Economic catastrophe almost always paves the way for political upheaval, and I doubt that it will be very different this time round. Most of the world may be much more prosperous than in the past, but that won’t count for as much as some optimists might hope: What will count is the extent to which rising expectations have been dashed.

No less important is the extent to which different societies can adapt to often inchoate demands for “Change.” You may not like the 2008 election result (I didn’t) but if we see Obama as a candidate who owed at least part of his success to the Wall Street crisis, it’s nevertheless reassuring to see that the discontent he represented and the unease he reflected could, to a greater or lesser degree, be accommodated within America’s flawed, yet remarkably flexible and responsive political structure.

The same isn’t so true elsewhere. There are repeated reports of trouble in China and now, from Russia, there’s this:

“As Russia’s economy begins to implode after years of energy-driven growth, Mr Putin is facing the germs of an unexpected power struggle which could hamper his ambition to project Russian might abroad. Mounting job losses and a collapse in the price of commodities have triggered social unrest on a scale not seen for at least four years, prompting panic among Kremlin officials more accustomed to the political apathy of the Russian people.The unease was deepened yesterday after thousands of protestors marched through the Pacific port city of Vladivostok and other cities, including Moscow, demanding Mr Putin’s resignation for his handling of the flailing Russian economy.”

And a series of strikes in the U.K. seems to suggest that the soft authoritarians of the EU may be about to face similar problems within their provinces too. The actual dispute revolves around an application of EU law that allows employers to import cheap labor from elsewhere in the EU at rates that undercut the locals. That raises plenty of issues as it is (I’ll try to return to that particular topic on some other occasion), but one of the things that makes this dispute so potentially dangerous is that under EU law the British government can do nothing about it.

Writing over at the Daily Telegraph Janet Daley looks at what this means and where it could lead:

“The peoples of Europe have finally discovered what they signed up to. I do mean “peoples” (plural) because however much political elites may deceive themselves, the populations of the member states of the EU are culturally, historically and economically separate and distinct. And a significant proportion of them are getting very, very angry. What the strikers at the Lindsey oil refinery (and their brother supporters in Nottinghamshire and Kent) have discovered is the real meaning of the fine print in those treaties, and the significance of those European court judgments whose interpretation they left to EU obsessives: it is now illegal – illegal – for the government of an EU country to put the needs and concerns of its own population first…
“But the response from the EU political class is the same to all of these varied manifestations of resistance. Those who protest are being smeared with accusations of foolhardy protectionism or racist nationalism when they are not (not yet, anyway) guilty of either. It is not purblind nationalism, let alone racism, to resent the importation of cheap labour en masse when its conditions of employment (transport and accommodation provided, as seems to be the case at Lindsey) allow it to compete unfairly with indigenous workers…Nor is it “protectionism” to argue that competition for employment should take place within a context of social responsibility and respect for the fabric of communities…The protesters are simply demanding what they thought – what all free people have been taught to think since the 18th-century enlightenment – was their birthright. That is to say, for the basic principle of modern democracy: the understanding between the state and its people that the proper function of a government is to represent the interests of those who elected it…
“…In the grand abstract terms of the enlightenment, the legitimacy of government derives from the consent of the governed, and therefore no government should have the right to hand over its authority to some external body which is not democratically accountable to its own people. So when the framers of the EU arranged for the nations of Europe to do exactly that, they were repudiating the two centuries old political struggle for the rights and liberties of ordinary citizens, of government “of the people, by the people and for the people”. It has always been my view that this was a quite conscious decision by the EU founders who, in the wake of two world wars, came to believe that the infamous national crimes of the 20th century could be traced directly to the democratic revolutions of the 18th century, and that the only long-term solution to this was to replace democracy with oligarchy.
“But there it is. And here we are, with a generation of European political leaders who almost all accept the terms in which their predecessors gave away the most important principle of that great democratic pact between a free people and its government. While times were good and there was enough prosperity to keep everybody distracted and happy, the loss went almost unnoticed except by a few persistent and despairing critics. Well, not any more…

Read the whole thing. It is, I suspect, an extremely accurate guide to what may be about to go very, very wrong…