Why Europe should not let Greece fall

Imagine a state with just a few more people than in tiny Uttarakhand, an area marginally less than Chhattisgarh’s, yet with a debt almost matching all of India’s forex reserves.

Imagine that country creating a global crisis, shaking every stock exchange in the world and threatening the viability of by far the strongest and richest economic confederation the world has ever known — the European Union.

That is Greece for you — once window-dressed to fool the smartest of forensic auditors in the run-up to its joining the European Union and the euro, now rotting away in a mess that threatens the very stability of the continent itself.

Not in sync Other states in the EU have gone under and resurfaced. Some like Ireland have recovered well, others like Portugal have shown remarkable maturity by accepting responsibility for a financial crisis on hand, and then worked hard to put it behind them.

Sceptical Great Britain, in danger of a political disintegration of its own, is half in and half out of the EU and fretting at East European plumbers and electricians who seem to dominate the trades in London and elsewhere.

The Italians muddled through a fiscal mess of their own while the French, some allege, contributed their bit by shortening working hours and generally snarling at the world.

The stolid Germans, meanwhile, are up in arms at having to pay for the profligacy of other nations, chiefly Greece.

They have the richest and most efficient economy in Europe and possibly the world, and, according to them, they are also the kindest and most generous too.

That’s “all hogwash”, according to many East Europeans who uniformly blame the Germans for being arrogant, dictatorial and parsimonious.

They contend that their countries — each enduring an economic crisis of its own — unwittingly exchanged one kind of exploitation, as colonies of the former Soviet Union, for another, as unwilling economic and cultural vassals of western Europe, chiefly the Germans, whose Audis are powered by engines made on the cheap in Hungary while the erstwhile Czechoslovakia’s greatest industrial treasure, the Skoda, ended up as a subsidiary of Volkswagen.

The real cancer While there is a terrific economic hurricane blowing through Europe right now, the real cancer eating away at Europe’s vitality is the continent-wide rapid decline of population, the increasingly longevity of its elderly, and the refusal to allow in many more immigrants than it does now.

What the EU is facing today is also a massive breakdown of self-confidence and a refusal to accept that the things that went into making the US so successful — amongst them, accepting immigrants from around the world — are just as suitable for Europe too.

In Europe, ancient antagonisms have hardly died — they have just been temporarily minimised.

The European Union has for decades kept a large and vibrant Turkey out of the Union for one unstated reason — that however secular it may be, it is nevertheless Muslim.

As its best historians acknowledge in private, Europe’s Turkey-phobia goes back in time.

The Europeans have particularly bad memories of the Ottomans who overran Eastern Europe, held Romania and Hungary, and laid siege to Vienna as far back as 1529.

Then there are other instances of mistrust and grievance that have no real resolution except through frequent bloodletting.

The Hungarians mourn for the lands they lost under the Treaty of Trianon they signed under protest 85 years ago even if they can, as members of the EU, live, work and own property anywhere within the European Union.

Deep-rooted prejudices manifest themselves in many ways: anti-Semitism for instance, leading to the desecration of Jewish graves in France and decades of racial profiling of Romas as natural suspects for everything from theft to rape, not only in Hungary but elsewhere in Europe as well.

A fragile peace Europe has been the cause of much of the world’s misery for hundreds of years. It had to be rescued from serious suicide bids twice in the twentieth century by the rest of the world, chiefly the US. The continent, it now transpires, never recovered from the two world wars that caused horrendous loss of lives — in millions — hastening a demographic decline long in the making.

If anything has saved Europe from imploding once again after the Second World War , it is the extraordinary compact between France and Germany that finally led to the formation of the European Union.

Even so, Europe has seen some brutal conflicts. The Balkans have experienced genocide and wars in the 1990s while Russia has taken on Georgia and Ukraine at will.

For now these conflicts have been contained, but if the EU were to collapse, and with it the euro, old rivalries will revive and the generals and the admirals will be back at their jobs once again across Europe; so fragile yet so important is the peace the European Union has ensured so far and for which it was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2012. As the Nobel citation stated, the formation of the European Union transformed “most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace”. That was no hyperbole.

Sadly, it is possible the Nobel committee spoke too soon. A Greek exit from the Union is just the sort of trigger that could lead to the collapse of the European Union itself and with that will begin the unravelling of the idea of a United Europe.

The Economist is hardly exaggerating when its latest cover proclaims that “Europe’s Future is in Greek Hands”. Is there any doubt?

The writer is visiting faculty, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and formerly visiting fellow at the Central European University, Budapest

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