European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell’s comments last year describing the bloc as a garden and much of the rest of the world as jungle were widely criticized.
Often missed, however, was that his view wasn’t just an assessment of the current lay of the land but was also forward-looking: “Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden. The gardeners have to go to the jungle.”
In essence he was describing a great shift underway in the EU – one that is increasingly set on moving polluting industry and energy generation outside the garden and to the bloc’s periphery in the Balkans (and North Africa, which I’ll detail in a post tomorrow). In the mind of the European elite, such an initiative will “help the EU meet its geopolitical, economic, and climate goals.” Or in other words:
- Keeps up the illusion of rejecting Russian fossil fuels.
- Wages are much lower on the European periphery.
- The garden is kept clean.
The contradictions in the EU’s endeavors over the past year and a half are probably best exemplified by the German Greens. Rabidly anti-Russian, they opposed any natural gas from Russia while simultaneously working to shut down Germany’s remaining nuclear power plants. Naturally this left Germany burning more coal, paying exorbitant prices for LNG, and shoveling money at industry in an attempt to soften the blow of higher energy costs.
As the whole of the EU follows a similar path, it’s interesting that the bloc does not have the same expectations for the statelets in the Western Balkans:
On top of mass transfer of positions/key portfolios to secessionist Dodik, the new govt in Sarajevo – heavily backed by both the U.S. & EU – is preparing to significantly deepen Russia’s chokehold on the country’s energy sector (while trying to publicly obscure the same). https://t.co/JMqiPmWoZp
— Jasmin Mujanović (@JasminMuj) May 22, 2023
Here are more details from Reuters:
The Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina has agreed to begin negotiations on building a gas pipeline to ship gas from Russia, the head of Republika Srpska’s representative office in Russia told state news agency RIA in an interview published on Monday.
RIA cited Dusko Perovic as saying: “The Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina gave the green light to start the negotiation process”, and that region’s government would seek to have gas shipped via neighbouring Serbia.
There are also major EU plans to build 3.5 billion euros worth of gas-fired power plants, pipelines, and liquefied natural gas terminals in the Western Balkans. According to a March report from Global Energy Monitor and Bankwatch:
In 2021, the six countries of the Western Balkans – Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia – consumed a mere 3.7 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas or 4% of what Germany used that same year.
Source: Global Energy Monitor, Global Gas Infrastructure Tracker and Global Gas Plant tracker
Since the Western Balkans do not currently need the gas (at least not unless more industry is moved there from the EU), it would appear the natural gas plants will transfer electricity to the EU. On top of the natural gas, there are also plans for major photovoltaic plants in Albania, Kosovo, and North Macedonia, and giant wind farms in Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Serbia.
There are numerous plans or projects already completed linking the power grids of the Western Balkans with the EU. For example, there are power interconnectors under the Adriatic Sea that will send energy from the Balkans to Italy (which is being expanded), and there are other interconnector projects linking to the EU nations like Hungary and Croatia. Importantly, this will in effect help “green” Europe as the natural gas will be burned outside the EU’s borders.
As of now, the plans would create new hurdles for EU accession for the Balkan nations as it increases their emissions and goes against the EU Energy Community Treaty. Given that accession is still many years away –if ever – Germany is instead focusing on establishing a Common Regional Market to implement the “four freedoms”—the freedom of movement for goods, capital, services, and people—across the region’s economies. The thinking goes that this will “provide tangible benefits to the region’s citizens by creating a more attractive destination for Western capital, especially as global supply chains struggle to adapt to political imperatives for near- and friend-shoring.”
On May 31, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled a new plan to bring the Western Balkans closer to the EU. It includes further aligning the region with the EU’s single market, more regional economic integration, judicial and anti-corruption reforms, and more EU funding.
European manufacturing already had a small presence in the Western Balaksn – especially Serbia – and a European Parliament study from last year notes how there is room for it to grow:
…Since 2011 external imbalances have improved. In some countries, export-led growth policies, associated with increased inflows of FDI into the manufacturing sector, have led to a substantial reduction in trade deficits in goods and services.
EU policies should be nuanced in relation to the different Western Balkan economic structures, with manufacturing-related infrastructure focused on Serbia, North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina….
The region has recently become a much more attractive investment destination, especially North Macedonia and Serbia, due to the provision of privileged tax breaks as well as other subsidies to foreign investors along with the establishment of special economic zones in Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Serbia. These economies have attracted large inflows of foreign investment into the manufacturing sectors, especially car components industries which have linked their economies into global supply chains for the first time.
Aside from heavy industry, there are other opportunities for the EU. From Intellinews:
Elsewhere in the region, Albania’s clothing and textile industry is largely geared to importing materials that are then turned into partially or fully finished garments or shoes and re-exported, a process dubbed ‘facon’. The industry developed thanks to Albania’s low costs – this is a labour-intensive sector and Albania has the lowest minimum wage in Europe – and its proximity to Italy, one of the world’s leading fashion countries.
According to industry insiders, typically, clothes and shoes are exported almost complete to Italy, where Italian workers add the final touches and packaging, allowing the products to go out to the shops with the prestigious ‘Made in Italy’ label.
Two of the biggest impediments to more EU industry in the Balkans are energy and transport infrastructure. We’ve already seen the above plans for energy. On the issue of transport, last year (oddly enough, on the day after Russia launched its SMO in Ukraine) the EU announced a 3.2 billion euro package to improve transport connectivity in and to the Balkans.
For years Germany has been the EU country leading the charge on the Balkans policy in recent years. In 2014, Germany started the Berlin Process, an effort to strengthen ties between the Balkan states and the EU. It has evolved into the infrastructure and development projects taking place today, although has done little to move the countries anywhere closer to EU status.
Germany is among the top three export destinations for Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo and is one of the top European investors in the region, making Berlin the most important EU partner for the Balkan states. German industry has numerous operations across the region.
Berlin also has a bit of an energy crisis on its hands – with a critical minerals problem likely soon to follow as relations with China deteriorate. Once again, the EU is looking to the Balkans for a solution.
The region has a ton of mineral resources such as copper, chromite, lead and zinc, with some of the largest deposits in Europe. Serbia happens to have vast lithium deposits, and a closer look at the situation there is illuminating.
Last year, in the face of overwhelming public opposition Belgrade revoked the licenses for the $2.4 billion Rio Tinto project in the country, but the project is far from dead. Opponents of the mine believed the government’s cancellation was only temporary and was intended to avoid backlash ahead of elections, and there are plentiful reasons to believe that to be true. Rio Tinto has continued to buy up land in the area, and is also offering financial aid to local businesses in an apparent curry good will.
In November, Belgrade also signed declarations of intent with the Slovakian battery maker InoBat for a factory in Serbia. Rio Tinto happens to be an investor in the company.
Berlin is one the strongest proponents of the project, which also has strong backing from the UK, Australia, the US, and Brussels. The latter is currently reliant on China for roughly 97 percent of its lithium but aspires to quickly secure an entire supply chain of battery minerals and materials. According to Handelsblatt, the German government listed the Serbian lithium mine as one of the most important projects in order to secure the raw material and reduce dependence on China.
The EU is fully aware that its policies to push forward with intense mining in the Balkans will invite resistance, but pushes forward nonetheless. As an EU Parliament study notes:
…policies to attract foreign investors, considered important for increasing government revenues and for economic development, could conflict with objectives in rural development or respect for environmental norms. As indicated earlier, demonstrations have taken place in Serbia by people who have been asked to sell their land at low prices and leave their agricultural activities on family farms, in order to implement agreements with foreign companies on the exploitation of minerals (e.g. Rio Tinto for the extraction of lithium) that could lead to environmental degradation.
It’s also worth noting that Sweden has the EU’s only heavy rare earth metal deposit of note. It’s not a new discovery; it was identified decades ago, but the public remains largely opposed to mining it because of negative effects on animal habitats and the country’s second largest lake, which is less than a mile from the site. And there has not been similar pressure to get the mine (and processing facilities) up and running despite the EU’s near total reliance on China for rare earths.
The Serbian public is overwhelmingly against the mine, just as they are against NATO and increasingly the EU, but the government in Belgrade typically swims against the current of public opinion behind closed doors. As Lily Lynch writes at New Left Review:
Upon closer inspection, however, the image of Serbia as a faithful servant of Moscow starts to fall apart. At the United Nations, Serbia has consistently voted to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Serbia has been a member of NATO’s bilateral Partnership for Peace program since 2006. In recent years, Serbia has participated in more military exercises with NATO than it has with Russia. While Western media has fixated on the presence of Putin coffee mugs at tourist stands in Belgrade, Serbia has quietly held high-level meetings at NATO headquarters. Last year, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg thanked President Vučić for his ‘personal commitment’ to the partnership between Serbia and NATO. The Serbian armed forces have also worked closely with KFOR, the NATO security force in Kosovo, for many years. Serbia might be pro-Russia before the domestic public; but behind closed doors, it is closer to the West.
***
Maybe nothing sums up the future EU-Balkans relationship more than the recently announced plan for Albania to help water the garden.
Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot, is filled with picturesque hilltop towns, olive groves, glistening beaches, and trulli – white-painted limestone houses with conical roofs. It’s also a region dealing with increasing drought that threatens its agriculture and tourism.
According to Corriere della Sera, Albania has now greenlit a $1 billion project to build an undersea water pipeline that would send 150 million cubic meters of water to the southeastern Italian region every year.
The plan could be incredibly shortsighted on Albania’s part. The country has historically been blessed with an abundance of freshwater and relies on hydropower to meet much of its energy needs. But it was also forced to ration electricity last year because of drought, and the problem is only expected to worsen with ongoing climate change.
***
While the beautification of the garden continues to drive away blue collar jobs, positions for the professional managerial class are also now being weeded out. Western European companies, searching for ways to cut costs and boost margins, are increasingly sending software development, administration, payroll handling and research jobs to Eastern Europe.
It’s unclear what the people remaining in Borrell’s utopia are supposed to do? As of now, simply tending to one’s garden doesn’t pay the ever-increasing bills.
36 comments
Comments are closed.
Lets not forget that back when Poland etc joined EU, the original plan was for a half way house of sorts. That is currently the position that the EFTA nations, sans Switzerland, is in.
Likely the Balkan nations will find themselves in a similar position down the road. Not quite in, not quite out.
Also, Norway is right now seeing a high number of wind farms being pushed forward. Quite often with some German investor involved. The North Sea is becoming quite tangled with pipes and cables delivering NG and electricity.
All in all, EU is becoming more and more blatant “German”. Or maybe more correctly, more and more ordoliberal.
In other words, empire is back on the menu…
Empire never went out of fashion. In Romania, where I was born, foreigners now own 40% of the agricultural land: colonial economies represent the only precedent for such an ownership structure. IKEA is the biggest owner (and destroyer) of forests in Romania, which is a tragedy because the country hosts 70% of Europe’s virgin forest, and one of the largest old-growth forests left in the world. IKEA is the biggest forest owner also in Lithuania, followed by Davos Capital – a Finland-based investment company specialized in ‘sustainable forests and natural capital’.
Wolfgang Streeck described the European Union as ‘Germany’s European Empire’. Eastern European states are now the neoliberal colonies of the West, in particular of Germany and the ‘German bloc’, to use Joseph Halevi’s term. The export-oriented dynamism of the ‘German bloc’ has been based on the cheap skilled labour of the East where German companies bought and restructured plants, and created dependent production chains after 1989.
The top investor countries in Romania by FDI position are Netherlands, Germany and Austria (the German bloc). However, around 45-50% of the total profit made in the economy leaves the country repatriated as interest and dividends – in hard currency, of course, which pushes up the current account deficit and puts the country under a severe export compulsion.
In Eastern European states, foreign-owned banks control on average 70-80% of all bank assets. These banks lend preponderantly in hard currency, unloading the forex risk on the population. They mostly lend for consumption, starving local businesses of credit and inflating the real estate bubble. In Romania, which enjoys 85% foreign participation in its banking system, Austrian capital dominates. After the 2008 financial crisis, when Austrian banks found themselves on the verge of collapse, they threatened to cut exposure in Romania, thus shutting down the financial system. Then government officials went to the IMF cap in hand and assumed new debt in order to make Western banks whole again.
Romania spends less on healthcare as a percentage of the budget than any other country in the EU; around a third of doctors have already emigrated. In 2014, all five candidates for presidency declared their support for the privatization of healthcare – including Johannis who won the elections and is now in his second mandate. The large majority of the population oppose the privatization of healthcare, but national politicians take their marching orders from the EU bureaucrats who ultimately represent the interests of Western Europe’s financial capital.
And speaking of gardens and jungles, in 2000 an Australian gold mining company spilled 100 tons of cyanide into a Romanian river. The spill poisoned the waterways of multiple Eastern countries and was considered the worst environmental disaster in Europe since Chernobyl. Since then three attempts were made in the Parliament of Romania to ban gold cyanidation, none of which succeeded.
Sorry for the long post, but I’m so outraged…
Welcome to Regan and Thatcher’s neon-liberalism and the colonization of your country.
The rich benefit and the rest of us become proles. The EU becomes “virtuous” because it has exported its pollution, and “avoided “the effects of global warming.
All this over the world indicates to me that Global Warming and preservation of our exosphere is being avoided while the rich dance to our collective near extinction
This reveals our lords and masters have no solution to Global Warming, as many have expected, and will dance and celebrate as the Human Race faces extinction.
Thia also suggests why the SETI program has not located and advanced civilizations. They all fell into the heat trap and perished. .
info appreciated.
any reading recommendations?
p.s. German thriller novelist Oliver Bottini wrote about the Romania agriculture issue that you are describing in his “Der Tod in den stillen Winkeln des Lebens”, (no English transl.) involving Romania and Germany and agricultural multis (received the German Crime Fiction Award for best political crime novel 2018.)
Most if not all the neoliberal development plan as presented here looks crazy stuff. Subsidizing financiers with tax breaks to invest in the Balkans, almost certainly having impacts all around the UE. “Jungle” Borrell might be happy with the opportunities in the Balkans but he should realise this might be, for instance, the last shoot in the feet for the textile industry in Spain which is a relatively important one in Valencia and Alicante. The textile industry in Spain is being forced by regulations to increase energy efficiency and recycle materials and these requires investments that might go sour if they are suddenly outcompeted by “Italian” fashion which does not have to comply with the same restrictions in Albania. Tax breaks for such investments in the “Jungle” can be considered under EU legislation illegal subsidies given for EU financial companies whose investments might make life more difficult to existing EU companies which in turn are subject to more restrictive EU regulations. Can these run away with this? Will they with a straight face be able to say workers in let’s say, Alcoy (Alicante), that, well, for you to remain competitive, you have to take down your salaries to lower than those of Albanese workers because, besides, we have to be pristine regarding recycling and energy while they don’t. Focus on tourism and forget about trying to produce anything? In the end, they’ll say, we will all be better off! Yes? How? Buying expensive Italian fashion made in the Balkans with 6 months of unemployment relief? OK, we are probably in early stages of this push and nobody can exactly predict where this will go but the direction we are heading looks very much misguided. As usual with the current crop of leadership.
I really do wonder what kind of money cycle these people envision, if they think about that at all. Because its is clearly not wages > revenue > wages.
Maybe they think it can all run on credit card debt, under some bastardization of the money multiplier myth.
I believe they can only think now “geo-strategically”, sort of. Let us bring the Balkans out of Russian’s influence, as their leit motiv. No matter the victims. As per how Gallagher presents the evidence at least.
The one of a gated community, I guess. Those schmucks, why don’t they learn to code or something?
Coding and AI will have a nasty collision, and AI will probably win.
Better to be in a trade.
An alternative is to hire Albanian workers in the garment plant somewhere in EU. There are plenty of Albanian workers there. Other alternative is moving the labor intensive stages of garment production from China to Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan. Keeping the production chain in Europe saves the production of fabrics etc. in Europe, the designers are near the producers etc.
That said, when I came to USA in 1980, shoes, snickers etc. were American made, and I do not thing that they became MUCH cheaper relative to wages over 40 years after far-shoring. Bulk of cost reduction on labor goes to intermediaries, brand owners etc. and those profits land in places like Cayman Islands. We are ruled by Caymanians and we are not even aware of it.
Italian brands are supposedly already shipping Chinese workers to Italy, something that came to light when COVID started spreading there.
re: Chinese workers & Italy
there was a fine Venice University art project on this 15 years ago.
German art historian Wolfgang Scheppe with his students at IUAV researched it, involving tropes of Venice tourism and illegal immigrants, “Migropolis”.
And of course books on the fashion industry.
See e.g. the work of Italian sociologist Giulia Mensitieri
This concept is the backbone of Italian “elite” fashion too.
While the German and French designers do it in Asia or Romania, the Italians brought the work force to Italy.
(So its has been known much longer than Covid.)
Any increases in productivity or decrease in the cost of production in the past forty or fifty years has got to the uppermost management and investors.
The decreasing cost of production certainly was greater than any decrease in the cost of buying.
Noted, during compulsive streaming of EU-produced TV, during COVID mandatory streaming: Albania & Turkish heavies took the place of US TV’s sexy “bad hombre” Columbian & Mexican cartels, running Black or redneck villans? Stereotypes of Ukrainian, Uzbek & Latvian tough guys in Gomorrah-esque, French or Belgian series (Bulgaria, is shot in somber blue, while Baltic gangsters are psychotic Aki Kaurismäki characters, with Russian mob heavies only appearing, for the season’s cathartic big shoot-out?) If there’s going to be more WEF wars of extraction, might as well be near their Dalmatian Coast investments?
It sounds as if the EU plans to use the Balkans as a garbage dump where citizens can be poisoned. Here have some industry and benefits but you got to be ready to die young, see your kids struggle for breath, and so on. Oh and keep with the cheap labor, diapers to work in, and sweatshops.
Apparently it will help EU make their numbers, but how is this going to help the climate crisis?
The EU climate plan is essentially:
“Accounting fraud to the rescue!”
>>>“Accounting fraud to the rescue!”
And we should be surprised by this? Why?
IIRC, one of the economic problems of the later Soviet Union was the increasing inability of the central planners in Moscow to competently govern. Leaving aside any discussion over a centrally planned economy versus a market economy (or to what degree as most modern economies have varying combinations of the two), a planner or director of something needs accurate information to be competent. The way for the up-and-coming apparatchik (bureaucrat) looking to become a member of the nomenklatura (secretary) was to do really well in managing something, like a factory or a mine. No, it was to appear to do something really well, which got you promoted. Restated, manipulate or just lie, about production to get ahead.
And now, you are thinking, so what?
Just how corrupt are the United States and the European Union? An increasing problem is getting any, forget honest, information. Between the lies in facts, distorted government statistics, the increasing classification of information into secrets, and the nihilistic, in the Russian pre-world war one sense or the modern post, post-modern American sense of fact/truth is whatever we want it to be, just how can anyone, never mind the government, function?
Or simply, GIGO, Garbage in, garbage out.
Well, now the relative silence of German industry regarding Russian sanctions makes sense. The plan was to ship jobs out anyway and emulate the “sophisticated” business practises of their American colleagues. The Balkans is their Mexico and Canada? Common Regional Market is NAFTA? When will the EU announce the building of the wall?
Well, that IS the price of access to the Garden: Surrender your lands and your kids’ futures to the Chief Gardener and his crew, to use/abuse/poison etc at will.
One will struggle to buy any home-grown agricultural produce in any supermarket in Serbia or Croatia – agriculture had been run into the ground and majority of food being sold is the knock-off of French and Italian and German rubbish quality food schrapnel that Fr/Ita/Ger citizens scoff at. 20-30 years ago the AG in Balkans was delicious and now is practically dead.
Someone whose blog I read in the past, I think it may have been Chrles Huges Smith, described the current EU economy as a pure colonial one. That is a good description I think. Perifery extracts goods from the ground (including any dirty/polluting local refining as necessary), sends these to the Colonial Core (EU) and then gets the highly priced processed goods in return. As these goods are way too expensive for the periphery populus, the transaction gets financialised and periphery falls into debt serfdom.
Given that the brainiacs in Brussels have seppuku-ed themselves with embargo on cheap-Russian-everything, and are now buying it all at 5-times the markup from their own Colonial Master the other side of Atlantic, there is no other way out of trouble but make the perifery (Balkans) pay for everything.
Looks like EU officials read the Hunger Games and saw a model for city/state planning.
The Balkans/Eastern/Southern Europe represent the 12 sacrifice zones for industrial exploitation. (There are actually 13, but it is believed the most radicalized of the zones has been destroyed).
I see some commenters mentioning the streotypes of people from those zones in Western Eurooean media.
“Stereotypes” is an overly diplomatic description of what’s on display.
The “clean garden” is full of filthy minds.
District 13 is believed to have been destroyed by sanctions?
Why do that bring some vague memories of a game set to Russia…
I suppose that moving stuff like industries to the Balkans might seem logical to the EU leadership. This might explain the keen interest that the EU has been taking in the Balkans the past several months. They want to fold the whole region into the EU structure and having them all as EU members means that the people in those countries will never have a say with how their country is run. But with this war, they might want the Balkans strong to fend off Russia for them. On the other hand, they want them also weak so that they have to do what Brussels wants. I wonder how they will square that circle.
export the “smart” ones westward, while keeping the “dumb” ones preoccupied with fretting about intruders from east and south.
Interesting that they think turbine producers in the EU can ramp up production when they have trouble sourcing some of the raw materials use to make the blading, generator windings, transformer cores, etc. for their existing contracts; or will be able to cancel all their existing contracts. I guess they assume the people of the jungles don’t know how to hire lawyers.
I don’t know what are the missing materials, but there is always the Congo as the world powers have spent over a century insuring that the whole place is a dysfunctional, corrupt, and exploitable hell hole. The country is a major source of many kinds of rare earths.
What the European and American powers have done to the Congo appears to be what they want to do to the Balkans and Eastern Europe to past the Urals into Siberia. Is that not the whole point of the American and European engineered Russo-Ukrainian War? Seeing what happened to the Congo once King Leopold II got his genocidal hands on it (and to Ukraine today), it really is nightmare fuel.
I dunno… but it sure looks like the DRC it’s not what it used to be…
Congo President shuts down Macron
The French have been parasitic in their treatment of their “former” colonies, which made seeing President Macron getting verbally reprimanded by President Tshisekedi nice to see. If the Congolese can kick Americans, Europeans, and I assume the Chinese, out and retain control of their economy, it will not be too soon.
Please do not industrialize Albania, it’s the only wild garden in Europe. Let it be wild. There are still bears roaming its valleys and mountains, I saw them myself.
All this will do is destroy their pristine habitat , and the rapacious capitalists will quickly jump to next prey once they made some money leaving a trail of devastation on the environment and the people.
Plenty of bears left in Romania… But then they are selling their forests to the Austrians and IKEA.
Where are the people who constantly come to complain on China building new, more efficient coal fired power plants (while they ignore China is co-currently remove old inefficient, dirty coal plants from the grid at an even faster pace)? Sigh.
I think the EU and Germany are simply small parts of the US. In both cases jobs are being exported to low wage destinations and in both places de facto open borders are bringing in millions of low wage, unskilled workers from the global south who have few prospects of meaningful employment. Like the US almost half of the future population is recent migrant as one can see from the makeup of my kid’s schools here in Germany. The FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) industries are transnational and finance the political elites…..Warburg Bank, among others for Scholz, Ukraine gas producers for Biden…..and the political elites serve their immediate circle. It was bizarre to watch Scholz, with a smirk on his face, stand next to Biden as Biden announced he would take Nordstream down last year. And in our area of Bavaria while Bosch and other big employers are shutting down the government is bringing in thousands of young men from the global south as refugees and there are simply no good paying jobs. Meanwhile China has 22 nuclear power plants under construction and 44 in planning. Serious consideration should be given to outsourcing the US government, and its subsidiary in Germany, to China. That would at least help global warming. And if the war in Ukraine could be stopped that might massively decrease CO2 production from bombing, fires, burning petrol etc. Seeing Scholz, Baerbock and the Greens pushing to arrest those who are anti war while outlawing wood, oil and gas heat is dissonant.
There is not much more our politicians can do to show us that we are serfs again now, so as long as we continue to be distracted by insider-groups like nationality pitched against each other in divide-and-rule confrontation, they will always win. The only way anything will change is when people stop being sheep and realise we are just all different provinces exploited for the beautiful lifestyle of the international ruling elite who parasitise us so they can live like kings on earth. When we stop fighting each other and any scapegoat groups they offer us to sacrifice, the focus can turn on them; history has proved this is the only way we can get a fair share of the resources needed for a decent life.
Why aren’t there any non-neoliberal candidates at elections anymore, anywhere in the ‘West’? How does that work? How, for instance, does Serbia end up with a government so opposed to its citizen’s interests?
see below
Because its all front run after agency and funds reformed academia to become feeder pipelines and destining voices marginalized through defunding or restructuring. The old boys from FEE and the likes of Kochs were quite vocal and on the record their agenda was best forwarded by capturing young minds to create a generational shift in social perspective.
Plus that to get ahead today one needs to ascribe to its foundations and as one does not colour outside of the lines, too much, you can ascend financially and socially if it forwards neoliberalism one more click of the ratchet to everyone else’s demise.
Stalin must be rolling in his grave at its success compared to his blunt attempts ….