Paris, May 15, 2013 – It is not simply the Eurozone, composed of the 17 European states that have the euro as currency, that is threatened by the dramatic economic discrepancies that now exist among its individual members, as well as the large gap that exists between the indebtedness of the southern members of the zone and the German-led bloc of northern countries. Now it is the European Union itself that is in danger, mainly but not entirely because of the economic crisis inherited from Wall Street abuses. The EU has contributed to its own misfortunes.

A new Europe-wide report by correspondents of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro reveals mounting disillusionment with the European Union itself among the voters of its member states. These are confirmed by the results of an American Pew organization study issued May 14.

Britain has made the most news about possible withdrawal from the union since the country’s most recent local elections gave the United Kingdom Independence Party nearly as high a popular vote as the ruling Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister David Cameron. The Ukip won an unprecedented 23% of the total vote. There was an immediate rise in demand among Conservative Party members for a referendum on quitting the EU – which the Ukip promises.

Conservative support for the prime minister on the EU issue is crumbling at the edges. David Cameron has also promised a referendum -- but wants first to renegotiate the terms of British EU membership (a non-British observer would add “if he can”).

Renegotiating with Britain has few fans among the leaders of the other EU states, nor in the Brussels Commission. But having Britain quit the EU is a scary prospect, since while London has been a nuisance ever since the late Margaret Thatcher’s demands that Britain “get back” the investment the British have made in the Union, it nonetheless is one of the four major European powers and economies, and with France is one of only two European states that are (relatively) heavyweight military and diplomatic powers. Without Britain the EU would be seriously weakened.

Paris, May 8, 2013 --The present debate in the United States over making policy for a Middle East that has been profoundly changed by the events of the past three years unhappily echoes past policies that failed. They were intended to promote democracy, and usually took the form of military intervention.

The most important current argument is over intervention in the Syrian civil war. But to what American purpose? As always, democracy-promotion, Washington says. Is this either politically or militarily feasible in Syria today? What contribution does intervention make to the question most on Americans’ minds today: what relevance has this to America’s domestic terrorist threat?

The civil war in Syria was originally an uprising against abuses by the predominantly Alawite government of President Bashar el-Assad, a family and sectarian dictatorship which has enjoyed support in the past of secular groups as well as Christians and Muslim minorities. The opposition, Syrian in origin, now includes Muslim Brothers and other Jihadists, fighting the established government of a largely Sunni population, although supported by Shia Iran, and currently by Russia and China. An American intervention would align Washington with groups which elsewhere it opposes. The logic of this is not apparent.

The Syrian war already offers signs of engaging groups in Lebanon, drawing the unfortunate Lebanese towards a conflict where they have nothing to gain. Israel envisages the possibility of getting at Iran by way of its Syrian ally. Again, enlargement of the war serves no visible American interest, which is restored stability in the region.

The undeclared war between Iran and its client, the Hezbollah organization, and Israel, motivated by Iran’s contention (via its departing president) that Israel has no place in the Middle East, having been created as the result of an attempted genocide of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany, and therefore a European problem that should be settled in Europe and not at the expense of an Arab people. This, of course, is purely a propaganda provocation, although true enough.

Paris, May 1, 2013 –- Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has consistently said that the answer to Europe’s problems is more political integration, and this is a view held elsewhere among those trying to find a way out of the conundrum which economic crisis has presented to the European Union.

The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, told the Financial Times last weekend that he harbors hope for this elusive “more union” in the more aggressive role the parliament has recently assumed in the Union’s affairs, as in recently voting a legal limit on European bankers’ bonuses and in scrutinizing the European Union budget, which it has threatened to reject.

There will be pan-European parties and party alliances running candidates in next year’s parliamentary elections. These elections in the past have seemed rather pallid affairs with declining participation. They attract relatively little attention in the major countries (at least) and voting usually is overwhelmingly influenced, indirectly if not directly, by local rather than pan-European issues and personalities. The parliament’s work also tends to be ignored, except on big issues crossing national lines (like the bonus ban), because there is no popularly-read pan-European press, and while everyone has an opinion about “Europe” relatively few quite know what goes on in Brussels.

The European Commission’s presidency, currently held by José Manuel Barroso, will also be up for election next year as a new term begins, and Martin Schulz is widely thought a candidate. He believes that the elections to renew parliament and president may provide an opportunity to rescue the EU, currently endangered by conflict over economic issues and remedies, with a split between the German-led hard-line debt-expunging northern states and the beleaguered French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and other “southerners.” France actually is in-between, and potentially the pivotal actor in the present crisis, but currently has a split Socialist party and, until now, an indecisive president who has squandered his political resources on a gay marriage and adoption law that deeply divides the country.

Paris, April 24, 2013 – The blood runs cold when one fully appreciates how vulnerable official policymakers and the Western policy community are to slogans and to magical thinking. The Reinhart-Rogoff case is the latest, and certainly will not be the last, in which the credulity and carelessness of experts wreak havoc among ordinary people -- in this case, ordinary people by the millions.

The Reinhart-Rogoff error was initially rumor but in the past week has become a scandal. Professors Carmen Reinhart and the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Ken Rogoff, presented in 2010 a research paper which seemed to demonstrate that in a crisis of the kind which the western world is experiencing, when the debt of a country goes above 90% of the country’s gross domestic product, economic growth falls precipitously, or may even regress.

Ah ha!, the economic and governmental policy community in the U.S. and Europe cried! Here’s just what we need! The method to end the debt crisis responsible for the great slump! All we have to do is to starve all the indebted societies, cut government services, eliminate workers, and soon investor confidence will be restored and the crisis will end in a way that vindicates currently dominant economic theory, validates the Chicago School and Reaganism and Thatcherism, and shows the world that economic science always has the answer.

Nobody seems to have checked the Reinhart-Rogoff paper, since it was what governments, politicians and academic economists wanted to hear. The Republican party’s star economist, Paul Ryan, and Olli Rehn, European Commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, both cited it to support their austerity policies, providing the justification for slashing infrastructure and social spending in the US, Western Europe and elsewhere.

Paris, April 17, 2013 – When the proposal was initially made for a common European currency, it seemed to this writer a good idea with the flaw that it wouldn’t work. Although inexpert in economics (being a product of the age of arithmetic), the idea struck me as a product of the false analogy with the United States common in Europe at that time.

If New York, Dallas and Dubuque could have a single dollar currency, why couldn’t Paris, Frankfurt and Milan? Europe already had – or was completing – the single European market, free of tariff barriers. Why not a single currency for the single market? A great many enthusiastic supporters of European unification seemed to think that all that was needed was to give it a name and design, and print it up.

Thanks to the imaginative former French President, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a fine history-redolent name already had been proposed for the mechanism that could lead to the single currency, the “Ecu,” which meant European currency union, and happily was also a French proper name, given during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to a series of small gold or silver French coins.

When the time to create the currency itself finally arrived, the chauvinists of other European Union countries balked at the French name, and the currency was drearily named the euro (not even capitalized) and bore exceedingly boring drawings of bridges and viaducts. (Every Euro-zone country had a bridge or viaduct, so each could say that it was its own that was pictured.)

The complaint that I (among others) made from the beginning was that
European countries were not American states. They were sovereign political entities. Each had its own characteristic economy, resources, products, markets – and its own national deficits and surpluses. Vitally important was the fact that each had its own currency, and these currencies were not interchangeable, and moreover, were not constant in value. You had to take them to a bank or exchange counter and buy their current equivalence in another currency.

But EU enthusiasts said Californians did not have to change their dollars when they drove to Nevada. It would be the same in Europe. At this point the American had to explain about the American Civil War, in which there was the largest number of war-related casualties of all American wars, and the purpose of the war was to terminate the sovereignty claim made until then by the slave-holding Southern states. The result was a single sovereign federal United States, with a single currency, and eventually a single budget that prevailed nationally.

The only reply to this that the American’s European interlocutors could make was that Europe had already experienced more than its share of wars. The European Union was meant to put an end to that unfortunate European practice.

The practice in recent times was that chiefly of the Germans. The France of Bourbons, Napoleon, and the Third Republic ceded leadership in precipitating wars to Hohenzollern and then Nazi Germany.

During those same recent times, the United States interested itself in Europe and its wars, and as a result constituted for itself a new role as a European power – as THE European power, as the late American diplomat Richard Holbrooke made plain to the West Europeans when he was U.S. Ambassador to Germany in the 1990s, reinforcing the dominant role Americans had played ever since the European unification movement began in 1951. It is a role now ending.