As news of a European deal to keep Greece in the eurozone reverberates around the continent, commentators, opinion leaders, and politicians of all stripes wonder what happened to the European dream. Two new factions are discernible: disappointed dreamers and shrugging realists.
It was Germany that brought forth the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who in his 1928 play "The Threepenny Opera" famously observed about people: "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral" ("First comes the feeding, after that come the morals.") "The Threepenny Opera" is a musical drama highly critical of capitalism and self-interest.
With this in mind, it is ironic that it was Germany that led the assault on Greece during the arduous negotiations to come to a deal over the country's debt obligations. It was, after all, Germany that benefited from international solidarity in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Yet if European Council President Donald Tusk is to be believed, it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel who gave up on the negotiations with Greece early Monday and announced that it should exit the eurozone. A Grexit was at hand. Tusk forced her and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras back to the table to hash out a compromise.
Yet while the compromise is seen by some in Europe as a capitulation of sorts by Germany to Greece -- Merkel appears to have really wanted a Grexit, after all -- many others see the agreement with Greece as a one-sided diktat that will destroy what's left of the country's economy. But what appears to gall them even more is that it was their leaders who pushed for that diktat.
Realists shrugged. It was hardly the first time that Greece came close to bankruptcy. In its short history as a modern independent state, it has gone bankrupt several times. Nothing new here.
But those who dreamt of a Europe united in solidarity choked on their coffee when they read the terms of the agreement on July 13. In op-eds, on social media, and on websites, astonished pro-Europeans lamented a Europe that never was and voiced their shock and awe, not at Greece, but at their own leaders. The main contention: the European dream is crushed, and their own people did the crushing.
While with every step in the European Union's enlargement the pro-Europeans thought they saw a deepening of pan-European solidarity, everyday reality to the practiced eye showed that the European Union is a collection of nation-states continuing to pursue their national interests. Below the blue-and-gold veneer of peace and unity, economic wars raged between the EU members. Revelations emerging from WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden showed that European governments snoop on each other in order to stay ahead of the competition.
Rivaling governments offer big companies huge tax incentives to lure them away from their so-called European brethren, LuxLeaks showed. To the uninformed -- the naive, perhaps? -- the Greece crisis laid all this bare in one fell stroke.
The European Union and its previous incarnations were never meant to lead to a full-blown political union in which all countries share their burdens with others, like the members of a close family. That would have required each state to surrender its sovereignty.
At best the European Union is a collection of families living on the same street, each of whom moved there for their own benefit. The eurozone is a monetary union based on solid and tough judicial agreements and contracts. Debt relief as the Greeks wanted was explicitly left out of the eurozone treaties when it was established, precisely to prevent having to bail out a member state.
But even though the disappointed direct their anger at their political leaders, who forced the tough compromise onto the Greeks, they should take a step back and see the bigger picture. The fact is that opinion polls in many creditor countries show that vast majorities back the tough stances of their leaders.
The daunting challenge to the disappointed dreamers is to convert those democratic majorities into believers of a Europe united in solidarity. How this can come to pass without first changing the fundamentals of our system, in which the loss of one equals the profit of the other, is unclear.
Until that question is answered, Brecht's quote still leads: "Erst kommt das Fressen, und dann kommt die Moral."
(AP photo)
