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The Latest Crisis in the Euro-zone: A Reassessment of the European Union

Yoav J. Tenembaum - 7/21/2011

The latest acute crisis in the Euro-zone should make us re-assess the whole nature of the European Union.

Let me start by acknowledging something important: I have always been opposed to the Euro, since its inception. Indeed, I have always been against transforming what should have been an economic confederation of free countries into a federal state of Europe.

I am what the British would call a Euro-skeptic; I have always been.

To be sure, I was, and still am, a wholehearted supporter of the idea of setting up a loose, confederative framework of democratic states. I was in favor of the European Economic Community. I am opposed to the European Union, certainly as it has developed so far.

To begin with, the whole idea of attempting to impose a federal setting on diverse cultures, distinct societies, having contrasting levels of economic developments, over such a wide territory, seems to me to be artificial.

It is a contrived exercise aimed at fulfilling a supposedly noble idea, which is counter-productive, as we are currently witnessing. The end-result could not be anything but detrimental to the people involved.

The idea of the European Union as it now stands could never have evolved naturally, spontaneously, willingly. It had to be shaped from above, designed by an elite group, a kind of social engineering at a continental level.

What strikes one about the idea of the European Union is the peculiarly un-democratic mechanism it is endowed with. Particularly, one is astonished at the fact that whenever a referendum is held on a vital, central question related to the nature and evolution of the European Union, leading to a No vote, a way is always found to reverse the vote by holding a further referendum, on occasion with a changed wording that could guarantee a Yes vote.

It has been in vogue to compare the attempt at establishing a federal Europe with the setting up of the United States of America.

The comparison is incorrect. People of different countries, from diverse cultures and social backgrounds immigrated to the United States, a country in situ, an already established sovereign entity. These immigrants were ready to live in a different country, accepting its socio-political settings and integrating into its singular culture.

The European Union is an attempt at creating, from above, a new federal entity out of already established states, with widely differing cultures, endowed with distinct political traditions and in the midst of a diverse economic development.

The original idea for the creation of a common market of European countries was aimed at preventing a recurrence of the acute conflicts that hitherto had beset Europe, which had led more often than not to tragic wars. This noble objective could have been achieved by devising an economic confederation of sovereign states that falls short of a federal structure, such as the one that has been developed since the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.

There is hardly a need for a common currency to prevent a European war. A central European bank has not rendered the possibility of an armed conflict in Europe less likely.

Even the attempt at devising common foreign and defence policies at a European level does not, by itself, make war impossible.

If at all, war has become a remote possibility by the creation of the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the European Union. Had the process stopped there, at the level of a confederative framework of European states, the aim of averting war among its member states would have been reached.

What actually made war much less likely was the simple fact that all the members of the European Economic Community were endowed with democratic political regimes. Modern history has shown us that democracies don't tend to fight each other. They need not be members of the European Union to prove that.