Greece has now lost almost 1/4 of its GDP in 5years; foreign companies sweep their cash out of the country before close of business every night; Greek banks have lost almost half their deposits as people camp outside cashpoints; political extremism is on the rise on both right and left, and there are even reports of Dickensian diseases appearing in parts of Athens that did not have slums before but do now.
Europe’s hubristic imperial overstretch
By Andrew Roberts
The key text for the coming dismemberment of the European Union can be found in that compendium of homespun wisdom and haunting melodies, The English Hymnal. In The Day Thou Gavest, Lord is Ended, John Ellerton reminds us that “earth’s proud empires pass away”. The adjective is crucial: for it is when empires become proud, and thence hubristic, that their days become numbered. It is now time for us to debate the precise moment when that fate befell the Brussels economic empire.
For the first French empire and the Nazi empire the moment historians call “imperial overstretch” is simple to spot: they both invaded Russia. The second French empire suicidally sent the Ems Telegram to Otto von Bismarck, ensuring its speedy downfall in the Franco-Prussian War. The Soviet empire invaded Afghanistan on Christmas day 1979, just as the Habsburgs had invaded Serbia in 1914. Imperial overstretch was obvious, at least in retrospect, in Britain’s invasion of the Boer republics, a war it eventually won, but only after it had become Britain’s Vietnam. For the Ottomans, the decision to join the Central powers in 1914 condemned a six-century-old empire to the scrapheap in less than a decade.
Historians will long debate the hubris moment for the Roman empire. For my money, it was when Diocletian established the Tetrarchy in 293AD, splitting the empire into four, a classic sign of hubris. Here in the US, the electorate is about to enter its own moment of hubristic over-reach, when it re-elects an administration committed effectively to nationalising healthcare, which represents 15.2 per cent of its economy, at the same time that it has a $15.56 trillion national debt, with no plans to rein it in.
So when was it that the Brussels empire over-reached, and became more concerned about its own expansion and glory, its own ambitions for hegemony, than about the daily economic wellbeing of its citizens? Was it when Greece was admitted in 1981, a country whose basic economic make-up had nothing in common with the original six as conjoined by the Treaty of Rome in March 1957? Those countries – West Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Italy – at least had a natural synergy since they had formed the European Coal and Steel Community six years earlier, whose “higher authority” had supranational powers.
Or was in when Spain and Portugal joined in 1986, cementing their admission into the rank of democratic nations only five years after Antonio Tejero’s attempted fascist coup, but again adding little in terms of genuine economic synergy to a project that still represented itself as a primarily economic one?
A much better candidate for the imperial over-reach moment, however, would be the European Economic Community’s Edinburgh Conference of December 11 and 12, 1992. It was then, after the Danes had rejected the Maastricht treaty the previous June, that the EU decided not to take their no for an answer. Too much was bound up in the project, too many hopes of one day supplanting the US as the top-dog world economic power were invested in it, to allow a small country like Denmark to derail it. So the following May, with every conceivable blandishment presented to them, the Danes approved Maastricht by a hardly resounding 56.7 per cent (after the French had approved it by an even less emphatic 51 per cent) On November 1, 1993 the EEC became the EU and a political entity on the world stage.
There is a moment in the lives of empires when its most fanatical adherents convince themselves that one last “big push” will see them through to victory, whatever the cost. It was a psychological feature that gripped Generals Hindenberg and Ludendorff (and occasionally Field Marshal Haig) in the first world war, and the German and Japanese general staffs in the second world war. Future historians might see the creation of the single currency in 1999 as Brussels’ Pearl Harbor moment, where it simply went too far ever to be able to retract, and invited threats and dangers that must one day overwhelm it.
Along with the cognitive dissonance required for faith in the efficacy of the “big push”, another well-known mental disorder is that of the “mark”, or victim, in a con trick who actually wants to be swindled out of his money. This explains what happened in 1999 when Brussels blithely accepted Greece’s statements about its economic health in good faith, and allowed it to join the single currency on January 1 that year. On a deeper level Brussels knew perfectly well that Greece was lying about its debt, but on an institutional level the mark was anxious to be conned. Brussels assumed that with rising markets it would all be fine in the end.
Well, here we are in the endgame, and it is certainly not all right. Greece has now lost almost a quarter of its gross domestic product in five years; foreign companies sweep their cash out of the country before close of business every night; Greek banks have lost almost half their deposits as people camp outside cashpoints; political extremism is on the rise on both right and left, and there are even reports of Dickensian diseases appearing in parts of Athens that did not have slums before but do now.
The testament of history is so often witness to the hubris-nemesis phenomenon that it is worth repeating, since there is a way out of this for Angela Merkel, François Hollande and a few others, though not many. If Napoleon had stayed one day in Moscow, rather than a month, and returned to Vilnius before the frost descended, there might be a Bonaparte on the throne of France today. If the Ottomans had stayed neutral or joined the Allies in 1914, the Caliph might still be reigning in Istanbul. Nothing is inevitable if empires do not overstretch.
Germany and France should, therefore, in as orderly and honourable a way as they can, return to the safety and the rationality of the original Treaty of Rome, reinstitute the “six”, and keep the euro only for those countries that deserve membership on the logical grounds of genuine economic synergy. These are utterly removed from the commission’s hubristic fetish of global hegemony.
The writer’s books include ‘The Storm of War’ and ‘A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900’ |
