New York Times
October 24, 2011
Jean Monnet, the postwar architect of European unity, once wrote: “Nothing is possible without men, but nothing is lasting without institutions.” When humankind fails, the best institutions save it from the brink. The forging of the European Union is up there with the U.S. Constitution as an act of creative genius.
Loving an entity is hard, given the intangibility of the thing, but I love the bland Brussels institutions that gave my generation a peace denied its forbears — all those young men engraved in stone and granite on melancholy town squares across Europe. It’s a measure of the success of the European Union that peace is now taken for granted by its half billion inhabitants. Nobody pauses at the memorials. These days I find myself wanting to shout: “Remember!”
That’s a tall order when people glide from France to Germany and onto Poland, across the killing fields of old, without pause for a border, and the Basque separatists of ETA have just laid down their weapons in Europe’s last armed confrontation. Yet I detect a dawning sense of the gravity of Europe’s crisis — its political rather than financial peril — in the parallels being drawn between dying for Danzig in 1939 and paying for Athens in 2011.
These are dangerous times. Helmut Schmidt, who as a German is hardwired to the nature of cataclysm and at 92 knows what sacrifice brought a borderless Europe, declared as much the other day, lambasting “anyone who considers his own nation more important than common Europe.” There are plenty of such people these days, driven by frustration or boredom or pettiness to the refuge of the tribe.
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