President Higgins says glaring inequalities threaten democracy everywhere

President Michael D Higgins has said that political debate about how to reduce inequality and protect against poverty has become “very much secondary to the management of newly socialised public debt”.

In a severe critique of neoliberal capitalism and “extreme market theory”, the President warned of potential risks to democracy, telling an audience at New York University last night that the world was at a “defining moment” at a time of deep political and economic crisis.

He warned that economic and institutional reforms in Europe will not on their own address deeper existential issues unless the dominant influences of capitalism and the relationship between economic and social policy is revisited in a fundamental way.

“The glaring inequalities of our globe must be recognised as the threat they constitute to democracy everywhere,” he said in his lecture, one of the keynote addresses of his six-day visit to the US.

People were living through a new form of capitalism with a global reach, “which existing institutional arrangements are failing to render accountable,” the President said in an address entitled “The European Union: Towards a Discourse of Reconnection, Renewal and Hope.”

Delivering an annual lecture named after Frenchman Emile Noel, the European Commission’s first and longest-serving secretary general, the President said that austerity was masking “a submission to forces that are not under any democratic control”. Fear and tension were the consequences of economic downturns and governments being forced to cut services and investment.

“Those consequences fall most heavily on the poor and within society hope is eroded among the young whose expectations, after all, were formed in a debt expanded financialised economy rather than in any version of the real economy that emphasised the possession of skills and creativity,” he said.

Mr Higgins spoke about the public’s alienation with and non-participation in politics as elected representatives were seen as “powerless to act” during the crisis. “The vacuum that has emerged becomes available to populist extremes, old and dangerous fundamentalisms,” he said.

It was well within the capacity of the European people to craft a new policy and institutional order that combined social cohesion with competitiveness, he said, but the danger was debate had stalled under pressure from a disconnection between economy and society.

“Rebuilding a social Europe” may require greatly increased taxation and spending by EU institutions, he said, but at present there was no political will to cede national sovereignty.

The President also warned that if the EU did not respond appropriately to the flow of migrants and refugees from the Middle East, it could “confound the best of European values with new xenophobic parties being the beneficiaries in a sea of populist tendencies”.