Guardian
Editorial
March 14, 2011
It is like being in an accident and emergency reception on a Friday night. To inhabit this place we call Europe is to see nations wheeled in on trolleys from a series of pile-ups. First the banking crash; then the sovereign debt crises of Greece and Ireland – with ambulance crews poised for 999 calls from Portugal, Spain and Italy. Once admitted, treatment can be worse than the trauma: the austerity packages, welfare cuts, job losses. Recovery is slow, fragile and sensitive to changes, like oil prices being pushed up by the revolution sweeping the Arab world. Small wonder that the banks feel "stressed". A good number of Europe's citizens do too.
The poll we publish today is taken from a sample of more than 5,000 people of working age in the five leading EU states – Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Poland – and clearly speaks to a crisis in European governance. Only 6% truly trust their government, and just 9% think their politicians are honest, either in power or out of it. Political anxiety is driven by economic pessimism, particularly in France and Germany, the powerhouse of Europe. Almost three-quarters of the French think they will be worse off a decade from now, and so do half of all those polled in Germany, despite its economic recovery.
If Europe is unthinkable without its nations, and those nations are led by a generation of politicians so lacklustre that the only character who stands out, for all the wrong reasons, is Silvio Berlusconi, does that mean that the grand European project is on the wane, however you define it – as a market, a union, a currency, a set of rules, standards and law? Which would now seem more eloquent of the collective mood – the optimism of Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the EU's official anthem, or John Cage's four minutes and 33 seconds of silence?
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