Europe´s breakdown towards the big freeze

              TERRITORIES
EUROPEAS
BREAKDOWN
TOWARDS THE BIG
FREEZE
BY OCTAVIO ZAYA
I
A new Europe is in the making (re-making?
un-making?)
It is one dramatically different from
that of our elders and our parents, who
either still carry the scars of World War
II or lived through the cold war.
The new Europe is also racked by
tensión; but not that one between the
East and the West. The tensions we face
now are, in part, the result of a
grotesque constellation of events (the
coUapse of communism in Europe,
Germán reunification, the attempt to
unite Europe as quickly as possible to
confront the many problems that were
coming) that has overbiu'dened the
political and economic systems and led
to disillusionment.
This time, the new generation is not
dreaming of changing the world, at least
in the same terms the students'
movements of the 1960's were dreaming
of. These are not times of affluence and
dreaming, but times in which a secure
Job is no longer assured and where
govemments are cutting welfare
spending.
Five years after the Berlin Wall came
down and five years after the leaders
proclaimed a new era of freedom and
prosperity, the European Community
youth and the youth of Eastem Europe
are transfixed by the nightmarish gloom
brought about by the worst recession
since World War II, the war in Bosnia,
the instabiljty and violent nationalism
that has prompted hundreds of
thousands of Southeastem refugees to
the doors of Western Europe, and the
rampant racism and intolerance foster
by the drastic steps the Western Europe
nations have taken to fend off and shut
out immigrants.
II
This new generation's most immediate
worry, however, is that it has been
educated to fill jobs that may no longer
exist. Unemployment has grown in most
conununity countries since automation
came to many industries in the early
1980's. The number of school dropouts
who únmediately began collecting
unemployment benefits also rose
drastically. At the same time, the
generous wages and benefits which
Western Europe nations used to boast so
much about have already priced its
goods out of many markets precisely
when low-wage eastem Europeans
finally have access to them. As a result,
almost no job growth has occurred in
Western Europe's prívate sector in years,
according to the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development
in París, and the average unemployment
rate for the 15 community nations is
heading toward 13 percent.
According to many experts, the
ballooning costs of social welfare
programs for the disabled, the elderly
and the unemployed are threatening the
community's economic future.
Consequently, the welfare state (the
crowning achievement of Social
Democratic and Christian Democratic
govemments in post-war Europe) is
under unprecedented strain.
There are already signs around the
continent of the beginnings of significant
change in the way Europeans are
employed and in the long vacations, free
health care and other social benefits
their govemments have long helped to
finance. In France, Italy and even
Scandinávia, govemments are trimming
welfare programs and demanding that
workers share most of the cost.
STILL, THIS RE-STRUCTURING
OF EUROPE IS BIGGER THAN MOST
EUROPEANS IMAGINE. ALMOST
UNNOTICED OUTSIDE THE
FINANCIAL MARKETS, SCORES OF
STATE-OWNED BUSINESSES, ONCE
REGARDED AS THE CROWN
JEWELS OF EUROPEAN STATES,
ARE BEING AUCTIONED OFF, ONE
AFTER ANOTHER, TO PRÍVATE
BUYERS. THE EFFECTS ON THE
JOBS AND LIVES OF WORKERS ARE
PROFOUND AND OFTEN PAINFUL.
AND YET THIS REMARKABLE SHIFT
IS HAPPENING IN SUCH A
CONFUSED AND COMPROMISED
FASHION THAT ITS IMPACT ON
EUROPEAN ECONOMIES,OR THEIR
COMPETITIVENESS IN THE GLOBAL
MARKET, IS AS YET DIFFICULT TO
MEASURE.
The scale of change is enormous.
Last July, U.S. investment bankers
Goldman Sachs & Co. brokered the sale
of Italy's state-owned insurer, INA, in a
massive intemational stock offering
worth 3.2 billion doUars. Also in 1994,
govemment sttikes in such European
industríal well-known companies as
France's Elf Aquitaine oil giant íuid
insurance conglomérate UAP were sold
off, Germany also appears on track to
sell off Deutsche telekon, one of the
world's biggest phone companies, valued
at more than 20 billion dollars. Many
more deals íire ükely soon, from
Scandinávia to Greece to the Iberían
península; a staggering 100 to 150
bilüon dollars worth of govemment
assets are likely to be sold to prívate
buyers by Western European
govemments before the year 2000.
CtNIíO AU ÍNTICO M Atlt MOOfíNO
These sales of nationalized industries
are a reversal of the post-war European
ideal that engineered the construction of
large and strong state-owned business
sectors that provided pools of public jobs
and allowed politicians to influence their
economies. And for many economists,
bankers and govemment official, the
implications of the sell off are far-reaching.
For, on the one hand, its effect
is to direct far more capital, and power,
to stock markets, prívate shareholders
and institutional investors than before,
weakening the grip of European
govemments on their own economies,
which now can be more easily moved by
decisions made by prívate speculators,
rather than politicians. On the other
hand, the other key consequence is lost
jobs: as state-owned monster companies
slim down to compete in the prívate
sector, Western Europe faces one of the
most daunting job creation challenges in
its postwar history at a time when it
already is struggling to cope with record
unemployment.
The pressures are rísing. As trade
barríers aroimd the world have fallen,
making Asian and Latin American
economies inte competitors on world
markets, and as U.S. and Japanese
companies have aggressively cut down
their work forces and streamlined
production, European countries are
finding that they are not as competitive
as they once were. And declining
competitiveness abroad means, again,
fewer jobs at heme. A record 20 million
people were out of work by the end of
1994 in the 12 nations of the European
Union, despite a relatively strong
recovery from the recession of the early
1990's.
Interestingly, as unemployment ríse
and more people enter the welfare
payroll (in Spain, for instance, there is
now one person receiving a social
security benefitfor every one working,
and in the Netherlands almost one
million, or 18 percent ofthe work forcé,
receive disability pay,) the system has
become so costly that, for economists
and politicians, what once safeguarded
Western Europe from the extremes of
poverty and alienation so pervasive in
American cities is now shutting Europe
out of business in an increasingly
competitive global economy.
III
Whether the rapid changes in the world
economy have rendered Europe's
system, with its high wage costs and
comprehensive social security benefits,
unsustainable, or the European recession
is causing serious financial problems
that will pass when recovery comes,
either way it seems clear that the
Europeans are at the beginning of an
economic and cultural revolution that
will throw the whole system into doubt
and that the social consequences of it
will be diré.
We have displaced a whole set of
anxieties we have about the new world
in which we live onto the welfare debate.
We worry about the postindustríal
transformation of the economy and its
insecurities, and we agree about
enforcing the work ethic for welfare
recipients. Yet the welfare debates
somehow lead us toward myths and
carícatures that help to cover up the real
issues.
It is now clear that as capital
markets became intemationalized and
the intemational level of interest rates
was raised, the terms of trade between
capital, labor and government shifted in
favor of the capital side.
From Sweden, until recently the
paradigm of the welfare state, to Italy,
with its swelling budget déficit, laws are
being passed to cut budget déficit and
cost of welfare programs. In both
countries, measures have been already
adopted for pensión eligibility and, in
Italy, some limits have been imposed on
free medical care for people with higher
incomes. And throughout the European
Union proposals have been presented to
cut benefits for the unemployed,
lowering retirement payments, reducing
reimbursement for medical expenses and
shortening the períod during which the
unemployed can receive jobless benefits.
Until recently, the priority was
protection for people who financed the
system with their payroll taxes, but now,
since there are fewer salarized workers,
there are more unemployment benefits
to pay and less money flows into social
security budgets, the priority is avoiding
fraud, encouraging citizens to
supplement national Insurance with
prívate insurance policies and, when
available, getting people back to work as
soon as possible.
For many social crítics the generous
unemployment benefits could be adding
to long-term joblessness in Europe.
Some say that, in many countríes, the
unemployment benefits system, rather
than providing temporary support to
job-seekers while they re-establish
themselves in the labor market, has also
become a mean for long-term income
support. And others complain that social
security systems are deterríng small
companies and corporations from
offeríng what many people regard
as the most important single source of
securíty to an individual: a fuU-time
regular job.
In Spain, for instance, new fuU-time
jobs have become an endangered
species, some critics say, because of the
protection guaranteed workers.
Dismissing anyone is so complex and
costly that companies have resorted to
hiring temporarily. More than 35
percent of the Spanish labor forcé is
working on temporary contracts of a
máximum of three years.
This new social poUcy is enacting
some other measures, among which the
war on the poor and on the immigrants
appears to be most explosive . This war
was initiated by dramatic shifts in the
domestics and world economy that have
tumed more and more imskilled and
semiskilled workers into surplus labor.
Prívate enterprise participated actively
by shipping jobs to other countríes and
by treating workers as expendable.
Effective job-creation schemes, housing
programs, educational and social
services that serve the poor and the
immigrants -and some of the working
classes- are vanishing.
Under all these circumstances, we
need to recast the current welfare
debate, taking as its starting point the
fact that many of us will face a life crísis
related to work or family during our
Uves. We'U lose our jobs and not be able
to find one that pays as well. We'U get
sick and be unable to fend for ourselves.
Most of US will not have to go on
welfare. We'U have die education and
the skiUs to move quickly into a decent
job; we'U be able to rely on friends and
family or we'U qualify for help from our
employer, Social Security or
unemployment insurance. But some of
US will ha ve to go on welfare.
EUROPEAN LABOR LEADERS
FEAR THAT THIS TREND IS
PERMANENT. MANY THINK
INDUSTRY NOW JUST CONSISTS OF
FINANCIERS TAKING A LOOK AT
THE WORLD AND SEEING WHERE
THEY CAN MAKE THE MOST
PROFIT. WHEREVER THE CASE, IT
SEEMS APPARENT THAT THE
PRESSURES OF THE
INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL
MARKETS ARE MAKING MORE
DIFFICULT THE PURSUIT OF A
CONTINENT-WIDE POLICY OF FULL
EMPLOYMENT. IRONICALLY, THE
FUTÜRE OF EUROPEAN SOCIAL
POLICY MAY BE WRITTEN IN
WASHINGTON.
IV
A malaise has setded into a región
unnerved bv joblesness, a decline in
social services and the failure of an oíd
guard of politicians to produce a visión
for the future. To judge from the
political situation alone, visión and
future exelude each other in a landscape
in which crisis managment pervades all
the issues, and improvisation only fuels
the discontent. France's Socialists were
ignominiously ousted from power, their
counterparts in Spain have lost absolute
control of Parliament (and much more
than their dignity) for the first time in a
decade, and an entire political élite has
been decapitated by scandal in Italy, not
to mention the unpopularity of John
Major and the all-time low in Chancellor
Helmut Kohl's. In general, Europeans
attitude toward their politicians is one of
psychological, almost clinical depression.
The Socialist altemative has disappeared
and even center-right parties are in
retreat in Germany, Britain and Italy.
The voters are fed up with seemingly
endless political squabbling that fails to
resolve any of the issues vital to
Europe's future. They are steadily losing
confidence in leaders who are either
exhausted after many years in power,
discredited by corruption scandals or
simply baffled by the challenges of the
post-cold war era. The ideological void
is such that the variables between left
and right are much narrower.
Since the fall of Communisin
changed the Continent's perception of
itself as an increasingly cohesive and
ever more prosperous bloc confronting
other great blocs -the Soviet Union, the
United States and Asia- the oíd
calculations, and the politicians who
based their careers on them, are
faltering. Europe's politicians are stuck
in a time warp, preoccupied with the
problems of the 70's and 80's as if the
current challenges and the challenges
ahead weren't quite different from those
of the past 20 years.
Fearfully and painfully, the nations of
Western Europe are recognizing that,
along with enemployment, immigration,
racism and xenophobia are probably the
most explosive problems they face, and
they are taking drastic steps to fend off
unwanted foreigners. France, Germany,
Britain -all of Western European
govemments, from Sweden to Spain-feel
that they are under siege as
hundreds of thousands of poor people
cross the newly opened borders of
Eastem Europe or flee economically
desperate countries in África and
Southern Asia. But in light of the
growing unemployment rate, these new
policies of the Western European
goverments are also tuming against the
"strangers" in their midst, a whole
section of their own citizens
and legal residents with darker skins,
including more than 3 million who are
already living illegally in the 17
countries.
Right-wing parties are trying to built
constituencies by campaigning on a
platform of expulsions of "foreigners."
While there is little immediate danger
that far-right parties will come to power
on a national level (?), govemments are
nevertheless shifting to the right on the
immigration issue as they listen to the
speeches of ideologues who hark back to
a bygone era when their countries were
supposedly homogeneous, economically
confortable and all white.
The fact is that the changes in the
ethnic makeup of Western Europe are
already irrevocable. For generations
Algerians have lived in France, Turks in
Germany and Pakistanies in Britain,
and, whether they are regarded as alien
or not, they are there to stay.
Ironically, in Europe southern
countries (such as Italy, Greece,
Portugal and Spain), where youn g
people and thousands of workers once
went abroad to start new Uves and wrote
home about the prejudices they
encountered, people are startled to find
that they are now the hosts, and can
themselves be bigoted toward
newcomers. Last sununer, in an
interview published in the Morrocan
newspaper "Le Nouvel", the writer
Tajar Ben Jelloum explained the racism
and general prejudice of Spaniards
toward the Morrocans and arabs in
general asserting that "the Spaniards
behave as an former poor who is still
afraid of becoming poor again, always
looking to the North (Europe) instead of
to the South (África)." Not to mention
the new policies enacted to control all
the Magrebies coming from the North
and Latin American immigrants. In the
Madrid suburb of Aravaca, para-military
thugs broke into an abandoned building
where Dominican squatters were living
and opened fire. In tum, in Italy -where
the plans of the caretaker Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi to enact laws similar to
those of France and Germany were
interrupted by his resignation at the end
of last December-, after a teenager was
struck and killed by a car carrying four
drunken Moroccans in Torvaianica
(cióse to Rome,) several foreigner were
attacked in the área. And in Rome,
"Nazi-skins" torched residences of
foreigners and patroled the parks at
night, beating up Africans who slept
there. More recently, also in Italy, far-right
groups gave toy-bombs to some
gipsy kids, who lost their limbs when the
"toys" exploded.
Almost every country has a
burgeoning far-right party circulating
anti-Semitic tracts and whipping up
anti-foreign sentiment and racism.
Among the legal organizations there is
the Republican Party in Germany, the
freedom party in Austria, the Falangists
in Spain, the Northern League in Italy,
the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, the
National front in France, etc.
GERMANY CENTRAL
INTELLIGENCE OFFICE
CALCULATES THAT 41,900 OF ITS
CITIZENS BELONG TO FAR-RIGHT
ORGANIZATIONS, OF WHICH 6,400
ARE 'MILITANT AND VIOLENCE-PRONE."
THAT FIGURE DOES NOT
INCLUDE SOME 25,000 MEMBERS
OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. IN
1992, THERE WERE 2,584 PROVEN
ACTS OF VIOLENCE BY THE FAR
RIGHT, A 74 PERCENT INCREASE
OVER 1991. OF THE RIGHTIST
ATTACKS, 88 PERCENT WERE
DIRECTED AGAINST FOREIGNERS,
OF WHOM SEVEN DIED.
The 2.6 million people in Britain
considered members of ethnic minorities
- 5 percent of the nation 56 million
people- include West Indians,
Bangladeshis, Indians, West Africans,
Pakistanies and others. Almost half of
them were bom in Britain, and as
British natives naturally identify
themselves as British rather than, say,
black African or black Caribbean. But
they are not usually viewed that way by
whites. The racially motivated incidents
reported to the pólice in Britain has
skyrocketed, from 4,383 in 1988 to
7,793 in 1992. In the summer of 1993
Winston Churchill, the grandson of the
wartime Primer Minister, called for a
halt to the "relentless flow of
immigrants," saying it was threatening
to changa Britain's way of life forever.
Of course, this is just an example,
among many, of the oportunism of the
idealess politicians. According to a
statement the Home Office Minister
responsible for immigration. Charles
Wardle, gave to The New York Times
only weeks later, "primary immigration
ceased [in Britain] years ago -I mean
years ago."
AFTER THE HORRORS AND
GUILT OF THE HOLOCAUST AND
THE NAZI OCCÜPATION OF MUCH
OF EUROPE, THE REGIÓN HAD
TRIED TO COMPÉNSATE FOR THE
PAST BY TENT)ING AN IMAGE OF
ITSELF AS AN ASSAMBLY OF
DECENT SOCIETIES AND A HA VEN
OF TOLERATION, DEMOCRACY AND
RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS. BUT
WESTERN EUROPE IS GIVING UP
ITS SENSE OF ITSELF AS A
CIVILIZING CÓRNER OF THE
WORLD. INCREASINGLY SELF-ABSORBED,
INTOLERANT AND
HEGEMONISTIC, THE NATIONS OF
WESTERN EUROPE -ACCORDING TO
A SURVEY CONDUCTED BY THE
EUROPEAN COMMISSION AND
RELEASED IN THE SUMMER OF
1993- FEEL THAT THEY HAVE
LOST CONTROL OVER WHAT IS
HAPPENING TO THEM. THE
EUROPEAN POLITICIANS HAVE
SIMPLY PICKED UP THE ANXIETIES
OF THE PEOPLE AND CARRIED
THEM ONE STEP FARTHER.
"They believe they'U be richer if they
toss US out," the Algerian Doctor
Zoubida Djelali said to The New York
Times . "They think there will be less
unemployment. It's a fiction. Look at
the work the foreigners do -maids,
busboys, hauling wheelbarrows on
construction sites. Underpaid or
dangerous. The French won't take those
kinds of Jobs."
The immigration problem stems, on
the contrary, from the question raised by
the Danish writer Nader Alexander
Mousavizadeh, a question which is at the
heart of Europe's identity crisis: the
deafening dissonance between the reality
of European society, which must be
described as a multiethnic and
multicultural mosaic, and the ideal of an
ethnicaly puré, almost organic entity in
which the alien, be African, Asían or
Muslim, will remain just that, an alien
whose presence must be tolerated but
never accepted as permanent.
VI
Indeed, along with the obsolete
economic structures of Europa and
enamployment, tha main problems ara
related to those of xanophobia, racism
and nationalism ("the venon of our
aga,") pracissely what brought Europe
to wars, ruins, to Auschwitz and to the
shattered reality of what was once
Yugoslavia. The idea of the so-called
"Europaan identity" has been
maintained in opposition to its
undarlying divarsity and heterogeneity.
This concaption conveniently overlooks
the fact that cultura and cultural
identities are always in a stata of flux,
that they are naver static or given.
The Yugoslavian issue, tha
immigration issue, the latest monetary
crisis, the decline in the faith European
people have in its major institutions, and
the new emergence of tha right-wing
parties in Italy, Garmany, Franca, Spain,
etc. are forcing a redefinition of Europe.
We cannot continué to build a Europa
on the same ideáis and the sama ways
we have since 1957. That idea of
Europe was conceived with a dividad
Germany, with the Soviet threat and its
satellites, with a Fascist Spain and with
no major immigration or ecological
problems. In fact, the immigrants also
helped to build that idea of Europe.
That's over. Everything has to be
reconsiderad and we must change. Bur,
instead, since 1989, the construction of
Europe has been purely political.
Mitterand, Kohl, Dalors and their
cohorts thought that because they
decreed a single currency Europe would
ba built as a unity. In fact, until the
eruption of the realities mentioned
before, it seamed as if wa were living in
pura fantasy. Europe has to face tha
disintegration of the oíd system, the
desintegration of itself, and look for
something new to take its place. Wa
should put to rest the European
illusions, the European tribalism, by
introducing reality not only in our
relations with the world and with each
othar but particularly in our ralationship
with tha new immigrants, by stoping tha
kind of domestic imperiaUsm axercized
within the already craking and
disjointad Europaan fortress being built
by the current myopic European
governments.
NOTE
A versión of the first three sections of this
"coUage" of texts was first published under
the title "Farewell Welfare" in the catalogue
of the exhibition IVelfare, curated last winter
in París at the Gallerie du Temple by Anders
Michelsen and Morten Salling.
This "collage" is indebted to the foUowing
books and anieles:
"The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases
of the European Welfare State 1875-1975",
by Peter Baldwin. Cambridge University
Press, 1990.
"Crisis and Choice in European Social
Democracy," by Fritz W. Scharpf, translated
by Ruth Crowley and Fred Thompson.
Comell Universitv Press, 1991.
"Future of the Welfare State", by Fred Block.
Dissent. New York. Fall 1992.
"Screening Europe", Edited by Duncan
Pietri. BFI Pubhshing. London, 1992.
Articles on the subject by different authors
published in The New York Times during
August 1993.
Articles on the subject by different authors
published in The Washington Post during
August 1994.
Articles on the subject by different authors
pubhshed in issues no.54 and no. 61 of the
magazine Transition, New York 1991 and
1993.
AN INTERVIEW WITH
THE DANISH HISTORIAN
PETER
CHRISTENSEN
EUROPE
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
AND MULTICULTURALISM
BY ANDERS MICHELSEN
Although we may be used to conceive of
Europe in politlcal, economical and
cultural terms, not least in the debate on
multiculturalism, it is impossible to
dissociate the notion of Europe from
nature. Not only is nature closely linked
to European thought in philosophy,
science and culture, not to mention art.
To the modem Europeans nature seems
a vast and alniost inexhaustible
resource. Something which may be
mute, a thing in itself, but which is
nevertheless always there, to utilize,
leam from, or doubt. Nature can be
apprehended and still keep its reserve.
In modemity nature becomes something
which can be designated, manipulated
and transformed - without costs - in
science and technology as weil as in
society and culture.
Nature thus plays a significant role
in the evolveraent of modernity and
modern institutions as one can see in the
thinking of Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel
and Marx. In these discourses nature
becomes closely linked to economy,
politics and ideology. In the industrial
age nature is seen as a state of affairs
transcended by the European and so is
natural man, i.e. the rest of the world.
The European discourse of nature thus
becomes liiüced to the establishment of
European hegemony over the world, not
least from the nineteenth century.
Nature plays its part in the claim that all
other races and cultures are inferior to
Europe as one can read in Kipling's
poem from 1899; "Take up the White
Man's burden - ... On fluttered folk and
wild - , Your new caught, sulien peoples,
half-devil and half child."
However this discourse of nature has
not kept its position. With the
postmodem deconstruction of modem
metanarratives throughout the last
decades, a new idea of nature has been
formed. Now the bond between man and
nature is emphasized. Maurice Merleau-
Ponty writes about nature in "Themes
from the lectures" (Northwestern
University Press 1970 (París 1963)); "In
truth, as soon as one probes into it a
little, one encounters an enigma in which
the subject, spirit, history and the whole
of philosophy are involved." (p.l32):
"... nature is not simply the object,
the accessory of consciousness in its téte-a-
tete with knowledge. It is an object
from which we have arisen, in which our
beginnings have been posited little by
little until the very moment of tying
themselves to an existence which they
continué to sustain and aliment.
Whether in the case of the individual
event of birth, or the birth of institutions
and societies, the originary relation
between man and being is not that of
the for-itself to the in-itself, for this
relation occurs in each man capable of
perception. However surcharged with
historical significations man's perception
may be, it borrows from the primordial
at least its manner of presenting the
object and its ambiguous evidence.
Nature, says Luden Herr in a comment
upon Hegel, "is there from the first
day.''(ibid.,p.l32-133).
The idea of nature as a thing in
itself, something to be designated,
manipulated and transformed is
replaced by a new ambiguity. The crisis
of Western world hegemony is
accompanied by an environmental crisis
in the industrial system, and this is
reflected in new notions of nature. The
idea of nature as inexhaustible is
transformed into a discourse of man
linked to nature. In the environmental
concern are contained possibilities of a
new thinking pushed forward by the
need to take action vis-a-vis the
escalating environmental problems in all
parts of the world. -But concern for the
environment cannot stand alone. It must
also be part of a multicultural,
postcolonial discourse.
This is one of the interesting
perspectives in the Danish historian
Petar Christensen's germinal doctoral
thesis - one of the most important books
about history written in Denmark for
several decades - about the relations
between ecology and history in The
Middle East between 500 B.C. and A.D
1500, "The Decline of Iranshahr.
Irrígation and Environments in the
History of The Middle East 500 B.C. to
A.D. 1500" (Museum Tusculanum
Press. University of Copenhagen 1993).
Chrístensen describes how society and
nature converge over two thousand years
of history in The Middle East with both
sustainability and catastrophy as
consequence. In detailed analyses of the
áreas which today consist of
contemporary Iraq and Irán he
establishes a new structural historical
understanding of relations between
nature and man.
Peter Chrístensen can be seen as part
of a new International environmental
history emerging within professional
history. But the importance of
Christensen's contribution is the - direct
and indirect - emphasis on the relation
between critique of the Eurocentric
notion of world history and detailed
analysis of relations between historical
development and environment. Thus
Christensen's analysis also becomes an
important contribution to the
multicultural debate and the creation of
a multicultural world. First, it prevés
that nature must be seen as something
which is historically present as an
interplay between nature and
civilization, and therefore not necessarily
connected with European ideologies of
modemity, industrialism and
colonialism. Second, it shows how this
interplay is always specific and thus
regional, creating many - multicultural,
displaced - versions of environmental
history. Third, it demonstrates how the
Malthusian ideas which lie behind some
present Western notions of
environmental history, including a
critique of demographical development
in The Third World may be qualified.