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发帖数: 29846 | 1 The End of the Euro?
by Bruce Thornton (Research Fellow and W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-
Campbell National Fellow, 2009–10, 2010–11)
Good riddance to a bad idea.
The champions of the European Union once touted it as a “bold new
experiment in living” and “the best hope in an insecure age.” But these
days “fear is coursing through the corridors of Brussels,” as the B.B.C.
reported in September. Such fear is justified, for the nations of Europe are
struggling with fiscal problems that challenge the integrity of the whole E
.U.-topian ideal. Greece teetering on the brink of default on its debts, E.U
. nations squabbling about how to deal with the crisis, debt levels
approaching 100 percent of GDP even in economic-powerhouse countries like
Germany and France, and European banks exposed to depreciating government
bonds are some of the signposts on the road to decline.
A monetary union comprising independent states, each with its own peculiar
economic and political interests, histories, cultural norms, laws, and
fiscal systems, was bound to end up in the current crisis. All that borrowed
money, however, was necessary for funding the lavish social welfare
entitlements and employment benefits that once impressed champions of the “
European Dream.” Yet, despite the greater fiscal integration created by the
E.U., sluggish, over-regulated, over-taxed economies could not generate
enough money to pay for such amenities. Now, the president of the European
Council, Herman Van Rompuy, admits, “We can’t finance our social model.”
The Euro Crisis
Photo credit: Image_of_Money (via flickr)
This financial crisis means the government-financed dolce vita lifestyle
once brandished as a reproach to work-obsessed America is facing cutbacks
and austerity programs immensely unpopular among Europeans otherwise used to
amenities like France’s 35-hour work week, or Greece’s two extra months
of pay, or England’s generous housing subsidies that cost $34.4 billion a
year. No surprise, then, that from Athens’ Syntagma Square to Madrid’s
Puerta del Sol, austerity measures attempting to scale back government
spending have been met with strikes, demonstrations, boycotts, and protests,
some violent, on the part of citizens for whom such government entitlements
have become human rights. In fact, such transfers of wealth have been
formalized as rights in Articles 34 and 35 of the E.U.’s Charter of
Fundamental Human Rights.
Meanwhile, the solutions to the debt crisis all involve solvent Eurozone
countries agreeing not just to finance some form of a bailout fund, but to
institute even closer fiscal and political integration. This is something
the citizens of those nations are loath to do, and sure to punish their
politicians for attempting. Just look at Germany, where polls show that two-
thirds of Germans oppose further aid for bailouts. The ruling party there
has lost six state elections in a row. Or Slovakia, where the average worker
earns $1,000 a month, and is in no mood to guarantee the debt of richer
nations like Greece or Portugal.
Economically sounder Eurozone countries may approve stopgap measures such as
increasing the European Financial Stability Facility by $600 billion, as
happened recently. But they will find it politically difficult to cede even
more national sovereignty and control over their economies to Brussels in
order to find a long-term solution to the structural problems bedeviling the
Eurozone economies. As economist Robert Samuelson says of this crisis, “
Political paralysis meets economic drift.”
The reason for this paralysis exposes the fundamental flaw underlying the E.
U.––the notion that nationalist loyalties and identities could be
subordinated to a transnational institution run by elites unaccountable to
the citizens. Long before Nazism demonstrated the destructive excesses of
nationalism, the idea arose that a “federation of free states,” as
Immanuel Kant imagined in his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” could create
global peace and order by transcending the zero-sum interests of different
states and peoples.
In Europe, entitlements have become human rights.
In the nineteenth-century, communication and transport technologies like the
telegraph, railroad, and steamship facilitated a global trade and exchange
of ideas that seemingly brought people together into a “solidarity which
unites the members of the society of civilized nations,” as the Preamble to
the First Hague Convention put it in 1899. For many, what Kant called the
“progress of the human mind” meant creating a global community of shared
values and aims that could be codified in international laws and
institutions presumably superior to the parochial cultures, irrational
customs, and retrograde values of any individual country or people.
Unfortunately for the idealistic internationalists, the mass of humanity
refused to go along with this project. Most people lived and found their
identities in the local and particular cultures that they were now supposed
to progress beyond. Indeed, from 1914-1918, millions of Europeans
slaughtered each other on behalf of those national loyalties. In 1918, G. K.
Chesterton explained why:
Nobody has any such ecstatic regard for the mere relations of different
people to each other, as one would gather from the rhetoric of idealistic
internationalism. It is, indeed, desirable that men should love each other;
but always with the recognition of the identity of other peoples and other
men. Now, too much cosmopolitan culture is mere praise of machinery. It
turns ultimately upon the point that a telegram can be sent from one end of
the earth to the other, irrespective of what is in the telegram.
In the end, Chesterton says, “Men care more for the rag that is called a
flag than for the rag that is called a newspaper. Men care more for Rome,
Paris, Prague, Warsaw than for the international railways connecting these
towns.”
Our collective identities and loyalties are necessarily local and
distinguished from those of other peoples, an existential fact that no
amount of technological advances can change. This means that we want to be
ruled by people like us whom we can hold politically accountable. And it
means our nation’s interests and aims will necessarily be different from
those of other states, and sometimes those different interests will lead to
conflict.
After World War I, advocates of transnational integration did recognize the
power of national and ethnic self-determination. At the same time, the
Versailles Treaty created the supranational League of Nations as an
instrument of global peace and order designed to avoid a reprise of the
nationalist-driven carnage of the Great War. It enshrined the notion of what
Woodrow Wilson called “national aspirations.” The two ideals were
contradictory, since sovereign nations were loath to surrender their
sovereignty to a body that would at times have to pursue aims contrary to
those nations’ interests.
The president of the European Council admits, ''We can’t finance our social
model.''
The dismal history of the League in the two decades between the wars, when
it failed to stop the escalating state violence that paved the way for World
War II, illustrates the truth expressed by George Washington: “It is a
maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation can be
trusted farther than it is bounded by its interests.”
Given this contradiction, then, between national sovereignty and
transnational idealism, it is not surprising that the first Kantian “
federation of free states,” the League of Nations, and its progeny, the
United Nations, both failed at enforcing a global consensus of interests.
Each instead degenerated into a forum for states to pursue their own
interests. Yet these failures did not inhibit the creation of the E.U., yet
another “federation of free states” whose purpose is to subordinate
national interests to loftier goals. The current crisis in the monetary
union has not led many European leaders to question the flawed assumptions
behind greater integration, which limits each state’s own interests and
authority, at the same time that those states retain their sovereignty and
thus an ultimate veto power over E.U. policy.
Many leaders do understand that the fiscal crisis has put at risk the whole
E.U. project. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel recently warned her
parliament, “The euro is much, much more than a currency. The euro is the
guarantee of a united Europe. If the euro fails, then Europe fails.” Yet
rather than question the assumptions behind “a united Europe,” leaders are
proposing even more economic and political integration, and short-term
fiscal fixes, such as the $600 billion European Financial Stability Facility
, which require significant transfers of wealth from successful economies to
those near bankruptcy. But as the New York Times writes, both the short-
term and long-term solutions “require a sacrifice of sovereignty that seems
to exceed the political appetites of European leaders.”
These solutions will not work because what historian Walter Russell Mead
calls “national egoism” has not disappeared among the peoples of Europe:
“Europeans are debating in European forums today with the same nationalist
selfishness that their predecessors did 150 years ago.” Different customs,
different values, and different attitudes towards work, leisure, and the
good life all derive from the particular histories, geographies, and
cultures that define a people and a nation. These differences will not
disappear because states share a currency.
Just as dirigiste economics, extravagant state-funded social welfare
subsidies, and idealistic internationalism are ideas that were bound to fail
, so too is the E.U.—it cannot be fixed. Rather, it is an idea whose time
has gone.
Bruce S. Thornton is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He
received his BA in Latin in 1975 and his PhD in comparative literature–
Greek, Latin, and English–in 1983, both from the University of California,
Los Angeles. Thornton is currently a professor of classics and humanities at
California State University in Fresno, California. He is the author of nine
books and numerous essays and reviews on Greek culture and civilization and
their influence on Western civilization. He has also written on
contemporary political and educational issues, as well as lecturing at
venues such as the Smithsonian Institute, the Army War College, and the Air
Force Academy and appearing on television, including the History Channel and
ABC’s Politically Incorrect. His latest book, published in March 2011, is
titled The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama's America
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