Paris, July 10, 2012 – Germany’s Chancellor Angela
Merkel is not the only European convinced that the European crisis,
now a political as well as economic crisis, can only be solved by
pressing forward – ever forward! -- to an ever more closely unified
European Union, with ever-strengthened institutions of federalism
and centralized authority.

This is the formula insistently put forward not only in Germany but
in European Union staff circles and the EU administration, and in the
academic and other professional groups concerned with the EU’s future.

What about going backward rather than forward?

I would argue that nearly every step in the federalist direction has
produced unnecessary complication and strain in the EU. The fiasco
of an unneeded and unwanted European constitution was the best proof
of this. The reason is simple. Nearly every step towards total
union has revealed still more of the inherent factors of disunity in
Europe, and has dramatized how distant ‘Europe’ has become from the
simple and lucid ambitions of its origins.

The fundamental motive animating Robert Schuman, Jean
Monnet, and Konrad Adenauer (when the project was offered to him),
was to create a new relationship between France and Germany that
would make a third world war impossible. The actual proposal was
simple: to place the war-making industries of the two countries under
a common authority. That was the Coal and Steel Community created in
1951. All that has followed, up to the European credit crisis of
2012, results from that.


Germany and France, together with Italy and the Benelux countries
that joined them in the original community, were historically and
culturally the foundation of West European civilization, and had been
so since the Visigoths, a migrant German people , sacked Rome,
breaking the political spell exercised in nearly all of Europe by the
Roman Empire.

The fall of Rome, and its political replacement in the eighth century
by the Holy Roman Empire, originally the Carolingian kingdom
associated with Charlemagne -- an alliance of German feudal entities
-- and the emergent Merovingian French monarchy, interacting with
Burgundy, then a major power, formed the Western Europe we now know.
Together with the brilliant Italian city-states, and those North Sea
provinces which liberated themselves from Spain to become cultural
appendages of Germany and France, are the core of continental Western
Europe. The French (after 1066) occupied England, and the two
kingdoms fought a hundred years’ war (which in some respects is not
even finished now).

Since 1951, the Union has added members so as to encompass nearly all
of Europe except a part of the Balkans. It created a common market,
and then a free trade zone, and turned that into the Schengen Treaty
Zone of free circulation.

It has become a complex system of concentric and overlapping circles
of action and influence, each providing a function necessary or
desirable to the whole. But this was not enough. It decided to
create a common currency, without the institutions necessary to such
a currency.

The documents will eventually provide historians with the complete
story, but my own conviction is that the influence of the American
example, very powerful since the war ended in 1945, had a damaging
influence on the political perceptions and imagination of Europeans,
above all on the increasing number of idealistic political people and
professionals who joined in this great effort to unify Europe. They
said too often to themselves, and to others, that Europe would
eventually become the counterpart and counterbalance to the United
States.

This it cannot do. David Cameron and François Holland, at their
meeting last Tuesday, both spoke approvingly of a Europe of different
speeds. Germans already talk about a Euro Zone North and a
Mediterranean Euro Zone, because of the radically different cultures
and political habits of Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Greeks on
the one hand, and on the other Germans, Swedes, Dutch, Danes and
Britons. Can anyone imagine Angela Merkel, in the federated Europe
she wants, submitting German economic policy to a majority vote of
Eurozone members?

Portugal is not Iowa. Italy cannot become California. There are
hundreds of languages and dialects in Europe. America speaks
English, and its government is the product of English, Scottish and
French thought. Greece, Cyprus and Romania are Orthodox Christian
and once belonged to the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

Take another example. The only European countries with substantial
military forces today are Britain and France. Both have powerful
military traditions. They are willing to spend money on armed
forces. France prides itself on military self-sufficiency: its navy,
air force, and ground regiments make up a self-contained force which
can intervene anywhere with a complete compliment of arms and
services, ships and combat aircraft of France’s own manufacture, and
its own independent command and staff.

For many years after the war Britain could do the same (as in the
Falkland war). Since, for economic reasons, it has allowed itself to
become dependent upon and auxiliary to the U.S. military. But it
could make itself independent again. Elsewhere in Europe, there are
splendid military capabilities, but limited ones, subordinate to NATO
in most cases.

Why is this so? History. Britain and France were great imperial
powers. So once was Spain, but that ended in the nineteenth
century. Spain, the Netherlands and Italy in the past were great
naval powers. (Greece today still has the largest merchant fleet in
the entire world.) All have declined for political reasons – the
United States insisted on its unique oversight of military matters –
and changing cultural outlook. The Europeans increasingly believe
that cultural power, “soft” power, economic power and diplomacy, will
become the most important instruments of future world influence.

The point I argue is that whatever the sources of European power and
influence, they can more effectively be exercised by a Europe of
concentric, creative, and cooperative circles of nations, than by
that imitation United States to which Europeans now are committed.



© Copyright 2012 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights
Reserved.=