Around the World

Having escaped with not much more than a 'they've learned their lesson' regarding treatment of the Roma Nation, Mr Sarkozy's Government has since been facing new troubles.

Students and unions have been out in force, carrying out protests in opposition to government austerity measures (Willshire, 2010). These protests have centred on the pension reforms undertaken by the French administration. Mass displays have, however, been unable to sway the government away from its set course.

Yet the actions in France have resonated with the riots occurring all around Europe, from the students in the UK to the unions in Greece and many places in between. The dissatisfaction blatant at the heart of these actions seems symptomatic of older problems reoccurring.

In England particularly, there are failed promises of abolishing boom & bust economics. In his talk 'Crises of Capitalism', David Harvey proffers the LSE explanation that suggests that 'Systemic Risk', that is the 'Internal Contradictions of Capital Accumulation' where exposed in this crisis.

And with it is exposed a decline of neo-liberalism, with the 'last desperate attempts to make capitalism work for socialism' (Zizek, 2010) and of social democracy (Taylor, 2010). The question is what is rising in its place? Zizek considers our current mode of capitalism, 'Cultural Capitalism', to be part of the response to the changing times and along with Harvey considers these current crises to be a sufficient explanation of the rerise of anti-capitalist & socialist movements; seeing them as a rational response to the times.

In other international news there is of course the 'Wikileaks', an issue that has devolved into politicising the Nobel Peace Prize (Harding, 2010). That issue is at heart one of a language, information and social revolution, as the Russian publication Pravda shrewdly pointed out (Santayana, 2010).

While it is an issue unaffiliated to the austerity protests, it is still connected to the core of the issue. With protests against governments penalising citizens for business indiscipline and unions beginning to mobilise in support, it does not feel far fetched to suggest that an anti-governmental secrecy movement could become affiliated to an organised anti-corruption movement.

If the radical spirit and momentum of 2010 is maintained in conjunction with organised Union action, 2011 could be a very tricky year for the globalised finance industry.

And if things are to get tricky for multi-national finance, governments must have a multi-national mandate to act. In a globalised world, uni-lateral action will be responded to punitively by business simply shifting its money elsewhere.

With a European response rather than just a French or British, with a Latin American response rather than just a Bolivian or Venezuelan, conditions are created whereby business cannot just sidestep everything from taxation to responsibility.

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References:
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+ Kim Willshire's 'Nicolas Sarkozy in warning to pension reform protesters';

+ Kim Willshire's 'French pension reform vote passed by parliament';

+ Slavoj Zizek's 'First as Tragedy, then as Farce'; November 2009;

+ Robert Taylor's 'Does European Social Democracy have a Future?'; Summer 2008;

+ Luke Harding's 'Julian Assange should be awarded Nobel peace prize, suggests Russia';

+ Mauro Santayana's 'Society and the world, after Julian Assange';