Lastly I want to enter a plea for reducing the chance of new wars occurring. There is a saying which is popular in the fire brigade: 窶郎ou can put out any fire with a bowl of water if you get to it fast enough.' For those who really want to contribute to bringing about a safer world there are therefore two questions to be answered: do we want to get there soon enough? And do we have a bowl of water left for it? In order to get there in good time we need to create a worldwide early warning system, one capable of enabling the United Nations and regional bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to offer timely help in preventing conflicts or, where conflicts already exist, avoiding any further escalation. This means that the UN, as well as the OSCE and similar bodies must have available adequate financial means, sufficient to enable them to offer such help effectively. After the war in Kosovo the western countries established a Stability Pact for the Balkans, excluding only the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The question is this: why were many prepared at that stage to allocate numerous troops to this region when that had not been the case earlier? We can never know for certain but can say with some confidence that the cost of the many thousands of military personnel who were deployed in the bombardment, as well as of the enormous destruction which was its consequence, amounted to many times the amount which would have been needed at the beginning of the 1990s to reverse the decline of the Yugoslav economy. Had this sum of money been provided and had European countries made efforts to establish a confederation instead of a group of independent republics, the human tragedy which was to play itself out in the Balkans could probably have been prevented. If we had at an earlier time done more for the people of the Middle East, then we might well not be stuck in the mire in which we now find ourselves. Broken promises Neoliberalism likes to present itself as a promise, the promise that if developing countries run down their already wafer thin social safety nets still further and further liberalise their markets and the movement of capital then prosperity will follow as day after night. The reality is that worldwide economic growth has diminished since the early 1980s when neoliberalism began to overrun the world. In the 'fifties, 'sixties and 'seventies the world economy grew by an average rate of around 4% per year. In the 'eighties and 'nineties, neoliberalism's heyday, this fell 3%, then 2% respectively a year. Furthermore, we all know that economic growth is one thing, while the distribution of its fruits is quite another, and if these are unfairly divided then what on earth would we have achieved?. And of course, neoliberalism hasn't only provided us with lower rates of economic growth, but also with greater inequality. This has been evident in almost all industrialised countries. In the Netherlands, income inequality has been growing since 1983. According to research conducted in every member state of the European Union, in fact, the gap between the best and worst paid workers has grown nowhere so quickly as in our country! It is not for nothing that my party has placed such importance on the struggle against the growing social divide, a divide which is moreover evident not only in relation to incomes and wealth, but also when it comes to education, health care, housing and even the law. And then again, I am here speaking only about developed countries, because it is unfortunately the peoples of developing countries who have been neoliberalism's biggest victims. We often forget that it is in such countries that the great majority of the world's population lives.
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