High on their own Miaow-Miaow

2010

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso will travel to China this week (29 April - 1 May) for talks with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao as the two sides look to map out a five-year co-operation plan.

"We will seize this opportunity to generate positive momentum in our 35-year relationship and develop a far-reaching agenda for the next five years," Mr Barroso said in a statement on Monday.

Actually they really aren’t an important global playa, but aside from that, the tone is enough to give one flashbacks.

1980:

Western analysts say the Soviet Union’s sluggish economy may be hard pressed to attain even the pared-down production goals set out for 1980.
The new year will mark the close of the current five-year plan, as Soviet officials strive to draw up the next master plan for guidance of the centrally controlled economy in 1981-1985.

Oddly enough, it’s THIS PART that has resonance today, considering the years of whining by European windbag commentators about American “cowboy capitalism”:

While Moscow commentators regularly harp on inflation, unemployment, and other woes in the West, sobering domestic figures for 1979 have made Soviet economists more cautious in assessing this country’s own performance.

And in this great passage of post-Lisbonian thinking:

Western analysts in Moscow said the Soviet economy appeared to be slowing down to such a degree that in the coming years the Kremlin spokesman may have to quietly abandon their long-time preditions about the economy eventually overtaking the west.

Instead, the analysts said, the Soviets might shift to stressing their economy’s stability and capacity for modest but sustained increments of growth

On a similar note, I hope Barrosso can account for what he meets along the way in China that cannot be criticized in the same way the United States can. Making that same “civilized, social growth” story to anyone, let alone a clutch of Chinese economists, makes them sound as silly as those Soviets saving fave.

Conrad Black summed up the self-administered delusions this way:

Europe has been harder hit than the U.S. by the economic crisis and is mired in spurious rhetoric, much of it in French, limning an illusory social-market variant to “cowboy capitalism.” This is like the Holy See’s ancient but sporadic search for a third way between socialism and capitalism. It is a vain pursuit of an economic system diluted by the imposition of self-indulgent European cultural fatigue, masquerading as gentility.