NEMTHEANGA'S COLUMN JULY 2012
– ROME BURNS?
My friend from Athens just told me he bought a gun. He just shrugged his shoulders and stared into the middle distance. ‘It’s really becoming crazy down there, people are desperate’. Fearing break-ins he seemed to have little option left in his mind but to take this drastic measure. For the moment it sits beside his bed in a drawer, how long before he ends up taking it out with him into the streets. The people are at breaking point, daily clashes between far right and far left in city and town squares mask the general feeling of unrest and brooding tension of people not affiliated with either of the headline grabbers. Greece is the historical birthplace of European democracy, reduced to soup kitchens and Molotov cocktails. Antonis Samaras, the incumbent new Prime Minister of Greece and has avowed to row back some of the more extreme austerity measures being imposed on Greece. Today I pick up a newspaper and look at pictures of well-fed Central European beaurocrats waxing lyrical about Greece’s problems, they talk tough, there is no room for economic weakness and the future is austerity upon austerity. I then watch footage of a young mother in Athens of two perched on a window ledge eight floors up about to fling herself to her death because she cannot feed her kids anymore.
So where did it all go wrong for Europe? The answer is really fundamentally rather simple and really a rather plain failure starting super state federalists in the face. Fiscal and economic union has always been on the cards for Europe since the Marshall plan helped rebuild Europe after WWII but it took the small matter of the ending of the Cold War to really hasten delivery. Planning monetary union had been moving at slow enough pace throughout the 80s but the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 moved Mitterand’s French fears of German economic supremacy to the brink as German reunification looked inevitable. The fundamental purpose of the European Union post WWII has been to keep countries that made war with each other economically dependent on each other to avoid future conflagrations. Mitterand and many others saw that German unification given time would strengthen the Deutschmark inexorably and irreversibly. How better to make Europe more co-dependent and also to hamstring Germany then to force economic union upon all member states?
The problem though is simple. How can x amount of European countries with varying economies achieve fiscal union? The ultimate goal was of course to stop nationalism in its tracks through further integration and stop the very source of 20th century conflicts. Changing the habits of hundreds of years of European nation and state building are not so simple. What should have happened was political union first and economic union second, it happened the other way around and many would argue political union never happened. There was never the appetite for it among the people so the politicians and bankers simply ignored it. As Europe unravels it becomes clearer and clearer that uniting the continents banking system and making them dependant is one thing but this should have followed political union. The simple fact that from Swedish Gotland to Spanish Catalonia people still see themselves as regional points to the ultimate failure of European Union. As soup kitchens grow on the streets of Athens, youth unemployment heads towards 50% in Spain, thousands of Irish emigrate as we did many generations and among many other examples the far left and far right are on the rise, capitalising on poverty and unrest throughout Europe. Wasn’t European Union supposed to have quelled all this? Creating a super state of prosperity and equality?
It was a botched and rushed job from the start and despite a few years in the sun the cracks were showing well before Lehmann brothers collapsed in the USA. This was just the symbolic fall of the old Empire and the baton being passed to the Far east and Chinese economic supremacy. You could well argue we’ve had 500 years of European expansion, colonialism, and empire building from the day Vasco de Gama set sail from Portugal round the horn of South Africa to India and established through force European dominance of trade. The Age of Empires had begun and we dear sirs are possibly at the end and the fall of the west. If I’m wrong then fine and well, feed me to the nay-sayers but the signs are there and poverty breeds unrest. Austerity does not support growth.
Isn’t this how the gears began to grind before the WWI started? The deeply entrenched French and English fear of Germany’s federal might at the heart Europe’s decision making? The bullet in the head at Sarajevo might have been the ultimate catalyst but the nations were restless, Bismarck’s sabre rattling had them digging trenches long before Ferdinand’s demise. Yet here we are again, Merkel calling the tune despite the rest of Europe’s best efforts to saddle Germany with crippling WWI reparations nearly 100 years before. Yet we all know what happened in the economic wasteland following the Great War in the thirties as depression sank in, inflation rose and poverty gave way to political extremism. Hitler rose from the ashes of enforced Austerity and the rest as they say is indeed history. Sure enough I’m hinting at the doomsday scenario for Europe right now but deep underneath the political hive of Brussels the molotovs thrown on an Athens are sending deep and dark reverberations through the political system and so they should. We all saw what happened during the London riots when after again one bullet pandemonium reigned on the streets of London and quickly spread like wildfire through the country. Britain’s new coalition government very quickly was staring a state of anarchy right in the face. Are you telling me that one scared cop at a student rally in Madrid, Paris or Athens who pulls the trigger couldn’t start the conflagration. Could we be so far from the people dragging the politicians and bankers to the gallows?
AAN
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