The past weekend’s Lennart Meri Conference, held for the sixth time in Tallinn, discussed international politics in the context of the North-South split, asking if this indeed was the nature of the new world order.
Lennart Meri Conference analysed European divisions
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Matthew Bryza, director of the host organisation International Centre for Defence Studies (ICDS), underlined President Toomas Hendrik Ilves’ Twitter dispute with the Nobel economic prize winner Paul Krugman, as the inspiration for the conference theme.
“We want to see if there is a North-South split in Europe and whether this is also reflected on a wider scale outside of Europe,” Mr Bryza said. “It is evident to many that here in Northern Europe, structural reforms and financial discipline have brought much gain and supported economic growth. Many governments pursuing this policy have been re-elected.”
In the opening panel discussion on the North-South split, Mr Ilves compared the related discussions to a much older debate on Western-Eastern divide in Europe. He illustrated his point by the more than 200 year-old disparaging German term, “polnische Wirtschaft (“Polish economy” – an example of an economy that has fallen behind – edit.).
The “poor” helping the “rich”
According to Mr Ilves, it should be noted that the North-South contrasts – at times dubious in their worth, perhaps – are being drawn against the background of a 200-250 year tradition of looking down on Eastern Europe.
“So now we find ourselves in a ‘poor’ Eastern European state which is helping out the richer South-European states,” Mr Ilves said, repeating a theme he has also raised in a recent CNN TV interview.
“You do realise how we may feel about it – they make more money, they retire earlier, they have bigger pensions, and they have not followed the rules which we have followed religiously,” he added.
Mr Ilves compared this to Benoît Mandelbrot’s (French-American mathematician of Polish-Jewish decent – edit.) fractals, where, magnifying the details, repeated patterns are to be observed. Thus an inhabitant of Milan is not satisfied with Southern Italians, the Flemish Northern Belgium’s Vlaams Belang looks down on Walloons, and Stockholm folk disparage those of Skåne.
The Swedish economist Anders Åslund said that in the European context, the South-North gap is obvious. However, he doesn’t consider it permanent. “We have seen that North Europe is much better off economically and also governmentally, both in regard to democracy and corruption levels.”
Mr Åslund cited Estonia’s example as a nation with low levels of corruption, while stating that in the Southern European context corruption in Italy and Greece is on a par with the most corrupt Eastern European states of Romania and Bulgaria, where corruption levels have actually improved.
Crisis came from the outside
Andrei Illarionov, a research fellow at Washington Cato Institute and one-time economic adviser to Russia’s PM Viktor Tšernomõrdin, pointed out that dividing Europe into North and South may not always be adequate, raising the question where, on such a continuum, would Russia and Belarus be placed?
In the conference’s economy panel, representatives of the South also got the floor in the persons of Fernando Teixeira dos Santos, Portugal’s finance minister in 2005–2011 and Italian parliament’s foreign committee member Federica Mogherini. According to the latter, financial crisis came to Europe from outside i.e., from the USA. However, once the crisis had arrived, Europe was not up to its tasks, meaning it was unable to grab the opportunity to strengthen political integration.
Thereafter, another, internal crisis followed in Europe – a crisis of distrust and divisions. According to Mr Mogherini, Europe has indeed learnt the lesson of austerity, but failed at the other exams of growth and investments.
The Lennart Meri Conference was rich in interesting and weighty discussions on various other topics as well. A prominent trend under discussion at recent conferences has been Middle Eastern issues and the fact of Islam penetrating Europe – a matter of special interest to Estonia, which lacks experience and experts on this subject.
The Afghani panel, quite pessimistic in its view of the future, featured Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid and female member of the House of the People (Wolesi Jirga) of the National Assembly (parliament) of Afghanistan. Past conferences had traditionally been limited to discussing Russian issues, energy security and NATO.