by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Defining Ideas<\/em><\/p>\n The champions of the European Union once touted it as a \u201cbold new experiment in living\u201d and \u201cthe best hope in an insecure age.\u201d But these days \u201cfear is coursing through the corridors of Brussels,\u201d as the BBC reported in September. Such fear is justified, for the nations of Europe are struggling with fiscal problems that challenge the integrity of the whole EU-topian ideal. Greece teetering on the brink of default on its debts, EU nations squabbling about how to deal with the crisis, debt levels approaching 100 percent of GDP even in economic-powerhouse countries like Germany and France, and European banks exposed to depreciating government bonds are some of the signposts on the road to decline.<\/p>\n A monetary union comprising independent states, each with its own peculiar economic and political interests, histories, cultural norms, laws, and fiscal systems, was bound to end up in the current crisis. All that borrowed money, however, was necessary for funding the lavish social welfare entitlements and employment benefits that once impressed champions of the \u201cEuropean Dream.\u201d Yet, despite the greater fiscal integration created by the EU, sluggish, over-regulated, over-taxed economies could not generate enough money to pay for such amenities. Now, the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, admits, \u201cWe can\u2019t finance our social model.\u201d<\/p>\n This financial crisis means the government-financed\u00a0dolce vita<\/em>\u00a0lifestyle once brandished as a reproach to work-obsessed America is facing cutbacks and austerity programs immensely unpopular among Europeans otherwise used to amenities like France\u2019s 35-hour work week, or Greece\u2019s two extra months of pay, or England\u2019s generous housing subsidies that cost $34.4 billion a year. No surprise, then, that from Athens\u2019 Syntagma Square to Madrid\u2019s Puerta del Sol, austerity measures attempting to scale back government spending have been met with strikes, demonstrations, boycotts, and protests, some violent, on the part of citizens for whom such government entitlements have become human rights. In fact, such transfers of wealth have been formalized as rights in Articles 34 and 35 of the EU\u2019s Charter of Fundamental Human Rights.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the solutions to the debt crisis all involve solvent Eurozone countries agreeing not just to finance some form of a bailout fund, but to institute even closer fiscal and political integration. This is something the citizens of those nations are loath to do, and sure to punish their politicians for attempting. Just look at Germany, where polls show that two-thirds of Germans oppose further aid for bailouts. The ruling party there has lost six state elections in a row. Or Slovakia, where the average worker earns $1,000 a month, and is in no mood to guarantee the debt of richer nations like Greece or Portugal.<\/p>\n Economically sounder Eurozone countries may approve stopgap measures such as increasing the European Financial Stability Facility by $600 billion, as happened recently. But they will find it politically difficult to cede even more national sovereignty and control over their economies to Brussels in order to find a long-term solution to the structural problems bedeviling the Eurozone economies. As economist Robert Samuelson says of this crisis, \u201cPolitical paralysis meets economic drift.\u201d<\/p>\n The reason for this paralysis exposes the fundamental flaw underlying the EU \u2014 the notion that nationalist loyalties and identities could be subordinated to a transnational institution run by elites unaccountable to the citizens. Long before Nazism demonstrated the destructive excesses of nationalism, the idea arose that a \u201cfederation of free states,\u201d as Immanuel Kant imagined in his 1795 essay \u201cPerpetual Peace,\u201d could create global peace and order by transcending the zero-sum interests of different states and peoples.<\/p>\n In the nineteenth-century, communication and transport technologies like the telegraph, railroad, and steamship facilitated a global trade and exchange of ideas that seemingly brought people together into a \u201csolidarity which unites the members of the society of civilized nations,\u201d as the Preamble to the First Hague Convention put it in 1899. For many, what Kant called the \u201cprogress of the human mind\u201d meant creating a global community of shared values and aims that could be codified in international laws and institutions presumably superior to the parochial cultures, irrational customs, and retrograde values of any individual country or people.<\/p>\n Unfortunately for the idealistic internationalists, the mass of humanity refused to go along with this project. Most people lived and found their identities in the local and particular cultures that they were now supposed to progress beyond. Indeed, from 1914-1918, millions of Europeans slaughtered each other on behalf of those national loyalties. In 1918, G. K. Chesterton explained why:<\/p>\n Nobody has any such ecstatic regard for the mere relations of different people to each other, as one would gather from the rhetoric of idealistic internationalism. It is, indeed, desirable that men should love each other; but always with the recognition of the identity of other peoples and other men. Now, too much cosmopolitan culture is mere praise of machinery. It turns ultimately upon the point that a telegram can be sent from one end of the earth to the other, irrespective of what is in the telegram.<\/p>\n In the end, Chesterton says, \u201cMen care more for the rag that is called a flag than for the rag that is called a newspaper. Men care more for Rome, Paris, Prague, Warsaw than for the international railways connecting these towns.\u201d<\/p>\n Our collective identities and loyalties are necessarily local and distinguished from those of other peoples, an existential fact that no amount of technological advances can change. This means that we want to be ruled by people like us whom we can hold politically accountable. And it means our nation\u2019s interests and aims will necessarily be different from those of other states, and sometimes those different interests will lead to conflict.<\/p>\n After World War I, advocates of transnational integration\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0recognize the power of national and ethnic self-determination. At the same time, the Versailles Treaty created the supranational League of Nations as an instrument of global peace and order designed to avoid a reprise of the nationalist-driven carnage of the Great War. It enshrined the notion of what Woodrow Wilson called \u201cnational aspirations.\u201d The two ideals were contradictory, since sovereign nations were loath to surrender their sovereignty to a body that would at times have to pursue aims contrary to those nations\u2019 interests.<\/p>\n The dismal history of the League in the two decades between the wars, when it failed to stop the escalating state violence that paved the way for World War II, illustrates the truth expressed by George Washington: \u201cIt is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation can be trusted farther than it is bounded by its interests.\u201d<\/p>\n Given this contradiction, then, between national sovereignty and transnational idealism, it is not surprising that the first Kantian \u201cfederation of free states,\u201d the League of Nations, and its progeny, the United Nations, both failed at enforcing a global consensus of interests. Each instead degenerated into a forum for states to pursue their own interests. Yet these failures did not inhibit the creation of the EU, yet another \u201cfederation of free states\u201d whose purpose is to subordinate national interests to loftier goals. The current crisis in the monetary union has not led many European leaders to question the flawed assumptions behind greater integration, which limits each state\u2019s own interests and authority, at the same time that those states retain their sovereignty and thus an ultimate veto power over EU policy.<\/p>\n Many leaders do understand that the fiscal crisis has put at risk the whole EU project. Germany\u2019s Chancellor Angela Merkel recently warned her parliament, \u201cThe euro is much, much more than a currency. The euro is the guarantee of a united Europe. If the euro fails, then Europe fails.\u201d Yet rather than question the assumptions behind \u201ca united Europe,\u201d leaders are proposing even more economic and political integration, and short-term fiscal fixes, such as the $600 billion European Financial Stability Facility, which require significant transfers of wealth from successful economies to those near bankruptcy. But as the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0writes, both the short-term and long-term solutions \u201crequire a sacrifice of sovereignty that seems to exceed the political appetites of European leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n These solutions will not work because what historian Walter Russell Mead calls \u201cnational egoism\u201d has not disappeared among the peoples of Europe: \u201cEuropeans are debating in European forums today with the same nationalist selfishness that their predecessors did 150 years ago.\u201d Different customs, different values, and different attitudes towards work, leisure, and the good life all derive from the particular histories, geographies, and cultures that define a people and a nation. These differences will not disappear because states share a currency.<\/p>\n Just as dirigiste economics, extravagant state-funded social welfare subsidies, and idealistic internationalism are ideas that were bound to fail, so too is the EU \u2014 it cannot be fixed. Rather, it is an idea whose time has gone.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Good riddance to a bad idea. by Bruce S. Thornton Defining Ideas The champions of the European Union once touted it as a \u201cbold new experiment in living\u201d and \u201cthe best hope in an insecure age.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[203,22],"tags":[614,42,1015,613,202,332,1066,1028,365,122,1056,283,1037,1072],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-va","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":706,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/dont-let-america-imitate-a-burning-eu\/","url_meta":{"origin":1932,"position":0},"title":"Don’t Let America Imitate a Burning EU","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 14, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Traveling through Europe can obscure the looming crisis threatening the continent. Visiting the medieval villages of Alsace, the castles on the Rhine, or the magnificent cathedrals in Basel or Cologne, it\u2019s easy to forget that Europe is on the brink of disaster. But these\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Economy"","block_context":{"text":"Economy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/economy-europe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8681,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-three-crucial-factors-to-maintaining-the-peace-in-europe\/","url_meta":{"origin":1932,"position":1},"title":"The Three Crucial Factors to Maintaining the Peace in Europe","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 25, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online The bailed-out Greeks are still broke. Now their islands are flooded with a horde of migrants from the Middle East and Africa. Spain, Portugal, and Italy are almost in the same boat. Their shared Mediterranean traditions \u2014 and vulnerabilities \u2014 are far different\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The World"","block_context":{"text":"The World","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via NRO","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/european-culture-in-danger-from-migrants-500x292.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10308,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-e-u-experiment-has-failed\/","url_meta":{"origin":1932,"position":2},"title":"The E.U. Experiment Has Failed","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 21, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Thursday, March 5, 2015 The slow-motion crisis of the European Union is the big story that rarely gets the attention it deserves. Even an event like the recent terrorist attack in France that left 17 dead is often isolated from the larger political, economic, and social problems\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":55,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/europes-wishes-came-true\/","url_meta":{"origin":1932,"position":3},"title":"Europe’s Wishes Came True","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 31, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Almost a decade ago, Europeans and many progressive Americans were lamenting how the United States was going to miss out on the 21st-century paradigm symbolized by the robust European Union. Neanderthal Americans were importing ever more oil while waging a costly \"war on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The EU"","block_context":{"text":"The EU","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/the-eu\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10306,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/europe-is-still-ailing\/","url_meta":{"origin":1932,"position":4},"title":"Europe Is Still Ailing","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 21, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Strategika by Bruce Thornton Tuesday, June 20, 2017 Image credit:\u00a0Poster Collection, GE 2678, Hoover Institution Archives. Recent elections in France, the Netherlands, and Austria, in which Eurosceptic populist and patriotic parties did poorly in national elections, suggest to some that the EU is still strong despite Britain\u2019s vote to leave\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Strategika"","block_context":{"text":"Strategika","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/strategika\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1594,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-old-german-problem\/","url_meta":{"origin":1932,"position":5},"title":"The New Old German Problem","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 23, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Reflections on Germany Munich \u2014 I\u2019ve been walking the last two days through Munich. Much of the city core was bombed out by the allies by spring 1945. Yet today there is little evidence of such destruction. The museums are among the best in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2010"","block_context":{"text":"May 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/may-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1932"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1932"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1933,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1932\/revisions\/1933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}