Let me turn next to splits in Europe and around Europe,
the ally of the United States from which the United States is splitting in more ways than one.
First of all, here are the splits inside Europe that are becoming aggravated. Many, many people in
Europe are upset and have been for years that the European Union was a union invented ,orchestrated,
constructed and run for employers not employees. That's what the European Union accomplished:
profitable opportunities for employers and ever more difficult problems for employees.
Harder to hold on to good jobs and good wages, harder to hold on to a social services program
from your own government. Under the pressure of competition within the unified Europe,
more and more Europeans felt, and they've expressed it from the beginning,
that something valuable had been lost beyond what they had been told, beyond what they had expected.
Something very nationalistic had been lost, and they didn't want to lose it. The European Union
threatened that was distinctive about French or Dutch or Spanish or Greek national values,
national political customs, national cultures. And those splits have not gone away. They have gotten
worse, and one of the key reasons that you'll see this as a theme
is that the economic well-being of the mass of the working class
in Europe has taken terrible blows in the first 20 years of this century, really the first
20 years of the experiment of a unified Europe with a single currency, the Euro and so on.
It means that they are now seeing the war in Ukraine as more evidence that something
is going on that makes them irritable, suspicious, skeptical that this war isn't really about what
the leaders say it is about. And they see huge amounts of money being shifted over to
help a small country that most of them have very little to do with and very little feeling for.
What you do have is inside each European country, in or out of the EU, a struggle going on
particularly for the last 30 years a struggle between those who want to advance the capitalist
profitability of their economies by being more like the United States and the United Kingdom
by reforming their labor markets, by reducing the social services, by shifting the burden of taxes
off of corporations onto individuals, to do in Europe what they see seems to have worked well in
the United States. Those people are squeezing the working classes in every one of those countries,
and the working class feels it. And the working class resents it. One of the interesting things
that have had to be done in the face of an angry, upset, threatened working class is to
distract them from the capitalist system that is their problem and has been from the beginning.
They need to be distracted of the capitalist system
can continue to do what it's been working so hard to do these last 30 years: become more profitable,
become more like the United States and Britain, even as the United States and Britain go further
and further in that direction so that the rest of Europe is always in some sense catching up.
What are the distractions? Well, we know them. They're not so different
from the similar distractions used here. Part of Europe has been excited beyond words for decades
against immigrants. You see the shrinking wage, the shrinking social care for people that is part
of the capitalist program in Europe as it has been is blamed on immigrants. They are the problem,
they cause money to be used in ways that aren't good for the native population- all those kinds
of stories. And they are very big everywhere from Scandinavia, in the north to Greece,
and Spain and Italy in the south and everywhere in between. The very problems of capitalism globally
producing chaos and masses of refugees coming- you guessed it- to prosperous Europe
then produces this kind of backlash which is a distraction, a way to blame something other than
the economic system for the problems of the economic system. Here's another distraction:
the war. War in the Middle East, war in Ukraine, war anywhere. Now, we can rev up the patriotism.
We can rev up the hostility to others. The splits between Christians and Muslims can be
brought forward as can other splits. Some old, some new. They're useful as ways of distracting
and deflecting the suffering of working classes from the system that puts them in that position,
and the Europeans are acutely aware of all of this just like they're aware
that the United States and Britain are extreme cases of this and that therefore following them
is a very dubious matter. For example, the British came up with a way of deflecting the anger of
their working class which was more extreme, but that's not a surprise because the British working
class, particularly after 2008, was really heavily damaged by the austerity programs of
the conservatives in the British government and by the inability of the labor movement,
except for the short period of Mr. Corbyn, to be much of an opposition about any of that.
And so they had to come up with an extreme distraction. They did. It's called Brexit.
They convinced the British people 'You know, your problem is the Europeans. We should
split from Europe.' They did. The British economy has been going down ever since.
The condition of the working class [has been] going down ever since. It solved nothing. It gave
Mr. Boris Johnson- a naughty boy with bad hair- an opportunity to become famous because he galvanized
a bitter working class's desire for something to change. And maybe he could do it maybe somehow by
distancing Europe, by leaving Europe, by splitting from Europe. It could be- There was nothing there.
In the famous line, there's no there there. There was no policy and of course, Mr. Johnson leaves
as befuddled and irrelevant to what's going on. Indeed, his parting shot will in the future
be understood not to be lying to the British people about the contempt that he holds for them
but rather his excited embrace of the war in Ukraine almost in a cartoonish way to get everyone
excited in Britain about his solidarity with Mr. Zelensky etc as a way of distracting people from
the reality of the British economy which is, and I am not exaggerating, an unmitigated disaster.
The Europeans are also smart folks, and they understand they're at a turning point
in the world. They know the splits I've spoken of. They're acutely aware of them,
and they are aware that the working class they have been squeezing
because they felt they had to to compete with the United States,
to follow the United States but also to try desperately to construct a European
capitalism that could play the role in the world that the United States had played.
Maybe not be the successor empire to the United States's empire but at least
be a contestant. They haven't been able to do it. They're so needy to distract their people.
They're so needy to accommodate the nationalism so that their working class doesn't turn against
them that that same nationalism that saves them condemns them to be unable to become a unified
capitalist competitor in the world. And they know it, and they suffer from it.