EU deal and the welfare state

It should be all too obvious to the world community that the politico-social crises erupting in the West and in some regions outside it are, at bottom, sourced by what may be described as crises in development thinking. The Wall Street protests in the heart of the West and the continuing bloody political turmoil in parts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East are pointers to the fact that the essentials of the welfare state are of continuing profound relevance to the publics of the world.

A number one issue is unemployment. The unemployment crisis in the West and outside it cuts across age barriers and it is safe to presume that this phenomenon is integral to cyclical crises affecting global capitalism. Over the past three decades and more, Western economic growth has slowed on account of very complex reasons and the crisis has been compounded by widening economic disparities.

In fact, worldwide, wealth is increasingly accumulating in a minuscule upper social stratum and the majority of the people have been compelled to brace for intensifying and progressively worsening economic hardships. Interestingly, those who stormed some Western metropolises in protest against their worsening economic situation said that they constitute the ‘ninety nine percent’ of the disempowered and poverty-stricken of the world, in contrast to a microscopic number of corporate executives and sections of the worldwide political class who are seen as luxuriating in mainly ill-gotten gains.

European economic revival

Seen against the backdrop of this ‘Winter of Discontent’ in the West, the 120 billion euro growth pact clinched by the EU countries recently raises the hope of a European economic revival, provided the programme focuses on the all-important combine of growth plus equity. There needs to be a tremendous amount of employment generation and special concern that the wealth generated in the growth process is distributed evenly across all social strata. In other words, the Development Dialogue must not only be revived but made to focus on sensible development models which would emphasize the redistributive justice aspect of the development experience.

The recent Rio + 20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development helped to focus on some important requirements of the development process and it is hoped that the world community would be alert to what needs to be done from now in terms of development. It should be quite plain that humankind has thus far been following a highly skewed strategy of material advancement.

Wealth creation has gone on without much regard for not only social empowerment and equity but for also the environmental destruction that is being incurred. The Rio meet has once again drawn the attention of the international community to the need to combine growth and equity with natural resource protection and it is a programme of material advancement that brings together these significant dimensions that could qualify to be accepted as a universally applicable development model.

If exercises such as the Rio Summit are to prove worthwhile, the findings of the meet must be studied in depth and implemented worldwide. A failure to do this would be tantamount to the world community perpetuating the current ills of the world willfully.

Global job market

East and South East Asia have emerged as the most robust growth centres of the world but it is plain to see that even in the case of these regions, the development model upheld by the Rio + meet would need to be followed. Clearly, the main pillars of the social welfare state would need to remain standing very steadily because the dire results of forgetting the social welfare dimension would be unemployment, disempowerment and consequent social and political unrest. This is all that the Euro crisis and the Arab Spring are all about.

As some authorities have given us to understand, 600 million jobs would be needed to be created worldwide over the next 10 years to absorb some 400 million new entrants to the global job market annually. Already there are some 200 million unemployed persons in the world who need to be provided job opportunities and 75 million of such unemployed persons are youths, the ILO’s World of Work magazine reports.

It could be seen that the world can no longer follow a ‘Beggar thy Neighbour’ policy in the task of advancing materially.

While it is hoped that Europe would see the need for equitable and environment-friendly growth, the same parameters of development should be adopted by the rest of the world, if the earth is not to self-destruct.