After the 13 colonies got together for a little less than 100 years….
The place got into a fight….
While some might say it was over human rights….
Some might say it was over economics and a way of life….
Could be the same problem is brewing in the European Union….
German Chancellor Merkel talking to the guys….Photo…Washington Post
The arc of Europe’s postwar history is turning toward tragedy. It isn’t just that much of the Continent has fallen into a new Great Depression, or that in some countries things will get worse before they get better. It isn’t even that the whole mess was avoidable in the first place. It’s that the crisis is dividing Europe along the very lines the European project was intended to erase.
Decades of clichés about European “solidarity” and “the European idea” are being held up to ridicule. The notion that Greeks, Spaniards, Britons, Germans, and Italians are instinctive partners whose commonalities transcend their cultural differences and historical enmities—that “Europe” is a real community, not just a heavily worked-over blueprint in Brussels—turns out to be, let’s say, disputable. Ancient stereotypes are as livid as ever, framing conversations about the crisis right across the European Union. Germans are bossy and severe. Italians are idle. Greeks are corrupt. Brits are arrogant. The French are vain. So much for 60 years of European unification.
Until recently, Germany could claim to be expressing the consensus of rich northern Europe, but no longer. France has chosen the socialist Francois Hollande as president, ditching German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s erstwhile ally, Nicolas Sarkozy. The resolve of other northern governments to stand with Merkel in her demands for fiscal austerity in the south is weakening.
Meanwhile, resentments thought to be dead and gone have revived. Three generations after the end of World War II, newspapers in Greece publish caricatures of Merkel as a swastika-sporting Nazi. In Spain, Italy, and other countries suffering the stress of a German-directed drive to restore Europe’s public finances, anti-German sentiment is better disguised but no less widely held. Germany stands increasingly isolated in a union that was intended, not least by Germany’s own leaders, to bind and subdue the country within a larger whole.
Why did it all go wrong? Three main reasons: French grandiosity, German shame, and a universal law of bureaucratic self-aggrandizement. Together these formed a European Union that was poorly adapted to the stresses the project was sure to encounter. The EU was perhaps unlucky that the crisis came when it did—before national loyalties had diminished and an emerging European identity had begun to take their place.
Yet the EU’s designers had some sense of the risk they were running.
They gambled and lost…..
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Good point.. it still feels sort of “new”… but the origins – and the whole experiment… is soon to be 60 yrs….
And.. thinking history.. climate zones seems to be natural borders… the roman empire lasted for over a thousand years…
sarkozy briefly flirted with a union around the mediterranean..
and knitting together territories in spite of differing climate tend to be inherent with huge problems over time…
The EU is going thru some REALLY rough sledding
The piece points out the ill will towards Germany and Merkel
We’re going someplace with that could bring back feelings
From a century ago mac
If you get my drift
Oh yes.. and the greeks seems outspoken on that.. but.
It seems like germany have been the good guys in this project. Giving more than their share, and afraid to demand their full say b/o history…
maybe it’ll be scaled back.. from six to 27 countries is two very different animals..
and i think i’m siding against the those entitled debt-ridden countries, who whine about foreign powergrabs and demanding bailouts at the same time.
Another thing.. a weak germany in the the EU would’ve been a LOT worse i think…
Merkel is gonna have to go into a compromise mode BIG TIME….
There is a WHOLE LOT riding on this horse….
And.. with only a shallow knowledge on this… but it seems open if that stretch is impossible… for her domestic survival…
And maybe.. it’s time for some real choices for EU.. after several years of drift and talks.. I’ve got a feeling this Hollande guy is changing the game…
He, he, he….
You’re making me smile mac!
Hollande IS a SOCIALIST……
ShhhhhisH!
That’s a cuss word this side of the pond!
We could ALL use a a little more of that here, eh?
They are in for it over there whether Merkel likes it or not…
Cut’s are just about dead over there…
And the bankers ARE gonna take a hit….
it’s time for the bankers to give back….
they have NO choice I’m afraid….
sorta of a mass Occupy thing….
Could you image that over HERE?
He, he, he….
The bankers made ALL those loans it turns out, eh?
Wow.. that IS sort of massive.. and symbolic… hm… wonder what kind of pushback one could expect from the bankers…. plots and political schemes….
Bankers are NO MATCH for the political
Dark cloud over Europe