The European social nightmare

What European social model? Is there only one, when the Germans are more than ever obsessed with competitiveness and their trade surplus? In reality, Merkel and Schauble’s only solution in order to compete with emerging and developing countries – and therefore to preserve Germany’s market shares – consists of crushing southern European workers under an intense fiscal pressure combined with the progressive erosion of their incomes.

Only austerity – and therefore the impoverishment of nations that are already suffering – will rekindle productivity, to the greatest of delights for Germany’s wallet. In order to do this, and to lower relative wages – that is to say the difference between the value of the good produced and the value paid to the worker for its production –, it is imperative to keep on lowering Europeans’ quality of life.

A new European social model? No, rather a diktat from the stone-cold German exporting machine – via the imposed European technocracy – that is now having a direct impact on the level of wages, with the help of the surveillance of our budgetary policies. Structural reforms, budgetary stringency, and progressive dismantling of social benefits and of the public sector are the cures for emaciation imposed by Germany, who finally seem to be coming to the end of their tether since unemployment is getting considerably worse and entrenching itself over a range of 12 to 30% in countries like Italy, Spain and Greece.

So, employers will be able to drive wages down even further because high unemployment eliminates all room to manoeuvre and negotiate for working people. Germany can therefore savour its victory because mass unemployment and unstable work are the keys to improving their sacrosanct productivity. We need to understand it once and for all: impoverishing citizens and exploiting them is the sine qua non condition for maintaining the profitability of Europe’s great capital, and for the comfort of Brussels’s technocracy that is liable for it.