Please, no confusion with the Europe Day
today!
MARSEILLE
— Europe is in danger of giving itself a nervous breakdown with all the talk of
economic failure and irreversible decline. So it’s worth remembering that,
although things might sometimes have been better, they have frequently been
worse.
And
what better reminder than Tuesday’s ceremonies marking Victory in Europe Day,
the 67th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe and the unconditional
surrender of the Nazi Third Reich.
May 8,
1945, marked the start of a period of recovery in which, with massive assistance from
the United States , Europe rebuilt itself from the literal ashes of
total war.
It also
marked the beginnings of a pan-European enterprise that, for all the current
failings of the European Union that
eventually emerged from it, was inspired by the ideal that the continent’s
nations should never go to war again.
President-elect
François Hollande and the defeated Nicolas Sarkozy weretogether
at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris for Tuesday’s memorial
ceremonies, a symbol that, although Europe might be broke, it remains
democratic and civilized.
They
and most of Europe’s present political leaders belong to the first, second and
even third postwar generations, with little or no memory of the war or its
immediate aftermath. Likewise their electorates, whose present stifled
expectations might encourage them to think they have been born into a continent
in terminal decline.
In a
memorable column late last year, my colleague Alan
Cowell compared Europe’s present challenges with the mammoth
task that faced it in the immediate postwar years.
“As it
confronts its massive debt problem…and a new austerity threatens to become its
default setting, Europe seems to have lost sight of the fact that it has been
there before; that the baby boom generation found its roots in postwar
hardship; that…the huge affluence of more recent years could barely have been
imagined as people struggled to shake off the gloom of war,” he wrote.
Europeans
embraced a shared austerity as the necessary price to pay to rebuild and to
avoid future conflict. “Now, the point of departure is prosperity, a fool’s
paradise in which Europeans came to see affluence as a state of being, a
birthright,” Alan wrote.
What is
missing in the new austerity is a belief that the pain is being shared equally.
That has provoked a range of reactions, from protests about the size of
bankers’ bonuses to the election of a Socialist president in France who
promises to tax the rich.
Europe’s
crisis and the seeming inability of its political leaders to provide quick
solutions have fostered the perception, both at home and abroad, of a continent
barely surviving on its past glories.
Some
blame the European Union itself for the Continent’s eclipse. Nile
Gardiner , describing Mr. Hollande’s election victory in France as the
latest symbol of the alliance’s decline, wrote in Britain’s Daily Telegraph:
“His government promises to be a symbol of everything that is wrong with Europe
today.”
Some
predictions of Europe’s fate verge on the apocalyptic. Commenting on the
current state of Europe in the context of recent elections there, the American
archconservative Frank
Gaffney Jr. forecast in The Washington Times: “Europe may soon
be in for another of the horrific cataclysms that have plagued it for nearly
all of recorded history.”
Come
off it, Mr. Gaffney. We’ve had it worse than this.
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