THE ONLY INTERESTING QUESTION ABOUT MODERN EUROPE...:

The European Union as a Retired Great Power (Ivan Krastev, May/June 2010, American Interest)

Diverse factors have contributed to Europe’s sour mood, the most important being demography, democracy, loss of geopolitical importance and lack of leadership.

Demographic reality, in particular, plays a critical role in explaining Europe’s fears about the future. Europe’s population is aging, its support ratio is shrinking, and the new generation of workers isn’t large enough to restore the balance. The data projections tell us that the median age in Europe will increase to 52.3 years in 2050 from 37.7 years in 2003, while the median age for Americans in 2050 will be only 35.4 years. Europe’s share of global GDP is thus liable to shrink in the decades to come, for immigration is unlikely to provide Europe with a solution for its demographic weakness. European publics are frightened by any prospect of growing immigration; indeed, Europe’s failure to integrate the fast-growing number of second- and third-generation European-born “immigrants” lies at the core Europe’s newly felt insecurity. Europe’s economics demands more immigrants than Europe’s politics is ready to tolerate.

Europe’s democracy, in turn, which is of far more recent vintage in most of the continent than present citizens would prefer to recall, was conditioned on ethnically homogeneous societies and well-functioning welfare states. Both conditions are now under intense pressure, leading elites increasingly to fear the return of identity politics in Europe. Extreme parties are invading the political mainstream, and some of the current majority groups are frightened by the decline—real or imaginary—of their influence and power. According to a 2008report of the British government’s Office of Communities and Local Government, white people are less likely to feel they can influence decisions affecting their country. The threatened majorities—majorities that display characteristics normally attributed to minority groups—are the new political force in many European democracies.

Europe’s loss of geopolitical centrality also helps explain its change of heart. The reason is not simply that European powers are not major actors on the international scene; that has been true for decades. What is new is that Europe no longer projects itself into where the action is taking place. Contrary to its behavior in the 1990s, the European Union today is a risk-averse, neither-here-nor-there power. It has been paralyzed by a deficit of solidarity, imagination and sound leadership.

...is whether American leaders (Marshall, Truman, etc.) intentionally used the Marshall Plan and NATO to destroy the continent or whether that was accidental.

MORE:
Is it the Euro or the Yugo? (Kurt Brouwer, 5/15/10, Fundmastery)

The highly-touted European currency, the Euro, is performing more like the ill-fated Yugoslavian car maker, the hapless Yugo. And, there is a pretty good analogy between the problems inherent in the fractious group of countries that make up the European Union and the fractious group of countries that made up the now-defunct country of Yugoslavia, where the Yugo was born. You know the regions I’m thinking of–Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro etc. Once the veneer of nationality was swept away, Yugoslavia quickly descended into a hellish nightmare of civil war and racial hatred.

Maybe I’m overstating things a bit, but the events in Greece over the past few weeks do not suggest a peaceful outcome is nigh as riots, strikes and social strife rock the country.

Yugoslavia, like "Europe," is the veneer, what gets exposed is the nationalism, making for war, not civil war. Happily, they're too old to fight anymore.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 15, 2010 5:05 PM