The Strengths of Europe

How could any nation possibly be more divided than Europe currently is? The European Union encompasses 450 million people, making it the third-most-populous political government or union of governments in the world.

It currently encompasses 27 different national governments, almost as many different official languages and three different forms of Christianity as the main religions — with long histories of war and conflict among each of them to boot.

And now three out of the 17 nations in the common euro currency — Greece, Portugal and Ireland — are in serious financial crisis, while Italy and Spain (the fourth- and fifth-largest EU economies, respectively) show worrying signs of following them down the same path.

To add to the apparent confusion, the divisions of government within the European Union are becoming more numerous, not less. Scotland now has its own parliament. Slovakia became independent of the Czech Republic not many years after the collapse of communism in Central Europe.

Belgium and Italy both have strong, enduring political movements that advocate breaking up the existing political divisions of the country to restore far older administrative, economic and cultural identities.

Yet, it is this very mosaic of relatively small political units — which have the flexibility to subdivide further — that has given the European Union the extraordinary peace, cooperation and political flexibility it has shown for so long.

Lest we forget, the predecessors of today’s Prophets of Doom were already thick on the ground when the Treaty of Rome created a Common Market of the six core nations of the European Economic Community in 1957.

Since then, the 180 million people or so in that original “common economic space” have increased by 250%, and the number of states within it has grown by 21. A common currency has been created for 17 of them.

In contrast, the population of the “common economic space” of the United States, whose economic growth is often compared with Europe’s to the latter's disfavor, has only grown by 150 million people — compared with 270 million in Europe.

And the United States has become the greatest debtor nation in world history, with the worst annual balance of payments deficits ever recorded by any nation. In contrast, the eurozone posted a €4.3 billion external trade surplus in July 2011.

Better yet, this astonishing record of achievement was reached without any war or repression being imposed on any of the member nations or any portion of their population. It was achieved without any internal revolutions or civil wars.

True, progress toward the deepening and expansion of the EU was always slow and always gradual because it must be always consensual. That usually involves extremely complicated political and economic compromises. But the bottom line is that it worked. Ultimately, the Europeans do use crises well in that the continent arrives at the right outcomes (i.e., reforms).

Today, the disparities of wealth between the “old” EU member states of the west and those of the “new” post-Soviet east are far less than the disparities of wealth between rich and poor in India and China.

That is true both for India’s high-tech southern states and the wealthy and middle classes of its “northern quadrilateral” area of major industrial growth, as well as for China’s booming coastal regions (the workshop of the world) — and these two countries’ still widely impoverished interior and rural heartlands.

Some experts, such as Gordon Chang, fear that if China’s fragile, export-driven economic and financial systems falter or collapse, a wave of instability and chaos could sweep the entire country as the still-unprivileged 900 million plus “have-nots” vent their frustrations at the 400 million or so “haves.”

Europe does not have anything like those regional or class tensions to contend with. To be poor in Europe is still to be vastly more secure, protected by national social security safety nets, than the terrifying total destitution that still afflicts hundreds of millions of people in both India and China.

The European social system and economy also has far smaller divides between the very wealthy and the urban underclass than those that afflict the United States.

And despite all the heady headlines, the European middle classes — even in countries like Britain, Ireland, Portugal and Spain that are economically retrenching — have not been remotely as afflicted by job losses, loss of government benefits or home foreclosures as the middle classes of the United States.

No insurgent populist movement remotely comparable to the Tea Party in the United States has shown any sign of emerging in Europe.

The hot button populist issue, of course, in several European nations is to control or curtail immigration. Whatever its future, it has not been fueled by any of the economic and social deprivation, anger and fear that is now driving such forces in the United States.

Finally, the populations of Europe show no sign of hating, fearing or wanting to roll back or destroy their national governments just for the sake of it, or to conform to some abstract political principle.

Politics in the European Union is still about the art of the possible. And therefore compromise within European political cultures has not become a dirty word. It is the enabling formula for stability, growth, peace and success.

Show at least 900 million people in India and another 900 million in China how the poorest elements of the populations of the European Union nations live — and they will be green with envy.

So would, by the way, at least two-thirds of the population of the United States, provided the realities of life in Europe were displayed to them by the media and political elites with any sense of factuality — and not the inherent desire to vilify.

Europe’s weaknesses, problems and future challenges are all very real and should never be minimized.

But as the great experiment of peaceful European economic cooperation and political unity enters its seventh decade — from the creation of the European Iron and Steel Community in 1951 — its prospects for resilience and survival, and for adapting to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world, appear to be at last as good as those of India, China and the United States — and arguably a lot better.

Europe’s internal divisions are doable stuff, compared to what ails the other major powers. Now, against the backdrop of history and all its weight, there is some good news coming from Europe.

Once the Greek debt rescheduling, expansion of the larger financial stability fund and bank stabilization are undertaken, we will all see Europe on the road to recovery.

It is especially unclear whether the United States has the same internal political resolve and ability to compromise. If not, the United States would then be the developed world's basket case.