Divide and rule the continent - and prevent any meaningful buildup of solidarity at the continental level.

The main change is how this narrow nationalistic and classist agenda is being sold as "reformist" and "pragmatic" and, even more  extravagantly, as anti-elitist.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

I can't actually manage to put together a coherent comment on this. It's so amazingly fucking mad that I just can't deal with it.

I like how they castigate the EU for being elitist:

...the corresponding failure of elitist supra-nationalists...

...rather than an elitist and supra-national approach...

Yet, is there anything about this whole screed that doesn't scream elitism? Countries who've taken their responsibilities, bailing out the laggards, qualifying agendas as "anti-reformist", wresting control of the agenda. They don't mind elitism at all, so long as they're part of the elite.

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror" - Oscar Wilde

It is almost as if the Anglo-Saxon press had consciously decided to push the issue of the breakup of Belgium as a way to weaken the EU. It makes one wonder where, how, by whom would such a decision be made.

Yesterday at the Lib Dem conference fringe meeting on the EU Committee of the Regions some bloke dropped the line "Belgium is breaking up" as if it were a done deal and I couldn't resists shouting "bullshit!" back. He said "but it is!" and I said "you read The Economist too much".

Oye, vatos, dees English sink todos mi ships, chinga sus madres, so escuche: el fleet es ahora refloated, OK? — The War Nerd

Neoliberalism is about the shifting of assets and wealth to a small group by cutting off public services and subsidies to others.

That raises the question, of course, of how that gets justified. How do you tell one part of a society to cut off the other? In some cases you just do it - see Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine - but when some measure of voter approval is needed, you instead demonize those you're cutting off, blaming them for everyone's problems.

Some neoliberals make arguments based on individual factors - that those who are wealthy are either better people, smarter, harder working, etc; and those who are poor and cut off are lazy, stupid, incompetent, and therefore undeserving of aid.

But much, MUCH more common are arguments based on various forms of sectarianism. In the US it's usually about race - whites not wanting to provide aid to blacks and Latinos. In Belgium it seems that ethnicity and language are the terms of division.

It's easier to cut off people, to make them the victims of neoliberalism, if you see them as an "other." Instead of seeing them as Belgians they're instead greedy, lazy, French-speaking Walloons. So neoliberalism stokes these divides, and then when individuals take them up, neolibs cheer them on in the service of their wider goals of destroying the public sector and attacking social solidarity.

And the world will live as one

What an ironic counterpoint to asiegel's diary.

We all bleed the same color.

divide et impera

the goal of the neocons is colonial [and I think it has to be because the industrial capitalism from which they spring and which they serve is inherently colonial, a product of colonialism and a colonialist model of resource liquidation, the ruination of one place to accumulate wealth in another]... that goal is always to divide and rule, not unite and share -- to destroy local solidarity and autarky so that there will be no local base of strength to resist their long-reach predation, extraction, accumulation.  to reduce everyone except the financial elite and their protected servant caste to the status of the Ik, fragmented and isolated in a looted landscape devoid of sustenance.  tribe must be pitted against tribe, worker against worker, church against mosque, so that we're all too busy biting and scratching and kicking to notice our overlords enclosing and stealing every last scrap of mineral, biotic, and hydrological wealth on the planet.

of course, our noisy squabbling will be ascribed to our inherent deficiencies of character and not to their clever manipulations.  they did it to India, they did it to the Americas, they did it to Africa, and now having run out of new continents to carve up, they're doing it back home...

what's really depressing is not that there are clever sociopaths among us --that's statistically inevitable -- nor that they gain advantage by being nasty -- cheaters do prosper in the short run, that's why they cheat... but that they fool us again and again and again.  you'd think we'd learn, eventually, the lesson of the Prisoner's Dilemma...

sky blue and leek green...

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

http://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/19/the-ingredients-of-the-belgian-cocktail/#more-6209

has a quite detailed and comprehensive analysis and interesting discussion on the topic of Belgium.

Alex Harrrowell on afoe isn't impressed by your argument.

Great post.