Voices from the eurozone:
From prostitutes to pasta
sellers, ignorance is bliss
Our correspondent sets out across Europe to hear
views at street level of people caught up in the euro
currency crisis. Today, Antwerp, Belgium
Business is slow. She says that she is lucky to get three customers a day prepared to pay her €50 (£43) minimum charge. But she is not worried about the crisis into which the euro has been plunged by the profligacy of Greece.
“I live from day to day,” she says blithely. So, it seems, does much of Belgium’s second city. The euro may be plunging, and the country may be effectively without government, after another bust-up between its Flemings and Walloons, but tour groups still flock to the Grote Markt, with its exquisite 16th-century Flemish guildhouses. The fashion houses flourish.
There is no shortage of visitors admiring the Rubens, Van Dycks and Titians at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts. Antverpians sit in the May sunshine outside the ubiquitous bars, enjoying their Stellas and Konincks. Pretty young women bowl along the narrow old streets on sit-up-and-beg bicycles, just as they have done for generations.
RELATED LINKS
Ordinary people are dimly aware that another economic meltdown may be brewing but, by and large, they choose to ignore it. “It doesn’t help me to worry,” says Rita Van Den Broek as she sells dishes of spicy pasta in her delicatessen.
“People don’t quite catch the whole depth of the crisis. It happens above their heads ... They are quite complacent,” says Geert Noels, the chief economist of a Belgian think-tank called Econopolis.
Indeed, in some ways the crisis may, in the short term, actually be helping this city of a million people who like to joke that while Brussels is the capital, Antwerp has the capital.
“The weaker euro to some extent might strengthen our position by increasing exports,” says Jan Blomme, director of strategy and development at the Port of Antwerp, which provides 65,000 jobs and handles up to 190 million tonnes of freight a year. However, it needs to. Last year the volume of freight passing through the port fell by 16.7 per cent because of the global economic downturn.
“I am worried about absolutely everything — the euro, the dollar the yen. You have to be dumb, deaf and blind not to realise we are experiencing something historical,” says Miguel Sureda, the president of Diamondland, one of 1,800 companies working in an industry that processes 80 per cent of the world’s rough diamonds and generates $45 billion (£31 billion) a year from one heavily guarded square mile near Centraal Station. But, he continues, diamonds are traded in dollars, not euros, the booming Chinese and emerging Indian markets are compensating for diminishing American demand and the weak euro lowers fixed costs. “The diamond business always finds a way out,” he chuckles. “We’re in a tough situation but the diamond industry is one of those industries with more potential than others.”
In Antwerp, at least, there is none of the anger at the massive Greek bailout that is rumbling across neighbouring Germany. Nobody wants the Greeks ejected from the eurozone. The sense is more of sympathy and solidarity, reinforced by the unspoken fear that Belgium, whose national debt is about 100 per cent of its GDP, could also be economically vulnerable. “When you’re in the European Union you’re in a community so you all have to help each other. If we were in the same situation we’d be grateful,” says Dorothy Maes, who runs an upmarket gift shop.
“We all have to help each other,” says Gunther Vanhout, 40, who manages a sandwich shop.
Such an attitude is hardly surprising in a small, divided, artificially created country hemmed in by powerful neighbours that was overrun in both world wars (many more Nazi V2 flying bombs landed on Antwerp than any other target). Belgium looks to the EU for protection, actively champions greater integration, and regards the euro as a political device to lash the continent together.
According to a 2008 Eurobarometer survey, 79 per cent of Belgians think the euro is a “good thing” — more than in any other eurozone countries except Ireland and Luxembourg, and apart from usual gripes about rising prices there is practically no nostalgia here for the Belgian franc. The preferred solution of most Belgians to the problem of profligate member states is not surprising, either: more power to Brussels.
We should think about enforcement mechanisms,” says Dr Blomme. Danny Zajtmann, economic adviser to one of Antwerp’s Liberal aldermen said: “There must be more orthodoxy ... There should be some way for the European Commission to oblige countries to act and say, ‘In a couple of years you should be in balance’.”
Mr Sureda, the diamond merchant, said: “The good thing about the Commission is it provides all these national politicians with an excuse to do what they should have done in the first place, and that’s worth a lot.”
Herman van Rompuy, the Belgian President of the Council of Ministers, already has a task force of European finance ministers looking how Brussels can strengthen its economic governance and impose greater budgetary discipline on member states. In July those efforts should receive a further boost when Belgium takes over the EU’s rotating presidency. In the circumstances, it will be hard for Eurosceptic countries such as Britain to resist.
Posts
