Will the European Union Survive?

¶ … 2010, about the survival of the European Union, the critical issue being the currency crisis with the Union's primary currency, the euro, which has been adopted by many of its members. The crisis manifested in several countries within the Union facing debt crises, largely because of recession, the one exception being Greece which actually managed to spend its way into debt all on its own. These crises were putting pressure on the wealthier countries in the Eurozone -- Germany in particular, to provide financing assistance.

While smaller countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal were struggling, the real fear was that these debt crises would spawn a contagion that would bring own a much larger nation like Spain or Italy, nations that are probably beyond Germany's capability of rescuing (Waterfield & Winnett, 2010). The financial crisis, especially in Greece, has lurched onward since that point, including the implosion of the Cypriot banking system but neither the euro nor the EU has failed. There are two key narratives in this story.

The first is that Europe is destined to fail and the second is that Europe cannot fail -- dodging this crisis is a sign that the European experiment is working. The latter is a tough point to argue. Europe's response to the cascading crises at first was little more than triage, and after countries like Ireland began to recover the Union was left with only one real problem child, Greece. The other countries are not out of the woods yet, but they're on the path to get there.

The European Central Bank and the leaders of the wealthy nations did just enough to avert disaster long enough for some semblance of economic recovery to take hold on the continent. Eurosceptics, of which there are many, would have to admit that however badly the crises were handled, the euro still exists, Greece still uses it, and ultimately barring any further crisis the system works more or less like it is supposed to.

Not only that, but Europe's vested interests are too powerful to allow a little thing like Greek tax-dodgers to bring the entire system down. However, the crises have revealed some cracks in the European veneer. The objective of the European Union was to foster harmony through trade, an appealing notion to a continent that had just been decimated by two world wars. If everybody is dependent on each other, they will not fight, is the underlying logic of the great European experiment.

Since its inception, it has to be said, European Union member countries have not waged war on each other. A sixty year track record of major European powers not killing each other is probably close to the record. So there is that. But what the crises has revealed is that there remains significant differences on the continent. Europe's geography resulted in myriad states and regions, some loosely tied by language and culture, some not as much.

The modern map of Europe arose in a wave of nationalism, where like-minded people unified to form nations -- Italy's city-states came together; Bavaria joined up with Germany and so on. Friedman (2011) notes that this nationalism is still very powerful in Europe. The expansion of the Third Reich to incorporate Prussia and the Sudetenland was driven by nationalism, so the powers that were tried to squash European nationalism and replace it with a sense of pan-European identity. Yet there are few days it feels like that is working.

Europe is still a land of different languages, different cultures and different peoples. It is still a land where traveling a hundred miles is unthinkable to many of its people, because that would be someplace nothing like home. Nationalism still drives many Europeans. It makes Europeans indifferent to the fates of others. If Europe was united, Germans would care about the fate of Greek pensioners, but the reality is that they do not. German taxpayers care about German taxes; the fate.