Timothy Garton Ash: 'We Europeans became lazy and hubristic'
Timothy Garton Ash: 'We Europeans became lazy and hubristic'
The British journalist and historian defines the post-Wall era up to the present day in ‘Homelands: A Personal History of Europe’
When the Brits want to shit on their neighbours they suddenly become European.
Well I don’t speak for everyone in the UK but we are Europeans, just not in the European Union. Nobody would say that the Swiss aren’t European just for not having EU citizenship.
That said the headline is itself lazy and hubristic; to call ALL Europeans these things is simply wrong, the breadth of economic and societal difference between the East and West, the North and South, make such generalisations completely pointless.
It doesn’t read as if the author is generalizing all Europeans, it reads more as if he’s criticizing European policy. For what it’s worth in his book he’s very critical of Brexit as well.
We believed that as things had gone well for us for years, that things would continue going that way.
More like right wing politicians dismantled the systems that worked well and now they won't anymore.
And conservative and bought politicians kept systems the same that were working well but don't work well now under entirely different circumstances and to solve different problems.
That is part of the process. Under fund the public services and let private companies replace the easily replaceable (read commercially viable parts) and then point at the public ones and say:
- They are inefficient compared to the private companies.
- Their efficacy is dwindling and "reform" is needed.
This is at least the playbook they have followed in my country to ruin postal and railroad services, and they are in the process of ruining healthcare as well. To give concrete examples the public postal service needs to be able to deliver mail and packages anywhere in the country while the private ones can target the population centers only. Similarly privatized health care clinics can offer doctors of particular specializations higher pay and less work so that the public hospitals have shortage of such specialized doctors and need to "buy" treatments from the private wards for extortionate sums. The latter example is again used to say that the private are more efficient since it can make a surplus budget, ignoring the whole dynamic in play and that they are actually less efficient and abusing the public system for profit.