The British have never been quite sure what to make of Europe and tend to flit between contempt and envy. But since the Eurozone began its descent towards accidental suicide, the tabloids have shifted to a weirder mix of delight at having been proved right that Britain never should have got involved in the first place, and outrage that we may be dragged with the rest of the continent anyway. Now, the focus is on Greece’s slide towards failed-statehood, and on Germany’s new found place as Europe’s political kingmaker, deposing governments in Spain and Italy at will and calling the new French President Francois Hollande to Angela Merkel’s knee barely a few hours after he took office.
While the right-wing side of the British press gloats and rants, the hacks who supported the European project from the beginning have been left with really very little to write about beyond depressing post-mortem analyses of the near-lifeless economies of southern Europe. The elephant in the room seems to be what the UK should actually do to try to stop complete euro-meltdown, or at least how it might save itself. No one seems to know.
Victoria Hislop falls back on omens as the only hope Greece has left, and tells of how the clouds parted to allow a rainbow to fall on Athens during her last visit, mixing Greek and apparently Irish myth to express her hope that ‘Greece can find its pot of gold’. Peter Hitchens geared himself up for overdrive though, calling Germany an empire in all but name and accusing it of colonial exploitation of Europe’s weaker southern states. Much of the rest of his Daily Mail column reads like an attempt to clear out all the insults for the EU he has saved up over the years and now needs to get rid of. He calls the EU a ‘stupid empire’, and at that a poor substitute for the USSR’s evil empire, with a weird mix of paranoid outrage and sarcasm. The EU is apparently also a mad hospital, and once hapless member states are incarcerated within, ‘the best thing to do is leave. If you can’t get out, you will probably die’.
Andrew Rawnsley points out the absurdity of Cameron now joining in with Obama, Hollande, and just about the rest of the world to convince Germany of the insanity of the very same austerity drive that he is now defending to the UK electorate. He has gambled, apparently correctly, that the British public will be so delighted to watch the Euro fall apart that they will not even notice the contradiction.
Paul Seabright reminds us in the Guardian that however ludicrous the amounts of money wasted by the Greeks, both the money they spent and the things they bought came from the rest of Europe. Who the hell in Germany thought that Greece needed to be the 4th biggest arms importer in the world? The rest of Europe was sucked into the credit boom just as much as Greece. Everyone else reaped just as much money as they did, and now we deserve to take our share of pain as well.
