have further asked yourself whether interference from the international community, whether political, diplomatic, military or humanitarian had not actually led to a prolongation of the conflict. We have to realise that it is the warring parties who must also, as warring parties, achieve peace, because peace deals are by definition concluded with your enemy. This piece of wisdom should have been made clear to the warring parties in Bosnia.

I had quite a debate over this with Hans van Mierlo, who at the time was the Dutch Minister for Foreign Affairs. At a certain moment the international community institutionalised the entire conflict, institutionalised it, that is, in the way in which certain prisoners or psychiatric patients are 'institutionalised' – rendered incapable of managing life in the wider world. The warring parties had increasingly the idea that it was the responsibility of this international community to bring about peace, and so they had no need to concern themselves with the resolution of their conflict. This meant that the solution would not come from each other at all! It would have been much better to have attempted to use political force to come up with just and correct proposals at the right moment: firstly to prevent the conflict; and secondly to try through diplomatic means to arrive at a perspective for peace for the people of the country. As far as the first possibility was concerned, instead of Germany's wish to recognise Croatia's declaration of independence, the European Union should have brought pressure to bear for a confederal Yugoslavia. And as far as the second goes, such a perspective was offered to neither the Muslims, nor the Bosnian Serbs, nor to a section of the Croats. This lack of any prospect for peace meant that people continued the seemingly endless war.

From United Nations to coalitions of the willing

The United Nations was established after the Second World War. In establishing the UN, and in comparison with the pre-war League of Nations, an important concession was made to the world's real powers: the General Assembly, in which all 170 member states would be represented, had little power, while the Security Council, where the most powerful member countries were represented, was almost all-powerful. France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia and China run the show, with the Americans topping the bill. In fact this is, in a nutshell, an outline of the major problem afflicting international politics, namely that the power of the mighty always prevails over the good intentions of the world community. The friction between the two is what makes all of these problems so difficult to resolve. Because the interests of big, influential countries always come into play, these invariably block any solution which is not in their immediate national interests. We know now as well a great deal about how the Russians and Americans employed their security services. In Africa they for a long time controlled puppet regimes and groups who in turn unleashed wars in which millions of people died – certainly in the time of the Cold War, when people thought in terms of spheres of influence. What we have now is a sort of Pax Americana, with a unilateral centre of power in Washington which no other country comes anywhere near. Russia is to a large extent dependent on America: for technology and ‘know-how’, for investment and for the right to export to the US. China must also rely on the US, while Britain has long been its lapdog. France remains in reality the only member of the Security Council which attempts to plough its own furrow, but in doing so very much keeps its own interests to the fore. The Americans are presently in a position to dictate, to a great extent, the decisions of the Security Council. As a result they were able to see the famous Iraq resolution adopted by the Security Council. And when they could not bend the Security Council to their will, the US simply granted itself the right as the world's superpower to intervene unilaterally. Whereas the attack on Afghanistan following the act of mass murder by terrorists on 9th September 2001 was carried out with the permission of the Security Council, the attack on Iraq in 2003 lacked any such approval, yet the ‘coalition of the willing’ was for President Bush an alternative acceptable in every sense. He was thus able to bypass also the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the resistance from within it from member states France and Germany. That Bush with his illegal attack eventually found himself falling ever deeper into the mire while the Iraqi people embarked upon an orgy of violence and counter-violence is something which now, a few years on, we can all agree upon. Anyone who, on the other hand, at the very beginning of the century, predicted that this would happen was reproached for defeatism both in the Netherlands and abroad.

Pax Americana

The Pax Americana is a peace replete with violence and one which offers no prospect of a better world. That is why we must, in relation to this also, work towards an alternative. That's easier said than done, of course. Just how difficulty it is to achieve a better global politics can best be illustrated with an example. At a certain moment in the past the United Nations stated that we should have an International Court of Justice in order to be able to punish crimes against humanity. Just a minute, the Americans then said, any such court will have no jurisdiction over us – not for American military personnel, diplomats or politicians. We must play the role of world policeman and for this reason do not want any American citizen ever to be brought before this court. If you don't agree to this, we'll reject any proposal for such a court. Because an International Court of Justice could only be established if a certain number of members of the United Nations were to ratify the relevant treaty, the Americans first persuaded Romania, and then a number of other countries, to sign bilateral agreements to the effect that they would never extradite accused persons to the International Court of Justice, with the aim of frustrating the United Nations.

Putting out fires before they start

To avoid any misunderstanding, I must say that it would make no sense to idealise the United Nations, as I have already clearly stated in De laatste oorlog, gesprekken over de nieuwe wereldorde ('The last war: discussions about the new world order') that I co-authored with Karel Glastra van Loon in 2000. There is, it would be correct to say, much to criticise in the organisation: its slowness, its lack of efficiency, the money it wastes, the very limited powers of the General Assembly, the dominant role of the Security Council, and the sometimes frankly cynical attitudes which prevail. For the time being, however, the United Nations is all that we in fact have. The world community has no other platform for the airing of issues related to war and peace. For this reason we must not be too hard on this institution and must indeed defend it from those people and countries which would undermine and ridicule its authority. The United Nations Charter contains extremely valuable moral cornerstones for the conduct of international relations, including the forbidding of acts of aggression, and even for relations between states and their citizens. It is reasonable to expect responsible states to treat the UN and international law as things to be valued. Any intelligent foreign policy must include as one of its goals the strengthening of the United Nations and its institutions.

Lastly I want to enter a plea for reducing the chance of new wars occurring. There is a saying which is popular in the fire brigade: ‘You can put out any fire with a bowl of water if you get to it fast enough.' For those who really want to contribute to bringing about a safer world there are therefore two questions to be answered: do we want to get there soon enough? And do we have a bowl of water left for it? In order to get there in good time we need to create a worldwide early warning system, one capable of enabling the United Nations and regional bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to offer timely help in preventing conflicts or, where conflicts already exist, avoiding any further escalation. This means that the UN, as well as the OSCE and similar bodies must have available adequate financial means, sufficient to enable them to offer such help effectively. After the war in Kosovo the western countries established a Stability Pact for the Balkans, excluding only the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The question is this: why were many prepared at that stage to allocate numerous troops to this region when that had not been the case earlier? We can never know for certain but can say with some confidence that the cost of the many thousands of military personnel who were deployed in the bombardment, as well as of the enormous destruction which was its consequence, amounted to many times the amount which would have been needed at the beginning of the 1990s to reverse the decline of the Yugoslav economy. Had this sum of money been provided and had European countries made efforts to establish a confederation instead of a group of independent republics, the human tragedy which was to play itself out in the Balkans could probably have been prevented. If we had at an earlier time done more for the people of the Middle East, then we might well not be stuck in the mire in which we now find ourselves.

Broken promises

Neoliberalism likes to present itself as a promise, the promise that if developing countries run down their already wafer thin social safety nets still further and further liberalise their markets and the movement of capital then prosperity will follow as day after night. The reality is that worldwide economic growth has diminished since the early 1980s when neoliberalism began to overrun the world. In the 'fifties, 'sixties and 'seventies the world economy grew by an average rate of around 4% per year. In the 'eighties and 'nineties, neoliberalism's heyday, this fell 3%, then 2% respectively a year. Furthermore, we all know that economic growth is one thing, while the distribution of its fruits is quite another, and if these are unfairly divided then what on earth would we have achieved?. And of course, neoliberalism hasn't only provided us with lower rates of economic growth, but also with greater inequality. This has been evident in almost all industrialised countries. In the Netherlands, income inequality has been growing since 1983. According to research conducted in every member state of the European Union, in fact, the gap between the best and worst paid workers has grown nowhere so quickly as in our country! It is not for nothing that my party has placed such importance on the struggle against the growing social divide, a divide which is moreover evident not only in relation to incomes and wealth, but also when it comes to education, health care, housing and even the law. And then again, I am here speaking only about developed countries, because it is unfortunately the peoples of developing countries who have been neoliberalism's biggest victims. We often forget that it is in such countries that the great majority of the world's population lives.

The Asian Tigers (the term itself is beginning to acquire a comic ring) were the argument presented by such bodies as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to demonstrate that neoliberalism worked. These countries formed the proof that globalisation could lead to convergence of incomes and economies towards the western level. Many of these countries had, however, pursued policies which on a number of points greatly diverged from those laid down in the miracle prescriptions of the IMF, basing themselves for instance on a strong state and the imposition of import limitations and restrictions on capital movements. South Korea and Thailand did not liberalise their capital accounts until as late as 1995, planting in doing so the seeds of their later financial crises. Despite this, the neoliberal 'Washington Consensus' was all too readily identified with these countries in what was supposed to be a demonstration that 'capitalism works'. Recent years have shown ever more clearly instead that neoliberalism is no road to prosperity, but rather a political ideology which all too often turns out to be a road to poverty and misery.

The rapid international movement of capital in speculative investments has grown explosively. Politicians often make it appear as if the internationalisation of finance capital was a logical consequence of the technological developments of the last twenty-five years. Modern means of communication, such as e-mail and the Internet, would have been essential to the infancy of financial globalisation, making it possible for capital to move from one side of the world to another in a few milliseconds. For speculative capital the world has indeed become a global village. Yet technological development is not the cause of globalisation, having at the very most made it possible. Politicians are responsible for this development, in that they have since the end of the 1970s systematically dismantled any regulation of international capital movements. It is now almost inconceivable, but the United States became in 1974 the first country to liberalise its capital movements. After Thatcher came to power in 1979, the United Kingdom followed suit. Not long after, almost every other industrialised country did the same. The free movement of capital and the international spectre of high-speed capital were products of the neoliberalism which has ravaged our planet since the beginning of the 'eighties.

WTO, IMF, World Bank

At the same time as the capital markets have been undergoing deregulation, international trade in goods has been increasingly liberalised. In 1986 around a hundred countries began, at a meeting on the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) in Uruguay, a round of negotiations which led eventually to the establishment of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The longer the negotiations continued, the more they came to be dominated by the rich countries of the west. The Dutch government itself later said of the talks that 'in the endgame, because of their economic weight, the European Community and the US have played the leading role.' In 1994, in Marrakesh, Morocco, the process was brought to a conclusion. Given the dominant influence of neoliberalism in both Europe and the United States, the outcome of the negotiations was hardly a surprise: in the framework of the World Trade Organisation, existing obstacles to trade would as far as possible be demolished, and tariff barriers broken torn down. Intellectual property rights would be enforced with a firm hand. This was principally in the interests of the rich western countries, which possess the vast majority of patents. In addition, the possibilities for national administrations to pursue their own economic policies were drastically restricted.

Global resistance

Resistance to globalisation concentrates in particular on the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, organisations which not long ago were known only to a handful of administrators, activists and economists. Since the 'Battle of Seattle', the failed WTO summit of December 1999, this has totally changed. Meetings of these organisation now bring tens of thousands of demonstrators on to the streets. Their motives and the alternatives which they propose vary hugely, but they agree at least on the failings of the 'Washington Consensus', the set of neoliberal prescriptions by which all three organisations are guided They direct their arrows not at globalisation as such, but at its neoliberal character and the manner in which the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank impose their 'solutions' on countries and people. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, belonging to progressive political parties, trade unions, human rights groups, religious associations, the environmental movement and development organisations, demonstrate since Seattle wherever the top dogs of the IMF and World Bank (as well as those of the G7 and EU) pitch their tents. The multi-coloured coalition of demonstrators is at one over the ineffectiveness of the IMF and the World Bank, the social consequences of their interventions, their fixation on mega projects and macro-statistics, the one-sided way in which their prescriptions are established and enforced, the lack of transparency within, and the undemocratic character of these organisations. The rise of the World Social Forum as well as its continental and national variants, especially amongst young people, shows that a counterweight to neoliberal globalisation is growing. The last World Social Forum in Porto Allegre was a tremendous success, while the European Social Forum in London in 2005 brought together a large number of people and of ideas concerned with the development of alternative opinion and alternative routes to power. In 2006 the European Social Forum sets up camp in Athens, where there will certainly be more discussion of recent global developments, including the WTO ministerial in Hongkong in December 2005 and the UN Summit on Poverty a few months earlier. This summit broadly considered the fact that nothing appears likely to come of the agreed Millennium Goals, which amongst other things were supposed to lead to the halving of world poverty by 2015.

‘This is no economics, it's ideology’

Today there are more poor people in the world than ever before and, according to one edition of the United Nations' Human Development Report (HDR) after another, the gap between poor and rich has never been so great. Yet the medicine men of the Bretton Woods organisation continue to this day to write prescriptions for draconian cuts in spending on education, health care, food subsidies and other attempts by governments to fulfil their duty of care. They continue to bring pressure to bear for privatisation and liberalisation of trade and emphasise in the most extreme fashion production for export in order to ensure that currency is available for the repayment of debts. A more evenly matched development would demand that the west would open its markets while poor countries were allowed to protect where necessary their economies. As a certain Gross Domestic Product per head of the population was reached, these countries could gradually enter the liberalised markets of world trade. Another complaint which might be brought against the IMF and World Bank is their domineering style of operating. Programmes are established with hardly any discussion with the finance minister of the country concerned and none whatsoever with social organisations, while knowledge of the relevant macro-financial and macro-economic data is not, in either the establishment or the implementation of these programmes, tempered by any taking into account of the situation of the people of the country. The IMF pays out and pays out, forcing national administrations to do whatever is assigned to them. Fortunately criticism is growing, and not only from demonstrating outsiders. The cracks in the 'Washington Consensus' are becoming ever broader and deeper. The idea that only free trade can bring structural and sustainable development finds fewer and fewer supporters. Henry Kissinger, not exactly a leftist, was some few years ago already denouncing the IMF's short-sighted approach, saying that the Fund works “like a doctor who has only one pill for every conceivable illness". According to Kissinger, the IMF's policies lead to 'exploding unemployment and growing hardship' amongst the population. In June 2002 the economist Joseph Stiglitz was forced to leave the World Bank because of an identical criticism of his employer: 'this is no economics, it's ideology.'

The undemocratic nature of the IMF and the lack of transparency are meeting growing resistance. The number of votes that a country has is directly proportional to the amount of money which it contributes. The principle of 'one-man-one-vote' is here exchanged for 'one-dollar-one-vote'. The US has fifteen percent of the votes and Europe thirty percent. The forty-five participating African countries have together four percent of the votes. Because there is no question of transparency or openness, the rich west can recreate the world in its own image, without it ever being clear how and why. I am of the opinion that we must work towards an alternative to these organisations and find new forms of cooperation. That is badly needed in a world which grows smaller by the day.

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“Enough” Contents:

• Index
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The wondrous rebirth of liberalism
• Chapter 2 The death of social democracy
• Chapter 3 The disempowerment of the people
• Chapter 4 Poverty in the midst of plenty
• Chapter 5 The assault of the market
• Chapter 6 The unbearable lightness of commerce
• Chapter 7 A question of civilisation
• Chapter 8 The United States of Europe
• Chapter 9 The spectre of the world market
• Chapter 10 The inevitability of an alternative
• Preface to the 2006 - updated edition
• Chapter 11 Ten years later, in the Netherlands
• Chapter 12 2006: Another world is possible
• Chapter 13 New optimism