One of the best bloggers on the scene today is Walter Russell Mead, whose blog is carried by The American Interest. It is one of the most thoughtful and informative posts available on the web, which may just mean that it gratifies my sentiments. See for yourself. Mead is also astonishingly prolific. To find a post I read just the other day, it seems, I had to go back several pages. But here is the nugget I remembered, from Europe Slips as Greece Fails.
The current crisis is the result of a decade of policy failure. Greece should never have been allowed into the euro; prudent leaders would have checked its statistics, discovered the blatant frauds with which the Greeks sought to conceal the true state of their affairs, and told the country politely but firmly to come back when it was ready.
Following that initial blunder, Europe failed to take note in any serious way of the serious distortions that were caused by suddenly reducing interest rates in Greece and other peripherals to near-German levels.
Beyond that, alarm bells should have been ringing as it became clear that Greece and a number of other countries were treating their suddenly lower interest costs as found money. They were spending the windfall rather than taking advantage of the once in a lifetime opportunity to reform their economies in preparation for life under a monetary union with countries like Germany.
If Europe's institutions were up to the job, the warning signs would have been noticed and corrective steps taken years ago.
That single paragraph (I broke it up for easier reading) is the best thing I have seen on the Euro-crisis. Europe is now tottering on the edge of disaster. This situation was long in preparation. It required the Eurocrats to ignore warning after warning, to constantly reinforce a self-imposed ignorance against any insult from reality.
Mead is no doubt right to speak of a failure of Europe's institutions, but institutions are just a bunch of people. Europe's ruling institutions have long been peopled by dreamers. Janet Daley at the British Telegraph has this.
The European federal dream was devised by its architects to be a definitive repudiation of the ideological conflicts of the 20th century. Pragmatism, consensus and regard for the greater supra-national good would reign where once wicked nationalism and zealotry had prevailed. But what strikes me when I hear the surreal statements emanating from those emergency summits and absurd Franco-German-Greek conference calls is that this is precisely a continuation of the old ideological delusions of the European past. The EU leadership and the Greek prime minister announce implacably that Greece will not leave the euro (ever), as if their uttering of the words made them indisputable. In fact, this is simply a statement of political will that dares the world to defy it.
It seems that the European political class still thinks that an assertion of its mystical belief can alter reality: that what it insists is so, will be so. If its idea of itself and its design for the future are in conflict with the facts of economics or life as it is actually lived, then it is those facts that will give way.
James Joyce famously wrote, in his seminal short story 'The Dead', that "the snow is general over Ireland." Well, the snow job is general over all of the European Community and, so far, they show neither the desire to dig out nor the possession of a shovel.
Well, the snow is general over here as well but here, let us be hopeful, there is a difference. Our citizens are rather less impressed by the authority, let alone the dreams of the elite. The rise of the Tea Party movement, whatever you think of it, made it impossible for Congress and the White House to simply ignore the fiscal crisis. Only last February President Obama submitted a budget that completely ignored the problem of unsustainable public debt. Now he is about to present a deficit reduction plan. That is proof that self-imposed ignorance on the part of government is more difficult in these United States.
Comments