In his “European dis-Union: lessons of the Soviet collapse” article available on OpenDemocracy.net, Ivan Krastev likens the current state of the European Union to the Soviet Union on the eve of its collapse. He speculates upon the possibility of another wave of wide adjustments to society, government, and economy on the scale of the Soviet Collapse, whose effects are still felt today, thirty years later. Although in Canada we feel much more secure in our political stability (unless we live in Montreal, perhaps), such framing of geopolitics calls into discussion the roles of governing bodies in shaping the social conditions that affect the billions living on this earth.
Interventionism and regulation has many supporters and opposers and many difficult debates. In Canada, we have seen postwar practices of more socialist policies focused on nation-building and social programming (accompanied with massive public spending and debt) shift to a selling-off of public holdings and deregulation. This deregulation continues with the Conservative majority government, who last week passed legislation lowering the minimum wage for migrant workers (against which there was a demonstration in front of Peter Braid’s office uptown last Thursday), and earlier began a weakening of the federal environmental assessment process, to name a few.
This attitude of economic liberalism has been the dominant trend in political circles for the past few decades. International financial bodies such as the World Bank and IMF, who provide loans to countries to further develop or recover from economic hardships, often stipulate such policies to the countries they lend to. There is a dominant ideology that government spending on social programs is a nice-to-have and not a need-to-have; that an economy is always weakened by forcing money through inefficient government agencies and that nation-building policies do not translate to economic benefits. In the 80s and 90s, there was an outcry in the international development world over such policies forcing governments to sell off national assets and globalize markets. A memorable culmination occurred in the Cochabamba Water Wars event of 2000, where violent protests erupted after a plan for radically privatizing water was proposed. Today, echoes are visible in anti-austerity demonstrations across Europe and, at home, with the Quebec students’ protest.
In Canada, we are still grappling with reconciling the question of how much state engagement is required to make a country equitable and sustainable, made interesting with a democratic socialist party as Official Opposition for the first time. The Ontario government is struggling with implementing their own “austerity” measures as recommended by the Drummond Report. One can hope that civil society and decision makers can take some lessons from the Soviet Union collapse, the failings of neoliberal globalization in the developing world, and the mounting discontent across collapsing economies in the EU and worldwide to find a balance in how much the state should and can control and improve global society for all its people.
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