LONDON — These are interesting times in Europe, both in Greece, where the sunlit European idea began, and in Britain, where it fizzles in the drizzle.
Greece, facing the tab for a long free lunch, is now the most hated member of the euro club. Germans are canceling their Greek holidays (and reckon Greece should be selling its islands rather than taking their hard-earned money.) North Europeans don’t think they should be paying for Greek retirement at 53.
Britain, having shunned the now parlous single-currency club, has been hit with a European curse, in the form of coalition politics. David Cameron and his Europe-bashing Tories look like they may be getting into bed with Nick Clegg and his Europe-hugging Liberal Democrats: That would make even Israel’s Labor-to-religious-right coalition look ideologically harmonious.
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. There is something irresistibly comical about post-Lisbon Europe with all its talk about punching its weight on the world stage — and the euro was supposed to be a political tool — reduced to a brawl over freeloading Greece, while Clegg tries to persuade himself that Cameron’s rightist Latvian loony allies in the European Parliament don’t really matter after all.
The minuet over Greece between dilatory, Bordeaux-sipping Angela Merkel of Germany and fidgety, mineral-water chugging Nicolas Sarkozy of France is also so agonizing — the fury just beneath the forced friendship — as to be guffaw-worthy.
But of course people are dying in Greece, which is serious; and Americans are seeing their 401(k)’s wiped out by Greek contagion, which they believe to be serious; and the most important political experiment of the second half of the 20th century — the European Union — is in real trouble, which is more serious than it might appear. There’s a case for holding the mirth.
Let’s play the blame game, so dear to European leaders, for a moment. I’m sick of all this rubbish about speculators (“wolf-pack behavior” and the rest). So desperate are Europe’s ministers to pass the buck that they’re even blaming ratings agencies for taking note of the fact that Greece is broke — that’s their job! — when said ministers have just finished blaming the agencies for ignoring risk — that’s not their job! — in the run-up to the 2008 meltdown.
No, the blame for the Greek mess lies much deeper: in allowing Greece into the euro in the euphoria of 2000 and then watering down the stability pact (deficits not to exceed 3 percent of national output) for France and Germany; in the current post-European German condition; and in the demise of any cohesive E.U. ambition as the British view of a loose trade pact rather than political union prevails.
Greece used to inflate away its inefficiency. It’s O.K. not to pay taxes if you can impose taxation in the form of devaluations. That became impossible with the euro, but the practices — of tax evasion and rampant corruption and 14 months’ salary — remained until the world woke up to the fact that Athens has a 13 percent deficit as well as a new E.U.-funded airport.
Europe now faces the choice Timothy Geithner faced in the United States over a year ago: costly containment or collapse. I don’t see a serious alternative to the $140 billion E.U. and International Monetary Fund Greek rescue; and an even bigger E.U. emergency funding facility should help shore up confidence. But the core problem — that the euro has bound vastly disparate nations in a halfway house where monetary and fiscal policy are not under unified direction — will fester.
It will fester in part because Germany has turned away from Europe. Merkel’s delaying tactics have been shameful, costly — and revealing. Solidarity of the European kind is now a dirty word in Germany (“The Greeks are stealing our money!” screams the Bild tabloid) when European solidarity was once Germany’s route out of post-war shame. There’s something a little obscene about Germans wagging a finger at all these Greeks who have crossed the road on a red light.
If solidarity goes, Europe goes. As Ivan Krastev, a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, put it to me, “Without solidarity, how do you convince Poles that Germans are prepared to die for them?”
But cohesion is at low ebb. I said the euro was a political project; it was. For the French, it had much to do with European unity, with “deepening” the European idea, and with a strong political Europe. With the Cold War’s end, that’s gone. “Broadening” has replaced deepening, to Britain’s satisfaction and the single currency’s cost.
A Cameron cabinet is not going to rectify that, with or without England’s prettiest polyglot, Clegg. It remains to be seen whether sterling will be sunk by Britain’s own deficit woes or will benefit from standing clear of the euro mess. Certainly Britain doesn’t have the money to buy the Greek islands and if Germany did, everyone would get nervous.
The party’s over but, hey, let’s all raise a glass (of ouzo) on the sinking European ship. It could be worse.
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