re: "The New Old Europe"

Victor Davis Hanson at Private Papers ("Victor Davis Hanson ON THE WEB") shared the big picture about Europe.

Money quote(s):

"Nearly ten years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld provoked outrage by referring to “Old Europe.” How dare he, snapped the French and Germans, call us “old” when the utopian European Union was all the rage, the new euro was soaring in value, and the United States was increasingly isolated under the Bush administration."

My how times change. Or remain the same. Or something. Whatever.

"The island of Britain is, and is not, a part of Europe — carefully pulling out when things heat up, terrified that it will be pulled back in when things boil over. British prime minister David Cameron knows the old script well, as he adamantly and publicly insists that Great Britain is still a part of the crumbling European Union while privately assuming that it is not." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Great Britain remains in the increasingly minority (at least in the western part of the EU), party of those nation-state who are part of the EU but not part of the "common currency." Unlike many other countries, the UK just couldn't seem to part with its legacy monetary unit, the pound sterling.

(Given the size and importance of London's financial sector within the British economy, this was a supremely rational decision for them to have taken.)

"No need to mention the German “problem”: Whether the year was 1870, 1914, 1939, or 2011, Europeans always have feared a united Germany, whose people, for a variety of cultural reasons, produce more wealth than the nation’s size might otherwise suggest."

Hmm. It's not like Prof. Hanson to sugar-coat or beat-around-the-bush. For the first three dates (of four), the "problem" with Germany wasn't so much it's economic reach but it's military one. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad no one's (not even the Greeks, for all their public hysterics) actually worried about German militarism anymore. That's, mostly, a really good thing.

"(T)he more France talks of the glory of Gallic culture, the more it seeks to restrain its too-powerful next-door neighbor or, in humiliating fashion, seeks to appease Germany."

France has issues. It takes, approximately, the same bipolar approach to its immigration (and immigrant community) problems.

"The squabbling European family has always feared two great rivals — Russia and radical Islam. From 1453 through the 18th century, Europe lived in fear of the Ottomans, who twice reached the gates of Vienna. Huge European armies invaded Russia twice, and both Napoleon and Hitler destroyed their own empires in their failed attempts at preemption. Russia occupied half of Europe for almost a half-century and now tries to leverage with gas and oil what it used to with missiles and tanks. Europe is as dependent on the oil of Muslim nations as it is terrified of millions of new Islamic immigrants." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Frankly, until those "(h)uge European armies invaded Russia twice," I'm not sure that Central and Western Europe had much reason to fear Muscovy.

(Which doesn't fully apply to Eastern Europe.)

But if you poke the bear enough times, he will come after you.

(CAA wrote an [unclassified] paper not that long ago about Russia's use of its economic leverage, particularly in the "near abroad" as a more subtle exercise of national power than how they used to roll. So I don't exactly disagree with Prof. Hanson's point here.)

(Digression: My professor said "I disagree with your analysis but I like your reasoning.")

"After the Revolutionary War, Europeans both flocked to America and damned it as uncouth and crass, even as they looked to it for money and military help. Nothing has much changed here either, despite the utopian pronouncements of the European Union"

Not only for money and military help. America was a target for investment. Rich Europeans could buy land, companies, stocks, and they were safe, at least from the American government. Their value might rise and fall (as investments do), but unless they (like Germany or Japan) actually went to war with us, their properties were safe. Never nationalized.

(IIRC, when British investments were seized in the U.S. during one, or both, of the World Wars, it was the British government which did it, to raise hard currency.)

"Like clockwork every few decades, some self-described European “visionaries” swear that the continent can either live in peace under utopian protocols or, more darkly, be united under one grand — and undemocratic — system, willingly or not. But for all the noble pretensions of the Congress of Vienna and the European Union — and the nightmarish spread of Napoleon’s Continental System and the Third Reich — and for all the promises of European-born fascism, Communism, and socialism, the result is always the same: disunion, acrimony, and infighting.

That schizophrenia is what we should expect from dozens of cultures and histories squeezed into too small a continent full of lots of bright — and quite proud — people. Every new Europe always ends up as old Europe."

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