What has happened to Europe?

So what has gone wrong in Europe in the recent years? I shall divide my analysis into three broad subjects: (1) the challenge of European unity, (2) the requirements of democracy, and (3) the demands of sound economic policy. They interrelate.

The unification of Europe is an old dream. It is not quite as old as it is sometimes suggested - the dream is not of classical antiquity. Alexander and other ancient Greeks were less interested in chatting with Goths, Vikings, Angels and Saxons, than they were in conversing with ancient Iranians, Bactrians and Indians, and Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony identified more readily with ancient Egyptians than with other Europeans, located to the north of Rome and or to its west. But Europe went through successive waves of cultural and political integration - greatly helped by the powerful spread of Christianity - and by 1464 King George of Podebrady in Bohemia was talking about pan-European unity. This was followed by many others in the centuries to follow, and by the eighteenth century, even George Washington wrote to the Marquis de La Fayette, "One day, on the model of the United States of America, a United States of Europe will come into being."

However, it was the sequence of the two World Wars in the twentieth century, with a flood of European blood that firmly established the urgent need for political unity of Europe. As W.H. Auden wrote in early 1939, on the eve of the Second World War:
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate.
And the events to follow only confirmed Auden's worst expectations. The terrible fear of a repeat of what European countries had seen in these World Wars continued to haunt a great many thoughtful Europeans. It is important in this context to appreciate that the movement for European unification began as a crusade for political unity, rather than for a financial unification or a common currency.

The birth of the European Federalist movement was motivated strongly by wanting a political unity - free from self-destructive wars - as the content both of the Ventotene declaration of 1941 and of the Milan declaration of 1943 bring out very clearly. There was no hostility to economic integration and not even to a financial union; however, the priority was not banking and currency, but peace and goodwill and a gradually evolving political integration. The fact that the political unification has fallen way behind financial incorporation is a later development, and the problems generated by that chosen sequencing is not, I will argue, irrelevant to understanding the complex nature and extensive reach of the present economic crisis in Europe.

©RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA