peterbirks | We think we know better

One of the recurring themes of history is that people of the modern age -- all ages were "modern" at one time -- think that they are so much more sophisticated than the people of the past, and that there is no way that they could repeat the ridiculous mistakes by those poor unknowing souls.

This is, clearly, an erroneous assumption. We see from history that mistakes are often repeated, and that this frequently happens because we think that "we know better".

At the moment we are witnessing a slow-motion car crash of the economy and, quite possibly, of the post-Second World War democratic consensus. To take yet another error that we glean from history. We forget that nearly all crises are slow-motion car crashes. Germany in 1923 did not zoom from a stable economy to hyper-inflation in a weekend. Even "the Wall Street Crash" is better viewed over two or three years, rather than a single day or week.

And, gradually, we are seeing what frightens me the most. We are seeing in Europe a loss of faith in the democratic system, because we are at the moment being led by donkeys. To quote just a few examples from the past 48 hours (this has been repeated again and again over two years -- once again, a loss of faith in the democratic system does not happen overnight, and the situation could be rescuable, but it's getting worse by the months).

Antonis Samaras, leader of the centre-right opposition New Democracy party in Greece, has dismissed the idea of a coalition government. Still playing party politics, he claims that Mr Papandreou had rejected his proposals and that "the only solution is elections".

Angela Merkkel's mantra at the weekend was even more dumbfounding.

"Everyone in Europe must make an effort to achieve all that is required",

she said.

Meanwhile Silvio Berlusconi said that the Italian bond sell-off was "a passing fad" and that:

"the restaurants are full, the planes are fully booked and the hotel resorts are fully booked as well".

Talk about fiddling while Rome burns (or, in this case, while Genoa floods).

The G20 has proved to be a joke on a par with the United Nations. As Eswar Prasad, a former senior official at the IMF and a Professor at Cornell University observed,

Rather than promote new ideas to promote global financial stability, the G20 has offered grandiose but vague promises for the future and a series of short-term fixes that are hostage to political fortune in individual countries".

And yet David Cameron can still claim that "we stand by the Doha Development Mandate" In other words, it hasn't worked for the past 11 years but, hey, let's carry on with the honk shops while the economic system falls apart".

Sarkozy claimed that the Cannes meeting had come up with "an action plan for growth and jobs". Well, TBH, I'd like fewer action plans and more action. Nothing came out of the G20 except more "vague promises for the future" as Professor Prasad accurately termed it.

Now, we have been here before. None of us was alive (or, if you were, you were too young to notice), but this is almost like 1919 to 1923 all over again. Liberal democracies utterly clueless, weak leaders, party politics, economies such as germany crippled by governments such as the UK and France on matters of principle rather than pragmatism. "They must pay!" cried the governments of France, the UK and Belgium, appealing to the populist feelings of the masses who wanted revenge for their lost brothers, sons, friends.

The current imposition on Greece is the Treaty of Versailles all over again, but this time Germany is on the "They must pay!" side. The mistakes of history are again being repeated, and again it is because of a need/desire to appeal to the populist masses. democracy, one might say, can have a lot to answer for.

So can you see what is happening here? If people like me can start saying "perhaps it's all the fault of democracy", then we are heading down a slippery path. On the one side, democracy could lead us to global economic meltdown. On the other, forswearing democracy could lead to a new fascism. And, if we take a Marxist rather than a "Great Man" historiographical line, we can presumably predict that great men will automatically appear to fulfil the socio-economic need.

Alastair Hamilton wrote an excellent book on Fascism in the early 1970s called "The Appeal of Fascism" (Anthony Blond, 1971). There are a myriad of relevant quotes in this, including the foreword by Stephen Spender, who observes that Fascism appealed not just to idiots -- ita also appealed to the likes of Ezra Pound, Marinetti, Oswald Mosely, Charles Maurras, William Butler Yeats, some of whom are only regarded as nutters by us today because they happened to choose the wrong side (we might also recall those English and Irish intellectuals who were slavish in their praise of Stalin at the very time that millions of Russians were starving and other principled Russian communists were being humiliated and then shot in show trials). It was not necessary to like the leaders who emerged (Hitler and Mussolini) to have an affinity for the political principles at first espoused.

As Hamilton observed, Fascism recruited

"those lower middle classes who were embittered by the economic and social crises, frightened by the idea of Communism, disappointed by the world which had emerged from the Great War, and who were dissatisfied with the traditional left- and right-wing parties".

It is easy to raise the differences than to accept the similarities. Fascism recruited ex-servicemen as its core, recreating the "good bits" of heroism, comradeship, idealism and the concept of a "cause". Today the anti-democratic movement will attract a different core - the 25% unemployed (50% of unemployed youth in Spain, Italy, France to come). The "new" movements won't be called fascist, obviously -- that's a brand name that has suffered too much damage. But it will embrace the concepts of early fascism as espoused by Mussolini - state corporatism, abolition of the privileges built up by the conservative unions, a leadership that can "get things done".

All of this frightens me; it's not just that I think it might become a reality before I am collecting my pension, but that, given the hopelessness of the current political leaders, that it has a certain appeal. And, if it has a certain appeal to me, I have to assume that it will have a certain appeal to others. We have seen nationalist parties increase their share of the vote in several European countries. It's only because UKIP is not a truly radical party that it is not performing better. Old colonials are not what the unemployed young will look for -- but a charismatic, probably young, leader, who offers a "new dawn" -- preferably someone who has been jailed for his beliefs, could easily fulfil that role.

I've written before that I think Sarkozy and Merkel do realize that this is one of the major threats that they face -- and yet they are so ineffectual that they still can't do anything about it. Once again this is an echo of Weimar Germany and pre-fascist Italy. Basically these politicians have been brought up playing a different game, one in which, at the bottom of everything, there was an underlying consensus that the system worked. Once you get a significant proportion of the population questioning the actual system -- and not in an airy-fairy Paris in 1968 Jean-Luc Godard/Jean-Paul Sartre student-led wanky kind of way, but in a real "we've had enough with not having enough to eat" kind of way, then a liberal-democrat Germany could see itself surrounded by states that have thrown off the shackles of democracy and are being led by fanatic nationalists.

If it weren't so horrifically serious, the irony would be funny.

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