Higgins warns against fiscal policies threatening democracy

Economic policies employed during the recession have meant parts of Europe no longer belong to the developed world, President Michael D Higgins has said.

A major factor in this has been “externally imposed fiscal rectitude which can strain democratic legitimacy itself”, he said.

He was speaking at the launch of the European Year of Development 2015 in Dublin Castle on Thursday afternoon.

“The high levels of youth unemployment experienced in many European countries, the recent debt crises, the existing and looming poverty and the consequences of externally imposed fiscal rectitude which can strain democratic legitimacy itself, are but some of the phenomena which must prompt us to interrogate the relevance of old distinctions between ‘developed’ and ‘developing worlds’,” he said.

“Simplistic oppositions between ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ countries risk obscuring the fact that, in many ways, elements of ‘the South’ are now in ‘the North’, and that, vice versa, some features of ‘the North’ have migrated to ‘The South’,” he said. “Food security, gender equality, dignity - these are core, universal values that are valid for any society across the globe,” he said.

“In the North as in the South, the legitimacy and soundness of the dominant paradigms of development and growth that we have inherited are being challenged. This is surely to be welcomed, but it leaves us with a set of practical and moral challenges,” he said.

Shared future

His view was that “elected representatives, academics and practitioners in the field must start by revising our traditional definitions of development, with their undertones of enduring divisions between the North and the South. We are invited, instead, to piece together a new narrative telling us of humanity’s shared future on this fragile planet.”

This, he said, was “a seminal year for the future of human development, as the nations of the world have engaged in two processes of negotiations of immense, and interrelated, importance: one on the UN’s post-2015 development agenda; and the other on climate change.”

Choices made this year in relation to both “will have a real impact on this and future generations”.

Commenting that perhaps “the golden days of a particularly strident version of neo-liberal economics lie behind us”, he very much welcomed “the fact that, after many decades, the role of the state is again being recognised as essential for responding to both novel global challenges and the destructive effects of self-regulating financial markets”.