Let Europe shake

The latest CD from the ethereal British femme-punk P.J. Harvey, who reaps the rousing applause of the critics, is Let England Shake. The latest book from “the most dangerous philosopher today,” left-wing Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, is titled “Living in the End Times”.

Both come out at a moment when it’s not just the financial world that’s rocking. Political, national, and, ultimately, supranational organisations like the EU and the IMF are teetering as well. The big certainties are tumbling. Add to that the tremor in the Arab world and the picture is nearly complete. The strange thing is how clueless the experts and the elites of society are.

What’s palpable is that we are wrestling with a demon whose name we don’t really know – and we have no idea how to floor him. The world, in short, is quaking, and there are no signs that the rumbling will be dying down any time soon. Just as with the financial crisis, none of the experts expected the Arab revolution – and still today we’re seeing the awkward academic articles that echo the same theme: how could we have been so blind?

All we really see is that we don’t see where it will end. The world itself apparently is not ending (as we were persuaded it would this month), but the system that we knew is.

Although we know from Tomáš Halík [Czech Catholic priest, intellectual and sociologist] that what is not shaking is not solid, the question remains: how firmly rooted are we? How resilient is our system, and how nasty are the shocks it can take before it crashes? Minor tremors are fair enough, and indeed they are a (healthy) part of life and of any system. However, few would call these latest shocks minor. The tremor, or rather the inflationary implosion, can be seen clearly even in philosophy and the social sciences.

A concept of bankruptcy that is itself bankrupt

Philosophy, it seems to me, has spoked its own wheel in its hyper-late-post-modern deconstruction that somehow deconstructed itself. It broke down in such a way that the philosopher is now so divorced from real life and sucked into a simulated one (modelled) that often he has nothing constructive to say on current events. When the really big questions come up, well, what next, when these great fields of knowledge leave the politicians in the lurch?

The question, at heart, is how to put a name to the current system. The concept of national debt is crumbling, because for a long time now, we know, the Greek debt has not been just the Greek debt. When the tremor rocked Europe, that debt became the debt of the Germans, the French – in short, the debt of all of us, and we all guarantee it. In the end, even loans from lending institutions of sovereign (?) states are actually implicitly guaranteed by all the other states.

We live with a concept of bankruptcy that is itself bankrupt – that is, in a situation where a bankruptcy is almost not admitted to, because admitting to it would have a devastating ripple effect on the rest of us. What was once separate (like Europe and China) is now bound together, and almost indissolubly. Faraway countries have become neighbours thanks to globalisation, which has its celebrated advantages but some drawbacks too – because we all sink together too. This has never happened before in history. The upshot is that our system of mutual accountability and safeguards must be changed. How? That is what’s at stake here.

Either Europe will unite and struggle together, state or no state, debt or no debt, or the world unplugs and takes a backwards step in the web of globalisation. The situation where one state runs up its debts but shirks its responsibility is also untenable. Till now we have been fortunate in that the economies that are going bankrupt have been small ones. That will probably change, though, in the times ahead. For that eventuality, it would be smart to have an emergency federal rescue Plan B or Plan C – of ​​which, I fear, our politicians have no clue. When the hour comes, and there won’t be enough time left on the clock, I’ll be curious to see the acute discomfiture.

Translated from the Czech by Anton Baer