Decentralisation trend in Europe - Collapse of civilisations?

10/05/2015 civilisation , collapse , energy , Europe , simplification 0 Comments

People in Europe are getting fed up with the elite. Rising resource costs, austerity, bank bail-outs, tax rate hikes and massive corruption of governments has led to a shattering European Union. Of course there are many different reasons for the increasing decentralisation trend in Europe, but my perspective is that the low ranked members of society has started coalitions to demand that the high ranked members of society share a larger part of their natural resources with the rest. As we all know, economic inequality is at an all time high with half of the worlds total capital in the hands of the top 1%, according to Oxfam. 

As we can see in the map above there are several so called "separatist" movements popping up all over Europe. As the global resource pie starts to shrink there will be winners and losers, the weakest suffering first. And this is what we see with the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) countries suffering, all time high youth unemployment, increasing refugee flows and homelessness. The trend towards decentralisation is the same as a break up of nations, or collapse of society, controlled by centralised corrupt or ineffective governments. Politicians have not understood or accepted that the Earth is finite and that debts have only postponed the harsh reality of resource depletion and economic down turn. Instead they have promoted perpetually borrowing year-after-year (for the last 30 years) despite that science tells us that we can never pay those loans back.

Now when the global economy is turning down, governments are going to attack ordinary people much more aggressively (increasing taxes, cutting benefits, slashing jobs, negative interest rates etc). Unfortunately most governments will think that if they can only increase taxes they will survive another election cycle. They do not understand that massive deflation, and rapidly rising unemployment, is what kills nations. Some politicians will think about starting international war to shift blame, create a diversion for their own population and to steal resources. Just think about what is happening in Syria right now, its a total mess.

So really it is no wonder that people are getting fed up with the political elite, in Europe and elsewhere, and are trying to return to smaller more local types of decision-making and trading of essential resources (food, water, housing etc). It is what one would expect realising that natural resources are scarce, expensive, and becoming more so. Only a steadily increasing supply of energy can maintain a complex society with a wealthy elite, but when the supply of energy starts falling and the elite gets richer on the backs of ordinary people we can expect social unrest and break up into smaller, simpler groups. I think this is whats happening right now.