Will Europe Survive?

The Sick Man of the World

Several years ago we read Bernard Connolly's  Rotten Heart of Europe: The Dirty War for Europe's Money. If you want a prescient backgrounder on what is happening in Europe at present, Connolly's book now reads like a prophecy.

A few days ago we correctly predicted that the dominant powers in Europe (that is, Germany and France) would come to the aid of Greece to defend the Euro and their own irresponsible lending to Greece. Their hubris over the grand experiment that is Europe and their pride in the Euro made their actions almost inevitable. Ironically, the markets have since responded by dumping the Euro. The "smart money" does not believe that the European experiment and that the Euro can survive.

Connolly argues in his book that Europe as a quasi-federal-nation would not be able to continue because its foundation was fundamentally flawed. Elites in both Germany and France ardently pushed for the European Community because each believed that it would achieve and defend the hegemony of Germany and France respectively in Europe. And that, dear friends, does not compute.  The German elites thought the EC would ensure German hegemony in Europe.  The French supported the EC ardently because they believed it would ensure French supremancy.  Go figure.

It is now clear that both nations have severely overreached themselves. Both nations, in pursuit of the grand vision, have flushed billions upon billions of euros down the proverbial commode to support, subsidise, and anoint the weaker economies with unparalleled largesse. The upshot has been to foster national cultures of dependency, entitlements, and demand rights in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, together with the widespread corruption that inevitably accompanies such evils. Meanwhile, Germany paid and paid and paid. And there will be no end to it.

Our view is that Europe will survive, but in a perpetual enervated state. Once Turkey was called the "sick man of Europe". Now, Europe will come to be known as the "sick man of the world". The Euro will descend to the status of a Venezuelan peso. Europe will enter the long, lingering decline of all failed socialist states.

Clive Crook gives us the following perspective in a recent Atlantic article:

When did a united Europe ever capture the imagination of many of its residents? The European project was an elite-driven, top-down affair from the outset. Its leaders took the view, often explicitly, that Europe's voters did not know what was good for them and would have to be led to enlightenment. There was never any willingness to let public indifference or outright hostility moderate the pace. For the most part, voters were not consulted. When they were, and voted No in the occasional referendum on further transfer of power to Brussels, governments resolved to keep on asking until voters got it right. Germany adopted the euro despite a sustained majority opposed to monetary union. (Surely this helps to explain German anger over the bail-outs. "We were against this in the first place. Now see what's happened.")

The political foundations for union were never laid. Governments kept building higher and higher regardless. Political crisis did not weaken this structure, as Haass says. Coming earlier than the architects would have wished - that is, before voters got with the program - political and economic crisis showed how weak the structure was to begin with.

History and ordinary prudence dictated that the union might be broad and shallow (a free-trade area, with embellishments, capable of taking in all-comers) or else narrow and deep (an evolving political union, confined to countries willing to be led there). Of the two, I always believed that the first was better. But the architects did not even have the brains to choose the second. They recognized no limits to their ambitions. They set about creating a union that was both broad and deep. A federal constitution, a parliament, a powerful central executive, one central bank, one currency - all with no binding sense of European identity. As for scale, well, the bigger the better. Today Greece, tomorrow Turkey. And why stop there? Madness.

Europe represents an attempt to make the nation-state obsolete. Margaret Thatcher once argued that the US alone, amongst all nations, was founded on a philosophy. She overstated the case. Europe, clearly, has been founded upon political ideologies flowing directly from the philosophic views of the Enlightenment--that the unity of man rests in reason, globalised justice, internationalism, the planned obsolescence of the nation state. The European Community has been an attempt to achieve the objectives of Napoleon without bloodshed. But, from beginning to end, it has been the love-child of arrogant "enlightened" elites. (Incidentally, it is precisely the same philosophic view of the globe and the nation state being advocated ardently by President Obama in the US.)

Will Europe come to its senses and reverse direction? Not likely. We expect that Europe will "double down" through the current crisis.

Previously, Europe's governments have responded to stress on the union by trying to accelerate the pace of integration. Don't rule out the possibility that this will happen again. In fact you could argue it already has. The bail-out plan is a huge development in its own right, and the innovation cannot stop there. Now there is talk of stronger central control of national budgets.

Voters won't like that. But what do voters know? It's not as though they'll take to the streets...

We do not expect that voters taking to the streets will prevail--because ultimately the vast majority of those voters believe, along with their arrogant elites, that government is their god. Theocide will be a step too far. So, a long, slow, lingering decline awaits--until the Living God is pleased to grant repentance--and that, we suspect, will be a matter of generations, not decades, if His dealings with His ancient people are to be our guide.

Meanwhile the Gospel continues to run freely and powerfully through the hearts and cultures of non-Western peoples. Expect that economic prosperity will be one of the results, for when a people turn to the Lord in truth, the blessings of the Covenant flow down upon them.