There are some things science cannot explain. Like why a lettuce and mayonnaise sandwich tastes so much better than it sounds. And just as science has been rendered mute and helpless in the face of such monumental culinary conundrums so too has political science reached something of an impasse in trying to predict what the future of Europe is going to look like.
Economists have a term for this as economists tend to, they call this particular branch of probability theory a ‘Martingale’ and it goes something like this; your expectation of a future value or state is equal to the current observed value at the time of observation. Or put more simply your best guess as to how much the US dollar will be worth tomorrow is how much it’s worth today and no number of fancy PhD’s from the London school of Economics can increase your ability to better what is at it’s heart a non- prediction.
Things used to be much easier for those of us studying politics. Emanuel Kant pretty much figured out what would be needed for lasting peace over 200 years ago[1] and it included, amongst other things the creation of a ‘Federation of free states’ or rather, disparate states inextricably linked via the user- friendly banter of fiscal interdependence. It was a good plan, a wholemeal plan, filled with roughage and it was duly put into effect, sans Kant's 'fiddly' imperative morality of course! That kind of thing was sure to get in the way of what promised to be a bloody good party. The Zollverine in 1818 was a Prussian-dominated customs union, cultured from the tatters of the Holy Roman Empire . It was designed to initiate German independence on the one hand and on the other hand to ensure that the centre of the German world would be Berlin and not Vienna Union became a Confederation, the Confederation a Federation and finally, after the odd war or two a unified German state emerged.
Yes ok, this new country was something of a problem and yes it would take Europe 120 years to sort that mess out, but the statesmen of the day in post WWII USA were neither oblivious nor indifferent to Kantian notions of peace; the solution was devilishly simple, more than moderately expensive and looked like altruism but smelt like self-interest. The Marshall Plan was, simply put, a thing of beauty. 'Here,' they said, 'Is $13 billion (about 5% of US GDP!) which we give to you with absolutely no strings attached whatsoever aside from one tiny little detail… you won’t get a bean unless you join the 20th Century equivalent of a pan European Zollverine.'
Those in the know would have nodded very cleverly at one another. ‘Ah yes,’ they must have pontificated, ‘Positively Machiavellian old boy.’ For the United States , the real victors of WWII, the Marshall Europe that they desperately wanted to sell shiny things to. That was good. Secondly they engineered the longest unbroken peace in European History. That was better. Yes, of course there was the small matter of a cold war testosterone-soaked pissing contest.to deal with but hey, boys will be boys! Whilst détente threatened to make Sodom and Gomorrah look like the slapstick destruction of a Laurel and Hardy set, the thermonuclear sword of Damocles nevertheless came, in hindsight, at a bargain price. No French soldiers walked timorously across the German border, no Armada gathered of the coast of Flanders and no Swiss mercenaries besieged European cities singing 'stand and deliver' at 4 O'Clock in the morning.. More importantly for our Yankee friends, American soldiers were left free to storm beaches in south East Asia where the enemy spoke in unfamiliar tongues and had no air support whatsoever. Good times y’all!
The collapse of communism brought the whole plan into sharp focus. The 120 year question ‘What the holy-fuck are we going to do about Germany ?’ was answered with a cry ‘Let’s all become part of Germany Europe saw the writing on the wall. Inch by inch Europe moved towards a Confederation (although that word was never used,) the Kantian Federation (although no-one dared mention that F word either,) didn’t seem that far off. And the economic crisis did not change the eventual goal anyway, if anything it seemed set to accelerate it. Desperate times called for desperate measures. On the day that Poland gave the German Chancellor Carte blanche permission to ‘fix Europe ’ it seemed that the deal was done. Germany would enter a fiscal Union with everyone else, they would check budgets, they would alter budgets and then eventually they would issue them. And then David Cameron issued something of his own, his rabble rousing veto. He walked out of the meeting hall looking like an Owl taking a shit; the thought bubble above his head read ‘What the shitting Crikey have I done? ‘
I didn’t see it coming, but then again neither did the Deputy Prime Minister. Though the intransigence of the French gained Sarkozy points towards the upcoming election that he’s liable to lose anyway and though Cameron regained the respect of the Murdoch press, the tangible effect of this single, stupid, selfish act was to effectively neuter the last desperate attempt to fix a quintessentially financial crisis via political mechanisms. Without the short term advantage of shoring up the Euro zone itself, old objections were raised to the fore, unsheathed and waggled in the faces of ancient enmities like a giant sulky nationalistic phallus; a threatened referendum here an opposition party’s denunciation there.
And so here we are, Europe is a martingale. What happens next? I have no idea. I can offer you a number of scenarios, the EU might disintegrate, it might Federalise, it might shrink, and it probably won’t expand… it might be a Federal Republic Europe is almost certainly going to go broke, we've lived beyond our means for far too long now and that's the problem with being the historical masters of the world, it's an addiction, the financial crisis, an intervention; we need to kick the habit. Europe's star has fallen, America's is falling and there is some hope there. They have further to fall of course and though dromology dictates that they are falling more quickly than the British or Roman Empires ever did, but that too points to something hopeful. Europe parachuted into obsolescence, it was a slow fall and the ground rushed up towards us at a pleasingly gentile pace; no problem we thought, we have time to figure out what to do. But we hit the ground anyway, and gentile pace or not we folded up like an Ikea flat pack table.
The US is in free-fall, not quite terminal velocity but close to it. They have less time to react to the looming disaster but at least the threat has become plain to all, a palpable sense of urgency permeates the American conciousness; the US recently slashed it's military budget by nearly half and if that doesn't tell you that they are taking this seriously then there is no hope for you. At all.
The US is in free-fall, not quite terminal velocity but close to it. They have less time to react to the looming disaster but at least the threat has become plain to all, a palpable sense of urgency permeates the American conciousness; the US recently slashed it's military budget by nearly half and if that doesn't tell you that they are taking this seriously then there is no hope for you. At all.
[1] You can read Kant’s rather brilliant essay here. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm
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