AHEAD OF YOUR TIME(S)
Europe: the flag of a dream and a project
In recent months, I have been depressed to see that my favourite American newspaper, the NY Times, appears to have given up on Europe. Regularly, the headlines, the slant of the news reports, and even the columns, show the continent across the Atlantic as a group of quarrelsome statelets engaged in a process that any intelligent observer always already knew was doomed to failure.
This shows an extraordinary shortsightedness, one that might be expected from the more provincial ranks of the GOP, for whom Yurrp has always been a place of moral decadence and Communist politics. From the great East Coast Thunderer, it’s alarming.
One might have expected the Times to show more awareness of the fact that, alone on the planet, Europe is engaged in an unprecedented experiment: forging a workable unity out of a multitude of states that have widely varying traditions, cultures, mentalities, economic potentials - and languages. Imagine having to forge a United States out of a continent where Kansas, North Dakota, Oregon, Mississippi, New Mexico and Maine all have different languages. (I know: some people say they already do; but that’s metaphor, not first-degree reality.)
The difficulty of doing this makes the mind boggle. Just to remind some North American friends of where it all began:
After WW II (in fact, during it) a few far-sighted men began to discuss ways to avoid this happening all over again. Realizing that nations do not give up sovereignty, armies, and other versions of PRIDE (see my last but one), they thought of starting with something apparently humble: an agreement on connecting the coal and steel industries of France and Germany. The real point was that coal and steel, in 1945, were the essential industries for making war.
The agreement succeeded, thanks to two remarkable men: Schuman and Jean Monnet. More or less simultaneously, an attempt was made to join three nation-states in a kind of union, just to see if the idea would work. This was known as Benelux, and comprised (surprise, surprise) Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg: too small to be dangerous, they could do what they liked. Gradually, since then, the group has grown. First the Six (Benelux plus France, Germany and Italy), then more, until now there are 27 countries in the European Union, and more waiting to be admitted.
A European Parliament was created; a European Commission, which functions as a kind of supranational cabinet; and a large civil service much occupied with such things as common European standards for all sorts of things. (This last often annoys European citizens because it interferes with what seem like harmless details of their lives.)
The great next move was the idea of creating a common currency. The Euro appeared as a name in 1995, replacing the ECU (European Currency Unit) as a unit of account; as a full-fledged currency it was introduced in 1999, with banknotes and coins appearing in 2002. Seventeen out of the Union’s 27 states have accepted the Euro as their currency.
As Paul Krugman wrote in his NY Times column on 18 June 2012, it was perhaps rash to create a common currency without creating at the same time a common institution with the authority to manage it; but that criticism, while valid, ignores the fact that what we now call ‘Europe’ has always come into being piecemeal, and that any other way would invariably have been rejected out of hand by most of its members. These, after all, are sovereign nations, and would on the whole like to remain so - and it is not yet clear to anyone what a future federal Europe would look like.
Analogies with the United States of America are not really useful. In the first place, the American colonies that federated had a common language. To Americans, the fact that the EU has to work in 27 languages doesn’t really register; and when it does, they tend to say, ‘Well, why doesn’t everyone just speak English?’ It is true that English has become the working lingua franca of a good deal of the planet; but for a number of European countries the idea of making it the community language still has too many hegemonic overtones. French is the old diplomatic language, but its replacement by English as working language in every country’s dumbed-down school system disadvantages it, as well as its being the language of one of Europe’s dominant nations.
Some Finnish professors a number of years ago started a European news website in Latin, ‘Nuntii Latini’, which still exists (see links on left); their idea I personally find brilliant. The fact that Latin has not been comfortably spoken since the 17th century is unimportant: at the creation of Israel, Hebrew had to come up with a vast new vocabulary and managed that very well. Yet when one suggests Latin as the EU language in any sophisticated company, people smile with a mixture of tolerance, pity and contempt. What they mean is, ‘Oh come on, you know the international language is English - that was settled a long time ago.’ But what they do not say, or want to know about, is that it is politically impossible to make English, or any other language, the official Community tongue. This makes for a huge, huge obstacle to federation.
The second obstacle is Parliament(s). There are 28 of them in Europe. 27 national ones and one European Parliament, in Strasburg. For that last, the elections are ill=publicised and greeted by most European voters with a yawn. Nobody much wants to give it more power: and there’s the rub. For Europe to work more federally, there has to be more democratic control to oversee the increased federal powers. And no one has come up with an idea that 27 jealous nations are willing to support.
However, some things have been happening that may push them together - as always, circumstantially. The first is the economic crisis, the second is a huge tidal wave of illegal immigration.
The economic crisis is gradually pitting Germany (and its acolytes, the Netherlands and Finland) against the other Euro countries. The Germans, having realized the stupendous feat of absorbing East Germany and still being the richest and most productive country in Europe, are miffed that they, the frugal ants, should have to pay for the imprudence of all those grasshoppers out there. Yet something of the kind will have to happen, because the belt-tightening they implacably advise is killing other countries with whom they are already uncomfortably linked in the international trade cycle; so that they are already beginning to feel the walls of their own house grow uncomfortably warm from the fire next door. So some kind of banking and financial control on a federal level is going to have to come into being.
The wave of immigration has grown higher and faster since the Arab Spring, and has caused a counterwave of populist reaction in every European country. It typically comprises about 20% of the electorate, too small to take over but too big to be ignored. As Marine Le Pen, head of the French National Front, was the first to recognise, the big culprit here is the Schengen Agreement, which opened borders between the central core countries of the EU, so that one can now drive or train from Italy to North Germany, and from Spain to Holland, without seeing a border post or a customs officer. And once there, can find a room to live in and try to find a small job au noir (black market) and hang out and on as long as possible, often with the support of other immigrants from your own country or part of the world (usually Africa). Schengen was not designed for this; and there is now an increasing movement to annul or revise it. What few have so far faced up to is what to do with the illegals already in place. Former French President Sarkozy simply sent them back, giving rise to media outrage and heartrending stories of small children and their mothers being sent to repatriation camps and bundled on planes. But what to do instead? If you just ‘regularise’ them all with an amnesty, you make all those going through the proper motions to obtain visas - and thereby those motions themselves, i.e. our own laws -- look stupid; and nobody believes in totally open borders. So the EU should come up with some regular method whereby illegals can work to legalise themselves over, say, three or five years. Again, this may be something that can productively push EU countries together in a federal effort.
The upshot is that this is how the European Federation survives, grows, and will continue to grow. In bits, untidily, often backhandedly, and increasingly not because of a shining ideal but because there is, in the long run, no other way. If we do not hang together, we will certainly hang separately. Nevertheless, it is an experiment, and one of great promise and great achievement; and it merits a more positive outlook from North American media. Especially the New York Times.