Special Report

The Myth of Europe

The euro crisis isn't really about money. It's about the fiction that Europeans ever existed at all.




First, there's the economic catastrophe. Like the United States, Europe is living through its fiercest financial crisis since the 1930s. Unemployment is high -- more than 20 percent in formerly go-go Spain -- while growth is almost nonexistent, banks are collapsing, and indebted governments are running out of money. Some countries, among them Britain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, face the prospect of a generation of hardship.


The European Union was built on the myth that we are one people with one common destiny -- an "ever closer union," in the words of the 1957 Treaty of Rome that founded what was then called the European Economic Community. We are now discovering that regional and national differences are not dissolving and that Europeans think and act very differently from one another. The British view of the state's role is very different from the French view. The Greek or Italian concept of law is very different from that of Sweden or Denmark. Latvians have a very different view of Russia from Germans. What an Irishman is prepared to pay in taxes is very different from what a Dane or Belgian will allow.

This lack of unity is Europe's third and most profound crisis, one that underlies the continent's economic and political woes. Most Europeans have little idea what the EU stands for in the world, what binds its people together, where it has come from in the past, and where it is going in the future. After more than 60 years of EU integration, 200,000 pages of legislation, and a hefty (and still growing) stack of treaties, we have succeeded in building a European Union without Europeans.

"Yes, but what is a European?"

The question from one of my students should have been easy enough for me to answer. After all, I was born in Wales and have lived in continental Europe -- Oslo, Prague, and Brussels -- for most of the last 25 years. I've traveled to every EU country except Malta. I speak a handful of European languages and studied European history and politics at university. I have worked in the European Commission and European Parliament. My best friends are Dutch, German, Slovak, and Swedish. My partner is French, and my children are bilingual. Unlike some recent U.S. presidents, I know the difference between Slovenia and Slovakia. If anyone should be European, or at least know what constitutes one, I should.

Yet I found myself stuttering and stammering as I searched for an answer. I waffled for a bit about European values -- freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law -- but didn't convince myself, let alone the class.



How did we get here? In the decades after World War II, it was clear what Europe stood for: prosperity for a war-torn continent, freedom from tyranny -- at least for those living in the Western half -- and peace among nations after centuries of bloodletting. (From time to time one catches a whiff of the lingering fear that these conditions are not permanent, such as in the distinctly Hobbesian observation that ran on the International Herald Tribune's op-ed page ahead of the euro-crisis summit in late October: "What's Saving Europe from Hell? The E.U.") It is difficult to argue with peace, prosperity, and freedom -- but what else is there? British essayist Timothy Garton Ash made a stab at defining European values in a 2007 essay in Prospect, adding law, diversity, and solidarity to the list. These are hardly unique to Europe, however. They also camouflage a host of differences among the EU states.


It is on the matters of diversity and solidarity, however, that the pan-European narrative falters most. The EU prides itself on its differences, even as it tries to legislate them out of existence. Its motto is "united in diversity," and few places on Earth have such a glorious mishmash of cultures, languages, landscapes, and peoples coexisting in such a small area. Diversity doesn't equal tolerance, however, and the existence of differences doesn't mean acceptance of them -- a fact that has come glaringly to the fore as Europe has slipped deeper into crisis and relationships have strained among its members.

When Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders suggested a fusion of Flanders and the Netherlands in 2008, one reader of a Flemish newspaper posted this outraged comment online: "If Flanders joins up with that people of busybodies, violent hooligans, murdering youths, and nuts, then I'm joining an armed rebellion! It's bad enough being with the Dutch at the same campsite!" Another wrote: "A union with Morocco or Mongolia would be better. There they don't pee against church walls, and they don't eat fried croquettes from snack vending machines." Particularly agitated responses, perhaps, but symptomatic ones: Despite 60 years of ever closer integration and interaction among Europeans, stereotypes are clearly alive and well, prejudices are as deep-seated as ever, and political parties advocating less diversity and more intolerance are gaining ground. In recent elections in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, and even progressive Sweden and Finland, voters have exhibited the sort of fears and phobias that can only be described as the flip side of Rifkin's European dream.


At the Congress of Europe in 1948, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously said, "We hope to see a Europe where men of every country will think of being a European as of belonging to their native land, and … wherever they go in this wide domain ... will truly feel, 'Here I am at home.'"

Some hope. Today there is less mobility than when Churchill made his speech -- roughly 2 percent of Europeans live in a different EU state from the country of their citizenship. Instead of borders being erased -- the aim of the agreement Western European countries signed in Schengen, Luxembourg, in 1985 -- they seem to be coming back into fashion. France recently set up frontier controls on its border with Italy to prevent a wave of migrants from Libya, which it went to war to liberate, and Denmark angered its neighbors by revoking some of the Schengen Agreement's passport-free travel provisions. Not all of Europe, it seems, is ready to accept all Europeans just yet.

In The United States of Europe, Reid argued that a new "Generation E" had emerged: transnationals who drink the same cocktails, shout for the same soccer teams, wear the same clothes, celebrate Europe Day on May 9, and cheer along to the Eurovision song contest. "The people of the New Europe -- and particularly members of Generation E -- are moving towards a common European culture," he wrote.

In opinion polls, however, voters today consistently identify much more with their nation-states than with Europe. As Chris Patten, former European commissioner for external affairs, has said, "The nation is alive and well -- more potent than ever in some respects.… It is the largest unit, perhaps, to which people will willingly accord emotional allegiance." In fact, even the nation-state is too much for many Europeans. Europe has 16 more countries today than it had in 1988, thanks to the shattering of artificial states -- the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. In Belgium, a country smaller than Maryland, there is such a vicious division between Flanders and Wallonia that until December there had been no government for well over 500 days -- a world record.

One can, of course, have multiple identities. Some Europeans are Catalan and Spanish, as well as European. Others are Muslim and French. But identities cannot be artificially created; they are forged early on and never go away. I have now lived longer in Brussels than in my native Wales. Despite my Belgian ID card and driver's license, I do not feel even 1 percent "Belge." My passport says I am a citizen of the European Union, but this is an administrative affiliation, not an emotional attachment. Marmite, marmalade, cricket, warm beer, snooker, darts, embarrassed silences, sodden moors, slow trains, pasty faces -- that is Britain. That I can relate to. That made me who I am. Ostend beach, snails, eels, King Albert II, lace curtains, kissing men's cheeks, garden gnomes, 55 percent taxation, racing pigeons, gingerbread biscuits -- that is Belgium. That I can't relate to.

Maybe my 8-year-old daughter -- who once declared she was "half-Belgian, half-French, and half-Welsh" -- will be one of the first members of Generation E. For now, though, I don't know anyone, even in Brussels, who celebrates Europe Day. If Europeans wear the same clothes, they are likely to be American clothes. Whatever common European culture exists is the preserve of a tiny band of well-educated and rootless cosmopolitans: junior EU officials, Eurostar frequent travelers, and foreign exchange students.







The European Union has constructed common institutions, laws, and even a currency. It has created all the symbols of a nation-state, including a burgundy passport that places "European Union" above one's own nationality, and a flag, even if it is only voluntarily waved at the Ryder Cup golf championships. It even has an anthem: Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," though it doesn't have lyrics and most Europeans don't know it is their anthem. What it lacks is a people who share a common culture, language, or narrative -- or at the very least are able to identify with the political construct that has been created in their name.


Here we get to the heart of the eurozone's travails. When the single currency was conceived in the early 1990s, there was a naive belief that by having the same money the nations of the eurozone would somehow converge. In short, the euro would make the spendthrift Greeks more like the parsimonious Germans. Instead, weaker economies simply piggybacked on the strength of the euro, borrowing staggering amounts of money at low interest rates to prop up unsustainable welfare systems and grotesquely inflated housing markets. Necessary reforms -- like making it easier to hire and fire workers, restraining wages, and trimming a bloated public sector -- were simply shelved.

The European Union is a means of peacefully managing differences among countries so that fudged compromises in drab Brussels conference rooms replace skirmishes on battlefields. And it has done this rather well. But compromising on food-packaging legislation and laws on the curvature of cucumbers is not the same as compromising on border protection, defense policy, and taxation. Brits will simply not accept Belgian levels of taxation; the French will never agree to scrap the EU's generous farm subsidies; and no country will send its sons and daughters to fight for European values if it opposes military action -- as Germany demonstrated by its absence from Libya.



The problem is at least in part a crisis of trust. The Dutch don't trust the Bulgarians and Romanians to guard their borders, so they are shut out of the Schengen Agreement. The Germans don't trust the Greeks to spend their money properly, so they hand it over in dribs and drabs. The Poles and Balts don't trust the EU to defend them against aggression from the east, so they rely on NATO and the Americans instead. And the Brits don't trust Europeans to do anything better than they can, except perhaps dress more stylishly and cook tastier food.

It is also a crisis of legitimacy. The EU has amassed extraordinary powers, but it has done so largely without consulting the people and without many of the basic safety valves we take for granted in a democracy. For example, nobody asked the German people whether they wanted to give up their beloved deutsche mark. The government simply made that decision for them, arguing that a single currency would be bound by strict rules -- which were later torn up by Paris and Berlin -- and that a currency union would not lead to a transfer of wealth from rich to poor states -- which has proved to be false.

In most democracies, if you don't like a government you can vote it out. In the EU system this is impossible. Neither the European Commission nor its president -- the nearest thing the EU has to an executive arm -- is directly elected. The president of the European Council, currently Belgian politician Herman Van Rompuy, was not popularly elected to his post. The two legislative bodies of the EU, the European Parliament and Council of the European Union, are largely made up of elected officials, but few Europeans bother to vote for the former, and changing your own representation in the latter is unlikely to have much impact on the collective policy of 27 nation-states.


The EU has responded to this wave of euroskepticism by asking for more powers to govern states' political and economic affairs. At a December summit in Brussels, 26 of the EU's 27 countries (with Britain left in splendid isolation) signed on to a fiscal pact that would cap state deficits and punish those that exceed them, give Brussels greater powers to tinker with national budgets, and potentially lead to harmonized tax rates across the bloc. There is some logic here. After all, the euro's current woes can be traced back to the decision taken at Maastricht 20 years ago to pursue a monetary union without a fiscal, economic, or political one. This meant that EU members agreed to common interest rates, inflation targets, and debt levels but were free to decide how much to tax their citizens, what welfare and pension payments to make, and what employment policies to pursue. Sooner or later the system's flaws were going to be exposed and the markets would react, as they have so brutally. Now the EU faces a grim choice: adopt piecemeal measures to prevent the financial contagion from spreading, or create a kind of United States of Europe with common fiscal and economic policies and a de facto federal government in Brussels.




In the past, EU leaders rarely had to worry about the tedious business of courting public opinion. Not anymore. The prospect of enlarging the union any further rests in the hands of voters in Austria and France, both of which are bound by their constitutions to hold a referendum on the issue -- a stipulation that effectively scuppers Turkey's chances of joining the bloc, given the animosity toward Ankara in both countries. Changing the EU treaty to make eurozone rules stricter, meanwhile, could trigger a popular vote in Ireland, where voters initially rejected the EU's last two attempts to change its treaty.


Jean-Pierre Muller/AFP/Getty Images


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