The New Dark Age

27 November, 2010 — Strategic Culture Foundation

I am, God knows, no economist but that may not be all that bad when you remember the words of Harry S Truman who said ‘Give a one-handed economist. All my economists say, ‘on the one hand…on the other’.’ I’m therefore unqualified to examine the EU’s field of economic landmines. Yet perhaps my ignorance of matters fiscal permits me to go outside numbers, trends, GNPs and the like and see if the current problems of the EU have other causes.

I approach all political problems with two personal axioms:

Axiom I – You make a very serious mistake is assuming that people in charge know what the hell they’re doing.

Axiom II – You don’t have to be a 10 in politics – you can be a 3 if everyone else is a 2 – which is what most leaders are.

Winston Churchill is credited as the inspiration for the ‘Common Market, now the EU. He said ‘The first step in the re-creation of the European Family must be a partnership between France and Germany. In this way only can France recover the moral and cultural leadership of Europe. There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany … we must re-create the European Family in a regional structure called, it may be, the United States of Europe’…

He saw, then, a common market more as a way of preventing war than an economic union; in the first case the EU has been successful but not so successful in the second. Moreover I would argue that unless it gets its economic and political act together it may well fail in avoiding war.

Mankind always seems to go too far. In 1944 the Allies, looking for ways to cross the Rhine, and having control of a couple of bridges, disastrously went for another inspiring the Cornelius Ryan best seller called ‘A Bridge Too Far.’ Alexander the Great’s overstep was Afghanistan (nothing changes!), for Napoleon and for Hitler it was Russia; for Casino’s it’s the near certainty that winners will take their winnings and plow them back into the games and lose. Biting off more than one can chew is normal for people … and countries.

As a former politician I can tell you that the legislator’s greatest fear is the unintended consequence. I can’t believe that the founders of what is now the EU foresaw a ‘Ponzi scheme’ where new countries join mainly because they needed the money. Good examples are the countries Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain all of which, I would argue, did not come into the union for what they could contribute but what they could get. As a frequent visitor I watched as Irelandwhich, after joining the EU, went from poverty to riches and back to poverty. What we see, then, is an EU bound to take from the rich and give to the poor. Better off members are increasingly reluctant to do bail-outs – yet they must to keep the Union going.

Allow me, the offshore common scold, give my overview. As the Common Market expanded, serious unintended consequences occurred, all of which were foreseeable but ignored.

First, as mentioned, was fiscal grief which was bound to occur as long as the Union had little control of their members’ disastrous economic decisions which inevitably wind up in the Union’s lap. Moreover, many members refuse to yield fiscal ground to the greater good. France won’t ever tolerate ending their traditional mollycoddling of farmers. The UK won’t chuck the Pound for the Euro. In short, there is not, nor will their ever likely be, a unified fiscal policy leading to one central economy.

Second, the European Union badly underestimated the cultural problems inherent in opening all borders. One need not dwell on this except to say ‘Muslims’ or ‘Gypsies’ to stoke the fire of prejudice especially in France but elsewhere as well. Because of this, Turkish membership is becoming less and less attractive to both the EU and Turkey.

The EU seemingly, even as individual states go into the fiscal dumper, can’t give up its almost evangelical desire to expand meaning more basket cases even though that further strains the budgets if the more well-to-do members. The yielding of national sovereignty to a Central EU has been spasmodic at best with the UK still being dubious about staying. Thus a situation where countries most likely to leave are the ones most able to assist members in need.

This leads to the question, what happens if the wheels come off? Will the remaining members stay together? The greatest question of all is whether the peace being kept will continue if the EU busts up or will member nations revive old grudges?

Difficult as it is for Europeans to think in these terms but they must. As the breakup of Yugoslavia demonstrated, people who had dwelt side by side for centuries suddenly started to kill one another.

In Europe there are national boundaries unaccepted by many who live within them – or once did. This especially true of German/Polish borders set by the major powers after World War I which gave a large part of Germany to Poland to compensate for what the Soviet Union got from Poland and the timeless dispute of Romania and Hungary over Transylvania.

The European Community has come to a crossroads and to paraphrase Woody Allen puts it, ‘… is facing a crossroads – one road leads to despair and utter hopelessness and the other to total extinction – I sincerely hope you choose the right road.”

It’s not as bad as that, of course, but to this observer the European Union has reached a critical point and must decide once and for all just what it really wants to be, how it will get there and how it will preserve what it achieves.