Timothy Garton Ash: Europe is Sleepwalking to Decline -- We Need a Churchill to Wake It Up
[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.]
Can anyone save me from Europessimism? I feel more depressed about the state of the European project than I have for decades. The eurozone is in mortal danger. European foreign policy is advancing at the pace of a drunken snail. Power shifts to Asia. The historical motors of European integration are either lost or spluttering. European leaders rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic while lecturing the rest of the world on ocean navigation.
The crisis of the eurozone has only just begun. The bond markets have not been convinced even by last week's giant "shock and awe" bailout of Greece. The one thing that moved them was the European Central Bank's readiness to start buying eurozone government bonds, but it still costs multiples more for the Greek or Portuguese government to borrow than it does for the German government. A leading bond strategist tells me he now sees two alternatives: either the eurozone moves towards a fiscal union, with a further loss of sovereignty by member states and drastic deficit reduction imposed by this external constraint, or some of the weaker member states default, either inside the eurozone or by leaving it altogether. At which point capital flees, even more than it has already, from the weak to the strong: that is, from the eurozone to elsewhere and, within today's eurozone, to Germany.
The domestic and international politics of both these paths are bloody. (In Greece, already literally so.) The tensions within European societies will rise, but so will those between European states. In particular, resentments within and towards Germany, the continent's central power, are bound to increase either way: if Germany imposes tough terms for a fiscal union while at the same time underwriting other governments' risk, or if it lets a Greece or Portugal go to the wall, resulting in further capital flight to Germany. In the very best case, if the old "challenge and response" pattern of integration through crisis works once again, Europe will be preoccupied with resolving its internal economic and financial problems for years to come.
The current and emerging great powers of the 21st century, from the United States and China to Brazil and Russia, already treat European pretensions to be a major single player on the world stage with something close to contempt. The minimal deal at last year's Copenhagen summit on climate change, a subject on which Europe claims to lead, was reached between the US, China, India, South Africa and Brazil. Europe was not even in the room.
Copenhagen was a wake-up call to which Europe failed to awake. The two figures the EU has chosen to represent it on the world stage are almost entirely unknown outside Europe. At a recent meeting at St Antony's College, Oxford, the New York Times' foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman quipped that he wouldn't know the president of the European council "even if he sat on my lap". The EU's new high representative for foreign and security policy, Catherine Ashton, may turn out to be an effective bureaucratic operator in Brussels, but talking to officials there one understands just how difficult the business of building a European foreign service will be.
Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi and Washington are not waiting with bated breath. For them, life is elsewhere. Barack Obama's United States is preoccupied with nation building at home, then with the Middle East and China. Britain's new prime minister earns a phone call from the president, and a flattering reference to the "special relationship", but Obama has no sentimental attachment to the old continent. His question to Europe is: "What can you do for us today?" The new geometries of world power are described by acronyms like Basics (Brazil, South Africa, India, China), Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa). Some of this is anticipating future developments that may not happen, but in the market of geopolitics, as in financial markets, expectations are also realities.
The European Union is still the world's largest economy. It has enormous resources of hard and soft power, at present much bigger than those of the emerging great powers. But the trend is against it, and it punches far below its weight. If it still wants to shape the world in the interests of its citizens then it must close the gap between its potential and its actual power. It's not doing so. Why?..
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
Can anyone save me from Europessimism? I feel more depressed about the state of the European project than I have for decades. The eurozone is in mortal danger. European foreign policy is advancing at the pace of a drunken snail. Power shifts to Asia. The historical motors of European integration are either lost or spluttering. European leaders rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic while lecturing the rest of the world on ocean navigation.
The crisis of the eurozone has only just begun. The bond markets have not been convinced even by last week's giant "shock and awe" bailout of Greece. The one thing that moved them was the European Central Bank's readiness to start buying eurozone government bonds, but it still costs multiples more for the Greek or Portuguese government to borrow than it does for the German government. A leading bond strategist tells me he now sees two alternatives: either the eurozone moves towards a fiscal union, with a further loss of sovereignty by member states and drastic deficit reduction imposed by this external constraint, or some of the weaker member states default, either inside the eurozone or by leaving it altogether. At which point capital flees, even more than it has already, from the weak to the strong: that is, from the eurozone to elsewhere and, within today's eurozone, to Germany.
The domestic and international politics of both these paths are bloody. (In Greece, already literally so.) The tensions within European societies will rise, but so will those between European states. In particular, resentments within and towards Germany, the continent's central power, are bound to increase either way: if Germany imposes tough terms for a fiscal union while at the same time underwriting other governments' risk, or if it lets a Greece or Portugal go to the wall, resulting in further capital flight to Germany. In the very best case, if the old "challenge and response" pattern of integration through crisis works once again, Europe will be preoccupied with resolving its internal economic and financial problems for years to come.
The current and emerging great powers of the 21st century, from the United States and China to Brazil and Russia, already treat European pretensions to be a major single player on the world stage with something close to contempt. The minimal deal at last year's Copenhagen summit on climate change, a subject on which Europe claims to lead, was reached between the US, China, India, South Africa and Brazil. Europe was not even in the room.
Copenhagen was a wake-up call to which Europe failed to awake. The two figures the EU has chosen to represent it on the world stage are almost entirely unknown outside Europe. At a recent meeting at St Antony's College, Oxford, the New York Times' foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman quipped that he wouldn't know the president of the European council "even if he sat on my lap". The EU's new high representative for foreign and security policy, Catherine Ashton, may turn out to be an effective bureaucratic operator in Brussels, but talking to officials there one understands just how difficult the business of building a European foreign service will be.
Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi and Washington are not waiting with bated breath. For them, life is elsewhere. Barack Obama's United States is preoccupied with nation building at home, then with the Middle East and China. Britain's new prime minister earns a phone call from the president, and a flattering reference to the "special relationship", but Obama has no sentimental attachment to the old continent. His question to Europe is: "What can you do for us today?" The new geometries of world power are described by acronyms like Basics (Brazil, South Africa, India, China), Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa). Some of this is anticipating future developments that may not happen, but in the market of geopolitics, as in financial markets, expectations are also realities.
The European Union is still the world's largest economy. It has enormous resources of hard and soft power, at present much bigger than those of the emerging great powers. But the trend is against it, and it punches far below its weight. If it still wants to shape the world in the interests of its citizens then it must close the gap between its potential and its actual power. It's not doing so. Why?..