The Weekend Interview With Norman Davies: The Emperor of Vanished Kingdoms - WSJ.com - 1 views
online.wsj.com/...3918304577240984211126416.html
governance Europe integration collapse political US historical gradualism crisis
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Norman Davies, Britain's pre-eminent historian of Europe. From where he sits, Europe's problem is one of failed governance. "It all started, I guess, in the 1990s, with the Yugoslav wars and the inability of the Europeans to do anything basic about a war in their backyard."
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"I now feel that the thing that is being proved wrong is what some people call the 'gradualist fallacy'—that . . . you drive European integration forward by economic means," he says. "And it's just wrong."
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After World War II, Europeans set about forming a union along three axes: politics, defense and economics. Britain quickly rejected political union, however, and soon enough NATO came along to become the only defense union Western Europe needed. An economic union—the European Economic Community, established in 1957—was the only remaining pillar of integration left to pursue.
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Europe has had only four years since the war when it didn't have its hands full—not much time to make a functioning union for 500 million people.
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Instead, Mr. Davies says, the EU has become a vehicle by which the stronger countries promote their interests—led, for the moment, by the tag team of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "So although all the member states have to be democracies—this is one of the conditions for entry—they're not required to act democratically once they're in."
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"It's like an avalanche, where you've got a huge frozen snowfield, which on the surface looks absolutely ideal. . . . All the changes in the ice field come from the sun shining on them, and the water melts underneath. But you can't actually see it. And you equally can't see which part of the snowfield is going to move first."
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"A lot of this crisis is to do with a period of economic growth, limitless money, people not worrying about getting into debt—mind-sapping comfort." He adds, "Western Europeans to a large extent are still in that comfort zone, whereas East Europeans have lived through much harder times and are much more appreciative of the degree of freedom and prosperity that they have got, that 20 years ago they didn't."
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"Europe 100 years ago was bullish," he says, and there's something in the American psyche that bears uncanny resemblance to Europeans' optimism, in the years before World War I broke out in 1914, about their peaceful, prosperous future. Does pride come before the fall? "The United States is this late-19th-century, 20th-century power which has a lot of those attitudes," he says.
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"There are one or two people around," he says, "who might, at the meeting of the Council of Ministers, instead of doing [the] horse-trading which goes on all the time, say, 'Enough of all of this. We are all going to lose the European Union unless we do something today.'"
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"But it happens in a second. Before the avalanche, the sun shines, it looks beautiful, and there's a sound like a gunshot, where the ice cracks. And the whole damn lot falls into the valley."