A new Europe must be built on the ruins of the old

by Simon Jenkins

Guardian
November 10, 2011

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a cliche. Crisis spirals out of control and Armageddon moves to the brink of abyss. "Europe" is too big to fail yet too big to succeed. Each newscast is a crash course in economics, each headline an incitement to suicide. But since we are not at war and few understand what is going on, the rest cannot believe it. As if watching the fall of Icarus, they sense the gods are angry but return quietly to the plough.

This week the European backwash of the crash of 2008 moved way beyond high finance. Economics may have pushed politics to the wall, but in Greece, Italy and, more important, Germany, politics is hitting back, hard. Yelling, spitting and choking with frustration, it has had enough of economics, and has beaten it to the ground. Yesterday it claimed its first scalp, demanding a new ruler of Greece.

There is no point in European Union acolytes loftily opining that "it was a pity" Greece was admitted to the euro. It was more than a pity, it was a crime. There is no point in bewailing the reluctance of Germans to bail out Greeks or Latins, or let their bankers print billions of cash. There is no point in hectoring or dreaming. A 50-year fiction is over. As often before in history, a new Europe must be built on the ruins of the old, and we had better get used to it.

More