…and I’d like to get US Green Cards for my children”
This extraordinary statement came this morning (Sept 14th) in the Hemicycle of the European parliament in Strasbourg, in a debate on the euro economic crisis. The speaker was Jan Vincent Rostowski, Finance Minister of Poland speaking for the current Polish Presidency of the EU.
Rostowski mentioned the possibility of war in the context of an anecdote about a conversation he’d had with a former colleague, now the head of a major bank. Admittedly he probably thought he was merely emphasising the scale of the economic crisis and the importance of finding a solution. But still, talk of a European war, here in Strasbourg, this great symbol of reconciliation between France and Germany, came as a shock.
He’s wrong, of course. The crisis may cause all kinds of upheaval, but a major war in Europe is inconceivable. What is much more likely is major civil disorder. Nigel Farage gave a powerful speech in which he decried the euro project for denying freedom and democracy to the Greek people. He recalled how a “troika” — three officials, from the EU, the ECB and the IMF — had arrived in Athens to tell the elected Greek government what it had to do. Greece is locked in an economic prison where its jailors — the EU institutions — have overridden all democratic initiative. The one thing Greece needs to do is to get out from under, to default, devalue and to establish a new national currency. Admittedly this will be extremely painful, but as Martin Callanan said in his speech, it is the least worst option.
Apart from the ECR (European Conservatives) and the EFD (the Farage group), all the other speakers called for more integration, more economic powers for the Commission (Joseph Daul of the EPP, our former group, called for a “Big Bang” of integration, and for new euro-debt instruments, or euro bonds). Across the mainstream of the europhile parliament, there was only one solution on offer — more Europe!
Apparently Albert Einstein remarked that a sign of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again, in the expection of a different outcome. Yet that is an apt description of the European project. At every turn of the road, facing every new problem, the call is always for “More Europe”. And things have always got worse — now to the stage where the euro currency, and the EU itself, face an existential crisis. Like the Borgias, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They still call for “more Europe”. Perhaps they are clinically insane.
How I see it is like this:
Greek people revolt and start a revolution which makes parliamentary government impossible. Chaos results on the streets. While Baroness Ashton does nothing and while the Commission makes idle threats (no army), the Greek Generals take power, leave the EU completely, devalue the Euro/Drachma and go on a productive search for lefties.
At the moment, I read, the streets are becoming less safe, there is more and more difficulty to keeping body and soul together and people are getting angrier and angrier in Greece, that heir to the Ottoman Empire.