Clash of Cultures - Between Human Rights and Economic Rescue

Post-modern thoughts on Europe’s grand master narrative of progress

Intellectuals and university scholars from anthropology over literature to politics define the 21^st century society as post-modern. According to them, we live in a world of relative and subjective truth, where a myriad of realities coexist, implying that all moral and ethical judgement is indeed fallible. There are no absolutes left, everything is just a construct, starting with reality, history, nations and even gender is narrated and performed. It’s a negation that bares its own implied criticism. Yet, the Western world desperately clings to what post-modern thinker Jean-François Lyotard called master narratives – capitalism, progress, civilisation and Western hegemony. We still talk in terms of growth analysis, GDP and GNP, stock market value implying that there is always more money to be made, forcing us to believe we are going onwards and upwards.  

Philosophy vs. Market Reality

Remember the housing bubble in ’04 and ’05, people made millions believing the mortgage industry could only go up. That is until 2008 when Lehmann Brothers was the first bank to go under triggering a veritable cascade of other more global, interconnected costly failures and governmental bail out programs. Now four years later, the crisis has spread, we do no longer bail out banks but countries. And it seems we are back to square one. With the Euro crisis looming large over the eastern seaboard the Foucaultian regime of a prosperous capitalist truth mediated through public news channels is crumbling before our eyes. However, media and policy makers and still propagate the grand master narrative of eternal growth and progress. With the mess we are currently presiding over, would now not be the perfect time to take a step back and re-evaluate our fundamental cultural believes? Especially if we try and convince China to drag us out of the pit and save our God-fearing capitalist souls, should we take a lesson in eastern philosophy instead of diving headlong into the prophesised inevitable confrontation? Maybe we could start by accepting some tough truths about ourselves, not only in papers with fancy sounding titles written by highly praised academics.

           

The winds of Change - Economic interests trump human rights 

If we were to believe Kissinger’s new book On China, we should not view life as a chess game focused on one goal conquering the enemy King. Civilisations rise and fall, Ancient Greece and Egypt were taken over by Rome and, in turn Rome was taken during the great migration by invading peoples. Someone stronger came and conquered. Renaissance and Enlightenment overcame the darkness of the Middle Ages. Predator and prey? For us Westerners falling means failing, in China rebellion and violence meant empires were regularly overturned, still, Confucius lessons created a cultural narration of a golden age of harmony that helped reunite the country throughout and in spite of its brutal periods. Forgotten is the age old adage that history is written by the victors, produced and consumed with a purpose in mind. Despite today’s inherent post-modern scepticism, we still cling to the idea of history as a grand work of art progressing towards something, anything really. Only now our growth rates prove be modern mathematical miracles in negative growth, producing artificial values, like MF Global's 6 billion dollar bet on the European crisis.

Over the past four years we seem to have manoeuvred ourselves a very dangerous check. The private sector had been taking out loans with interest rates at an unprecedented all time low. In countries like the Italy, Spain, Greece and Ireland this high-life on credit worked until in 2008 when the party was over and governments all over the world had to bail out their banks. Inside the European meltdown, between boardroom austerity deals and backdoor exit-strategies, the suicide rate in Greece has tripled and only today Moody’s cut the EU’s outlook from stable to negative, threatening to downgrade its AAA rating. Now, Merkel needs to tap into new markets, namely China, to balance the export-based losses from Southern Europe. Out of the global economy crisis, China emerges as Europe’s new saviour with Merkel as high priestess of a new religion, which ultimately could mean next time the Dalai Lama is in town he may just be left waiting in the rain with the door forcefully shut in his face. The tide is changing and economic stakes trump human rights.This is no longer about principles its about survival. 

The German magazine Der Spiegel remarked Merkel has become more and more soft spoken about human rights violations, ignoring the plight of Chinese dissidents like the writer Liao Yiwu, censorship issues, religious freedom, homosexuality, women’s rights and Tibet. During Merkel’s visit to China many critics, like artist, social activist and class enemy number one Ai Weiwei, denounced the German chancellor’s silence on the subject as disappointing. And on that note as disappointing as Merkel’s new stance on China may be, our human rights human rights violations have gone unnoticed even within Europe’s boarders.

 What about the people in Greece and in Ireland? Article 3 of the Human Rights Charta grants them the right to life, liberty and security of person. What does security mean? Technically all a human being needs to survive is a beating heart. Creature comforts like food on your table or a roof over your head are no longer readily available  for everyone even in a highly industrialized Western country like Ireland, where in 2011 the  Census i.e. The Housing Needs Assessment and Counted In revealed 98,318 people in total were homeless.  The ruined apartments like Priority Hall in Dublin Ireland left Hundreds of tenants with a huge mortgage payments even though their homes, a legacy of the housing boom in the 1990s, were declared fire hazards. Article 5 states that no one shall be subjected to “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. Yet, we fail to determine inhuman and degrading, the debt-wrecked country can no longer afford to pay their police force and judges, pensioners rally against health care cuts and the Greek Orthodox church is feeding 250,000 people a day. We have our human rights in black and white but paper doesn’t blush. In times of economic crisis have human rights become luxury items we simply can no longer afford? 

http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2012/world-report-2012-china