Future is ‘bleak’ warns Joschka Fischer
Joschka Fischer, the former German vice-chancellor, has issued a bleak assessment of Europe’s prospects for surviving the financial crisis, warning that leaders of a “self-weakening” continent are failing to come to grips with its decline.
“Modern capitalism is based on a global ponzi scheme,” he said. “There is no quick fix to this very severe crisis. It will transform global reality in a similar way as the collapse of the Soviet Union transformed the global system 20 years ago.”
Global power was shifting from West to East, “and it’s completely short-sighted to believe that other powers will look after our interests”, Mr Fischer said in a speech to the London School of Economics.
“We are ignoring the basic facts – we’re discussing whether we are creating super-states or not, whether to help Berlusconi or not – but we don’t discuss our relative decline.”
The result, he predicted, would be an acceleration of the transfer of power from West to East – something that did not bode well for an inward-looking Europe.
“If you walk through the corridors of Washington these days, everyone’s talking about China. Add India, Indonesia and Southeast Asia,” he said. “It was not by chance that Hillary Clinton made her first foreign trip to Asia.”
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