According to the dictionary, schizophrenia is:
“a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.”
In Europe, they’re having the same thing—only writ large: It’s not that the political/financial leadership of Europe is at odds with the people—it’s that they’re two minds locked in a single body, struggling for control.
In the one hemisphere of this divided brain, the political/financial leadership is convinced the European union is something devoutly to be wished—no matter what the costs, no matter what fortune and the people throw up in opposition.
In the other hemisphere of the europhrenic brain, the people of Europe overwhelmingly do not want integretation “at all costs”. In some parts (a lot of parts) of Europe, they don’t want integration at all.
Now, like a lot of schizophrenics, europhrenia has been latent over the past dozen years—since the 1999 monetary union, as a matter of fact—because everything’s been going great guns.
This is natural—and completely predictable: You ever see a schiphrenic have a break-down when he’s happy, high, and just got laid? No you do not—he only has his little “episode” when he’s stressed.
Same with europhrenia: Everything was copacetic between 1999 and 2008—though there were signs of the disease. In fact, lots of unmistakable signs of europhrenia:
- No country ever voted for monetary union—ever. European monetary integration only ever happened by either government diktat or the legislature overriding the will of the people.
- Switzerland is not a eurozone member because, although the political leadership rather desperately wanted in on the union, legally the only way to do such a monetary union is through a Swiss-wide referendum—and the Swiss political leadership knew that they would lose any such referendum.
- In the nations where the European Constitution was put to a vote in 2005—Spain, France, Holland, Luxembourg—the results were so embarrassing that the other countries retreated on a referendum. In Spain, the Yes vote won—but in the lowest voter turn-out in Spain ever—while in France and Holland, the Constitution lost by resounding margins. And this was back in 2005, when everything was booming. In the end, rather than face the electorate, the European Constitution was superceded by the Treaty of Lisbon—a work-around that short-circuited the democratic process, and got the European leadership what it wanted.
These examples are to emphasize one and the same thing:
The people of Europe never wanted total European integration, not even in the best of times—whereas the European leadership adamantaly insisted upon it.
Now, we are no longer basking in the golden glow of good times: On the contrary, Europe is facing a nasty solvency crisis.
So naturally, we’re heading into the manic phase of europhrenia.
The basic problem of the current crisis is, countries of the European periphery—Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy—took on too much cheap debt from banks in the core eurozone countries—France, Germany and Holland—and now are unable to pay for it. It’s not more complicated than that.
(One could argue that the reason the European nations overspent was that the leaders were basically bribing the people with a false sense of affluence, bought and paid for via debt, so that they would acquiesce to the European Union and the eurozone. But that’s for another post.)
There are five ways to get over an unpayable sovereign debt:
- Default on the debt.
- Restructure the debt, with both sides making sacrifices.
- Inflate the currency, as the United States is currently doing.
- Lend more money in the form of “bailouts”, which is essentially kicking the can down the road.
- Or squeeze blood from a stone—i.e., impose austerity measures.
Option #1—default—helps no one, and wrecks economies in the short term. Option #3—inflating the currency—is a bad idea for the euro, as it is too young a currency—if the ECB starts really inflating, there might well be a panic out of the euro. Option #4—lending more money—is just postponing the day of reckoning, while adding more to the debt burden. And Option #5—austerity measures—cripples an economy by leaving it too weak to grow its way out of the solvency jam that it’s in.
The sensible thing, of course, would be Option #2...
