Rod Dreher

Advice I wish someone had given me

The end of old Europe

By Rod Dreher • September 29, 2011, 9:07 AM

The indispensable Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf says that Europe is out of options. Excerpt:

No good choices remain. The risks involved in the proposed actions are big. But the alternative of financial collapses and sovereign debt crises that ricochet across the globe is vastly worse. The need for such a rescue may be viewed as the price of having entered hastily into an indissoluble monetary marriage, tolerating the emergence of huge imbalances, failing to discipline the banks and then dealing with the emerging crisis so incompetently.

The eurozone has still to decide what it will be when it grows up. But first it needs to reach that stage. The costs of a meltdown would be too grave to contemplate. The members simply have to prevent that. They have no sane alternative.

It would appear that the spectre of financial apocalypse is going to compel the Eurozone nations to sacrifice what remains of their sovereignty to Brussels. An enormous tragedy, and the cost of believing in the secular utopianism of the Eurobelievers, and their faith in a rational homo economicus. As is now plain, you cannot have monetary union without fiscal union — and you cannot have fiscal union without political union. Thus will the European superstate be born out of crisis and desperation. A rough beast disguised as a man of peace and stability is slouching towards Brussels to be born.

15 Responses to The end of old Europe

Park Hyun says:

September 29, 2011 at 9:23 am

Rod,

This could be a really bad thing, but it fills me with a little hope. Why? Because when the British Empire was collapsing, the US was rising. That dynamic helped Britain survive the chaos of the world wars. Essentially, the British had someone to hand power over to.

Who do we have to whom we can hand over power? China? A dictatorial, hyper-nationalist, aggressive state with values antithetical to Western civilization? Or India? India may be democratic, but it’s still a mess, and far from Western.

That leaves the EU. The Beast of Brussels may look ugly when you’re under it, but from our perspective, if America is going to fall from grace, at least the EU can be there to pick up global leadership and influence rather than the Chinese.
Jon says:

September 29, 2011 at 10:05 am

@ Park – European power is declining far faster than US power. In fact, if anything, the biggest factor in American decline is the shift of power from Europe to China. The American share of global GDP has remained more or less constant since the 1960s. Europe’s share has declined and Asia’s has risen. For a time “Asia” primarily meant Japan, another ally of ours, but Japan has become stagnant as well. America’s problem is not, primarily, that it is declining, but that its allies are.
Niall says:

September 29, 2011 at 10:30 am

More than ever I see the wisdom of Montaigne’s aphorism, the ignoring of which is at the heart of so many of our problems.

“Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.”
Roger says:

September 29, 2011 at 10:36 am

EU a ‘rough beast’.

Really?

This just sounds like rank xenophobia.

If the EU is in a pickle it is largely because because it engaged in what was a fundamentally conservative project of preserving the more rural and traditional cultures of its Catholic and Greek Orthodox peripheral states by letting them into the Eurozone long before they were really ready.

Where a ‘faith in a rational homo oeconomicus’ (which is incidentally surely far stronger on the American right than in any part of the European political spectrum) comes in is quite beyond me.

The creation of the Euro was (like the precipitate expansion of the EU eastwards) on the contrary a true leap of faith that defied economic rationality – a ‘build it (monetary union) and they (fiscal and political union) will come’ moment,

And although I agree it looks less plausible with every passing day, why the hell should you Americans be the only people on earth allowed to live in a federal superstate?

If we do somehow manage to build a more perfect union then that is our right (and given how dangerous the world is becoming probably our duty) and we can do without snark from people living in a country who already have a federal superstate but have royally screwed it up to the point of utter chaos and dysfunctionality.

And before you pile on read Chris Christie’s Reagan Library speech summarised by Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic:

Americans should care what foreigners think of us. The world is watching when our politics is mired in dysfunctional infighting and stubborn refusal to compromise, he noted, and “There is no better way to reinforce the likelihood that others in the world will opt for more open societies and economies than to demonstrate that our own system is working.”

Slow, painful and inept as our endeavours to create a functioning European Union might be they do represent a quite extraordinary level of compromise amongst peoples who only two or three generations ago were slaughtering each other by the million.
Park Hyun says:

September 29, 2011 at 10:45 am

Jon,

True, all of it. But I’m hoping a single market of 300+ million people with good infrastructure, technology and excellent universities can pick up a little. A little German engineering under the hood should help.
Rod Dreher says:

September 29, 2011 at 10:58 am

Good grief, Roger, settle down. You are being ridiculously sensitive about this. I am, and always have been, on the Euroskeptic side, precisely because I don’t want to see national and regional particularity subsumed by bureaucratic rule from Brussels. For better or for worse, a Cajun fisherman in Houma has a lot more in common with his counterpart in Maine than does a fisherman in Portsmouth with his counterpart in Piraeus. It is folly of the worst kind to make taxpayers in northern Europe, which is much more rationally governed, subsidize the nonsense of southern Europeans. It is bizarre, though, that you would call it a *conservative* error to allow the Greeks into the Eurozone before they were ready. I would call it an error of those who thought that local customs don’t matter, ultimately, to people who believe human beings behave rationally, according to their economic interests.

But: In defense of southern Europeans, why should their own local customs (e.g., foodways) come under threat by levelling bureaucrats in Brussels? Surely you, living in the UK, have heard these arguments.

If you wish to live in a federal superstate, by all means fight for it. But I think Europe and the world will be poorer for it. And I think you British are very fortunate indeed that Mrs. Thatcher and the Tory Euroskeptics kept you out of that mess across the channel. If I were an English taxpayer, I would believe that I dodged a bullet.

Besides, in what sense does opposing a federal European superstate on the grounds that it erodes national sovereignty and cultural identity and tradition count as “xenophobia”? I’m against a Eurostate not because I fear Europeans, but because I love what is particular in Europe, and I fear the levelling power of Leviathan.
Jon says:

September 29, 2011 at 1:01 pm

Rod – a Cajun fisherman in Houma has so much in common with his counterpart in Maine in part because the federal government has been intact since 1789. This is, I take it, exactly the levelling you fear in Europe. That is an understandable concern, but that said, there has not been a war fought on this continent in almost a century and a half. Europe had to endure two world wars in the 20th century. This is exactly the reason the EU exists, so perhaps it is worth “levelling” to create a common European identity and European government.

Not to say you are wrong about Greece being admitted into the Eurozone too early. Clearly it was, and its collapse is exacerbating what would probably be much more manageble problems in Spain, Italy, and Portugal.
JonF says:

September 29, 2011 at 1:06 pm

Isn’t this how the US was born (I mean the current US governemnt, in 1787)? The states were broke and the federal government under the old Articles of Confederation was impotent. So they had a little pow-wow to sort out the mess and the Constitution emerged from it.
That’s not to say I am Polyanna about the current Euro situation. I’m not. But I don’t see the peaceful amalgamation of small states into a larger state as being inherently wicked.
Rustywheeler says:

September 29, 2011 at 3:21 pm

Well; someone’s feeling their eschatology today.
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Niall says:

September 29, 2011 at 4:03 pm

As a European (albeit a Brit and thus semi-detached), I really have my doubts about whether the relative peacefulness of Europe since WW2 can be ascribed primarily to the EU per se. It seems to me like a classic example of the post hoc fallacy, and unfalsifiable to boot.

I think that those who see parallels between the 13 colonies in the 1770s and Europe in 2011 may be mistaken. I don’t think the situations are in any significant respect comparable. The cultural, linguistic, economic, political and historical differences between the nations of Europe are such that there is no European “demos” in any meaningful way.
Conradg says:

September 29, 2011 at 4:41 pm

A European federal superstate does not have to threaten local customs and ways. What is required from a closer European Union is not just a common currency, but a common budgeting process. The problems with the Euro is that we have a common currency, but each state is free to create budgets and loans that undermine that currency. There’s two ways to go: either get rid of the Euro and go back to each country having their own currency, or go towards the superstate with a federal structure that coordinates state budgets and keeps them responsible.

The superstate economic model does not need to surrender local autonomy over customs or culture, it merely creates a structure in which responsibility for economic stability is shared and in which irresponsibility is simply not permitted in the first place. If that means Greek have to work a little harder rather than have as much fun in the sun if they want to enjoy the same economic prosperity, they can refuse to do that, but in doing so they won’t be able to bring down the rest of Europe by requiring others to pay their bills.
John E says:

September 29, 2011 at 5:59 pm

A rough beast disguised as a man of peace and stability is slouching towards Brussels to be born.

Or…some political wrangling will be done that will stabilize the situation until the next crises comes along.
cecelia says:

September 29, 2011 at 11:52 pm

One thing which strikes me about the rulers of the EU is that they seem determined to prove the truth of the adage about insanity is trying the same thing over and over again expecting to get different results (we seem determined to go in this direction also). They keep trying to address their fiscal crisis with cries of “austerity” and bailing banks and bond holders out – and things keeping getting worse and worse – yet they still cry “austerity” and protect bond holders. The most recent response to the worsening crisis is more of the same – so I am not sure they are out of options as they might just eventually try a different approach. Of course there is the danger that by the time the IMF/ECB etc crowd are willing to admit to how wrong they have been they will have sunk so much money into a failed strategy that they will be too broke to try something which might be more successful. And will have destabilized many EU countries along the way.

I do not think the EU undermines regional culture at all. In fact they have worked to preserve it – albeit sometimes in ways that have not been helpful (see sheep and erosion). By building infrastructure across the EU especially in the less affluent countries they promote economic health in these distinct regions. Nothing spells the death of regional culture more than the flight of young people away from rural and agricultural communities to the cities in search of jobs. The support the EU gives rural regions reduces such flight.

I’d bet the homogenization of culture is more a function of mass media than of the EU.

I do admit that it seems ironic that we fought two world wars to keep the Germans from taking over Europe militarily but now through treaty and the ballot box the Germans have taken over Europe. Too bad that couldn’t have happened before 80 million died.
Thomas O. Meehan says:

September 30, 2011 at 2:53 am

A number of years ago an British MEP (Newton Dunn?) showed me some proposed Euro-coins, before the real thing hit the streets. The coins all portrayed bridges, temples, etc. What struck me was that they were GENERIC temples, bridges etc. Not an identifiable landmark in the bunch.

I suppressed the desire to laugh but did say that “no one would ever give his life to save such a soulless cardboard monstrosity.

I’m inclined to agree with Ambrose Evens Pritchard of the Telegraph, that the best solution to the present farrago would be the creation of two currency unions, a northern “teutonic union” and a Mediterranean one. I believe Roger Scruton also agrees with something like this.

This drive for centralization is an artifact of delusional progressive giganticism. Before creating a United States of Europe, perhaps the Europeans should see if the United States of America lasts another 25-50 years.