A spectre is haunting Europe,' wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'the spectre of Communism'. That was in 1848.
Listen to some of the wilder comments from business-leaders and right-wing commentators on the return to power of faintly pinkish, centre-left governments in so many European capitals and you might think the spectre was back haunting the continent again, as if the iron curtain had never rusted away.
But is it really time to dust off that dog-eared old copy of the Communist Manifesto? Not unless you want to remind yourself of the second inflammatory line. 'All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre.' The powers are still at it, 150 years on. In the old days, it was just as likely to be done with guns and repression. Nowadays, the exorcist's chosen weapons are blackmail and propaganda against the plans of popularly elected social democratic governments.
Europe's largest insurer, Allianz, has threatened to pull out of its German home base because of the government's proposed tax reforms, while Britain's right-wing The Sun newspaper has branded German Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine the most dangerous man in Europe for his calls for harmonising taxes in Europe.
Mr Lafontaine and his French counterpart, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who has called for changes in European Union voting rules to make it easier to ram through tax-harmonisation rules, find themselves the subject of anger and derision at home too.
And after surveying business federations across the 15-member EU for their opinions on tax harmonisation, the Financial Times declared: 'New Europe's business people are starting to respond. And the message to the politicians is clear: they hate it.' There is certainly something to worry about for those who still believe in the 'Thatcher Revolution', the painful economic reforms started in Britain in 1979 and followed by right-of-centre governments across Europe over the next two decades.
