Connect: 'French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day," wrote Thomas Friedman in the New York Times last week. It's unclear how many hours a week Friedman works, but it's unlikely he works as many as the Indian engineers. "Old Europe" is being derided and much of the ridicule is coming from the US.
Hard-won entitlements - a 35-hour working week; six weeks paid holidays; retirement at 65; unemployment insurance; leave arrangements - are under attack. Now the wheezes include encouraging people to get 40-year mortgages, work 60-hour weeks, 50 weeks a year until the age of 75. It's better, of course, if you have the decency to die before any of that retirement nonsense.
However, if you insist on being so inconsiderate that you won't conveniently die, you can, when you're old and have paid for your house but have little cash, "release the equity in your home", as a gushing TV ad suggests. That means you can sell a financial lending outfit ownership of part of your house. When you finally realise you're a burden and take the hint to die, they'll make a profit.
A generation ago, we were promised that computers and other labour-saving devices would hugely increase our leisure time. Because there would be little to do, the problem was going to be how to prevent boredom. Minds as well as muscles might atrophy. Yeah, right! Such predictions, like flying cars, meals consisting only of protein pills and everybody wearing dodgy lycra suits (much mercy in avoiding that!) have turned out to be rubbish. Computers have certainly made transactions, calculations and communications much faster. The problem is that capital, not labour, has benefited unduly. Thus globalisation is construed in terms of capital only.
That's not surprising seeing as the main agent of globalisation is the US which is currently run by the government arm of ruthless big business. All empires attempt to remake the world - or at least the chunk of it they rule - in their own image.
In that sense Rome, France, Britain and the rest were no different from America which, after all, is a former European colony.
So western Europe is old now and like an old person it's more concerned with comfort than conquest. Friedman's Indians are welcome to their 35-hour days. If that's what it takes to succeed in India, so be it. India is, of course, an even older civilisation than Europe but it's also the world's largest democracy with the youngest population - almost 70 per cent below age 35.
It is, too, a country in which a huge proportion of its people lives in wretched conditions. Thus youth is fuelled by desperation and Europe cannot - even if it wished to - compete with such energy. Meanwhile, in order to remain "competitive" (essentially this has come to mean making politics subservient to market economics), hard-won entitlements of European civilisation are under attack.
Since France voted "no" to the European constitution on May 29th, Europe - or, at least "Old Europe", the most civilised, least desperate part of the continent - has been cast as decadent. The hard-won entitlements are sneered at: "Next to India," wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning Friedman, "western Europe looks like an assisted living facility with Turkish nurses." Well, look at it the other way. Next to Europe, India looks like an overcrowded and filthy sub-continent in which industrious and ambitious people - most commendable, some deplorable - are desperate to better themselves materially. Some will succeed and others will not. The usual self-glorifying rhetoric - "I got up off my arse and on my bike" - will coarsen civilisation there too.
Anyway, there is much ugly neo-con and Tory gloating over the French and Dutch rejections of the proposed European constitution. Almost all the sneering calls to scrap workers' namby-pamby entitlements are coming from people who exploit labour. A simple question: how many hours a week does George Bush actually "work"? I know we see posed photos of him "clearing scrub" (there seems to be an endless amount of "scrub" on his Texas ranch). Is he not, however, notoriously lazy? Six weeks holidays would, I understand, be little more than a long weekend for him. Yet he, the cabal around him and his supporters sneer at France's desire to maintain civilised work practices.
"A few weeks ago," snorted Friedman, "Franz Muentefering, chairman of Germany's Social Democratic Party, compared private equity firms - which buy up failing businesses, downsize them and then sell them - to a 'swarm of locusts'. The fact that a top German politician has resorted to attacking capitalism tells you just how explosive the next decade in western Europe could be." But many of these "private equity firms" are locusts. The idea that there can be nothing to life other than profit - though it matters, it's vital it be kept in proportion - is all the bullying neo-cons have to offer. Guns, bombs and other weapons, including massive and abject propaganda through the media, enforce an entire mindset and seek to make it seem like common sense. It'll end in tears.