Friday 26 August 2011

Eurozone? Danger Zone

Everyone who wasn't an involved politician pointed out that setting up a European currency couldn't work, at the outset. There was no central control ('there will be baby, there will be' said the politicians) so individual countries did their individual thing tied to a currency set at a level that suited Germany. They were the bankers of this European project (or suicide pact) after all.

In the background was the potential for upset with their neighbour, the French, with each having already threatened war if the other does not step aside on the issue of who actually runs the EU. But the most important problem was the difficulties facing nations that were not Germany. Like Brown in the UK, most Treasuries around Europe decided to ignore fiscal reality and hope the mess they could clearly see would somehow, miraculously sort itself out. Or that daddy Germany would bail them out.

Britain had stayed out of the Euro project and Labour made great claims for their skill in this respect, with Balls and Brown both claiming it was they and they alone who understood and foresaw the problems. Naturally, Labour wanted in desperately and only fear of the people at the polls held them back. Power after all was their exclusive reason for being there and their drug.

So having retained some ability to control our own destiny, we could watch the Eurozone slowly melt. It is clear now that the fecklessness of Greece in particular was due to Greek politicians feeling that all responsibility had been removed from their shoulders and so they just partied. Hard. Similarly, Ireland, Spain and Portugal all came to dislike the EU when the subsidies dried up.

The answer to the current crisis (entirely of their own making) in the minds of EU politicians is to seize control of all Eurozone countries, to run them from the centre. But what centre? Germany has been providing the money but the French feel that they are uniquely gifted in the art of running things and it cannot be foreseen that they would let German hegemony reign in a United Europe, in the final creation of the the new USSR.

So now, I fear we have the horrific confluence of economic instability, power grabs over sovereign nations and the old argument over who should run Europe. This is a mighty driver for a new European war, instigated by the usual suspects France and Germany. And in this regard, the recent rise in militaristic activity by the French is alarming. Their military equipment development has been accelerating and they have been aggressively showing it off to the world, partly to achieve international sales, but also for martial display. This is a clear signal of a nation that thinks it may face a challenge and that has steeled itself for conflict.

The EU has been seen, particularly in Britain as a silly bauble, a corrupt group of, in the main, useless politicians playing a grand game of Risk. They could be left alone to their big salaries, pensions, subsidised shopping and all the other contrivances that they have created, emulating the power clique of the old Soviet Union and its two class system; the powerful and the workers. But it is a dangerous construct and these people, so long treated as children to be ignored have built a monster.

The days of lazy politicians are over and yet that is still all we have. Is the luxury of our Titanic about to meet the colossal dead weight of the EU iceberg? Is the status of Alsace-Lorraine once more of concern in the minds of stupid, but powerful people? Britain could be the country to bring the world to its senses, having seen it all before. But that would require a politician of Churchillian proportions and last time I looked we have only something less than Chamberlains.

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