Democracy in Crisis by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812251630
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2019-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Europe Disunited

“The old, fragmented Europe has given way to a European Union made up of twenty-five nations and 450 million citizens. It has more people, more wealth, and more votes on every international body than the United States. It eschews military force but offers guaranteed health care and free university educations. And the new ‘United States of Europe’ is determined to be a superpower, whether America likes it or not.”1 These are not the words of some crazy sage who has spent the last few decades living in a cave, cut off from the external world. Nor do they come from the obscure blog of a lonely fanatic. This is the jacket text of a New York Times best seller by journalist T. R. Reid, in 2004. Reid, in his book The United States of Europe, imagined the emergence of a “European colossus” that would threaten America’s preeminence.

As remote as it now appears, in the middle of the decade that followed the millennium, this vision seemed thoroughly realistic. The European Union, in the midst of its eastward expansion, was about to incorporate twelve additional members. Its Lisbon Strategy was intended to raise pan-European competitiveness in the era of the “knowledge society.” And economists confirm a massive economic boom during these years. After the dot-com economic bust had been overcome, the European Union’s gross domestic product doubled.2 Unity seemed within reach. Arguments about consolidation or expansion of the European Union were primarily academic and had little practical influence. People just kept floating along, buoyed by the wave of the euphoric 1990s. It seemed that the economically liberal Third Way was bringing with it political integration beyond national borders. The almost jealous gaze from the other side of the Atlantic, as conveyed compellingly in Reid’s book, gives us an idea of what could have been.

A mere five years later, the optimism of the millennium had swiftly and completely evaporated following the eruption of the crisis. Talk of a colossus with global ambitions was nowhere to be found. The financial crisis split the European Union and then, during the years after 2010, morphed into the Eurozone crisis. The inequality between the northern countries and their southern, Mediterranean neighbors became ever greater—and massively skewed the European project. In the south, today, youth unemployment rates remain at more than 50 percent. In the north, especially in Germany, for the first time in fifty years, there are full tills and debates about where best to invest the country’s tax surpluses—accompanied by growing social and economic inequality.

Even before the crisis, in 2007, British historian Timothy Garton Ash was writing very thought provokingly, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome: “Europe has lost the plot. . . . Europeans now have little idea where we’re coming from; nor do we share a vision of where we want to go.”3 After the financial crisis, this lack of unifying ideas, of a common political project, became the most severe test the Union had yet had to face.

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