Since the beginning of June, demonstrations of an economic nature, linked to the spectacular return of inflation and the downgrading of the middle classes, have taken place almost simultaneously in a slew of countries as different as Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Belgium, Great -Britain or Ecuador.
If we go back a month, in May, we also find angry and even destructive ones in Sri Lanka, where a “family” government (Rajapaksa) has fallen. Sri Lanka where, as in Lebanon during the previous two years, a “middle class” country, long considered promising, solid and reliable, is suddenly falling into misery. With — in both cases — corrupt clans, families, community or denominational cliques clinging to power.
British “Brexitized” railway workers, employees of Europe’s major airlines — beware, travellers! -, the Zimbabwean nurses, the Belgian trade union federations have all organized, in recent days, social movements, walkouts, street demonstrations on a scale that had been forgotten for decades.
The world is in turmoil, and the feeling of a great crisis of globalization is omnipresent. Better than ever for a very long time, we can see the link between a war, economic interdependence, national political debates and the stability or instability of societies.
The beating of the butterfly’s wings that suddenly changes everything and everywhere is rather the deafening noise of Russian artillery in the Donbass, and the ships that prevent the circulation of essential food.
In a way, it’s the return of the 1970s. But, at the time, the forces of the left were more concerned about unemployment. Worry, even obsession, with inflation was more the preserve of liberals and the economic right.
Today, we rather see inflation hitting the working classes and the small middle classes with full force. This dramatized concern for inflation comes to the very forefront, on an eminently “social” register, by no means reserved for economic elites concerned with “great balances” and fiscal rigor.
Faced with skyrocketing prices for energy and food, and in particular grains and oils, governments are reacting in disorganized fashion. With diverse, contradictory and so far inconclusive national strategies.
Germany has always remained, even in the era of peace and great prosperity of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, a country obsessed with the hypothetical and staggering return of inflation, always associated with the dark years of the XXe century. And that, even when she wasn’t really there—as she had been for…a good forty years. “Watch out, she’s coming back! Look out, she’s here! said the tough neoliberals. It was not true. But now it is.
In Poland, in the face of this new universal evil, taxes on food are for a moment erased. In the United States, Joe Biden proposes a suspension of the gas tax. The federal government in Berlin sends checks to taxpayers, suspends energy taxes (on… Russian gas), supports food banks that are suddenly under siege.
We thus try to make inflation “disappear” on arrival, by overcompensating… but without attacking its cause, upstream, and by drying up the coffers of the State in the process.
For their part, intransigent and consistent ecologists rejoice at the “healthy and inevitable” increase in fossil fuels, which is supposed to be the sign and the accelerator of their decline… and the announcement of their necessary replacement, as soon as possible.
But go and explain to the lower middle classes that the ordinary liter at five, six or seven dollars is ultimately a good thing and a “must go”!
Here as elsewhere (for example in France), this message does not pass, among the Yellow Vests and other “Rebellious” of the XXIe century. Short-termism, which is generally associated with a disease of the body politic and its vile representatives in search of re-election, is also a central characteristic of many demands and social movements – except perhaps ecology. .
The causes of this global economic malaise, which today crystallizes in energy and food prices, vary enormously from country to country, but some are common.
The war in Ukraine and the Russian naval blockade against Odessa are causing the prices to skyrocket and the volumes of cereals exported all over the world to fall. With dramatic and massive consequences in Africa, in the Middle East, where the number of hungry people is skyrocketing (after decades of uninterrupted progress)… but also for the working classes of the whole world, even in our supermarkets.
Global, external, global causes? A single crisis, everywhere the same? Certainly, the Russian aggression in Ukraine is a reminder of the interdependent and fragile nature of our economies, of their link with politics, diplomacy and war. But the examples of Lebanon and Sri Lanka also bring into question, in a characteristic way, national crises, traditions and failings. These two countries would have exploded even without a global crisis.
So, a bit of “de-globalization”? Warning: it could also hurt a lot…
Have a good summer anyway.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. This column is on vacation for the summer and will be back on August 15th. [email protected]