From TruthOut
By Claire Gatinois

Will the economic and financial crisis degenerate into violent social explosions? Tomorrow, will there be civil war in Europe, the United States and Japan? That’s the rather alarming conclusion that the experts of European think tank LEAP/Europe 2020 lay out in their latest bulletin dated mid-February.

In that edition, which addresses the issue of the crisis entering a phase of “global geopolitical dislocation” in the third quarter of 2009, the experts foresee a state of “generalized every man for himself” in the countries stricken by the crisis. That panic would then conclude in logical confrontations, in other words, with partial civil wars. “If your country or region is an area where firearms are in mass circulation” (among big countries, only the United States is in that situation) LEAP indicates, “then the best way to deal with the dislocation is to leave your region, if that’s possible.”

According to that association, made up of independent contributors from European political, economic and diverse professional circles, the most dangerous regions are those where the system of social protection is the weakest.

Thus, the crisis would be able to spark violent popular revolts, the intensity of which would be aggravated by the free circulation of firearms. Latin America, as well as the United States, are the areas most at risk. “There are 200 million guns in circulation in the United States and social violence already manifests itself through gangs,” LEAP head, Franck Biancheri, reminds us. Moreover, LEAP experts already detect population flight from the United States to Europe, “where direct physical danger will remain marginal,” they maintain.

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