Nachhaltiges Europa Abschlusspublikation - Global Marshall Plan

Nachhaltiges Europa
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der without having first defined the area on which
this order is to be imposed.
So let’s be careful not to take on attitudes about
global phenomena on the basis of the associations
we have with some of the words. I said earlier that
sustainability may be an impossible ideal, but it is
a very powerful and important guiding principle. In
the same way borderlessness may be a distressing
concept in many ways, but it very much reflects
the reality of today’s world. If you lean against a
window and fail to notice that somebody has re-
moved the glass you are likely to fall through. In
the same way I take it as a given that if we in
Europe are going to survive and prosper in the
world of the 21st century, we need to have a good
grasp of the reality of what that world is. The extent
to which the world is borderless is an impor-
tant aspect. It is no good being the person falling
out of the building saying to himself – “but a window
has glass and therefore I can lean against it”.
There is no point in denying that improvements in
world-wide communications including transport,
and the world-wide organisation of capital, as well
as some political and institutional developments
have all worn away much of what borders used to
stand for. And it is true that the concern about
sustainability which this fact gives rise to is not
only about the social and ecological consequences
of production conditions abroad. It is also about
the economic consequences at home. What we
have to bear in mind is that whereas the role
played by developing countries in the past had
relatively insignificant impacts on the European
job market, this is about to change, big time. The
majority of European trade used to be trading
similar products between European countries
which had similar industrial structures. Philips
would compete against Miele, Lacoste against
Benetton, rather than one country trading white
goods (electromenager) and another textiles. A
half percent to one percent of jobs used to be affected
by imports. This is going to change substantially
in the next fifteen years. It is a sudden
change. The North accounted for two thirds of
growth in exports and four fifths of the growth in
imports from 1995 to 1998. But now just in these
last few years the South has gone from a third to
more than half the growth in exports and has doubled
its share of the growth in imports to two
fifths.
So, many more European jobs are threatened by
developing country competition than previously.
And the movement of jobs can be taken in some
way as a proxy or a short-cut for some of the
more subtle pressures on our own standards that
is also an issue here. We can see this when com-
paring the trends in agreements on hours across
different European countries where in some cases
workers have been willing to secure their jobs by
working longer hours, but in other countries the
hours stay short but a wage cut is negotiated.
Either way it is a response to competition. Remember
too, that as far as our own conditions in
Europe are concerned we can and do decide the
level at which the pressures are intolerable and it
is the job or industrial sector itself that must go
rather than trimming the environmental or social
standards. At the end of the day we can set the
rules for our own environment and our own social
conditions. There are limits to how much we can
do that for the places where the jobs might go. I
will talk later about some of the rule-setting and
some of the non-rule based but consumer-driven
voluntary actions which can help to guard against
the downside of these developments. I don’t say
that our efforts at rule-setting or using voluntary
systems has yet proved to be perfectly effective,
but there is an enormous movement going on and
effort going in towards making that so. What I do
want to say is that those rule-making and con-
sumer-driven developments represent the way
forward and answer to our concerns, and we
should not follow some alternative path of re-
inventing some constraints to in some way replace
the old borders.
It is not that such constraints are impossible to
imagine – we could put some together in a few
minutes. But it would be extremely difficult to persuade
anyone of their merit, especially the countries
whose development would be affected by it.
The only conceivable way of getting away with
such a development would be to pay for it and I
am afraid that we could not afford it. So, as we
cannot afford to pay transfer payments to the
whole rest of the world, why put restraints on their
ability to compete?
Let’s look a bit more at what we mean by competition
and competitiveness.
The normal understanding of what we mean when
we say that an individual firm or an entire indus-
trial sector is the most competitive, is that its unit
costs of production are lower than those of its
competitors. This does not of course mean the
same thing as having the worst social conditions,
the lowest wages, and charging least for the product.
It is much more like saying that it manufac-
tures the product best and most effectively, so
that people want to buy it.
So soon after the successful Athens Olympic
Games I think we can all see and admit the benefits
of world-wide competition in principle. World