Soros: political crisis in EU causing ‘immense human suffering’
EPA/Zsolt Szigetvary HUNGARY OUT
The economic crisis in Europe has turned the European Union into “something radically different” than its original political intention, dividing member states and opening-up society to extremist opinions, George Soros has said.
Speaking in Budapest at the conference Tackling Hate Speech: Living Together Online, Soros, the philanthropist and chairman of Soros Fund Management, said that the European Union is holding together “out of grim reality”. He said that the EU is far from the open society it had originally aimed to be.
“Hate speech, xenophobia and extremism are symptoms of a more deep-seated crisis that has a hold on Europe”, he said. “This crisis started out as a financial crisis, but the way the authorities have dealt with it, or, perhaps I should say, not dealt with it, has turned it into a political crisis”.
This political crisis, he said, “threatens the European Union”.
The historical beginnings of the EU, he said, “fired people’s imaginations, including mine”, but has since fractured member states, and transformed the EU into “something radically different”. Where once there was a “voluntary association” of countries, now the financial and political crisis has widened the gulf between nations.
“We now see that the centre is dictating policy to the periphery, and the periphery is subordinated to the centre”, he told delegates.
The crisis that began in the US in 2008, saw “greater problems in Europe than anywhere else”, he said. The reaction of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the crisis is a large part in continuing the decline of the political system in the EU, he said.
“The euro crisis has brought the financial system to the point of bankruptcy”, he said, adding that the hard pushing of austerity measures has seen the Eurozone “divided into creditor and debtor nations, where the creditor nations dictate policy”.
The centre, represented primarily by Germany, he said, “is imposing a regime of strict austerity on the periphery. This, he said, is causing “immense human suffering” and “inflating hate speech, xenophobia and all forms of extremism”. The EU has been “transformed into the opposite of an open society”, he said.
“The ways of preserving the euro should be modified so as to meet the political objectives of the European Union”, he said. “If there is a contradiction between the financial problems and political objectives of the European Union, then the political objectives should take precedence. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
The continued tension between the centre and the periphery, he said, “is such a dismal prospect that it can not be allowed to happen”, he said. “One way or another, we should get back to our shared values” .NEW EUROPE ON LINE
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