Financial Times
October 24, 2011
“The facts, ma’am, just the facts”: these words, attributed to the detective Joe Friday in the American 1950s crime series Dragnet, resonate in today’s eurozone crisis. Will anybody help Angela Merkel, German chancellor and a trained physicist with a sharp analytical mind, to get hold of the facts blurred by this misguided eurozone debate? Or must we wait for François Hollande, Socialist challenger for the French presidency, a European with hyper-sober realism, to grasp the facts his country’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has so far ignored?
Europe is facing clear and present danger. Europe: not the eurozone, not the subcontinent south of the channel, but the society that after triggering two world wars has finally learned to peacefully build on a wonderfully diverse cultural heritage. That Europe is now in danger of being sucked into a black hole of mistrust, in the course of a long-lasting series of economic and political failures.
As Europe grapples with financial instability and its leaders hold a series of summits to try to agree a rescue plan, free-floating financial capital keeps shunning entrepreneurial investment, maintaining that instability. In the present world, only a green growth strategy – currently spearheaded by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Developement – offers the opportunity to turn sufficient amounts of financial capital into entrepreneurial investment. Transforming the cities, businesses and homes of Europe so as to increase welfare while reducing damages to the environment is widely seen as a desirable goal, and it can trigger the investments needed to overcome the present crisis.
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