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Southern European Syndrome

- May 19, 2010

As American once again debates the significance of a “House special election result”:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37473.html, things on the other side of the Atlantic are also heating up, and not just because of “volcanic ash”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/05/volcano_jokes_1.html. Europe is witnessing the emergence of disturbingly familiar pattern which I’m going to try to label _Southern European Syndrome_ (with no disrespect intended for “Iceland”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7744355.stm or “Ireland”:http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h-2YAiEAC9OSrsNnMxYl0ZbagLrw). But here’s the basic pattern for now:

# A country gets into trouble with international financial markets and starts having increasing difficulty borrowing
# Said country then enacts austerity measures, including pay cuts for civil service workers and reduced expenditures on pensions
# People in said country then take to the streets and protest

A lot of how the story ends probably depends on this final stage. The world was capitivated when this played out to tragic consequence in “Greece”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/world/europe/13iht-greece.html earlier this month. However, this pattern is repeating itself in other countries as well. I returned to Spain last week to find that the government had announced “wage cuts of 5-15%”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/business/global/13peseta.html for public sector workers amid a host of other deficit reducing measures; unions announced a strike for early June but then “postponed it”:http://www.expatica.com/es/news/spanish-news/spanish-unions-postpone-public-sector-strike_68352.html.

I then arrived in Bucharest, Romania yesterday to discover that the government here has called for a “25% cut in public sector wages”:http://www.nineoclock.ro/index.php?issue=4683&page=detalii&categorie=politics&id=20100517-512130 and that there was a large scale protest called for today at Piata Victorei, from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM. According to media accounts, anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 angry protestors took to the streets (reports and pictures can be found “here”:http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5gL8tZT3sdqhi4lD9oogcedco1l4Q “here”:http://www.providingnews.com/romania-street-protest-in-bucharest-live-coverage.html and “here”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/europe/10127366.stm). Here’s a picture from the media coverage:

street-protest-romania_news_2010_05.jpg

One question that has emerged about the protests in Spain is whether they are genuinely designed to prevent the austerity measures from taking place, or if they simply represent a face-saving attempt by unions not to appear to be passively giving in to what they in the end may know to be inevitable. As _The Economist_ duly “noted this week”:http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=16116773, “democratic governments can impose only so much hardship before people rise up”. So the question of where and when people are going to decide to rise up – or step three of the syndrome I outlined above – seems crucial for us as political scientists to think about.

It was with this in mind that I headed up to Piata Victorei a little more than an hour after the protest was scheduled to end. Here’s what I found; note that the building in the background is the same one in the picture above:

street_protests_romania_later_resized.JPG

Pretty much nothing. Clean up crews, some newspaper reporters conducting interviews, but that was about it. Now I don’t know exactly what this tells us about the potential for more protest in Romania or elsewhere in the future, but it was fascinating to see just how quickly the whole thing had already to seemed to disappear.