blutto said:
...now I realize you threw out that blame the US comment as irony but there is a case to be made that that is more to that case than not...it all boils down to the US support, in the post WW2 period, of military backed governments in what have become three of the major economic headaches presently troubling the EU...these countries, Spain, Portugal, and Greece would have very likely not stayed juntas without that US support...and there is also a good chance they would have developed into modern economies in other more democratic circumstances...the corrupt crony based economies that are part and parcel of the military junta scenario are less than an ideal path to a developing a modern economic system...
...so yeah US foreign policy concerns did help shape the current crisis...not totally to blame but also not entirely blameless either...
Cheers
blutto
During the Cold War the US supported any non-left party government, even when that meant, as in Greece, supporting a neo-fascist party to allow them to claim power and crush the opposition on the left that had faught against the Germans during the war.
As it has been so often told, Europe envisioned a political-economic system that accomodated capitalism and the free market, but that maintained aspects of socialism to promote social justice and cohesion. While it lasted the European model was the most civilized system the world has ever known. Repeatedly, in defeated Germany, in Britain, in France, in Italy, the socialist party leaders were increasingly vilified by the pro-market political factions and right-wing establishments (like the Christian dems in Germany, France and Italy), who were under direct support and manipulation from the US government, which offered financial rewards for compliance and threats of cutting funds for disobediance or an unfavorable (to its interests) election outcome.
Europe's post-WWII democracy was, therefore, sedated and under the influence of a heavy dose of US tranquilizers. Some have found a moral justification in this history because of the threat of Soviet tyranny, but of course I have not, and that such was just the unfortunate prerogatives of a geopolitical chess game then under contention.
Then came the Reagan years and the fall of the Berlin Wall and all of the sudden the game was over, the victor had found renewed confidence in its global and historical missions, while the neocons would, in time, take care of the rest...
But just as US capitalism and democracy seemed to have crested the wave of ultimate triumph and were headed toward a kind of cultural invinciblity, the demons lurking beneith its surface began to rear their ugly heads: greed, depavity, mendacity, baseness. Having exeeded the limits of decency, the US brand of deregulated, financial capitalism and privatization, which the superpower was able to make into the world's driving force, especially following the Soviet demise, has entered into a phase of inexorable crisis since 08.
Europe, if not entirely without financial fault (and of course the lack of concordant strategies and internal bickering have been most blameworthy, but also in places like Greece and Italy rampant corruption), was, however, much more conditioned by US economic policy and market ideology than its social-democratic world had impacted internally upon the United States. The lack of social security and inequality that the predominat US system generated and, in the wake of the global economic crisis, has of late so glaringly produced; its impact upon globalization and the consequences for the public's future fiscal responsibility; are incalculable in terms of the damage they have done to that incredibly more humane and civilized system, which the socialist elements in Europe were able to produce and give to European society in the wake of the Second Wold War.
Then the market fundamentalists took over and, in a remarkably short period of time, everything went straight to hell as they say. So yes, US policy concerns didn't only shape the current crisis we face today, but have been the driving ideological force behind it.
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