Europe is a Continent, Not a Body Politic

News over the last week coupled with European handling of its debt crisis last year has highlighted that Europe is merely a continent, and not a body politic.  The EU was created by the French in the 1960s to be a countervailing weight to the heft of the United States.  It rested on the assumption that all of the nations of Europe would rally around the same existential need that the French felt.

History, however, has demonstrated that when there is real crisis in the EU that each of the nations follows their own self-interest.  Take for example, the Balkans crisis of the 1990s where European nations could not agree on a strategy for dealing with the former Yugoslavia.  The United States ended up spearheading a military coalition to deal with a European problem.  That is, the Europeans couldn’t even handle a problem in their own backyard without U.S. assistance.

Last year a debt crisis unfolded in Europe as international investors turned their attentions away from the United States and looked at other places around the globe that had mismanaged cheap money and easy debt.  As many investors and various credit agencies reviewed Europe they saw spend thrift habits that exceeded even those in the United States.  So the nations of Europe came “together” to try and stave off a complete collapse in the confidence of Europe.  With all of the eyes of the financial world on Europe in that moment of crisis the Europeans punted.  Europe came up with blustery, symbolic press releases rather than real reform last year.

Not surprisingly the European financial crisis continued unabated until the Germans stepped in and used the crisis as an opportunity to finally craft a new, post-World War II, foreign policy of dominating Europe.  Unfortunately, Chancellor Angela Merkel is now facing a blow back against her bailout strategy in the midst of domestic political wrangling for the future of the German government.  So now Portugal’s government has dissolved and 30 banking institutions in Spain have had their debt downgraded today.  What else?

Libya’s leader, Ghadaffi, has been bombing his own people and a civil war is unfolding.  European nations cajoled the United States into adding its force of will to a United Nations Security Council resolution that would permit a “no-fly zone.”  This attitude, after European bellyaching for nearly a decade about having its troops serve in Afghanistan.  The last time I checked the Europeans (e.g. Spain and the U.K.) have had terrorist attacks on their soil more recently than has the United States.  Now that the air campaign is underway in Libya, and now that the initial phases led by the U.S. are over, the Europeans can’t agree on who should lead the campaign going forward.  Nor have they been able to agree on what definition of “success” to use in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the mission.

The trend here is that the Europeans cannot agree on anything when there is crisis.  Clearly Europe is a continent and not a body politic.

Jason