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In this issue:

Anthony Giddens, Europe in a Global Age.

Can the EU afford its social model? In fact, it can’t afford not to keep it.

Lord Ashdown, International intervention in the new world order

Lord Ashdown speaking about his new book, Swords and Ploughshares.

Europe in the Global Age

Anthony Giddens  (2007)

Can the EU afford its social model? In fact, it can’t afford not to keep it.

The European Social Model - loosely defined as a robust welfare system providing protection to all citizens and limiting economic inequality - is a fundamental part of what Europe stands for.

Over the last 20 years, the EU has not achieved the ambitious economic goals set down in the Lisbon Agenda of 2000. Confidence in the EU’s capability to be the world’s foremost knowledge-based economy has been shaken, and the sustainability of its social model brought into question.

The answer is not to discard the European social model under the mistaken belief that a low-tax economy is the only way to remain competitive. Instead, the European post-industrial social model must evolve. The pillars of a renewed model should be preventative welfare and investment in human capital.

The classical welfare state is a system of risk-management; protection against disease, ignorance, poverty and unemployment when they occur. In the post-industrial countries these negatives should be replaced by a set of positives: active health, continuing education, and prosperity. Social policy should focus on achieving these goals through a positive, or pre-emptive, welfare approach.

This would include: 

• Heavy investment in early years education, preventing poverty before it occurs.

• Investment in continuing education and training, creating a more flexible workforce, and facilitating transitions between diverse jobs.

• A flexible labour market. Not American-style ‘hire and fire’, but a labour force adequately trained to allow workers to move between jobs as technological change demands requires.

• Incentives and sanctions to achieve healthier lifestyles, shifting towards preventative healthcare.

• Employment insurance, rather than unemployment insurance. Benefits would take effect before the individual becomes unemployed, by facilitating time out to enhance employability through extra training or education.

• Policies addressing not just the ‘poor’ - those below the poverty line - but those close to being impoverished.

• Older people must be persuaded or motivated to stay in work longer. ‘Old age’ should not represent a cut-off point beyond which people are prevented from working.

Such a set of social policies must be extended across Europe if the EU is to equip itself for an economic future without sacrificing its social model.

International intervention in the new world order

Lord Ashdown examines international intervention when political legitimacy is globalised.

Lord Ashdown, former EU High Representative in Bosnia and co-Chair of the National Security Commission speaking about his new book, Swords and Ploughshares, London, July 2007

Power is shifting:

• Laterally: first economic then political, from the Atlantic and Mediterranean to the wider Pacific Rim, giving us much less capacity to push Western liberal values

• Vertically: out of structures we created to control it, like from states to ‘global space’ 

Where power goes, governments must follow.  Problems, too, are globalised.  So we must move towards global governance.

International intervention – not always military – is now normal.  It has happened on average once every six months since 1992.  We have cut the number of conflicts and casualties.  We know how to do it:

• Prevent the conflict if possible

• Plan for reconstruction

• Give people security, then the rule of law, get the economy going, build institutions

• Leave elections as late as you decently can, otherwise the state is criminally captured.  Be culturally sensitive to local forms of democracy

• NGOs have a right to be part of the military planning

The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is not easy to enact.  It will be built up untidily.  China’s view is shifting, especially on Darfur. 

There will be exceptions to R2P, some of them immoral.  Sometimes we will have to contain a situation because we can’t do anything else, where we can’t succeed in intervention but we can’t afford to ignore it, like in Northern Ireland.

Criteria for a legitimate intervention, drawing on Aquinas and Kant:

1. Contravention of international law

2. Regional or international instability

3. All other means exhausted

4. Proportionate means

5. Legitimised by the proper authority

6. Reasonable prospect of success

Responsibility to protect has ruled out number 2 – it is no longer necessary.

Comment

Little of what Lord Ashdown presents is new, and that which is new is poorly conceived.  He sees hope in international intervention, yet at the same time concedes that power is shifting to countries (China, for one) that baulk at the idea of Responsibility to Protect as a norm.  NGOs would not be happy to be involved in military planning, either: this would collapse the distinction between civilian and military on which humanitarian operations are based.

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