In our persistent but feeble attempts to try and understand just what the hell is going on with the so called European sovereign debt crisis, we keep coming up against a brick wall. It’s all so illogical! All solutions pressed and imposed lead to the opposite of what they were supposed to do. And yet, the so called leaders of Europe persist in spoon feeding the rest of Europe with the same deadly potion again and again. And here, logically enough, this has lead to the creation of the death spiral that Europe now finds itself well in the throes of.
It is illogical! It is Nonsensical! It is down right stupid! Not to mention completely counter productive. In fact it is a living example of Einstein’s definition of stupidity. That is when you keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting that this time you will achieve a different result.
So why is this happening? For all the scorn I have poured over the likes of Frau Merkel, Mme Lagarde, Herr Schauble, Junker, Barroso, Van Rompuy and the rest, it is unfair to claim they are all stupid! At the very least they may be devious and self serving, but not stupid. So what is going on here?
I have been accused of trying in vain to find some narrative that will explain all these ludicrous events when, quite simply, there isn’t a coherent story. I have also been told that all this is not the result of some decision making and policy implementation, but merely the cyclical dynamics of an inevitable decline.
Well, I can’t argue with any of these, can I? But being first and foremost a story teller, I DO have to find some kind of a narrative! So I thought I would offer a medical metaphor this time.
And that is that the European project has turned cancerous.
When the European Coal and Steel Union, which later metamorphosed into the EEC, then the EU and its EZ branch, was originally set up it was for one reason alone. Germany had devastated the continent through vicious and barbaric warfare not once but twice within less than half a century. Such a union in the heart of Europe, tying up the economies of France and Germany at first and then the six and so on, would lead to peace on the continent.
And so it did. Extremely successfully. Though the European project never really caught the hearts and minds of the people, it did appear to abolish all belligerency between them, and perhaps even bring them a little closer. Until, the culprit of the story finally realised that all this, the Euro in particular, after the Marshall Plan funds, had made her top dog Economically in Europe again.
At which point Germany reverted to type. You do as I say, as I decide, because I know better, or else you will be severely punished! Now here, we have to put part of the blame on that inept narcissistic French politician who managed to become President of the Republic, Sarkozy. Instead of balancing Germany and keeping her in check, as had been the role of France from the Community’s very inception, he decided it would be more fun? less strenuous? more suited to his servility? to become the bully’s side kick instead of its counterweight.
And we have now reached the point where the break up not only of the Euro Zone but perhaps even the EU itself is not only not inconceivable any more but is even beginning to look inevitable.
Here I agree, deficits, debt, recession inducing measures and so on are irrelevant as an explanation. What has happened is that Europe has reverted to from. The peoples of Europe who never really acquired a “European” identity for all the bluster, have been pushed back into their age old national prejudices.
The states of the north who did very well out of the Euro because it opened up a market for them in the south they otherwise would never have had, are now back to feeling that they are superior, more civilized, better than those swarthy, lazy, good for nothing (not to mention racially inferior) southerners who, they believe, created the mess! So they should be punished.
In their turn, the southerners, and particularly those who experienced the horrors of German occupation in the last war, see their former dynasts as being out to get them again, to throw them into poverty and rip off all their assets. Much the same way they did during the war.
The peoples of Europe have begun to hate each other again. They hate the arbitrary way Germany is perceived to be throwing her weight around. In their turn, Germans hate the way they are expected, as they see it, to keep paying for the profligacy of the south. The truth is completely absent from these narratives. Partly (if not wholly) because of the propaganda, or populism used by ALL politicians throughout Europe for their own self serving interests and hang the interests of their own country and even more “Europe”.
So the EU, originally set up to abolish belligerency within Europe and create co operation and solidarity between the peoples of Europe in order to eradicate war, is now doing exactly the reverse. Europe has turned in on itself. The European Union is now fanning the destructive fires of national prejudices and hatreds that it was set up to quell.
In effect, a cancer is now eating up Europe against which there no longer seems to be an effective antidote.