As the economic crisis unfolds before our eyes, we’ve been drip fed the never ending rounds of midnight negotiations and emergency summits.
If we were to interpret the dynamics between the different players, through the Theory of U, we could argue that the EU, ECB and IMF are making people believe that we still live in a hierarchical and rule-based society, dominated by the control of these institutions over their members and the regulations which they are bound to.
Given these organisations were created in an era where this society did exist, they want to create the illusion that’s the world we live in now, to preserve their legitmacy, when in fact the ECB and IMF in particular, as well as the EU, are driven by competition and markets.
However, wider society are influenced by public opinion, networks and negotiation, what Scharmer calls a social market economy.
But the governments of the other EU countries no longer possess the legitimacy of a state-driven society and don’t yet have the tools to understand let alone influence markets. As such, they are having to submit to public opinion.
Meanwhile, Greece has been retreating into a more communally-driven economy, no longer being able to count on a crumbling state and trying to escape from the clutches of an internal market which is controlled by a few people.
You could argue that given how dependent the economy has been on imports, creating more economic self-sufficiency could build its resilience and create a platform for exporting the goods and materials it produces.
But what if people across Europe lived, thought and acted in a more transnationally-aware ecosystem, what Scharmer calls society 4.0?
