Reports of the EU's Demise are Somewhat Exaggerated, Part II
It's nothing a fantasy America couldn't fix
Bilibin Redux
The other day, I wrote of the pseudonymous Bilibin’s assertion that the EU is dead. I ended by promising to take up the subject again “tomorrow.” I must stop promising that. I consistently underestimate how long it will take me to write the next newsletter and how apt I am to be distracted, before the day passes, by the latest catastrophe in the news. It has taken me so long to return to the subject that by now, you’ve surely forgotten what I wrote in the first place. So let’s review.
Bilibin wrote,
The project of a united Europe has never been objectionable to me, despite its status as an object of reflexive loathing on the American right. We’ve forgotten just what a bloody and dangerous font of violence Europe used to be—costing hundreds of thousands of American lives in the process—and so we forget that a deadening bureaucracy suffocating the Continent is a much preferable alternative to the historical precedent.
Nonetheless, he argued, the EU was dead. He noted:
The European Union was unable to prevent or persuade against the secession of one of its largest constituent nations.
The European Union was unable to play any meaningful role in a pandemic that ravaged several of its member states.
The European Union was unable to prevent or preclude a Russian military mission entering one of its major member states.
The European Union was unable to prevent, or bring consequences for, one of its member states from sliding from democratic liberality to authoritarian dictatorship.
The European Union was unable to muster the political will to withstand pressure from the Communist Party of China.
The European Union was unable to provide credible security guarantees to its member states as NATO went into precipitous decline.
He concluded: “The European Union is dead. Something will arise in its place. But this is Europe: we should be prepared for the possibility it will be something worse.”
I agreed with some, but not all of his observations. Above all, I agreed with his key point: Our best hope for Europe, within the confines of reality, is something like the EU. The realistic alternative, I wrote, was not a continent of peaceful and thriving independent liberal democracies allied enthusiastically with the United States. Nothing in Europe’s history suggests this is possible.
The future of Europe—whether it is the same, better, worse, or much worse—depends upon the answer to this question: Can Europe can preserve the essential aspects of the EU while ridding itself of the reflexes and weaknesses that have led Bilibin to declare its demise?
The future of the United States, like it or not, depends upon Europe getting this right. If you’re a new subscriber, please refer to this post to understand why I say this. You need to read the whole post (remember, this is a book, it builds upon arguments I’ve made previously), but if you’re in a hurry, this is the key paragraph:
If you look at a map and calculate shares of the world’s population, firepower, and wealth, [it] is perfectly clear. A United Europe—and the United States—are together strong enough to sustain the liberal democratic tradition and Western values. Together with Australia, New Zealand, and our partners in the Far East, we could credibly contain Russia and China, and defend free outposts in Asia and the Middle East.
Separated? No.
Have a look at the maps I used to illustrate these points. They make the situation very clear.
The United States could, in principle, play a significant and positive role in shaping Europe’s future. It should. It is very much be in our interest to do so. The Trump Administration is incapable of this and won’t. But a Hypothetically Competent Administration—hereinafter an HCA—would grasp that preserving the Transatlantic Alliance and promoting Europe’s cohesion, economic recovery, stability, and friendliness to the United States must be among its highest priorities. An HCA would, moreover, understand why the European Union has fallen upon hard times. Having the right diagnosis is essential if you’re to form the right policy response. (If you’re familiar with Anselm’s ontological argument, you will understand my faith in the existence of the HCA—I’m afraid there is no other evidence for it.)
Let’s inspect the points Bilibin has made more carefully, because in places they are overstated and his diagnosis is off. We can improve upon it.
Seriatum.
Deadening bureaucracy
Bilibin takes as given that a deadening bureaucracy suffocates the Continent. This notion is common among Americans, but misplaced. I don’t know quite where it emerged or quite why. Or actually, now that I think of it—I do. Let’s look at the origin of the notion that Europe is stultified by its bureaucracy; that’s important.
The charge suggests there was a Europe, prior to the EU, where bureaucracies were lean, mean, sleek and streamlined; or even a Europe with no bureaucracy at all. But why would we think this?
Claire: Class! Who is the greatest sociologist ever to have lived?
Class: (In unison) Max Weber!
Claire: Very good. Now, class, what is the greatest essay ever to have been written about bureaucracy?
Class: “Bureaucracy,” by Max Weber, in his magnum opus, Wirtschaft Und Gesellschaft!
Claire: Very good. Now, class, where did the idea of bureaucracy as as a threat to individual freedom come from?
Class: Max Weber!
Claire: Good. And to whom do we owe the image of a bureaucracy that leads to a “polar night of icy darkness” trapping humanity in a soulless “iron cage?”
Class: Max Weber!
Claire: Excellent. Now, class, do you see a relationship between these images and that of a deadening bureaucracy?
Class: … Ach so.
Claire: Class, can you tell me when Weber wrote this essay?
Class: 1921!
Claire: And where?
Class: Germany!
Claire: Very good. And when was the European Union founded …. ?
You see where I’m going.
For those of you who raised your hand to offer the answer, “Ludwig von Mises,” and suggested the image might be related to the words, “straitjacket of bureaucratic organization [that] paralyzes the individual’s initiative”—Yes! I’m in a good mood: You get an A today, too. But he wrote that in 1944, having grown up in Austria. He was not inspired by the European Union.
The etymology of the word “bureaucracy” is another clue about Europe’s former bureaucratic condition. The word—literally, “government by desks”—was the satirical invention of the French civil servant Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay. He was appointed France’s intendant du commerce in 1751, well before the founding of the European Union. De Gournay was best known for his belief that government regulations stunted commerce—that they were, one might say, deadening. (He also invented the terms bureaumania, laissez-faire, and laissez-passer.)
What might have inspired him to think this way?
For anyone poised to object that “deadening bureaucracy” must, surely, have been a problem confined to the Continent and unknown to Britain in its halcyon days before the arrival of the busybodies from Brussels, I commend to you this fascinating study by Peer Vries: “Public finance in China and Britain in the long eighteenth century.” You won’t be able to put it down.
Now, there may be a country, somewhere in the EU, that has had a different experience, but having lived in France before and after the EU, I can say with authority that the amount of deadening bureaucracy in France has declined, not risen. If France is now less dead, bureaucratically-speaking, this is in many ways because the EU urged more rational bureaucratic standards upon it; if it is more commercially vibrant, this too may be attributed in some measure to EU regulations.
The EU’s Consumer Rights Directives, in particular, had a salutary effect. The stereotype of France as a rude and miserable country with terrible customer service was once absolutely warranted, but is now laughably outdated. I’ve written about this—the mysterious death of French rudeness. It’s a sociologically complex phenomenon and the reasons for it are hard to disambiguate, but the adoption of the Consumer Rights Directive played a role. Customers became entitled, by law, to return faulty or defective goods. This, along with the experience the French obtained in conducting commerce across a broad region where customer service is generally pleasant—and expected to be pleasant—transformed French commercial culture, and much for the better.
So “deadening bureaucracy” isn’t quite the right starting assumption.
One of my readers, by the way, Xavier Lewis, recently wrote to say the same thing. He works as a legal advisor to the European Union, so this rejoinder comes straight from the murderous heart of the deadening bureaucracy:
There are a bunch of us beavering away in our incommodious and thoroughly depressing offices in Brussels. Bilibin is semi-correct that the bureaucracy is a deadening one, but he selects the wrong target. It is a bureaucracy that blunts national bureaucracies, clearing the way for folks to go about their business without let or hindrance (or at least, much less bureaucratic grief than before). Consequently, you can buy stuff from abroad without filling in endless forms, queuing in remote, dismal customs offices, and paying dues, charges, fees, taxes and duties. You can choose phone operators and call for nothing. You can cross borders, pop up to Brussels (you’re welcome to come when that’s possible again, by the way) without being searched, questioned, searched again.
That’s why, when Britain first joined the EEC back in ‘73, roughly 800,000 trucks per year carried goods the Brits needed or wanted from the Continent. I remember stories of truck drivers detained for days in Dover as their merchandise rotted and perished while the paperwork matured. Now, over four million per year cross between Calais and Dover alone, a fact of which the British minister conducting the Brexit negotiations was blissfully unaware. The Brussels bureaucracy has reigned in the national bureaucracies, so that people can do more as they please: a living experiment in Berlin’s (Isaiah, that is) negative freedom.
All true.
Secession
Let’s now consider the rest of Bilibin’s observations. “The European Union,” Bilibin writes, “was unable to prevent or persuade against the secession of one of its largest constituent nations.” Indeed.
Again, one of my readers, the author Nicholas Sumner, sent me an insightful comment:
Britain’s mistake was not treating the EEC/EU as the French treat it. To the French, Europe was always à la carte, never prix fixe. The French had the measure of the thing, the British did not and slavishly tried to follow the rules. When Cameron went to Europe in 2016 to ask for aspects of Britain’s sovereignty back, he demonstrated only that he was merely another in a long line of British Prime Ministers (the exception was Thatcher and possibly Blair) who did not understand how Europe worked. If he had simply announced that Britain was taking back what it wanted, the rest would have had no choice but to sweep it under the carpet and say “Move on, nothing to see here.” Et voilà! No referendum. No Brexit. British sovereignty restored. He might even still be PM ...
Absolutely right.
The UK’s vote to secede represents, I think, the stupidest thing any country has ever done to itself in a mindless fit, and it’s profoundly damaged the EU, too. The most extraordinary aspect of the story is that the whole thing happened in a fit of carelessness. No one wanted it to happen. The Brexit vote represented brinksmanship in negotiation gone too far.
But the thing to note is that Britain has not, in fact, seceded. Everyone knows that the Britain must be declared “out of the EU,” one day, so that all parties to this imbroglio may save face. And so the talks go on. But it’s unclear whether anything will ever result from these talks, particularly now that the coronavirus has emerged from reality to slap all parties to this nonsense in the face.
Now no one in Europe can quite remember why they were so adamant about the free movement of people. Everyone in the UK is too embarrassed to admit they just didn’t really think much about the difference between trading with Europe for things like pharmaceuticals and trading, say, with China. Only open supply chains to the Single Market prevented the UK from confronting empty supermarket shelves during the pandemic. A taste of food shortages in late March reminded everyone in the UK that supply chains are no joke. No one can now, seriously, imagine that the government will just cut them at the end of the year if the EU doesn’t bend to its will. Similarly, no one in the UK can quite remember why they objected to having so many immigrants from Europe, given the NHS is staffed by them, and columnists in Britain are now asking, in all seriousness, how Britain will solve the challenge of attracting enough immigrants to make up for the loss:
The National Health Service is buckling under the weight of rising demand as is faces a severe staffing shortage.
With recruits from the European Union beginning to leave the NHS in greater numbers, the question of how to staff our hospitals and care homes becomes more acute.
More than 40,000 nursing roles are currently unfilled amid a sector-wide crisis.
Note: That was published in The Telegraph, hardly an anti-Brexit voice.
So in practice, “Brexit” no longer means “secession,” it means, “negotiations that may well last into the 26th century toward a goal no one cares about anymore, so long as it never really happens.”
A new round of talks began yesterday. This sums up the situation:
Britain and Brussels embark on a third round of trade talks Monday with little hope for a breakthrough, amid the far more urgent challenge of dealing with the coronavirus crisis. The new negotiations will begin with a virtual head-to-head between Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, and his UK counterpart, David Frost—both of whom have recovered from a bout with the virus.
The object of these negotiations, though no one can say it, is just to negotiate forever, because it is well understood that if Britain were to secede, the costs would be intolerable. The very last thing anyone actually needs or wants during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression are high tariffs and customs barriers between the UK and EU.
Nonetheless, Britain may manage to secede for the very same reason it voted for Brexit—through sheer carelessness. It would be traditional, after all, for Europe to sleepwalk right off a cliff because no one had the good sense to stand down.
“Business groups” in Britain, as Politico reports, “harbor quiet hopes that the UK government will backtrack on its refusal to request an extension to the Brexit transition period.” So does everyone else, except those too proud to admit it.
Ultimately, if everyone is sensible, what will emerge is a Britain that is, basically, mostly in the EU, but very insistent that it is not. The EU will accede to a few of the UK’s original negotiating demands, which it should have done in the first place. The UK will agree to most of the EU’s demands, while losing all of its influence over EU policy. All of this could have been negotiated without Brexit, and should have been, because this has been an entirely needless drain and an embarrassment to all parties—as well as a long-running torture to EU citizens who live in the UK, and vice-versa.
But in the end, the UK will not really “secede.” It will just proudly call itself “out of the EU” while maintaining a renegotiated but roughly similar relationship to it. Many citizens of the UK and the EU, however, will be mutually hostile and estranged. This weakens the West, which is an unfortunate outcome.
Under a Hypothetical Competent Administration, we would have prevented this in the first place. We would have been actively involved in negotiating or finessing some kind of compromise between the EU and the UK before Cameron got it into his head to roll the dice on a referendum. We would have done this quietly, tactfully, and diplomatically.
It was neither quiet, tactful, nor diplomatic—nor remotely intelligent—to do what Obama did and tell the British public how to vote. Note to the HCA: Never tell people in another country how to vote. It is stupid and counterproductive. No one, anywhere, even if they like the United States, enjoys being reminded that the United States is more powerful than they are. No one likes the idea of the United States meddling in their domestic affairs.
An HCA would preside over the most powerful country in the world and do plenty of meddling—don’t get me wrong. But it wouldn’t be stupid about it. Of course that speech would backfire. Does anyone remember the Guardian’s misbegotten “Letters to Clark County,” when readers of the Guardian took it upon themselves in 2004 to write patronizing letters to voters in Iowa, urging them to vote for John Kerry? I believe the Guardian played an under-appreciated role in Bush’s reelection.
Obama was correct to say the UK would go to the “back of the queue” for trade talks. It has. He was also right that UK citizens should have voted against Brexit. It was and remains in the interest of all concerned—the UK, Europe, and the United States—for Europe to be whole and free. But the time for intervention—quiet intervention—was in 2014. American diplomats should have quietly urged their counterparts in Brussels to send Cameron home with enough of a victory to get the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party off his back. (They tried to, very earnestly, but they needed to say something more sympathetic about allowing Britain to control its own levels of immigration.) Failing that, the HCA would have quietly advised Cameron against holding a referendum; first, because you can’t govern a parliamentary democracy by referendum; second, because an HCA would have done its own polling, realized Cameron was playing with fire, and quietly shared that information with him. Had Cameron insisted upon holding the referendum nonetheless, an HCA, realizing that Russia planned to be involved in its outcome, would have countered these measures—quietly.
Yes, an HCA can do such things. Once upon a time, we had real administrations that were competent enough to do things like that. It was so long ago that few of us who remember it are still alive.
Failing even that, we would now be pushing the UK back into some kind of integrated trade and defense structure with Europe, face-savingly renamed, for its own benefit—and for ours. Our diplomats would be all over this, helping to find face-saving formulas, offering incentives to cooperate, helping to tamp down irritated feelings.
There is a reason we wanted a Europe “whole, free, and united.” It wasn’t a passing outbreak of altruism or idealism. It was because, after two world wars, we realized we would be dragged into the conflict, again and again, unless Europe was “whole, free, and united.” The formula animating our foreign policy toward Europe was, for generations, “enlightened self-interest.” But now, it is just “self-interest,” and this cannot work for long.
If through some error or lunacy Britain really secedes—which will happen by default on December 31, unless a new deal is ratified or the negotiation period extended—it would give us enormous diplomatic leverage, which the Trump Administration would surely use to strategically and economically to enslave the UK—but an HCA would not.
Peter Zeihan is good on this. (He’s good on many things: he’s a canny observer.) As he points out, the British are now desperately vulnerable:
The only market with the proximity, size, institutional capacity, and complementary needs and capabilities to be a meaningful trade partner is the United States. … and their eventual post-EU membership trading partner will be able to pick them clean. … Post-EU domestic economic regeneration was always a near-impossibility, but with this sort of political chaos the post-Brexit Brits will be desperate for any sort of lifeline. Only an American lifeline will be on offer, but that comes with conditions. Many conditions. …
If the Brits thought that tussling with the French over aerospace or the Germans over automotive was a frustrating experience, it’s nothing compared to dealing with the colossal, tangled networks of North America where mammoth economies of scale can drown the Brits out. ….
Most of the pro-Brexit crowd voted the way they did because they don’t like faceless European bureaucrats deciding issues for Britain. The reality is that Britain’s only way forward post-Brexit is to assign even greater levels of authority to American bureaucrats.
I agree with Zeihan that what we’re likely to do, if Britain actually secedes, is bleed them dry. That’s the logic of America First. Our Washington bureaucrats will step right in to replace the bureaucrats from Brussels. Submitting to our bureaucrats will work out better for the UK, in the short term, than autarky, but worse than a reasonable deal with Brussels. In the long term, it will work out poorly for all concerned, because it will weaken the EU and lead to dramatic resentment in the UK. An HCA would have the foresight to see that it is not in our long-term interest to reduce the UK to our vassal while allowing the EU to collapse. It would use its immense negotiating leverage to ensure a face-saving settlement between Britain and the EU that basically preserves the relationship now in place.
Our short-term benefit here should be subjugated to the long-term benefit of a Europe whole, free, and united, because the alternative is a Europe fragmented, unfree, and in many parts subjugated to Russia and China. That will not make our lives easier.
The Pandemic
Bilibin says, “The European Union was unable to play any meaningful role in a pandemic that ravaged several of its member states.”
Certainly, the EU failed to cover itself in glory. But it has done more than people realize. It shoveled 3.8 billion Euros toward the Western Balkans, for example, and it accelerated 5.2 billion in loans from the European Investment bank. It spent three billion Euros, from its own budget, the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, for medical equipment, and the Emergency Support Instrument, which finances and coordinates the cross-border transport of medical equipment.
The EU has certainly done a great deal more than China—not just for Europe but for its neighborhood; the extent to which China, which was responsible for the pandemic, managed to position itself as Europe’s savior is not proof that China is a more effective actor, only that it is more adroit in publicizing itself.
But in the real world, “adroit at publicizing oneself” matters more, to most citizens, than reality, and the initial, panicked response—in which EU countries both hoarded supplies and stole each others’—won’t soon be forgotten. Nor will the debacle over coronabonds, revealing not only a “lack of European solidarity,” as the phrase goes, but an extraordinary lack of economic foresight among the northern countries. Their economies are export-based, to whom do they imagine they'll export their goods if Spain and Italy collapse?
This is where “right populism” appears in its most destructive form; this is precisely the moment when Germany should have the foresight that led American planners to arrive upon the Marshall Plan (and for the same reasons). But Merkel is stuck. If she does the sensible thing, she runs the risk of riling up Germany's far-right. This is what I mean when I say that Europe is (and will always be) blackmailed by its own history. Here, again, is where adroit American statesmanship—or just a heavy American hammer—could do so much good.
But we’re so far from having even the capacity to do this now that it scarcely matters that we haven’t the will or the foresight. I assume by this point we’ve got rid of every diplomat who knew anything about Europe at all. Even if we wanted to play a condign role, I don’t think we’d have the institutional resources to do it.
The Reds in Rome
Europe was indeed unable to prevent the Russian military mission from entering one of its major member states. I’m afraid this is Power 101: When the United States precipitously leaves—anything or anyplace—it does not leave behind “a peaceful and sovereign thing or place.” It leaves a vacuum. Had we been there, visible, and doing what a global hegemon is supposed to do, that wouldn’t have happened.
It was never reasonable to expect Europe to be anything but junior partner to a global superpower. Europe will never be capable of acting as a united superpower in its own right. It is blackmailed by history. The United States can choose whether it wishes, as it has since the Second World War, to work with Europe as a useful, indeed an essential junior partner, or hand its fragments to China and Russia.
Authoritarian Dictatorships
The European Union, Bilibin notes, was “unable to prevent, or bring consequences for, one of its member states from sliding from democratic liberality to authoritarian dictatorship.” Indeed, and this—along with its failure to prevent the same thing from happening in Turkey, over which it had considerable leverage that it never used—is the strongest argument against it.
If it can’t do that, what’s the point. Truly, what’s the point.
Some day, I would like to explore the archives and try to figure out why Europe failed at this, the most obvious and imperative of tasks, even though there was and is nothing to be gained—strategically, economically, diplomatically, morally—from allowing this to happen.
I suspect the answer lies less in any specific moral failing and more in the ungainly structure of the EU, which was poorly designed from the outset because it had to be. No country would have accepted the project if it had been clear from the beginning that it involved a massive compromise of sovereignty, so enforcement mechanisms with teeth were never built into the thing.
At this point, it would be worth a shot to try fundamentally rebuilding it. A politician who was radically honest about the EU’s failings, but had a better idea to offer than “shambolic right populism” or “shambolic left populism” might be able to exploit this crisis to transform the architecture of the EU and make it a more effective entity. Macron has hinted—more than hinted, said explicitly—that this is his ambition, but has gone about it in a way that’s alarmed rather than inspired too much of Europe, particularly in his opening to Russia. What’s more, he doesn’t have the domestic capital to sustain this kind of foreign policy vision.
The real problem
Of course the EU was unable to offer credible security alternatives to NATO. None of this—not NATO, not the EU, not a peaceful Europe that has ceased to export its violence to the rest of the world and even contributed much of use to it—can work without American power and hegemony. That's always been the case and it always will be the case. We designed it this way. We designed it this way because we learned, at incalculable cost, that this was the reality of the world.
When Americans say, indignantly, that it’s time for Europe to “grow up,” it reveals the kind of insensibility to history only possible among citizens of a very young nation. The problem isn’t that Europe hasn’t “grown up,” it’s that it has been “growing up” for four blood-soaked millenia, of which only the past three-quarters of a century have been tolerably peaceful. Expecting more of Europe is absurd. This is the best it has been and the best it will be, and it is very good indeed compared to what we might call its “natural state.”
All that said …
The Europe of today is different, demographically, than any Europe of the past. This is true of the whole developed world (China included), but I am less concerned about “what comes next” than I might be if Europe’s population were larger and younger. The EU is stricken, but it is not dead. It will continue to exist in some form; it may perhaps even be an improved form. It is hard to say.
But Europe is now facing an economic crisis that dwarfs ours. Again, Zeihan is very good on this:
Europe’s young cadre is thin and getting thinner by the year. Most European countries—Italy and Germany most notably—have already aged to the point that any sort of demographic rebound is now impossible. They simply don’t have enough people who could even theoretically have children. There certainly aren’t enough people of the right age demographic to drive a consumption-driven rebound.
Which makes mitigating the economic damage of coronavirus structurally impossible. The sort of consumer stimulus which is the backbone of consumer-focused, anti-recession efforts in the United States simply wouldn’t work in Europe. On the whole, the European Union has aged into being little more than an export union. And in a time of global travel restrictions and virus-forced collapses in income and consumption, there just isn’t anyone to export to. All Europe can do is shelter in place, pray their health systems hold, and wait for the world to restart. So long as the coronavirus is impinging activity anywhere, a sustained European economic recovery is impossible.
Bilibin is obviously right to say, “This is Europe: we should be prepared for the possibility it will be something worse,” if only for the reason that this is a rule that applies to every human experience. We might rephrase: “This is humanity: we should always be prepared for the possibility of something worse.”
But what kind of “worse?” should we expect?
The problems will not be the same as before. The EU has already fulfilled its destiny, in some sense: France and Germany have experienced several generations of peace, prosperity, cooperation, and economic integration, allowing a certain forgetfulness mercifully to blanket the Continent. If these days I said to a French student, “Pensons-y toujours, n’en parlons jamais!” it is fully possible he’d have no idea what I was talking about.
It’s hard for me to imagine the recrudescence of the acute Franco-German animosity that characterized the period from the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War to the end of the Second World War. The Furor Teutonicus has been tamed—permanently, I think. One never knows for sure, and certainly, given their last performance, you can’t blithely say, “Germany? What could go wrong?” But in my great hierarchy of global geopolitical worries, I can honestly say that I lose no sleep imagining that France will be invaded by Germany.
Solo voyage
What does cause me concern is that without a healthy, united, and economically vibrant Europe, allied to the United States, liberal democracy has no future. Again, it is a simple matter of addition. The free world either hangs together or it hangs separately. (Remember, this is a book, not just a newsletter; if my argument to this effect—On Life Support—is not fresh in your mind, read it again.)
Zeihan, alas, has put his finger on the problem. Europe is in grave trouble. But it is not quite for the reasons Bilibin suggests. The trouble lies here:
Europe’s demographics make consumption-led growth impossible, even as coronavirus blocks export-led growth.
The Americans were backing away from the global security rubric that makes Europe’s export-led growth model possible before coronavirus, and the virus is only accelerating America’s turning-inward.
Europe lacks the institutional capacity to manage crisis response.
Europe lacks the financial capacity to cope with the crisis, much less apply the sort of financial fire-hose the Americans did almost reflexively.
Dealing with the virus’ spread has already forced the Europeans to abandon the free movement of people.
Dealing with their financial shortfalls will force them to abandon the free movement of capital.
Dealing with mass nationalizations and the loss of export markets will force them to abandon the free movement of goods.
That’s three of the four freedoms upon which modern Europe relies. The fourth freedom—movement of services—was largely something that only the UK cared about, and the Brits are gone. [Editor’s note: They’re not gone, just much less influential.]
He is also right that there is only one possible solution: Dropping the Euro.
If the Maastricht Treaty were abrogated (or at least suspended) and national control over monetary policy reintroduced, individual European countries could then engage in unlimited quantitative easing, both to mitigate the current crisis and to help manage the subsequent damage and recovery. This would (obviously) hold (many) downsides, but if the goal is to have the necessary capital required to address the current crisis, this is the only path I see that still results in salvaging Europe’s current economic and social structure. …
Regardless of the path forward (or down) coronavirus is just the beginning of Europe’s problems. Demographics, economics, financials, supply chains, none of it works under coronavirus—and coronavirus is going to be with us until we either get a vaccine, herd immunity or mass serological testing, none of which is particularly likely to happen in 2020. Even then, it is far from clear that Europe as we know it can reconstitute in the world after coronavirus. …
An end to the concept of “European” being singular represents more than simply the return to the norm of European history, it removes one of the central pillars of the world we know.
Indeed. And while Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity—that would be the Pacific—it matters quite a bit whether Europe survives in some liberal, democratic, and friendly form.
So far-sighted US policymakers, in some alternate universe that not only doesn’t exist now, but will probably never exist again, would be all over Europe now, helping to negotiate the unraveling of the Euro, creating incentives to cooperation toward that end, and ensuring that Europe stays whole, free, and allied toward the United States. The alternative will be a Russian and Chinese race to colonize Europe, which will put us in an even worse strategic position than we are already.
But I am now longing for a fantasy United States that no longer exists, and "fantasy" isn’t a practical policy suggestion.
So there we are.
Have you subscribed?
Remember, there’s a difference between “signing up to receive my emails” and “subscribing.” The first is free, the second isn’t. The newsletter is free and always would be.
Why, you may be asking yourself, would you want to pay for a product that’s free? Two reasons: First, because if no one pays, I can’t keep writing. I’m grateful beyond words to those of you who’ve made it possible for me to write this newsletter, send it out for free, and continue to eat. Thank you.
The second is that occasionally I publish things—like “The Years of Living Hysterically”—only for paying subscribers:
If you can’t afford to subscribe right now, I fully understand. I’ve had to cancel my own cherished subscriptions lately. These are tough times. Please keep reading and enjoy the newsletter. I’ve made it free for everyone because I genuinely believe that unless we change course, a long and glorious experiment in liberal democracy—in human freedom and self-governance—will come to an end. A world without liberal democracy is not one I want to live in.
If you can’t afford to subscribe, it would help me very much if you shared this newsletter, instead. Forwarding it, by email, to ten of your friends and encouraging them to sign up for the free newsletter, or become a paying subscriber, is just as good as subscribing:
If you’d prefer to make a one-time contribution, please do. You can contribute via GoFundMe:
Or PayPal:
Or you can become my Patron on Patreon:
If you’ve done that—or if you’ve ever bought one of my books—send me an email: I’ll give you access to everything behind the paywall.
Thanks!
Much of this represents reasons why it would be useful to invent a viable European Union-like facility.
None of it, though, presents an argument for why the present, realized European Union is not doomed to failure and irrelevance if not outright dissolution.
Eric Hines