Bret Stephens: Europe Needs a Tea Party
[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.]
Once upon a not-very-long-ago time, Europe was the land of the future.
In 2005, American trendspotter Jeremy Rifkin published "The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream." The same year, Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid came out with "The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy." A year later we got "Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century" by British think-tanker Mark Leonard.
Whoops.
Say what you will about most seers, they usually have the sense to kick the proof of their predictions a century or more into the future. Sadly for our authors, Europe's dismal reckoning is unfolding now. Month after month, strikers, protestors and rioters in Athens, Paris, Dublin and London have offered their own verdict on Europe's future. So have the bond markets. Sooner or later this combined revolt of workers, students, pensioners and financiers will be joined—albeit for very different reasons—by middle-class taxpayers, mostly German, who will not endlessly finance the profligacy of people they're already inclined to detest.
What will happen then? Jean Monnet, the EU's founding father, famously predicted that Europe would be "forged in crises." In this crisis, it's just as likely that Europe will be broken by it...
Read entire article at WSJ
Once upon a not-very-long-ago time, Europe was the land of the future.
In 2005, American trendspotter Jeremy Rifkin published "The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream." The same year, Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid came out with "The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy." A year later we got "Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century" by British think-tanker Mark Leonard.
Whoops.
Say what you will about most seers, they usually have the sense to kick the proof of their predictions a century or more into the future. Sadly for our authors, Europe's dismal reckoning is unfolding now. Month after month, strikers, protestors and rioters in Athens, Paris, Dublin and London have offered their own verdict on Europe's future. So have the bond markets. Sooner or later this combined revolt of workers, students, pensioners and financiers will be joined—albeit for very different reasons—by middle-class taxpayers, mostly German, who will not endlessly finance the profligacy of people they're already inclined to detest.
What will happen then? Jean Monnet, the EU's founding father, famously predicted that Europe would be "forged in crises." In this crisis, it's just as likely that Europe will be broken by it...