More political and economic developments and trends in Europe reveal a clear and manifest rapture in the social fabric of the Continent and its water-surrounded annexes. After decades of so-called free-market policies that have led to an abyss of debts in certain countries while the bankers, financiers and their politician friends of certain other countries ran away with the bonus lollies, there is this obvious, urgent realisation that things have to change.

While stale and worn out conservative governments have chosen the way of obstinate austerity, in the hope that this would pull EU nations out of the current economic crisis, the people, mostly from the middle and lower working classes, have been made the sacrificial lambs required to heal the wounds and scars caused by the savage butchery of global economic and financial manipulators.

This is being done regardless of the more than reasonable fear that slashing spending will halt financial growth altogether, while the stronger EU economies inevitably dominate the weaker ones.

Is it any wonder that the disgruntled populations in places like Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal and others have already shown they intend to – one way or another – rebel against Brussels?

The French, not oblivious to their own dire state of affairs, have quickly jettisoned a bluffing, bravado-inclined, one-term president and replaced him with a Monsieur Normal who, not surprisingly, speaks the language of the average man in the street.

The Italians, quite characteristically, have denied their new, EU-imposed technocrat government a honeymoon extension. Clashes with riot police have become a daily occurrence. Rampant tax evasion needs to be addressed, but why start from the bottom of the social ladder?

The Greeks, admittedly the least liberalised economically, have voted with animosity against those who want them to commit national hara-kiri.

In Spain, there have been massive anti-austerity protests despite the recent change of government. It goes to confirm the issue is beyond national party politics.

The Germans too, not to be outdone despite their fabled economic efficiency, have started to give Frau Merkel enough rope to hang herself with.

Sledge-hammer austerity, which we are experiencing here in the form of energy and fuel bills and a spiralling cost of living that has punctured the nation’s economic lungs, has led to a growing wave of electoral protests. The chorus of anti-austerity voices is fast intensifying into a crescendo, aided and abetted by the phenomenon of the worldwide Occupy Movement.

Alessandro Politi, a renowned political analyst, comic and TV pundit, insisted recently that the squeezing of the middle class of a country for the sake of the financial interests of speculators in another is something that goes against democracy, dignity and freedom. He said that if protesters march divided, the speculators and their political sugar daddies will inevitably attack in a coordinated way.

How much longer are the public and the working middle class expected to take the brunt of the harsh austerity measures when they are obviously watching their money being drained, their pensions slashed, their retirement postponed, their healthcare drastically reduced and other surgical interventions by people who are either unelected or are too obviously doing a ventriloquist act in the name of the blessed “market”?

With Greece already having hit the bottom, there is a queue waiting out there and no one country can really say it is safe and warm on dry land. While there is indeed a political class hobnobbing with an entrepreneurial class, bred and educated in more than 30 years of deregulations, and which thinks that numbers and statistics count, and not people, the shocking increase in the number of suicides, as just one example, does not in any way worry them.

Back to Politi, the Italian insists that the more secure countries of the eurozone do not want to see the common currency go “down the toilet” because their own banks are “generally filled with toxic assets”. It is not a problem of countries whose debt has been singled out by speculators, because other countries also have a worrying composition of their debt but are still projecting an image of “good health”.

It may sound rather naive, particularly coming from this insignificant scribbler in an insignificant, little country, but the only way forward for Europe is to rise. If that does not happen and the recent protests and public manifestations are put on the backburner, the wrong species of politicians will continue wanting money, which they take from international bankers and their fat cats, and then the people who were daft enough to elect them in the first place, will have to walk the austerity tightrope by way of paying it back.

As one irate blogger stated last week, it is very much like having a rich uncle who gives you everything, but when he passes away, you find out he left you the bill. The loan shark bankers will continue to lord it as long as they have their friends in power to do their dirty work, for a percentage of course.

But if Europeans rise, as they have been giving the impression of wanting to do, there is little Europe, and the US for that matter, can do. It is why electorates everywhere now prefer politicians of both the right and the left who have come up with alternative suggestions to the crisis. Ideology is rightly playing second fiddle to their standpoints and methods aimed at offering people a respite from the greed, the hidden gluttons and the shamelessness of the past three decades which are, really, a sick extension of the Reagan-Thatcher calamity that hit the world in the eighties.

Europeans of the north, the south, the west and the east have historically and frequently been the pioneers of change. Revolution may not necessarily be in the mind, but rising via the ballot instead of the bullet is an option that is seriously being taken into consideration. Some have already put it into practice.

I can’t see it stopping, though the old, dark forces still incredibly rooted in feudal times will not roll over and watch it happen. With much of the media mercenaries eagerly on their leash, and their special police squads indoctrinated into blind obedience, they may even fight back – in their case with the bullet, not the ballot. The instigation to violence is as old as civilization, a highly successful trick to outwit social change when change does not suit the powerful, the rich and their hangers-on.

As with the United States, when Europe sneezes, the rest of the world sneezes with it. A Europe that seeks change in a fair and fruitful manner would be carrying the torch for other nations everywhere.

Our own Dom Mintoff was once demonised, again by those same old, dark forces, for having distinguished – inside the continent’s famous assembly halls – between Cain’s Europe and Abel’s Europe. So many years later, we are actually witnessing Abel’s desire to make up for Cain’s trail of destruction. He cannot stop here. He cannot let go. His motto will have to remain: Rise, Europe, Rise.