The Crisis Will Divide the West

The crisis will divide the West

The Camp David summit was doubly interesting. The leaders of the two superpowers constituting today’s West –the USA and the E.U.- were trying to find preventive means to the financial crisis that has shaken the fundaments of global capitalism. After the meeting, Bush, Sarkozy and Barosso made a nice sounding promise that they would cooperate on the issue, which should make stock market investors optimistic, at least for a few hours- writes Dziennik commentator Cezary Michalski.

However, simultaneously, a new war has started concerning the shape of the world that will emerge in the aftermath of the crisis. The conflict of the two Western superpowers- America and Europe- is recurring with double force. At this point the U.S. and European governments are doing the same thing: with help of hundreds of billions of dollars and Euros, they are putting out the fire in the financial sector so as it would not spread over the entire world economy. The summit proved that even though the practice of current actions is almost identical, the theories and ideological language used in the face of the crisis are totally different in the USA than in Europe.

We heard two totally different declarations on the future of capitalism from Bush and Sarkozy. Bush kept repeating the neoliberal mantra that only the free market is reasonable, and any intervention or regulation might have a catastrophic impact on the free- market rationality. These words did not sound very convincing coming from the man who had just accepted the biggest intervention in the financial sector in the history of capitalist government. Sarkozy, on the other hand, clearly stated that once the crisis is over, capitalism should not be revived by those who destroyed it. In the language of French politics, it might refer to greedy and unimaginative global speculators: banks and hedge funds. Sarkozy suggested that global capitalism should be bridled through global regulations.

We are now at the battle front of the old conflict between the Anglo-Saxon and continental models of capitalism. The fact that it is not just an argument between two leaders has been evident in reactions on both sides of the Atlantic. Le Monde praises Sarlozy, Washington Post, on the other hand, warns against European “state capitalism”. French intellectual Emmanuel Todd is proclaiming the decline of America and rise of Asian superpowers, while McCain is attacking Obama’s polices for being most closely linked to “European socialism”.

Sarkozy also said in Camp David that Americans would not rule the world after the crisis: firstly, because it is them who caused it and secondly, because it will make the USA much weaker than the other centers of capitalism, the European and the Asian one. It is hard to say whether this diagnosis is true, but it definitely has an enormous political potential, which could be reduced to one call: let’s put a straight jacket on the Americans. Sarkozy proposed that the crisis should be handled by both G-8 and G-5. It would mean a creation of one big coalition between Europe and Asia having one priority: destroying global domination of America or at least freeing oneself from its control.

Thus, it looks like the financial crisis that originated in America added more fuel to a new conflict between the two Western superpowers than the American intervention in Iraq a few years ago did.