by George Blecher
Europe's leaders need to take a hard look across the
Atlantic before they start dismantling the Union, writes George Blecher.
Emulating the US would risk forfeiting all the things that make Europe
the best of all worlds.
Many of the articles I've written about US culture for European
publications over the past twenty years have had the same message:
Here's
something stupid that we're doing in the US. If you don't watch out,
somebody will be doing it in Europe in the next five years. Some of
these stupidities included the takeover of independent publishing houses
by conglomerates with no interest in publishing; the commercialization
of everything from higher education to art to sports to medicine; the
switch from consensus to adversarial politics, to the point where nobody
in American government can agree on anything, and politicians become
spoiled kids who look at compromise as a sign of personal weakness.
I was no soothsayer: changes always flow from the bigger countries to
the smaller. What was interesting was that, thanks to technology, the
lag-time between events in the US and Europe started to decrease: what
used to take years to cross the ocean now could happen overnight.
Then came the US financial crisis. Though it was initially treated by
the American press with a kind of breathless surprise – and by the
European with a hint of condescension – plenty of people saw it coming.
Last year an excellent American financial writer, Michael Lewis, wrote a
book called
The Big Short, in which he described a bunch of Wall
Street "contrarians" – speculators who watched the crisis developing
(at first they were just flabbergasted by the shakiness of bad home
mortgages and investment-banking-generated "derivatives") and made
fortunes from what they saw.
In the space of a few nanoseconds, the crisis came to Europe. How could it not? And for many of the same reasons.
Some aspects of the euro crisis ring old bells to anyone familiar with
the American version. For example, the response to the bank speculation
that helped foment the crisis has been just as timid in Europe as in the
US; only the Icelanders, and the brave initiators of Occupy Wall
Street, allowed themselves to get really pissed off. And even though the
EU seems to be trying to punish speculators a
little by reducing
the payback on Greek governmental bonds (as opposed to the US
government rewarding big banks for their avarice), the main blame for
the crisis has settled on the Greek citizenry, in particular those
employed in the public sector. The banking/financial complex, many of
whose members were making fast money
à l'américaine, has largely
been overlooked; certainly no one – with the possible future exception
of the ex-Prime Minister of Iceland! – has gone to jail. (Not that
European bankers needed to be inspired by American greed; I suspect that
they had enough of their own.)
However, there's one disturbing subtext to the euro crisis that's
different from the American version: the fact that Europe has begun to
see itself as divided into two distinct
classes of nations – not
only rich vs. poor, but "grown-up" (the North) vs. "childish" (the
South), "responsible" vs. "irresponsible", "hard working" vs. "lazy" –
you get the idea. Not only is this dichotomy wildly simplistic, but it
has spooky echoes of earlier classifications about IQ, ethnicity, race,
religion – things that
nobody wants to talk about.
But now that Mrs Merkel and Mr Draghi have taken over the management of
the euro crisis, sitting in judgment over the poor Greek state like
stern parents preaching abstinence, it feels like the right time to
offer a few kind words about the post-war European project, and about
its future – from a perspective of 5,000 miles away.
The first point is that no matter what bad names American Presidential
candidates attach to the European welfare state, it's a pretty
spectacular achievement, and one that Europeans should be proud of. If
you only knew how
hard it is to live in the US without the safety
net of a welfare state! How much effort parents put into finding either
a decent public school for their kids, or enough money to send them to
an expensive private one. How much time Americans waste dealing with
their private medical insurance plans, and how, at least until
Obama-care kicks in years from now (if it ever does), the many millions
without insurance let their illnesses worsen to a point where they can
hardly walk through a hospital door. I could go on. The point is that
for me and other admirers, the European welfare state doesn't look like a
universal fact of Nature so much as an act of will and self-sacrifice.
The EU really is based on the same noble premise: the wish to create a
society of nations willing to look out for each other. Instead of
shaking a parental finger at the errant Greeks, the EU would do better
to find a way to nurture its partner-nation back to health by
centralizing the debt and softening the rhetoric of austerity.
The second point is probably obvious to the point of banality – and
yet, given the anti-American feeling of many European intellectuals, it
may also sound counter-intuitive: Europe seems still to be suffering
from a post-war inferiority complex, which makes it admire and emulate
the US for the wrong reasons. Take the speculation of the past twenty
years. Rather than looking at the heated-up American markets with a dose
of scepticism, too many Europeans jumped on the bandwagon. Following
the rhetoric of both the American Right and Left, several European
countries tried to privatize public services, but without much success:
they didn't gain popular support or cut their costs to any significant
degree. Their mistake was that they saw the US as a European outpost (or
Europe as an American outpost!) instead of what it really is: a rich
Third World country with a weird overlay of Puritanism.
A few summers ago I saw a TV interviewer ask Slavoj Zizek if he liked
being European: "Oh sure," he said, "it's the only big public space in
the world where one is free to be an atheist." Underneath the clowning, I
thought he was saying something important. If you look around the
globe, you'll see that he was right. He was expressing a necessary
Eurocentrism that wasn't snobbery as much as gratitude: a lot of the
best European thinking (humanism, the Enlightenment, scientific inquiry,
etc.) thrives best in an atmosphere where religion or worship of the
state aren't oppressive forces.
So then – why can't the euro crisis be an opportunity for Europe to take
a hard look at its past and future? To get some distance from either
the American or Chinese models, and come up with a quieter, more humane,
less volatile system than either of the superpowers is able to muster?
Maybe it's asking too much of a group of nations still learning to get
along with each other, but doesn't it make more sense to rekindle a
sense of solidarity within the EU than to break Europe up into classes
again while the financiers wait for the next exciting way to fill their
pockets?
This article was commissioned by
Berliner Gazette.
Source:Eurozine
