Has something gone
wrong with us Europeans? We fancy ourselves as the bastion of parliamentary
democracy, the champions of liberty, equality and fraternity, the home of the
industrial revolution, the continent to which, above all, Fukuyama's "end
of history" is meant to apply . . . And yet, economically, we seem to be
going nowhere. In the six years from 2007 the gross domestic product of the European
Union has not increased at all.
Perhaps we are
wrong to equate GDP growth with "progress". One of the sobering
lessons of the 20th century was that industrial expansion does not guarantee
moral or cultural progress. All the same, most people would regard material
progress — more output, crudely — as a crucial dimension of any larger notion
of progress. In modern Europe it has now been absent for more than five years.
Unless something changes soon, the ten years to 2017 could be the first
peacetime decade since the 17th century to see no economic growth in the
continent usually seen as the core of Western civilisation…..To Read More….
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