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Questo articolo è stato pubblicato il 25 agosto 2012 alle ore 16:56.

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One point is particularly important to note in this historical context, especially since it is often missed. The problems created in the Euro zone by going first for the integration of currency and having a monetary union without the supportive presence of a closer political union and a fiscal union extend well beyond economic mishaps into social adversities in the relation between people in different European countries. Anger and frustration, in many different forms, have generated tension between the countries with differential fortunes within the Euro zone, and have also empowered extremist politics of a kind that Europe would have expected to have left behind.

There is nothing particularly surprising about the problems of balance of payments and other economic adversities that many of the European countries - Greece, Spain, Portugal - have faced with the inflexibility of the Euro zone restrictions on exchange rate adjustment and monetary policies. The consequent scenario of crises and rescues involving demands for draconian cuts in public services have also frayed people's tempers on both sides of the divide. It has strongly exacerbated international disaffections within Europe, as is clear from the political rhetoric coming in recent days, in very different forms. from the north as well as the south of Europe – with pejorative anger targeted at objects of contempt that vary from "lazy Greeks" to "imperial Germans."

An often-invoked "analogy" with German sacrifices to achieve the unification of East and West Germany, which clouds at least some European thinking, is thoroughly misleading here. This is partly because the sense of national unity that prompted the German sacrifice does not exist, at this time, between the different European nations, but also because the sacrifice in that remarkable exercise of national unity fell mostly on the richer part of Germany on the west, not on the poorer components as is being demanded right now from many of the afflicted European countries, from Greece to Spain.
The costs of failed economic policies extend well beyond the statistics of unemployment, real income and poverty (important as they are). The grand vision of a union with a cementing sense of European unity is itself threatened by what is going on in the economic arena. Those who advocated a "unity of an European currency" as a "first step" towards a united Europe have, in fact, pushed much of Europe into an entirely counterproductive direction for achieving European unity. There is, of course, no danger of a return to 1939, but, to use the analogy of Auden, "dogs of Europe" barking from sequestered regional bases of resentment and contempt - if not hate – does immense harm to the cause of cultivating European amity and unity.

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