This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a cliche. Crisis spirals out of control and Armageddon moves to the brink of abyss. “Europe” is too big to fail yet too big to succeed. Each newscast is a crash course in economics, each headline an incitement to suicide. But since we are not at war and few understand what is going on, the rest cannot believe it. As if watching the fall of Icarus, they sense the gods are angry ,but return quietly to the plow.
Last week the European backwash of the crash of 2008 moved way beyond high finance. Economics may have pushed politics to the wall, but in Greece, Italy and, more important, Germany, politics is hitting back, hard. Yelling, spitting and choking with frustration, it has had enough of economics and has beaten it to the ground. On Thursday, it claimed its first scalp, demanding a new ruler of Greece.
There is no point in EU acolytes loftily opining that “it was a pity” Greece was admitted to the euro. It was more than a pity, it was a crime. There is no point in bewailing the reluctance of Germans to bail out Greeks or Latins, or let their bankers print billions of cash. There is no point in hectoring or dreaming. A 50-year fiction is over. As often before in history, a new Europe must be built on the ruins of the old, and we had better get used to it.
GERMAN SUPREMACY
It is a massive irony that old Europe’s last gasp should be to seek the very outcome it sought in the 1950s to avoid, German supremacy. The one thing on which I agree with the columnist Timothy Garton Ash is that “if the eurozone is saved, it will be as a fiscal union on largely German terms.” Substitute the word political for fiscal, as honesty dictates, and we are back to the ghoulish first half of the 20th century. European union is always on someone’s “terms,” and they rarely have much to do with consent.
There is one difference today. Garton Ash may want “the kind of budget, debt and wage discipline [Germany] has practiced with such impressive results over the last decade, and now seeks for the whole eurozone.” It may be “precisely what Europe needs.” However, what Europe needs does not embrace the enforcement of what Germany would like to see.
We might have said the same of the British empire in its heyday, that British discipline was “what the peoples of India and Africa” needed. We could mow them down when they disagreed. Germany has no panzer divisions, nor does it desire to dominate Europe politically, and without that desire there is no means of enforcement. The implied German supremacism of the EU’s last-ditchers, under the euphemism of “fiscal union,” is archaic, elitist, dangerous and mercifully impossible.
The paradox is that this impossibility is to the credit of the postwar European movement itself. It has achieved what it set out to do, to liberate the nations of Europe from fear of German overlordship. This liberation has allowed France to walk proud, Britain to enjoy semi-detachment, Scandinavia to think for itself and middle Europe to breathe free. The EU lobby may have cobbled together institutions for a united states of Europe, but it was a fool’s errand, and one that could only play into the hands of German revanchism.
The tragedy is that the chosen vehicle of European union should have been a common currency. This ostensibly innocent tool is a weapon of mass economic destruction. It has imposed its clammy grip on divergent national economies, forcing hundreds of thousands of workers and their families to flee the “overvalued” countries of east and south Europe to seek work in the north. Others were kept at home only by government jobs funded by reckless foreign indebtedness. The reason was not just the fixing of the value of the euro to the Deutschmark, but the fixing of any weak currencies inflexibly to stronger ones. The resource cost of the euro over the past two decades must have been stupendous.
A common currency as a means of imposing wage or fiscal discipline on uncompetitive states is a crude economic sanction. As with all sanctions, it corrupts and distorts domestic politics and makes electorates hostile to external pressure. To Eurocrats this hostility, like democracy itself, is a little local difficulty. However, sooner or later, push comes to shove. Greeks and Italians are toppling leaders who fail to listen to them, and voters in Germany are threatening likewise. European political union, the universalist dream of visionaries, has met its Waterloo.
Some confederacies have worked, such as the US, India and the UK (so far). However, the EU was always a confection of elitist diplomacy, supported by Europe’s peoples only for as long as they thought it would bring them money. It sought to craft a political entity from cultures whose differences have defied Hapsburgs, Bourbons, Napoleon and Adolf Hitler alike. Political union is a discredited orthodoxy and its advocates should retreat gracefully.
The sensible route forward is not underpinning the euro at some new and temporary frontier, and “kicking the can down the street.” It is for those states that sincerely wish to merge their political institutions with their neighbors — there must be precious few — to find common ground within the euro.
FINDING EQUILIBRIUM
Countries in southern Europe must recover their economic separateness and their political souls, writing off debts and devaluing their currencies, as Britain has done. Then Europe can find a new equilibrium. Metaphors of “two-speed” Europe, inner and outer clubs, and trains or planes being missed are meaningless. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are right, as is British Prime Minister David Cameron. A new and more flexible constitution for Europe is blatantly needed.
This constitution will be easier to define than to engineer. It must somehow retain the (overrated) gains of free trade, but accept that there will be many unlevel playing fields. The German Reichstag or Bundesbank cannot legislate for Greek labor laws, Italian opening hours or British tax havens. The currencies of less competitive states must float. The lash of devaluation and domestic austerity is one thing when self-imposed. When edicts emanate from unaccountable foreign agencies, as now in Greece and Italy, it is not. There could be no more disastrous last chapter to this sorry saga than the crude imposition of German “discipline” on the weaker members of the EU. Who would enforce it?
Europe is a continent, not a panacea. It can no longer be seen as an ideological construct, whose adherents treat all challenge as an offense against infallibility. Historically, its strength has been its diversity, a high street not a hypermarket of nationalisms. Each time a centralized power has denied this and struggled to impose “union,” the outcome has been catastrophe, followed by the need to restore and reassert the sovereignty of nations. This time round, the catastrophe has remained economic. It could yet be a near-run thing.
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