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Letter From Paris
The Slow Melting of Eurofudge
Twin crises and rising populism threaten the European Union.
Skies are dark with chickens coming home to roost as the European Union faces its worst existential crisis since its founding. But EU officialdom has other creatures than chickens on its mind, namely, hamsters. Not just any hamster, but none other than the Great Hamster of Alsace. After thorough investigation and due deliberation the Union’s highest court, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, has solemnly threatened France with $24.6 million in fines if it does not better ensure the wee, timorous beastie’s favorite diet of grass and alfalfa.
Thus goes “Europe” — the quotation marks distinguish the artificial creation from the real thing — today. The Eurocrats’ 20th-century dream was to force Europe’s vastly diverse nations, each with its own proud history, culture, language, and currency, into a single politico-economic mold — an early example of cookie-cutter globalization. Today’s 21st-century reality is something else: a surreal multinational botch run by a Brussels-based oligarchy. Busily fiddling while Rome burns, it spouts Eurospeak and produces a Eurofudge of questionable statistics, fake achievements (it claims to have singlehandedly brought peace to the Continent), and intrusive, pettifogging regulations.
The Eurocrats’ two most radical measures for forging “Europe” were the 1992 Maastricht treaty creating a monetary union with the euro single currency, and the 1985 Schengen accord abolishing borders between the 17 EU member states that adopted it. With the euro and passport-free travel, the official propaganda went, Europeans would celebrate their newfound brotherhood, merrily mingling freely. Everybody would feel more “European.” Initially these were the EU’s most popular innovations, seemingly greasing the wheels of integration and making life easier. The irony is that today’s twin European crises are precisely the result of 1) a rigid, unworkable monetary union and 2) a borderless area open to uncontrolled population movements.
Now Europeans are rebelling from Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, where tens of thousands of Spanish indignados this summer chanted their refusal to pay for the Eurocrats’ errors, to Athens’s Syntagma Square, where outraged Greek aganaktismenoi rioted in clouds of tear gas against punishing austerity measures imposed to save the endangered euro. Anger is also boiling in Ireland and Portugal, where economies have gone bust due to soaring consumer prices and disastrous credit bubbles created by the artificially low interest rates of an easy-money euro.
The revolt has caught the Eurocracy by surprise. It shouldn’t have. After all, the Common Market/European Community/European Union, or whatever it will be called next year, was never put to a Europe-wide popular vote. This oversight is delicately described in Eurospeak as “the democratic deficit.” But on the few occasions when Europeans have had the chance to express their opinion in national referendums, they have shown contempt born of clear-sighted common sense. The Danes voted against the Maastricht treaty; the French and Dutch both tried to shoot down the new EU constitution. The Eurocracy’s reaction was to order them to vote again (and again, and again, if necessary) until they got it right. When a majority of British and French citizens dared tell pollsters life had actually gotten worse under the EU, the oligarchy dismissed them as “nostalgic and insecure.”
Postwar Europe’s leaders were blinded by their vaulting ambition to create an ever bigger “Europe” as fast as possible before anyone noticed its flaws. It was, they explained, like riding a bicycle: you had to keep moving or you would fall. Or, as one European Commission president, the French Socialist Jacques Delors, baldly put it in the 1980s, “We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re on our way.”
Otherwise they would have realized the folly of a politically motivated monetary union, with fixed, one-size-fits-all interest rates and no possibility of individual member-states devaluing in times of -crisis. It should have been obvious that it was impossible to combine strong economies like Germany and France with weaker “periphery” countries like Greece and Portugal. American free-market economists like Milton Friedman early questioned the validity of the euro, a currency based on utopian dreams instead of economic reality. But they reckoned without the European practice of arranging facts to obtain the desired result. Thus countries applying to join the eurozone were allowed to qualify by cooking the books, using off-budget accounting, getting special waivers, and other typical Eurofudge.
IN THE CASE of Greece, epicenter of the current euro crisis, the fudge was particularly thick. To start with, Greece flagrantly failed to meet the required fiscal criteria for membership when the eurozone was set up in 1999. Not to worry. In 2001, Brussels turned a blind eye to Athens’ phony budget numbers and admitted Greece. Monetary union marched triumphantly on. With that, Greece was eligible to borrow at much better interest rates than it could have with the lowly drachma as its national currency. Thanks to abundant cheap money, the Greek economy, rife with chronic corruption, cronyism and tax evasion, suddenly boomed. The Greeks knew they were living high on credit. They also knew that, when the crunch came, the hardworking Germans would bail them out to save the euro, for which they reluctantly had sacrificed their cherished deutsche mark.
When Greece’s inevitable debt crisis hit last year, the solution was more Eurofudge: in breach of the Maastricht treaty, which forbids financial aid to a member state that gets into fiscal trouble, Brussels put together a $158 billion bailout. When that wasn’t enough, it kicked the can further down the road last June with a $17.4 billion loan to keep the government running through summer. And that loan was just to tide Greece over until the EU, after a series of embarrassingly futile summit meetings, could deliver still another billion-dollar rescue package. In return for continuing life support, the Greek parliament went through the motions of passing an emergency austerity package of spending cuts to public services, tax increases, and the sale of state-owned assets like the ports of Piraeus and Salonika. (And if you believe those deeply unpopular measures will ever be applied, thereby increasing unemployment and prolonging the recession, I have a tower in Paris I’d like to sell you.)
With Greek bonds downgraded to junk status by rating agencies, few believed the country could avoid default. (The agencies, like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, were American and therefore biased against Europe, sniffed the Eurocrats, attacking the messenger who brings bad news). Default by one member could put the entire eurozone in danger of domino-like contagion—Portugal’s bonds are already junk grade, and there are doubts about Spain and Italy—and catastrophic financial failure, a Lehman Brothers disaster on a Europe-wide scale. As the economic journalist Robert Samuelson says, “It has come to this. A year after rescuing Greece from default, Europe is staring into the abyss. There is no easy escape.”
HAD IT NOT been in such a hurry to achieve its fait accompli, the Eurocracy also might have foreseen the inevitable problems caused by its other grand projet, a passport-free Union. After their initial enthusiasm for leaving passports at home when heading for Mediterranean beaches, Europeans began to realize that free movement within the 25-nation Schengen area meant just that: once accepted in any member country after a cursory procedure, a new arrival from anywhere on the planet can roam freely and eventually settle in next door. He may not speak the language, he may not have a job, but he is eligible for free medical care and other generous social benefits paid for by local taxes.
This is now running head-on into the instinct for self-preservation and enduring nationalism of ordinary Europeans, especially now that public opinion is being increasingly influenced by right-wing parties from France to Finland, Austria to Italy. One telling sign can be found in the usually liberal Netherlands. From the creation of “Europe” half a century ago, the Dutch have been stalwart promoters of greater integration.
No more. Now Dutch leaders are warning Eurocrats to heed the growing populist anger. “The most stupid thing is to neglect this and tell these people they are behind the curve, that they don’t understand what’s going on in the world,” says Ben Knapen, the Dutch EU affairs minister. Pushed by the right-wing, anti-EU Freedom Party, the Dutch government is considering expelling EU migrants who have been unemployed for more than three months, and cutting benefits for those who fail a Dutch language test. As one Dutch parliamentarian puts it, “We don’t want jobless Poles, Romanian beggars and people from North Africa or Turkey.”
In Denmark, the populist Danish People’s Party, a coalition partner in the government, recently forced the reopening of Denmark’s long-closed border checkpoints and customs houses. This direct challenge to the Schengen treaty—and the trend it represents—creates painful angst among EU faithful and draws frowns from the Eurocracy. “Stopping free movement endangers solidarity among Europeans and jeopardizes the European project,” lectures José Manuel Barroso, a former Maoist and now, most appropriately, president of the unelected, unaccountable, Politburo-like European Commission in Brussels. “Nationalists in every country will get the same idea,” warns a foreign ministry official in Berlin. “They will model themselves on Denmark.” How true. Denmark’s new policy on border checks was hardly announced when France’s National Front, led by the charismatic Marine Le Pen, began putting up posters with the slogan, “Denmark patrols its borders. Why not us?”
The campaign resonates in a country like France, struggling to accommodate tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the chaos of the Arab Spring. At last count some 40,000 Tunisians and Libyans had reached the Italian island of Lampedusa just 70 miles off the African coast. Silvio Berlusconi threw up his hands and freely distributed “temporary” residence permits to all comers, opening the door to the rest of Europe. The French-speaking Tunisians have made a beeline for France, where many have friends or family. When Nicolas Sarkozy asked Brussels to put the Schengen open borders rules on hold so France could stanch the flow, the Eurocracy reacted with the usual fudge: “temporary” border controls could be set up, it agreed with a wink, undermining one of its own favorite measures.
About the Author
Joseph A. Harriss is The American Spectator’s Paris correspondent. His latest book, An American Spectator in Paris, was released this fall.
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C. S. P. Schofield| 9.15.11 @ 7:50AM
"We don't know where we're going, but we're on our way."
The fact that they were in a handbasket should have given them a hint......
Alan Brooks| 9.15.11 @ 4:27PM
Good, now the Russkies and the Jerries can't dominate Europe.
Keep the Russians out, the Germans down, and the English up.
The English can't help it they're the best- that's the way they were created.
Alan Brooks| 9.15.11 @ 4:30PM
.. Britain is the greatest country in the world, not America- Brits started America; we wouldn't be America without them.
Talk about gratitude!
Alan Brooks| 9.15.11 @ 5:53PM
PS,
don't quite agree?
What would America be like without Britain?:
it would be New France, New Spain!
No thank you, am glad our forbears took their chances with Britain.
Timothy L. Pennell| 9.15.11 @ 8:13AM
All of this is nothing, compared to the LACK OF MILITARIES in Europe. What kind of a Country doesn't have a Military? What kind of a Country can't defend itself?
George Bush Senior, and Arnold Schwarzkopf, defeated Iraq's Military - the 4th or 5th largest, at the time - in a matter of HOURS. Bush the junior, beat them in a matter of DAYS.
NATO is STILL in Libya, MONTHS after they began.
You think that you can't be attacked.
That's what the FRENCH thought, tucked safely behind their Maginot Line.
It's sad when we don't learn from History.
Something about being Doomed to repeat it, or something.
Oh well.
TrueBlue| 9.15.11 @ 11:45AM
Can't learn from the past when people aren't taught history.
Nixonfan| 9.15.11 @ 7:37PM
Ours too big; theirs too small (aka, nonexistant). Gates was brilliant by saying to Europe: OK, you do Libya. And then they ran out of ammunition within a month. And their tomahawks misfired. The US is no longer a hyperpower; it is now (with respect to conventional weapons), the only power.
Melvin| 9.15.11 @ 8:14AM
So what is the difference here? We have throngs of politicians who are enthralled with everything Euro. Mayors of US develop city growth plans and taxation at peak hours because that is how they do it in Europe.
We have a health care plan based on a failed single payer policy in Europe. In fact just this week England was thinking about turning over it's health care system over to the Germans to make it work.
Congressman and Senators during their Congressional and Senatorial breaks flock to Europe on vague fact finding missions and especially the beaches in Italy are beautiful this time of year, all on the tax payer dime.
Does the above go to US beaches or visit their constituents? Nah, we masses are not cultured enough, and we don't extend our pinkies when drinking our espressos.
How many times have we heard Progressives, Liberals, and our token Communists espouse to us that we need to be more diverse and multicultural like Europe. In fact many of our government run schools curriculum is based on that, minus the education, just propagandizing the multicultural part.
Even when the some Euro trash denigrate the US we have those who still look across the pond like star struck teenagers pining to be the first to squeal with pregnant anticipation of being the first to see the Beatles from Liverpool.
Come to think about it, just why in the heck did our ancestors come over here to the United States anyway?
Alice Moore| 9.15.11 @ 8:56AM
In Europe there has always been Orwellian named artificial constructs. Remember the Holy Roman Empire? As one wag put it: "It is neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire."
Doctor Right| 9.15.11 @ 1:04PM
...Kind of like Orwell's "MINISTRY OF LOVE".
That's where they tortured people...
Doctor Right| 9.15.11 @ 1:04PM
...Kind of like Orwell's "MINISTRY OF LOVE".
That's where they tortured people...
CESC| 9.15.11 @ 9:28AM
Is it possible that no thinking person saw this coming? Europe has never been successfully united, and this result was destined from the beginning. I lived in Europe for 4 years in the late 1970s, and it was clear to me that national identification superceded european unity. Europe was never a "melting pot" as we once were. Once were. Now the diversity police call us a "tossed salad" and the result is more and more division within the U.S. as separate cultural identity is celebrated and encouraged. No longer is learning english and melting into American culture needed. Put up your business signs in whatever language you speak, clump together in separate neighborhoods and watch TV stations broadcast in your language, live here for decades and never become an "American".
We are headed down the same path as Europe.
FastJohnny| 9.15.11 @ 10:01AM
I agree. Years ago, when discussing the formation or proposed formation of the EU I would mention that there were problems of forcing the on the hugely different and diverse cultures and societies of Europe, an artificial construct of 'togetherness'. Even when traveling around Europe as a young adult just out of college I could see the vast differences of the people in each country and how it would be cause for future problems. We all know about past conflicts, rivalrys and bad feelings between different people there and whenever I mentioned that, I was poo-pood and looked upon as a 'bruto'. Well, they got what they wished for. I also was skeptical about European military capabilities ever being able to do anything on their own. Well, guess what. Even though they love to bash the US, they are almost completely dependant on the protection that America would provide in the event of a crises. Now we see China looking into heavily investing in Greece and other financially unstabile countries...just great. One of the counter arguements I would run into was that they US was a conglomeration of many states and we were able to succeed in relative terms, but that was an invalid debating point. Even if the states many states in the US were somewhat similar, everyone in the US identifies as an American first and then with their state second in both existential and intrinsic ways. My favorite statement about Europe is how small minded they are.
canuckistani| 9.15.11 @ 4:39PM
I have family that lives in Ireland and own homes in Spain. They have a front row seat in this running debacle.
Luckily they bought before 1992 for a song overlooking the Costa del Sol and adjacent to a pretty good golf course. They saw their villa go from about $65,000 in 1990 up to $750,000 in 2007, now it's worth about $250,000, still a return but a far cry from the peak. Very much like the sunbelt experience here.
Spain, prior to 1992, was a cheap place to live work and recreate. Afterwards, prices went through the roof and successive governments started to spend crazily in order to get them up to German and Scandinavian standards of infrastructure and governance.
They didn't make it, and now they have the heart-wrenching job of destroying the futures of the youngest generations that were told the EU was the path to prosperity.
Ireland is the same, but the difference is that the Irish have a muscle memory of bad times that will carry them through - and even help to create more music!
Places like Spain and Greece do not possess the work ethic nor do they accept personal responsibility like northern euros and tend to arms-length government from civil duty.
This is their flaw. Germany would be wise to take steps to marginalize them where possible. It was the French that pushed for EU expansion in fear of a German economic hegemony, after all, and it should be the French to lead the changes.
Nixonfan| 9.15.11 @ 7:42PM
All humans are nationalists, aside from the Baltics (who are Nordic and civilized). From a sociological perspective, whoever thought of creating a county that included Prussia and Greece must have never read a book (or a magazine).
martin j smith| 9.15.11 @ 9:58AM
Maybe people do not like Socialism and do not like it that their nations have lost their sovereignty . That does ring a bell does it not --right here. Yet--
our brilliant elite in the Ivy League --and our brilliant Socialists and RINOS want to bring Socialism right here--of course with the help of the International Socialist Union with an assist fro the Communist Party and even Islamic radical groups as well. It is my theory that a great deal of Socialist money went into support for Obama by the way. In any event I suspect it is vital for the citizens of the individual European nations to decide on what kind of system they really want to live under. Capitalist or Socialist. What they are responding to are the fruits of Socialism--but they will have to pay a price and accept fewer goodies because they aynt got du dough to afford dem.
ABNCP| 9.15.11 @ 2:21PM
I spent 30 days in the midlands of England about a year ago. The town my wife was born and raised in.
The town was full of middle Europeans that had come there to find work and when that didn't happen, they were very happy to go on the dole and let the local tax payers support them. The local people are not happy!! Talking to many of the people I know in that town, the anger about what is going on with their whole welfare system and their politicans allowing the system to be worked by lazy jerks is growing there just as this piece states. What they need over in Europe is a Tea Party and talk radio.
canuckistani| 9.15.11 @ 4:46PM
Like the Iron LAdy in the early 80's, class warfare is resuming in England and elsewhere.
First it was the ex soviets infesting their regions, now it's the muslim colonials coming home to roost.
Each country will have to take serious steps to rid them of these problems. Burqa bans, poll taxes and severe welfare reforms are on the docket.
It was an error to permit the entry of PIGS, Poland and other underperforming economies into the EU. There has to be a mechanism to kick them out if they fall below standards.
Does anyone know?
Nixonfan| 9.15.11 @ 7:51PM
Maggie did. And the Tories tossed her out for being too masculine. If you were at war, who'd you prefer as your PM, Thatcher or Major? "She's a man, baby!" History can never forget that woman. It has already forgotten John Major "the acceptable face of Tory conservatism".
Audace| 9.17.11 @ 3:13AM
ABNCP, you mention talk radio. Oh, they have it. Well, limited stuff. All night, overnight sports talk. Mostly football with some rugby or cricket. Or now London Olympics preparations.
But that, as we know, is pure fluff. Its pointless to talk goals scored or MVPs when your country is going under.
So every time I get miffed at the cumbersome, repetitive, loud, inane radio ads that grab lots of airtime (along with the weather, traffic reports, news), I am thankful that somehow many of the smaller market talk radio hosts do manage to squeeze in useful political discourse.
And this "talk radio" phenomenon is all over our smaller markets in the US.
You are correct: From Oslo to Lisbon, there is very little radio not controlled by the state. Very little free market media enterprise that permits open, unfettered public speech. Particularly where callers or emailers get their "say."
We call him John Q. Public. The Germans call him "Otto der Normalburger." Well, ole Otto will never be dialing up a national radio show and in real-time getting to rip away at the Bundestag and Chancellor for 30 uninterupted seconds.
And the Eurocats in Brussels, Strasbourg, Luxembourg City, Berlin, and Paris will do all they can to keep it that way.
I would dearly love to listen to a national radio show hosted in Birmingham (England) by a man like Mark Steyn.
John| 9.15.11 @ 3:31PM
The bicycle quote sounds eerily similar to:
"We have to pass it to see what's in it"
faxmatter| 9.15.11 @ 3:54PM
TeaParty would have a lot harder time there because of parliamentary systems and party lists. Generally, there are not primary elections there to choose the party's candidate. That is done centrally by the party organization/leaders. In the U.S., we could select and elect Republican candidates that the leaders did not want because they were true conservatives. That all happened within only about 18 months of the formation of the TeaParty, which is quite amazing if you think about it.
shipley130| 9.15.11 @ 4:22PM
The Greece situation will be acceptable to the EU until it is not. When the people catch wind of what the dirty little secrets are, that is when Greece will become unacceptable. The power brokers played One World Roulette. The chamber with the bullet is fast approaching.
Audace| 9.17.11 @ 2:47AM
Bailing out Greece is like giving $3,500 cash to your ever drunken uncle. What's he really going to do with that money? Anything worthwhile?
We have world events -- for a purpose. That purpose? To pay attention.
Remember Athens 2004?
C'mon. It's not so tough. You should remember. Answer: Summer Olympics.
Anyone who spent any time paying attention to the 48 month run-up to Opening Ceremony Day should have seen, read, and heard enough to know how official and unofficial Greece operates.
Innept, slow, unwilling, unfocused, undisciplined, corrupt, untrustworthy, and yes, just plain stupid lazy.
So...you still want to bail your "uncle" out?
And your aunt in the Algarve in Portugal?
How about your cousin in Bari?
And that cousin in Cork?
A character named Polonius once said,
"Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry"
dw| 9.15.11 @ 5:33PM
The European Union is an invention of the socialist left and like all programs created by leftist there is never a cohesive study aimed at finding out weather or not their dream is financially feasible or realistically possible. Much like obozos green inititive,it does not matter to him that the technology is not ready for implementation he and his cohorts will still waste billions of dollars to will their ideology into reality ie. Solandra, EPAs wasting of millions for their "enviormentaal justice" inner city program, 50 billion federal dollars given to "scientist" to verify global warming, etc.
Nixonfan| 9.15.11 @ 7:31PM
When "Europe" finally cracks up, as it must (because Germany is tired of apologizing for the 20th century), what will happen to those thousands of worthless, unskilled, nicely dressed Eurocrats, such as those in charge to banana size, labour tribunals and sexual harrassment codes? If civilization is a Ponzi scheme, then "Europe" will be the first domino to fall. The UK should build a a Westminster monument to Mrs T and Gordon Brown who, despite his class envy, had at least the sense to say "maybe later" to the euro. There are now two "Europes", those that are in the euro and those that are not. The ones that are not are the ones who had real economists on the state payroll. Look at France, Italy and Deutschland: how many foreign policy mistakes have those three countries made in the last 250 years? They are poster children for nuttiness, ain't over by a long shot.
POST American| 9.15.11 @ 10:55PM
---------------------BOTTOM LINE---------------------
Of course the EU, liek the UN and the
Globalist-EUGENICS agenda,
was almost entirely put through by stealth utilizing
their fave instrument of control,
the ULTRA RICH, TAX FREE
'benny violent' foundations ---themselves
ALLL linked by Satanic doctrines of 'Works'
and elite Social Darwinism.
ALAN WATT really is the man to see about
this. He's got the docs and has done the
background. He lays the entire thing out.
We know history ---and his work checks out.
------AND BTW ---as the FUKISHIMA world
nuclear disaster and DEPOP OP cover up
goes into its 7th month ---one and all
should check out that Jay Weidner interview now posted.
He's a director, science background, and
is making a series of documentaries on the
Kubrick legacy.
CHECK OUT:
OXP Radio
'Stanley Kubrick Moon Landing HOAX'
Weidner has much that's highly interesting
to relate about Kubrick. He lives on the
west coast ---and goes into vivid detail
about the REALITY of the fallout from
Japan ---across North America.
The interviewer is sappy ---but Weidner is
riveting.
---------------REALLY, CHECK IT OUT
Audace| 9.17.11 @ 2:25AM
Just a point that bears stating: Spain's borders with France never removed their border stations, border police, narcotics officers, and some nearby military. Unlike the much more peaceable borders between France and Germany, Germany and Belgium, the Netherlands and Belgium, there remains a physical presence and human eyes on people and cars when crosssing over into Spain or into France.
Major crossings are still elaborate affairs where all car licenses are read and computer entered. They have elaborate computer programs which -- when working -- swiftly identify vehicle, owner, registration info, etc.
And cameras still do this in many places where it appears nothing of note is in existence at a Eurozone border. For example, not just photography is in use, the Germans use heat scanning equipment on the border with Poland and the Czech Republic in places -- to detect human activity (movement).
Big brother is still watching at borders and even on the stretches of road once inside.
There is still a great deal of mistrust. Old habits of smuggling, black market, drugs, human trafficing, etc. are still in practice and law enforcement officials know all about it. (Now, whether they actively do things to end or thwart it is different.) Much of the border action that requires this attention results from perpetrators well outside the EU boundaries: Russians, others from former USSR republics, Africans. Now Chinese criminals, too.
The human trafficing? A fine example. Much of law enforcement turns a blind eye (or just takes its bribe at some point) because the men in law enforcement are often regular customers of the women who wind up in the "establishments" all over the continent. Translation: brothels.
The problem is that "freer" societies do a very poor job of controlling borders. Criminals and drugs come in because freer societies have the money. Lax border efforts results from: A mixture of laziness, naivete, corruption, organized crime, a hopelessness to alter the tides, and a tendency for bleeding heart liberal judges and politicians who ignore and fail to support/enforce border efforts.
Europe has many problems that make its utopian excessive unity efforts folly. The article is well written and points out the obvious flaws. But there are bigger ones the author did not even touch.