This year, France experienced 283 protest rallies on Labour Day in cities from Marseilles to Bordeaux, Grenoble and Paris. Although not as dramatic as 1968, the estimate by one of France’s largest trades unions of 1.2 million protesters was five times higher than the protests in May 2008.

In addition, compared to 1968, the 2009 Labour Day protests were more widespread throughout Europe. On 1 May in Germany, union leaders estimated 484,000 people demonstrated in 400 rallies across the country. In Berlin, 237 police were injured after running battles with stone-throwing activists, leading to 289 demonstrators being arrested and five cars torched. In Istanbul, more than 100 protesters were arrested and dozens of people injured as supermarkets and banks were deliberately targeted. In Athens, rioting was dispersed by tear gas, and in Linz in Austria, 20 people were injured and five arrested.

This violence was unrepresentative of the majority of peaceful demonstrations that occurred on 1 May, which is a traditional day of socialist, worker and union-led protests. Nonetheless, the geographic spread of the violence and diversity of motivations behind it reflected an underlying trend: revolutionary and protest movements have become more active across Europe amid the global economic downturn.

AGITATION AS MIDDLE-CLASS EUROPE STRUGGLES TO COPE

By John Thornhill

Economics is convulsing European politics. Governments have fallen in Iceland and Latvia; strikes or protests have erupted in Greece, Ireland, France, Germany, Britain, Lithuania, Ukraine and Bulgaria. Financial turmoil has shaken even the continent’s furthest-flung outposts: the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe has been ravaged by violent strikes, while Russia flew riot police into ice-bound Vladivostok to quell street protests.

This spasm of unrest was hardly expected when the crisis broke in the summer of 2007: many Europeans believed they would be spared the worst effects of a disaster forged in the suburbs of the US. Since then, as the crisis has spread, initially sanguine forecasts have given way to ever more gloomy predictions: European Union finance ministers this week revised down an already grim outlook issued barely 10 weeks ago.

Beyond the economics, there is now a gnawing concern that Europe may be only at the beginning of a far more tumultuous cycle of instability. Whereas the administration of Barack Obama in the US may be looking to exploit the political upside of the crisis, Europe’s leaders are more concerned with limiting its downside. The region’s democracies, as well as the institutions of the EU itself, are being stress-tested as never before.

The proudest achievements of the 27-member organisation – a single market, a common currency and the convergence between west and east – are under strain. “There is no doubt we are living through the greatest financial and economic crisis in living memory,” says José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission. As governments take often unpopular action to salvage their economies, anger is mounting as a result of rising unemployment, pay curbs, bail-outs for devastated banks and falls in house prices and the value of pension funds.

Juan Somavia, director-general of the International Labour Organisation, a United Nations agency, has warned that social unrest could worsen if stimulus packages are not seen to benefit ordinary people, saying: “There’s a sense that it’s ‘billions for bankers but pennies for the people’.”

For the moment, it is impossible to predict what the political aftershocks of the economic earthquake will be. The left should be the natural beneficiary. Yet many of Europe’s socialist parties seem more concerned with defending the partisan interests of their supporters rather than devising a holistic response. Trade union leaders recall ominously that it was the far right rather than the moderate left that gained power in much of Europe in the 1930s during the last catastrophe of capitalism.

Some observers, such as Emmanuel Todd, a French sociologist, are predicting the end of democracy, or at least its significant erosion, as populist rightwing leaders including Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy become increasingly demagogic and authoritarian. Others forecast a reversion to nationalism and protectionism as countries abandon the European ideal and look to defend their own.

In this view, the EU may increasingly be seen as part of the problem rather than the solution, the “Trojan horse of globalisation” in the words of Mr Sarkozy. Along with other national leaders, he has been spearheading the response to the crisis, leaving Brussels bureaucrats to fret about infringements to state aid and competition rules and the trashing of the eurozone’s fiscal rules.

But in spite of heated rhetoric, the national political impulse and the traditional muddle of EU policy, the bloc’s political leaders have not yet broken ranks over the sanctity of the single market or the imperative of collective action. After a hesitant start, the Commission is taking the initiative in developing pan-European financial regulation and helping the most vulnerable member states. It is still possible that the crisis will result in deeper integration rather than disintegration.

Different countries are responding in different ways depending on the vulnerability of their economies, their political systems, their leaders and their national cultures. Yet one feature common to almost all is that it is the middle classes who are suffering the most in this recession. Even before the turmoil, some sociologists were talking about the emergence of “hourglass societies” in Europe as globalisation sifted the winners from the losers.

“The middle class – at least in Germany – is shrinking now. This is a completely new situation for Germany. You have much more upward mobility and downward mobility from the middle class. I assume that the financial crisis will accelerate the process,” notes Stefan Hradil, a German sociologist. That analysis is resonant in Britain too, where the media have highlighted the plight of the “coping classes”, those once self-assured professionals who are now financially stretched.

Perhaps the most explosive political moment will come when Europeans are presented with the bill for today’s rescue packages. Governments will be able to rebalance their public finances only by cutting spending and raising taxes on the struggling middle class.

Wouter Bos, Dutch finance minister and leader of the Labour party, says the crisis has killed the myth of “happy” globalisation, in which everyone benefits. Politicians will have to do more to protect the losers from globalisation if they want to maintain support for open markets and free trade. That will mean that the “visible fist” of government will be increasingly used alongside the “invisible hand” of the market. Effective regulation and social justice are going to become priorities.

But Mr Bos has no doubt about the scale of the challenge: “For the first time in post-world war two history we have a generation that seriously doubts whether the next generation is going to live better than themselves.”

Additional reporting by Hugh Williamson ]]> http://www.greatrecession.info/2009/03/12/middle-class-europe-made-precarious-by-crisis/feed/ 0