Fickle Europe

Europe is an unpredictable and unreliable U.S. partner. More than 20 European states helped the CIA set up a global web of human rights abuses by setting up clandestine prisons and secret flights to hold and transfer terror suspects after 9/11 to countries where they faced torture in breach of the continent’s human rights treaties. First, Europe is a willing partner and then it squelches on the deal. Europe is a continental basket case. The description France’s “national psychiatrist” Gerard Mermet, gave France applies to the Union it founded. They both suffer from a collective form of three mental illnesses: paranoia, schizophrenia and hypochondria. Europe is terminally ill.

The European Union’s hypocrisy has hit a 21st-century cyber Berlin Wall and imploded. As a result, Western Europe experienced a prolonged economic stagnation at the dawn of the 21st century. The International Monetary Fund estimated the GDP growth for 2005 at 1.6 percent, from 2.5 percent in 2004, while growth in the 12-member euro-zone fell 0.8 percent year on year to 1.2 percent – a stagnation that can turn into a depression. Should that happen, then pluralist democracy there may be at serious risk. The EU is much like the Byzantine Empire before it disappeared – a weak center with limited means to pursue its interests and stabilize its periphery. The EU is rudderless and directionless since its draft constitution was defeated in the French and Dutch referendums in 2005. The defeat of the “European Dream” at the ballot box, continued to perpetuate European inertia in the face of globalization, protectionism and a rise in national self-interest. European solidarity is an illusory dream. Of the 15 “old” EU members, 12 have refused free access to their labor markets to eastern Europeans. The images of the cheap Polish plumbers invading France that helped defeat the constitutional referendum, loom larger than life. An EU without the free flow of laborers across national boundaries – as France advocates ─ is a non starter.

The carrots held out by the EU to future aspiring members are not juicy enough to motivate political elites to undertake the painful reforms required to grow or survive. Europe has to go back to the drawing boards and be refounded. “One must unfortunately note that Europe seems to be going down a road which could lead it to take its leave from history,” Pope Benedict XVI warned calling Europeans who want less children “dangerous” individuals. Europe is searching for a new identity that is relevant to the 21st-century.