Left Out in the Cold: The Problematic Partial Inclusion of Europe’s East

Europe will always be unfinished, because it is an idea as much as a geographic expression, and a rather idealistic one at that.

The European Union and a few countries which opted not to join, like Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland, have their problems – structural economic imbalances in the EU which threaten its sustainability, nationalism on the rise, democratic regression in countries like Hungary and Romania – but overall these countries are still among the wealthiest and the freest in the world.

The geographical dilemmas of completing a Europe “whole, free, and at peace” remain, however. The peninsulas and islands jutting into the northeastern Atlantic can be pretty sure they’re part of Europe, as can anyone living anywhere near the Alps. But the seas and straits between Gibraltar and the Caucasus and the Ural Mountains are a pretty arbitrary divide. The problem of only partial inclusion in Europe has been particularly damaging for the more than 260 million citizens of the Russian Federation, Turkey, and Ukraine.

The EU has its reasons to consolidate its troubled project rather than continue to expand to new countries. However, Western Europe has a record of sending contradictory messages to the countries in the continent’s east. These include extending candidate status to Turkey in 2005, then electing Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy with their “privileged partnership” and non for Ankara; refusing to confirm the potential of future membership for Ukraine and Moldova, despite the EU treaties opening such potential to “any European State” which respects European values; expanding visa-free travel to all the Christian countries in the Balkans before any of the Muslim countries; and rhetoric from European Council President Herman Van Rompuy about European unification’s roots in Middle Ages Latin Christianity, which dismayed Bulgaria. 

With Catholic Croatia now safely in the EU, 23 years after Germany unilaterally recognized its declaration of independence, and the four Eastern Christian countries in the bloc (Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, and Romania) in not particularly good standing in the eyes of the older member states, many EU citizens would be happy to keep these borders. These are the realities of how a union of 28 disparate democracies handles the prospect of extending pooled sovereignty to some of more than a dozen countries further east. These nations are seen as less culturally similar to the older member states. Some are quite large, some quite small. They are fragile democracies at best, many fractured, several with breakaway enclaves. All are relatively poor. But ambivalence in EU capitals and mixed messages sent by Western European leaders imposes real costs and dilemmas on the democrats of Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and other countries.

Extending the hugely successful European integration project to the east was always going to be a huge challenge. There are many reasons to call Europe’s eastern neighborhood policy a great success – the EU has absorbed 11 former communist countries (12 when you include East Germany), with over 100 million people. But some clear failings are seen with the three big countries in Europe’s eastern reaches. Although Russia and Turkey have had a good 21st century in many respects, with incomes and international influence steadily rising since the year 2000, it is not surprising that both of them as well as Ukraine have seen massive protests by pro-democracy / pro-Western citizens in the last three years, which autocratic leaders attempted to crush.

Russia, with 142 million people, was always too big and proud to join the EU. But Russia is clearly a part of modern Europe in many ways – economically integrated, if mostly as a source of energy sent through pipelines and oligarch’s cash spent in London and Switzerland, a member of political groupings such as the Council of Europe and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a participant in Eurovision and UEFA soccer tournaments. However, democracy failed in Russia, damaged by the chaos of the wild 90s and then smothered in the Putin era by an elite prioritizing its personal short-term interests and willing to ignore a clear long-term downward trajectory masked by high energy prices. European companies and many leaders – above all in Germany and the City of London – tried to look past Russia’s democratic failings and corruption. But if Berlin’s “Annäherung durch Verflechtung” (rapprochement through interdependence) worked, “Wandel durch Handel” (change through trade) failed. Vladimir Putin watched as NATO expanded to Russia’s borders (as was the right thing to do – the Baltics had very good cause to want NATO membership), watched the Western intervention in Kosovo (again, the right thing to do in the face of ethnic cleansing), watched the U.S. invade Iraq (a grievous mistake in which the U.S. ignored some of Putin’s better advice), and suffered a major political defeat in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. Putin’s anti-Western side was stoked and he transformed from a awkward partner of the West to an adversary. Russia took actions to destabilize its neighbors whenever they tried to move closer to the EU and the United States. Those who claim that the Obama Administration’s “reset” policy was wrongheaded are unrealistic or ideologues – it was necessary to try to mend ties with Russia and progress was made on nuclear reductions, Russian membership in the World Trade Organization, cooperation on Afghanistan, Iran, and Libya. Dmitry Medvedev was not completely a puppet as president. But in 2011 Putin announced he had decided to return to the presidency – a historic mistake for Russia – and responded to subsequent protests with greater repression. At the same time, Russia backed the Assad regime in Syria to the hilt as its killed tens of thousands of its citizens and radicalized the opposition. Washington – and importantly Berlin – have rightly responded with more vocal criticism of Putin and his regime.

Turkey, with a fast-growing population of 80 million, is about to surpass Germany on the population table. Many Europeans see it as too big, too poor, and too Muslim to join the family. Turkish membership would change the EU, and for EU citizens and leaders who follow the polls, the negatives of such a change outweighed the positives – greater diversity, stronger demographics, etc. – which required greater imagination to see. The arguments of those who saw the benefits were drowned out. Turkey’s candidacy has effectively been dead for years, buried by the hard opposition of several member states and ultimately by the subsequent actions of the increasingly dictatorial Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. For many years, Erdoğan advanced democracy in Turkey by pursuing European integration and civilian control of the military. But his uglier side has been unavoidable in the last year, as his response to the Gezi Park protestors made clear to the world that he had a purely majoritarian view of democracy and did not respect those of his countrymen who disagreed with him. Challenged by a corruption scandal, Erdoğan has responded with purges in the criminal justice system and banning Twitter. He may have substantial support, as the most recent elections again confirmed, but at this point he is clearly damaging Turkey’s democracy.

Ukraine, with 44 million people, is where the autocrats – Putin as well as Viktor Yanukovych – failed. Corruption is even worse in Ukraine than in Russia or Turkey and the country has been consistently misgoverned. Persistent Russian interference, often using its energy monopoly as weapon, has not helped. Critically, the EU has also refused to make clear whether or not Ukraine could ever become a member, limiting politicians’ appetite for reform. President Viktor Yushchenko made a mad dash for NATO membership, despite such a move (and his government) being unpopular within the country, but at the Bucharest Summit in 2008, Germany and France stopped a Bush Administration push to give Ukraine – and Georgia – a Membership Action Plan. Ukraine’s diversity gave it a more competitive and indeed chaotic political space than many of its fellow post-Soviet states, while it remained a fragile economy with terrible government finances and was walloped by the global economic crisis in 2008. In 2010, Yanukovych, rejected in the Orange Revolution, won a fair presidential election, then surprised many in the West with the aggressiveness of his monopolization of the levers of power. He also made moves which pleased Russia, like unconstitutionally extending the lease on the Black Sea Fleet’s base by 25 years. But with the EU offering an Association Agreement including a comprehensive free trade deal, Yanukovych balanced Brussels and Moscow for his own gain as long as he could. In November 2013, his time ran out, and he chose Moscow and gave impetus to the EuroMaidan protests. If he hadn’t used violence against the protests when they were relatively small and imposed draconian “dictatorship laws” in January 2014, Yanukovych might still be in power. Instead, he ended up fleeing in February after several bloody days in Kyiv and an abortive deal brokered by the EU. Ukraine swung west and an incensed Putin invaded and annexed Crimea. Now Ukraine faces major difficulties in maintaining control of its territory even without Crimea, given the activities of secessionists in the east directed and/or inspired by Moscow, while its economy remains on the brink of collapse, elections must be helped, and difficult economic reforms must be implemented.

So all three countries are severely troubled. Russia and Turkey look more autocratic than they have in decades, while Ukraine reached that point earlier in 2014 and currently remains at acute risk of state failure. All three are divided countries, their places in today’s Europe – which for people many means the EU, NATO, or both – are vexed. The reasons for this are manifold, the products of geography, history, economics, and domestic politics and foreign policy in dozens of countries. China’s economic performance over the past three decades has given autocracy a good name, while Putin’s model of so-called “sovereign democracy” has inspired imitators. The United States, leader of the free world, allowed its financial system to blow up the world economy, setting some countries back by a decade, and characteristically did nothing to deal with the root causes of the problem. Both the U.S. and the EU are distracted by internal problems, some very serious, and fatigued with foreign policy and enlargement. But Russia and Turkey heading fast in the wrong direction and Ukraine in chaos are very dangerous indeed for Europe and its allies across the Atlantic.

It is in the enlightened self-interest of Europe and the United States to help Ukraine stabilize and succeed as a less corrupt democracy in which citizens can meet their aspirations and to incentivize democratic development and European integration in Russia and Turkey. But success will require more creativity and generosity than has been in evidence in recent years. 

Croatia Joins the European Union

99 years ago today, on June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Austrian-controlled Bosnia and Herzegovina by a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip. The killing in Sarajevo didn't really start the war in the Balkans, which had been going on for some years as Ottoman control over its over-extended empire collapsed, but it managed to spark a much larger fight across Europe and gave birth to the "short 20th Century." After that ended in 1989-1991, Yugoslavia collapsed for the second time into five and then six and seven countries, hundreds of thousands of people died, and towns were ethnically cleansed before NATO operations brought a tenuous peace. Since then, the countries of the Western Balkans have watched as their neighbors to the north, including former Yugoslav Slovenia, joined the European Union, with all the economic advantages it brings, in 2004, followed by Romania and Bulgaria in 2007.

A few years ago, some optimists in Serbia were hoping to join the EU on the centenary of the assassination. That won't happen, but on Monday, Croatia will become the Union's 28th member in the first enlargement since 2007, before I started my serious study of European political affairs. Enlargement has been Brussels' most effective foreign policy and the accession process is hugely helpful for the European countries still outside the Union. But the policy has looked moribund for a few years, between well-known blockages of candidates Turkey and Macedonia, the EU's extremely serious problems, and the lack of progress on reforms across the region. Today, things are looking up. The EU has just agreed to open accession talks with Serbia, a candidate country since 2011-12, in December or January. It will finally open talks on a Stabilization and Association Agreement with Kosovo, a first step. Even more significantly (since those decisions were based on prior progress) Albania just had a breakthrough election with a peaceful transfer of power to former Tirana mayor Edi Rama and his Socialist Party, a needed solidification of Tirana's democratic credentials which should lead to candidate status.

Croatia will be the last new member for several years, but it must not be the last. During the break-up of Yugoslavia, newly reunified Germany made its first bold unilateral and slightly alarming foreign policy move in recognizing the Western Christian breakaway republics, Slovenia and Croatia, ahead of the rest of the EU and international community. The EU has four Orthodox countries as members, but its signalling about who can belong to Europe has often been daft, for example when it granted visa free travel to everyone in the Balkans except Albania, Bosnia and Kosovo, the three countries with Muslim pluralities. Turkey has been granted candidate status and indeed Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus are granted at least potential candidacy by the Treaty of Rome, which states "Any European State may apply to become a member of the Community." Particularly in a multi-speed European Union, which appears to be destined by developments in the euro crisis response and the Europhobia of the British public, there should be room for any geographically European country which meets the political and economic accession criteria. A revival of the accession process for Turkey is the most effective way outsiders can check the autocratic tendencies of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and support the aspirations of Turks for a democracy that goes deeper than elections. An accession prospect for Ukraine is the only way in the long term to keep Kyiv from slipping into the Eurasian Union which Vladimir Putin is constructing.

Meanwhile in the Western Balkans, tiny Montenegro should lead the pack and Albania is also a relatively straightforward case, both simply need to follow the path to readiness that Croatia took, toughened after many thought Bulgaria and Romania were let in too early. Albania is already a member of NATO (which for the moment also has 28 member states, 22 in common with the EU), which has traditionally come first, Montenegro is likeliest to become NATO's 29th member. Macedonia has been stuck at the starting gate since 2005 over its stupid name dispute with Greece, and it has become more of a basket case, bingeing on the construction of monuments summoning a glorious past rather than reforming for a future in the EU; the name problem must be solved for the country to have a future that is anything but dim. Bosnia and Herzegovina has serious constitutional problems and must transform politically into a more unified state at some point, hopefully peacefully; it will not get into the EU with the present state of affairs. Serbia is the most attractive member in the Western Balkans after Croatia for the EU because of its size and transport opportunities along the Danube Valley and it is also in many ways the most ready in terms of reform; it is also the most repulsive because of its crimes in the 1990s, the persistence of an ugly nationalism, and the Kosovo problem, which has not yet been solved despite progress. Kosovo itself, hobbled by a limbo status of recognition by only half the world, is years behind Serbia in readiness, but they should only join the EU together, with Belgrade along with Madrid, Athens, Bucharest, Bratislava and Nicosia recognizing the full sovereignty of Prishtina. The Germans, thankfully, seem to understand this and they also seem to be leading Brussels' Balkan policy and doing it more responsibly these days. When all six countries have joined the EU, it will be a great accomplishment for the peoples of the region and for Europe as a whole. Until then, congratulations to Croatia.

Oh, and out in the north Atlantic, candidate country Iceland isn't going to join. The euro looks less attractive to them these days and Beijing, interested in increasing its footholds in the Arctic, is waving too much money around.

The EU's Nobel

The European Union won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize a few days ago, and the mockery and anger that followed were as vehement as they were predictable. For what it's worth, I'm not a big fan of giving such awards to institutions rather than individuals. But does the EU deserve such an honor as much as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), the International Atomic Energy Agency (2005), or the United Nations (2001)? Sure.

Yes, the United States and NATO and the Cold War framework helped prevent war in Europe. But they did not guarantee the productive cooperation between former enemies and rivals which has changed the continent and made war in Western Europe unthinkable. The founding fathers of the European Community were far-sighted men, and their project of European integration helped create an enormously prosperous continent for hundreds of millions of people. Earlier hold-outs like the Sweden, Finland and Austria joined in the 1990s precisely because the European Union was a roaring success, and Europe and the EU were starting to mean the same thing in the eyes of many. For Greece, Spain, and Portugal, and then for the 10 countries of Central and Eastern Europe that joined in 2004 and 2007, and for those in the Western Balkans and further east who continue to look to the EU, it means something even more important - an anchoring in a community of democratic values for people who had lived under dictatorships in the decades after World War II, and feared its return.

So why the moaning? Yes, European governments and the bureaucrats who make the EU run don't seem as heroic as activists facing authoritarian governments or fighting for development and rights for the world's poorest. And yes, there are hordes of British and American commentators who have always hated the EU, and those keen to further debase the prize to further embarrass the controversial 2009 winner, President of-then-less-than-a-year Barack Obama. But much of the complaints are because of the timing. The committee of Norweigans have given the EU the prize when it looks like it might be in its dying throes. Or else in the birth pangs of a more integrated polity which would be constructed against the will of a Euroskeptic movement that has never been larger or noisier. The EU has utterly failed to handle its crisis of confidence, with Angela Merkel's Germany imposing austerity on the troubled states at a level that is self-defeating in terms of calming the crisis. Elections cannot fundamentally change policy in countries like Greece. Even if a "Grexit" looks less likely in the short term than it recently did, a Spanish bailout looks in the cards. Merkel and her finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble poo-poo any talk of a fundamental change in their policy. European Central Bank President Mario Draghi helps, but makes clear he can't save the euro by himself. Europe lives in a state of permanent economic crisis. The European Union's future is, bluntly, bleak. And the Nobel Committee is obviously hoping to spur greater Brussels and European capitals to save their union, whatever it takes.

The late Wangari Maathai was a Kenyan environmental and political activist. She was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2004. I see her as among the more interesting and more deserving of the recent award winners, and there is no doubt at all in my mind that she was morally superior to the likes of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder and Tony Blair. But on some level I wish the EU had received this award in October 2004.

In 2004, membership of the European Union increased from 15 to 25, as the countries of Central Europe "returned to Europe." That was an accomplishment worth awarding in and of itself, on top of all that the EU had done over the decades to cement Franco-German friendship and southern European democracy and to spread prosperity across the continent. The EU was also wrapped up in its constitutional debate - before it had become a constitutional crisis which was only put on ice in 2009, only to be reopened months later by the Greek debt crisis. Would such an elite recognition of an elite project have helped the "Yes" vote in France and the Netherlands in 2005? Maybe not, but one could hope. Would a European Union that had moved forward with deepening as well as widening as its shapers had always intended, currency union before true political union but ultimately requiring that as it was, have been able to avert the crisis before the wave of Euroskepticism left it half-finished? Maybe not, but one could hope.

In 2012, though, the euro looks like a half-baked idea and the European Union's consensus-based decision-making combined with angry publics and scared governments have turned the common currency into an infernal machine to undo the political gains of European integration. Thomas Risse, in his book A Community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public Spheres, notes that bad news about the European Union in public spheres is bad for the construction of European identity. That doesn't bode well for today's EU of headlines about bailouts and anarchy in Athens. If there's a counter-balancing "we're all in the same boat" feeling, as I believe there is, it still weaker than the feeling many appear to have that this whole European integration thing might have been a dreadful mistake.

Barack Obama actually did a great job with his Nobel acceptance speech. Selected for peace, but elected by the American people as commander in chief, he laid out an eloquent case for just war. That the troop surge in Afghanistan might have been a mistake (though not unjust) does not invalidate the correctness of Obama's argument. The European Union also needs to take this opportunity and use it to build momentum towards a solution of the crisis. The sight of Herman Van Rompuy, Jose Manuel Barroso, and Martin Schulz, of the European Council, Commission, and Parliament, squabbling over who gets to accept the award will not make the EU look good. Everyone can go to Oslo, but there should be one speaker and one damn good speech. Out of those three, Van Rompuy, as representative of the member states, who are indeed the actors which actually created the European Union, has the best case for primacy. He is the President of Europe that everyone was talking about before the quiet Belgian was actually selected. But you might find a better speaker, or a louder voice. Would Angela Merkel be appropriate? She would be if she laid out a serious, doable path forward that actually stabilizes the European Union, which she would then take to the German people in her re-election campaign over the following year. If not, maybe Schulz. He's German, and he represents both the most democratic of the European institutions, the Parliament, as well as the Social Democrats, the political party that could change Merkel's counterproductive policies if she won't change them herself.

Socialism in One Country (At Least)

Yesterday's election results are quite troubling, in Greece. The extreme austerity program imposed by the euro zone and IMF is painful and may not be working, but the seven-way split of seats is going to make it very difficult to form a functional government at all. A racist fascist party that makes European far-right figures like Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders look good made it into parliament. The old-school Communist Party is still there. Many analysts expect the divided result to lead to new elections in weeks, after no one gets paid next month. The chance of a Greek exit from the euro zone, and all that entails, just went up.

France, on the other hand, had a result to welcome. I have never been a hater of Nicolas Sarkozy, but his strong points (a good partner to the United States, Germany, Britain and others, indisputable energy, a reform agenda) were matched by serious negatives (implacable opposition to Turkey's integration into Europe, anti-immigrant populist posturing, continued failure to follow through, political tone-deafness which led to his deep unpopularity in France). Not long ago, on some level, I worried that his impending defeat at the hands of Socialist Francois Holland would upset the markets, reignite the euro crisis, and damage Barack Obama's chances of re-election - the most important of a host of significant elections. But ultimately, I concluded that a jolt to the austerity mantra of Angela Merkel, the ECB and the IMF was exactly what Europe needed, and that was most important at the moment.


Though the European social welfare state needs reform, it does not deserve the blame for an economic crisis that was caused by deregulation and the irresponsible behavior of the financial sector. But with Greece launching a succession of sovereign debt crises two years ago, a crisis of globalized free market capitalism became a crisis of what was left of the state in Europe. Neoliberalism, a cause of the crisis, was triumphing in continental Europe, that bastion of social democracy. Germany is largely to blame. As her mentor Helmut Kohl complained, Merkel is destroying Europe. There is no political leadership on positive further European integration such as Eurobonds and ECB purchases of government debt coming from Berlin, despite this being the only way out of the euro crisis other than at least partially breaking up the euro zone. Just strict fiscal discipline, with no room for "crass Keynesianism." And Sarkozy was not providing a counterbalance. He was the junior partner of Merkozy. As society suffers under austerity, you get results like in the Greek elections yesterday. Or the 6.4 million French voting for Le Pen in April. And desperate center-right politicians accommodating the far right to stay in power.

Francois Hollande has changed the conversation, even before his victory yesterday. Merkel and Mario Draghi are talking about the importance of growth, even if they have different ideas. The way forward will be difficult. President Hollande's agenda is even more intimidating than President Obama's was in January 2009, given the weaknesses of the French economy compared with the power of Germany and the markets. But his election is a good thing.

But that's enough of the economics - I was in France for the election yesterday as the Socialists celebrated their first presidential victory since 1988, in the left-leaning northern city of Lille (where Parti Socialiste chief Martine Aubry is mayor), a 35-minute TGV ride from Brussels. The city was fairly quiet during the day, except for the lively Wazemmes market, near which we discovered a polling station. We stood in line checking out the scene until someone told us we needed our blue cards to vote, then left the election to explore an art museum, the book market in the old bourse, the citadel, and the zoo (I mused that if the zoo had been somewhere in America, two weeks prior, I might well have run into a Campaigning Newt).

Around 5, we stopped for a drink at a bar with a TV and watched commentary about a good turnout. At 8, we were walking by another bar when I spotted Hollande's picture flashed on the screen and heard cheers. We entered and caught Sarkozy's concession speech, where his raucous crowd of supporters reminded me of those at John McCain's concession four years ago. After a nasty final stretch of campaign, both Sarkozy and Hollande were very gracious once the result was announced.

On the Place du General de Gaulle, the party had started. A crowd of a few hundred people gathered, waving posters of Hollande and flags - of France, of the Parti Socialiste, of the Hollande campaign, of Algeria. A congo line weaved through the crowd as dance music pumped out of a balcony above. I caught the scent of weed. Socialism is back, in one leading European country at least, and if it's hardly going to be a party over the next months and years at least it could be one on Sunday night.

Tony Judt as Nostradamus

One of the wisest commentators on post-war Europe, Tony Judt, passed last summer, and his piercing analysis is missed as Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Herman van Rompuy, Jose Manuel Barroso, Mario Draghi and others struggle to prevent the Eurozone from falling apart while credit ratings agencies and Tory backbenchers sharpen their knives and Barack Obama breaks a sweat. But a short book by Mr. Judt has reappeared on the bookshelves of Brussels. A Grand Illusion? is a Euro-pessimist essay based on lectures given in spring 1995 at my alma mater, Johns Hopkins University's Bologna Center. Judt appreciates the EU's accomplishment but doesn't see "Europe" expanding on equal terms or defeating nationalism. While the integration of Poland and other eastern states has been far more successful than Judt predicts, he's got plenty of salient points, and the book is well worth a read. To be honest, very little seems out of date. For example:

"The recently touted German idea of a small inner core of European states moving at full speed toward integration and setting demanding macro-economic criteria for membership in their club is merely the latest evidence that the future of Europe will be on German terms or not at all. It is unlikely that Italy, Spain, or even Britain will ever qualify for such an exclusive club, and even more absurd to envisage Poland or Slovakia doing so. Actually, no one except Luxembourg really qualifies according to the criteria set out in various position papers from the Christian Democrats, but to make the idea even semi-plausibly 'European,' Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands have to be in, rules or no rules."

And that's your probable core of a new two-speed or three-speed or four-speed EU, with the possible additions of Austria, Finland, and top pupil Estonia... and just maybe, in a few years, Padania.

Armistice

In several days, I will depart a Europe that is on the brink of falling to pieces. It is nearly impossible to predict the specifics of the break-up of the Eurozone and the effect that will have on the European Union and the social cohesion of Europe's countries. But we are headed towards a disaster. Germany and the European Central Bank may still have the power to come to the rescue (Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski gave a great, impassioned speech addressed to Germany on Monday), but it appears it may be a matter of days before something snaps. It's a scary and depressing situation. The failure of the euro was not assured from the start, despite the EU not being an optimum currency area, etc. This could have been avoided, even as late as the last few weeks. I pray it still can.

Some talk of war. I worry about resurgent nationalism, I have worried about that for years. Does a major economic crisis make the election of a radical like Newt Gingrich or Marine Le Pen more likely? Yes. Is actual violence in Europe likely? Europe's suicide in 1914 and the carnage of the two world wars have probably extinguished the likelihood that western Europe will erupt into violence between states anytime soon. Also, most countries are embedded in NATO and have sold most of their tanks and planes. More likely is riots along the lines of what we saw in London this year.

But things can change quickly in times of upheaval. And even without violence, politics in a crisis could rip Europe apart. And that would be an unspeakable tragedy. 93 years ago, the armistice ending the Great War came into effect between the Allies and Germany. November 11 is a holiday across the European continent. It fell on a Friday this year, and I happened to be in Paris for a long weekend.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, by the Arc de Triomphe, surrounded by troops, tanks and dignitaries, President Nicolas Sarkozy stepped out of his vehicle to the pomp of "La Marseillaise," comically short next to a tall general in uniform. But the ceremony was completely somber. The head of state acknowledged a series of different groups of veterans, represented by guards with flags. He stood with the mothers, widows, and children of fallen soldiers from the past year, as an announcer read the names one by one, each punctuated by "Mort pour la France." The head of state laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc and gave a solemn speech. Only when the ceremony was over and he had walked past my vantage point on Av. Hoche did he reach out and shake the hands of his people, the politician rather than the national patriarch.

Two weeks later I visited Ypres, the Flemish cloth town resembling Bruges and Ghent which was absolutely demolished during the war, as it lay just on the Allied side of the front line for years. I lived this year with a former captain in the British Army's Royal Irish Regiment, Patrick Bury, and we had been planning a visit for months (he and my other roommates made it to another blood-soaked piece of Belgian soil, Bastogne, in Belgium's southeast corner where the German counter-offensive in early 1945 struck hard, for Armistice when I was in France). The supposedly can't-miss In Flanders Field Museum is unfortunately closed until June 2012, but the town was gorgeously restored, the huge and beautiful Cloth Hall looks much older than it really is.

We visited the Island of Ireland Peace Park in Messines, unveiled in 1998, months after the Good Friday Agreement, in tribute to all the Irish who died in the Great War. The German Soldier's Cemetery in Langemark, a few miles north, was the most haunting site. Small square stones are laid in the ground in a plot surrounded by a short wall and trees, each has a few names on it, many also say "10 [or 15 or 20] unknown German soldiers." We arriving in the dying light of the sun. I stood in front of a mass grave where another 24,917 German soldiers are buried. This is the site where I found my own surname among the names of the dead.

At 8 p.m., we came to Menin Gate, an imposing white marble arch at the eastern entry into town honoring the dead who have no known grave, who vanished into the muddy hell of the Ypres Salient. Churchill wanted to buy the entire town of Ypres; the Belgians declined, but they gave Britain the town gate. By the end of the 1920s the gate was constructed with about 55,000 names inscribed. The remaining 35,000 Commonwealth missing are honored at another nearby memorial, as they had run out of room on the gate. Every night at 8, buglers from the local fire brigade sound the Last Post to a gathered crowd. We looked at the names for a while, finding the Irish on the outside of the arch, then drove back to Brussels.

Decades of European integration have brought peace to the continent, along with prosperity and made most of its countries firmly democratic (there are always exceptions: Russia, Belarus, Liechtenstein, and the Vatican are not democracies and some of the democracies are pretty flawed). Western Europe in the past several decades has had about the highest standard of living of any place ever.

At the center of the European project stands the bilateral relationship between Germany and France. As I said, if the Eurozone and European Union fall to pieces in the next months over this crisis, instead of moving forward into deeper integration, it is very difficult to predict how it will happen and into what they will transform. But one scenario that seems likely it a more tightly integrated core Europe. Germany does not want to stand alone, and I would be shocked were it to give up on France. France will lose its AAA credit rating soon, but I expect it to retain a joint currency with Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and others. And though its debts are among the worst, Belgium will not leave the core either. Brussels is the capital of Europe, Belgium is economically healthy enough to grow. In a silver lining, the worsening euro crisis has led to a Belgian government after a world record 535 days - everything was agreed yesterday, and the new government will be sworn in on Monday.

The places where the fall of Europe will be most catastrophic, if it occurs, are on the periphery. Italy, one of the original six member states of the European Community, risks plunging out and into economic and political chaos. Greece's misery will continue. Portugal and Spain could be taken out by contagion. Further east, the EU's newer member states will have their economies damaged; Austria and Germany have already restricted lending to the east. Germany's other key bilateral relationship is indeed with Poland, and it would be devastated if the EU shrinks and excludes members who have done nothing wrong. The treatment of the Central and Eastern European member states is one of the real unpredictables of the crisis. And with a shrunken, inward-looking EU, the European dream could die in places like Belgrade, Sarajevo, Skopje, Pristina, Chisinau and Kyiv.

The crisis is scary and confusing. We can only hope that political leaders, particularly Angela Merkel, show braver and more enlightened leadership in the next days then they have in the last 20 months.

Belgium's Unhappy Birthday

Belgium was born in a mild revolution in October 1830, but it celebrates its National Day on July 21, as that was the day nine months later that Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (father of the Congo guy) took the oath as first King of the Belgians. So Belgium is basically celebrating its 180th birthday today. There will be a military parade in the center of town, I saw a KFOR truck driving down Rue de la Loi on my walk to work yesterday. It seems likelier than not that the country will not survive to celebrate its 200th.

I have now lived in Belgium for more than six months without the country having a government; it has lacked one for more than 400 days and counting, a world record. The problem is that the leader of a powerful minority is being intransigent and refusing to compromise because it suits his goals to prevent Belgium from functioning - much like the Tea Party-inspired hardline stance of the House GOP in the negotiations to raise the American debt ceiling. However, there is no apocalyptic deadline forcing the parties into forming a government. They already went through their turn in the second half of 2010 in the EU's rotating presidency without a government, and that went fine and was even held up as a model. The country isn't falling apart.

(Although the sidewalks of Brussels are. When I was a reporter in Saratoga Springs, I once did a story on a crack in the sidewalk by the farmer's market that was a lawsuit against the city waiting to happen. True, the US is more litigious than Europe. And there are plenty of streets and sidewalks in the EU which are falling apart. But Brussels is the third richest of the EU's 271 regions. The sidewalks in Flanders aren't like that. So why? Perhaps it's that because of the crisis, Brussels doesn't have a 2011 budget. At least it's easy to come by "Brussels blocks" for your home construction projects.)

Briefly, Belgium is divided into two regions, now mostly autonomous, and the Brussels Capital District. The country is bilingual - speaking Flemish, a dialect of Dutch, and French - but actually the only bilingual city is Brussels itself. French used to be the language of the elite, and the historic Flemish city of Brussels remains Francophone, an island surrounded by the "Flemish ring" of suburbs which separates the city from French-speaking Wallonia - only about 4 km at its narrowest point - but the rest of Flanders speaks Flemish. In nine daytrips to Flanders I have only heard French at the beach (plus at the airport, where, of course, special language laws apply). Due to an economic reversal in recent decades, Flanders produces the vast majority of Belgium's wealth, while the geographically larger but less populated Wallonia lags behind. One of the most heavily industrialized parts of the world in the 19th Century, Wallonia has suffered since its coal and iron mines dried up and became unprofitable. Flanders has a thriving and sometimes separatist nationalist movement; if Walloons have a strong sense of identity, pride, and dialect, they still want to be a part of Belgium. One reason is north to south money transfers through taxation, which the north resents and the south needs - much like Italy or the EU as a whole. [As a case in point, Liege, the largest city in Wallonia and well worth a visit, has one of the most gorgeous train stations in the world, opened in 2009 and pictured.]

The New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), a soft separatist party perhaps comparable to Alex Salmond's Scottish National Party, won the most seats in the election on June 13, 2010 - 27 out of 150. Bart De Wever, its leader, has played hardball in the negotiations to form a government. The Francophone Socialists (PS) won 26 votes, the second most among the nine parties. Their leader Elio Di Rupo was assigned by King Albert II to try to form a government two months ago. In recent news (I get my Belgian news here for the most part), all of the political parties were willing to negotiate based on Di Rupo's proposals except the N-VA, as De Wever rejected them out of hand. The Flemish Christian Democrats (CD&V), the old dominant party which produced the current President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, had been unwilling to continue talks without the N-VA, but the latest news on this National Day is that parties including the CD&V will try to form a government without the N-VA. Exerting political power while officially staying out of government and avoiding responsibility can be politically smart, as irresponsible populists like Pia Kjaersgaard in Denmark and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands have shown in recent years, De Wever may be taking a note from them. But that is why the CD&V has been wary to proceed without the nationalists. Still a country needs a government. Timo Soini's True Finns were supposed to join the government in Finland after their success in this year's election, but ultimately they were not included because they would have prevented bailouts to stricken eurozone countries.

Back to Belgium. Even if a government does form - and one must, sooner or later - to prevent the markets from turning to the high sovereign debt of the eurozone's sixth-shakiest economy, if nothing else - a breakup seems inevitable though not imminent. Brussels has helped hold the country together thusfar, because its fate in any breakup would be complicated. It is technically the Flemish capital, but is now a strongly Francophone city. The price of Flemish independence is that they would lose their Jerusalem. Brussels and Wallonia could form a rump Belgium - perhaps joined by a corridor through the "Flemish ring." Or maybe Brussels could become a city state like Singapore, thus dividing Belgium into three new countries. This isn't great for the city of Brussels or the European Union, as one might imagine. The EU has enough problems functioning with 27 members and there are plenty of countries in the Balkans and Eastern Europe that have greater need to join as a new member than Brussels or Wallonia, who have no desire to be independent countries.

The sticky issue in the election last June and neverending government formation has been that the Flemish want to take away the right of French speakers in the Brussels suburbs to vote for French-speaking political parties. They say this is unfair because when the province of Brabant, which contained Brussels, Leuven, and Waterloo, was cut into Flemish Brabant, Walloon Brabant, and the Brussels Capital Region, Flemish speakers in Walloon Brabant lost the right to vote for Flemish-speaking parties. Honestly, I think everyone in Belgium should be able to vote for whatever party he or she wants, but the reason citizens of half of Flemish Brabant have this extra right is that they live around a metropolis, the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of Europe, host of the biggest concentration of EU institutions and the headquarters of NATO. Attempting to preserve the Flemish character of the Brussels suburbs by taking away this unique-in-Belgium right is attempting to prevent Brussels from its natural growth.

Some have called the king the last Belgian. I know others who are Belgians first, not Flemings or Walloons, and I believe many citizens of Brussels feel this way. But the king obviously has something special at stake. While I am generally not a fan of monarchy, Belgium's could help hold the country together. And Albert's message in his speech yesterday on the occasion of National Day made some good points. He warned that the well-being of Belgians could be affected if the crisis is prolonged further, a nod at dangers of the markets. He warned that the political class was leading to citizens' disillusion with possibility of politics providing solutions. And he noted that "our country with its cultural diversity has partly been seen as a model for the European Union." The Belgian crisis could "threaten the momentum of the European structure, already damaged by euroskeptics and populists."

Most of the people of Belgium do not want the country to break apart. There are still strong cultural and historic ties binding Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels, even if 180 years isn't that long a period in this part of the world, where one is constantly reminded of the grandeur of towns like Brussels, Bruges and Ghent in the 1500s. But the birth and death of states is often accomplished by small groups with a clear vision and the rest of us live with the consequences.

Europe, Eat Your Seal Heart Out

A bad day for seals - the European General Court in Brussels has suspended the EU's ban on seal products from coming into force as an injunction was requested by Canadian and Greenlandic Inuit groups. Like Roger Clemens being indicted, this brings back memories - of the Governor General of Canada eating a raw seal heart on TV last year to protest the ban.

Kosovo: What's Next

The International Court of Justice issued a clear decision in the case of the legality of Kosovo's declaration of independence yesterday: the declaration is legal, because declarations of independence are not illegal under international law. This ruling could have ramifications in many other places around the globe where there are separatist movements, but the court did not certify that Kosovo is a state that should be independent and a member of the United Nations. It left that to the nations of the world to decide by recognition. 69 countries have recognized Kosovo so far, the amount has grown slowly since the initial weeks after independence, although Kosovo has picked up some key regional backers, such as Montenegro. Many analysts are predicting that many more countries will recognize Kosovo soon after this decision. No one has been the first to jump yet, and I'm not sure how many will recognize in the near future.

The Economist just published a useful map of recognizing and not-recognizing states. The main reasons for not recognizing Kosovo are because your country has a separatist problem and because not recognizing Kosovo will keep you friends with Serbia and its most powerful supporters in this issue, Russia and China. The main reasons to recognize Kosovo is that will put you on the good side of the United States and the main European powers and because it is the just and right thing to do. Kosovo is independent and guarded by the international community today because Yugoslavia's leaders applied a heavy-handed ethnic cleansing approach to a separatism issue in the 1990s, not because Albania's borders were drawn so the state excluded more than half of all Albanians in the 1910s.

While the ICJ decision is definitely good for Kosovo and bad for Serbia's case of getting Kosovo back, I don't see that many countries moving right away. Four out of the five EU countries which do not recognize Kosovo have already reiterated their positions, including Spain, the one that is not acting as a friend of Serbia or Russia but entirely because of its domestic issues, Slovakia, which has a new center-right and Atlanticist government, and Romania. Greece appears to still be thinking. It is the one of the five without a separatist problem of its own, but it has a stake in Cyprus's situation and is close to both Serbia and Russia. Greece could be a powerful first mover, and it could use goodwill from the rest of Europe in its current financial state, although that might lower the possibilities of getting financial help from the Russians. This would be a politically easier West-pleasing recognition for Greece to make than recognizing Macedonia by its actual name. Still, I don't expect Greece to move now. I hope they give me a mild and pleasant surprise.

Looking at the map, if I have to guess the 70th country to recognize I might say Chile. New president Sebastian Pinera, the most conservative leader of a non-recognizing Latin American country, would ingratiate himself with Washington by the move. But that's a pretty wild guess, there are many possibilities. Once one makes the move, a few more might soon after. But Kosovo probably won't reach the 100 recognizers needed for UN membership without Serbia gaining entry to the EU with acceptance of Kosovo's independence as the cost of accession. Whether a country is willing to demand that, what Serbia would do when the choice of EU or Kosovo was laid out that starkly, and whether the EU will ever actually expand beyond Croatia are the key questions.

Kosovo's future will not be decided by an assortment of African, Asian and Latin American countries recognizing its independence, nor in Washington, Moscow and Beijing, but in the Balkans and in Brussels, the Hague and New York.

Touring Europe Without Leaving Washington

In April, skies blackened above Europe as Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano spewed ash over an area of thousands of miles and as far away as Russia, causing the cancellation of nearly all flights to, from, and around the continent and, in short, utter chaos. Then the markets' confidence in Greece's ability to survive a sovereign debt crisis went from bad to nonexistent. European leaders eventually faced up to the existential nature of the crisis in the eurozone but contagion had already started to spread. Protests in Athens against austerity measures turned into deadly riots featuring Molotov cocktails. Then British voters delivered twin scary results for the country's economic stability and its place in Europe - a hung parliament and a Tory plurality. And the volcano has decided it isn't finished yet.

The state of Europe’s union is not strong. It is being sorely tested. Hopefully it will come through a tough couple years and be stronger than ever. On Saturday in Washington, DC, the EU was putting its best face forward, welcoming hordes of fascinated Americans and other citizens of the world into their 27 embassies plus the delegation of the EU itself for its annual Open House Day. As a theme, the embassies were encouraged to promote the EU’s relatively impressive record on alternative energy, which some took more seriously than others.

I made a day of it, and managed to exceed my own expectations, visiting seven embassies from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. This was a cool opportunity - DC has upwards of 180 embassies, many with multiple buildings, packed into it, but I had only ever been inside one - that of the Russian Federation for a tribute Andrei Gromyko featuring Henry Kissinger. I began by walking down Florida Avenue towards Dupont Circle, my usual path to school, but kept going on Florida until I reached the cluster of embassies west of Dupont and east of Rock Creek. This is home to a third of the EU buildings as well as the delegations of a couple more countries which would like to be in the EU (Turkey, Albania, Moldova, which shares its building with one of my favorite restaurants and classy bars, Russia House). My friend Phil had worked in the US embassy in Estonia last summer and we met outside that cozy corner embassy at the intersection of Florida and Massachusetts and 22nd Street, across the street from Luxembourg’s ridiculously oversized palace, along with his girlfriend Ulla from Austria. The Estonians still had their front door locked and seemed surprised to see us at 10:15. They also lacked a stamp for the “passport” on the Open House Day brochure, as it was apparently in New York. A filmstrip showed pictures of Estonia’s nature and wildlife. This is a lovely, charming and beautiful little country (the EU’s fourth-smallest by population), I was there in January in Tallinn for two days and nearly dropped out of graduate school to take a job at the hostel. Estonians are quiet but friendly. Designer clothes by Reet Aus made from recycled materials, including a blouse decorated with little moose, hung in the corner. Photographs displayed the late President of Estonia Lennart Meri with Boris Yeltsin, Vice President Al Gore, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, and legendary diplomat George Kennan, who worked at the American embassy in Tallinn in the 1930s. We picked up booklets like Minifacts About Estonia 2009. Did you know the national stone of Estonia is limestone?

Next up was Greece. I had a vague idea of touring the PIIGS, the peripheral economies that the market is so worried about, plus Britain, which also had a terrible public finances problem and just had a fascinating election. I spent Thursday night in front of my computer, watching the 650 constituencies of the United Kingdom turn 11 different colors, until the Green Party won Brighton Pavilion and I decided I needed to go to sleep at about 1:30 a.m. Plus the Embassy of the United Kingdom had a fascinating description of its activities in the brochure: “Britain on Your Doorstep: The Embassy will showcase the Ambassador’s Gardens and a Bazaar highlighting the armed forces, arts, whisky, eco-friendly displays and family activities.” Much more interesting sounding than “Come visit the Embassy of Luxembourg for the day!” Plus we kept seeing people with complimentary fancy plastic displaying the Union Jack. But I sadly did not make it to the UK embassy. It does serve as consolation that both the ambassador and his deputy visited my Modern British Politics class at SAIS this semester.

Greece’s line was long, absurdly so once we left though still shorter than Ireland’s across the street, but bad enough at 10:45. The line kept going once we were inside the embassy’s basement, because the Greeks had not yet become so austere that they could not offer us delicious samples of olives, olive oil, tzatziki sauce, and cookies, along with pamphlets, maps, and raffle tickets for an Aegean cruise. Ulla got frustrated and went outside because she dislikes olives and perhaps Greece. I enjoyed the snacks and a few minutes of traditional Greek dance before moving on outside. I am partly of Greek extraction myself (it may well account for my family’s wiliness) and visited in 2003. I would like to return someday. My sister Anna went last year and made it to our ancestral island of Nissiros, right off the coast of Turkey south of Kos. By her account, it’s the only Greek island where the women have big thighs instead of long beautiful legs. It comes from climbing up and down the volcano, which started going off around the turn of the century, driving most of the population into the arms of America.

I left Phil and Ulla at Starbucks and joined other friends, Cory and Ben, in the line at the Portuguese embassy. This line wasn’t so long but it was slow. Then again, Portugal’s embassy isn’t so huge as Greece’s. It is quite nice, and the Portuguese were formal about it. We entered in groups for a three step tour. An overstressed mother yelled at us for cutting in line, which we didn’t, and told us not to do it again. The military attaché, an officer of the Portuguese Air Force, brought us into a small room where we were shown a video about Portugal’s substantial use of alternative energies. We walked by a painting of the country’s original ambassador to the US, who was such good friends with Thomas Jefferson that he lived at Monticello for a few months. The current ambassador, João de Vallera, greeted us all personally in his office, where he talked about the historically excellent relations and economic linkages between our two countries. On his desk was a copy of the Financial Times and Cory spotted additional material about understanding the EU economy. Portugal is being targeted by the speculators, a bit unfairly, as the weakest link in the eurozone after Greece. The country simply does not grow that fast, with low productivity growth exceeded by higher wage growth, although its public finances are not terrible. I hope Portugal doesn’t get screwed by the crisis. I spent a lovely week in Lisbon in spring 2006 and have a love for the country, that city, and its food. We got to sample mini pastéis de nata, wonderful custard pastries that are great with coffee, and a drop of port wine, which is one EU export which I purchase multiple times a year.

The day was hot but windy, and my eyes were being continuously attacked by specks of dirt and plant matter. The lines for the shuttle buses between the embassies were very long, which is why we decided to skip the UK and take the Metro to Van Ness and visit the Slovak embassy. Central Europe – Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – are based much further to the north than the rest of the EU, in another cluster of chanceries which also includes Israel, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates. It appeared that there was a long line for Austria and no line at all for Slovakia (it turned out that the line was for the shuttle bus). But Slovakia was nice, children in national dress handed us helpings of dumplings and sauerkraut, a traditional band played, arts were on display, and the backyard had a Friends of Slovakia Wall of Honor. I had my picture taken with it, as a friend of Slovakians (and housemate of one of them). Slovakia’s best friend, however, is US Steel, which was honored on about half of 50 or so plaques. We went back for more dumplings. Slovakia had limited tourist information – mostly about its skiing – and not much about alternative energies. Robert Fico’s government has decided not to close old nuclear plants near the Austrian border that Slovakia was supposed to shutter when they gained entry to the European Union. Austria was not pleased.

With plates of dumplings and sauerkraut in hand, we moved on to Austria, where we surprised by the lack of the line. Given what the people downtown were experiencing, we had clearly made an enlightened decision in coming to spend our time with Central Europe. However, there might have been one good reason Austria had no line – they were already out of strudel. But I didn’t mind, because there was still free wine, free coffee, free information on master’s programs in History of South-Eastern Europe and free tourist publications about hiking in Tirol, which has many gorgeous mountain landscapes and women.

The bus line was still endless, so we followed a bevy of chattering Fräuleins back towards Connecticut Avenue, where Cory left us to go read at his restaurant before his shift. Ben and I continued on foot down the hill to the edge of Rock Creek Park, where the Hungarians and Czechs have embassies on Spring of Freedom Lane. Outside the Hungarian embassy lounged a number of fine specimens of the Kuvasz, a beautiful white Hungarian dog, and the Vizsla, a less beautiful in my opinion but apparently also nice Hungarian breed. Inside we saw displays of lace and china, and a couple performed a Hungarian dance in traditional dress. The couple then offered to teach the dance; I was more interested in the goulash and wine but at this embassy you had to pay for the food. Perhaps wisely, given that Hungary has been the subject of an IMF rescue since 2008.

We walked back up the hill to the Czech campus. Young women in traditional dress greeted us at the entry, we moved through the building without spending much time with the modern Czech designs on display to get the free beer – a generous full glass of Pilsner Urquell rather than an ounce of booze like most samples today. We sat on the sunny hill with many others, drinking our afternoon beers, and watched a cluster of red, white and blue balloons escape into the sky. We just missed getting to go up the path to tour the ambassador’s residence as a woman put a chain across the gate as the clock struck 4.

Enough European embassies for the day, I suppose. I took the Metro home with several pounds worth of tourist pamphlets and informational booklets wrapped inside my jackets and passed out on the couch. If I’m still in Washington next May, I will definitely embark on another day of touring the embassies of the European Union. As long as the European Union is still here then… (don’t panic, it will be).

The Rape of Europa; or Greece and Germany, You Disappoint Me

Last night in my Balkans class I brought up Greece, which has by now rejoined Europe’s messiest region (not including the Caucasus). Asked by the professor what I thought about the debt crisis, I said that given what we had seen in the last three days (the sharp rise in debt yields for Greece, Portugal and Spain and debt downgrades for those countries), the euro was finished. That’s a bit hyperbolic, as I tend to be, especially when I talk rather than write. But the problem is huge and I do believe the European Union as we know it is on the brink and we are likelier than not to see some major changes.

There is plenty of blame to go around. True fiscal federalism and a United States of Europe are not what the citizens of the European Union want, so there are political limits to the centralization of fiscal decision-making, which would the best way to ensure a stable common European currency. I do not support the argument of those who wrote ten years ago that the euro was doomed and who are now eagerly writing columns to prove that they were right. The euro was a much greater success than anyone anticipated for a full decade. There were two large policy problems beyond the inevitable and insurmountable economic asymmetries which have led to the problems of Spain, for example, which experienced a construction boom and built up external private sector debts and cannot devalue its currency in the crisis because it is on the euro. The first was that the rules of the Stability and Growth Pact limiting debt to 60% of GDP and deficits to 3% of GDP, which Germany insisted was necessary, were not followed, by the Germans and the French among others, well before the crisis of 2008 and onwards, which has required flexibility. Across the eurozone, the rules to limit vulnerabilities were flouted in normal economic times. Secondly, Greece lied about its numbers to get into the eurozone and continued to lie about its numbers until autumn 2009.

I believe the Greek crisis might still have been solved by a skillful response to the crisis by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. But this did not happen. Nicolos Sarkozy wanted to keep the IMF out, partly because he is worried that Dominique Strauss-Kahn could be his opponent in the next presidential election. Germany wisely insisted on IMF participation. But Angela Merkel’s government has wavered so much on allowing the EU to do its part in rescuing Greece that the uncertainty in the markets has made the necessary rescue package larger than it had to be and less likely to succeed in helping Greece avoid default. As of a few days ago, I am 99% sure Greece will default. Why has Merkel allowed this to happen? Because rescuing the Greeks is enormously unpopular with the German public, and there is an election May 9 in Germany’s biggest region, Nordrhein-Westfalen (which includes Cologne, Dortmund, Essen, Düsseldorf, and a quarter of Germany’s citizens, actually a larger population than that of Greece). If Merkel’s Christian Democrats lose the region to the Social Democrats, they lose control of the upper house of the German parliament, they will have trouble getting their agenda enacted, and early federal elections could result. So Merkel can make an argument that she is acting in the wishes of her countrymen and bowing to political realities. But she is also sacrificing the interests of the entire European Union over the region of Nordrhein-Westfalen. Small-minded priorities are not new in Europe – Greece’s objection to Macedonia’s name is a perfect example – but Merkel is the most powerful woman or man in Europe, she knows it, and she should act accordingly.

The stakes are quite high. Contagion could result in multiple sovereign defaults. If only Greece defaults, the eurozone should be able to survive. If Spain goes down, it’s hard to predict what happens. Reintroducing the old currencies would be tremendously damaging to the peripheral economies. But if Spain defaults, we really would be in a “moment of extraordinary politics,” to use Leszek Balcerowicz’s phrase. What I anticipate is that a two-speed Europe would then become inevitable. A German-led core of the strongest economies, looking much like the original European Community of six nations (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Italy) plus a few like Austria and/or minus Italy, would have the euro, more fiscal federalism, and perhaps a more unified foreign policy. A ring of European states would be affiliated more loosely, naturally led by Great Britain, but including Greece, much of Eastern Europe and sooner or later possibly Spain, Portugal, and Ireland if they did not manage to or did not want to stay in the core, possibly Turkey (the lower-speed of a two-speed European Union is the only way Turkey would ever gain entry) and perhaps Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. It is hard to work out exactly what the looser group would share with the core Europe or how many of the EU-27 would choose or be forced into it. Perhaps there would be three “concentric circles” rather than two. But a Spanish default would change the European Union significantly.

One thing is certain even if Greece dodges default – Germany and the other members of the eurozone are going to be very wary of letting additional members into the common currency area from now on, although according to the accession treaties Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Sweden are all obligated to join the euro eventually (only Denmark and the United Kingdom are excepted). For Latvia in particular, a country which has suffered an internal devaluation as its leaders have clung to a tight currency peg to the euro and an as-soon-as-possible euro accession strategy like a raft in the storm of a crash which has cut the value of the economy by 20%, changing rules would be extremely cruel. The crisis in the eurozone and the European Union could also delay the EU membership of Croatia, which is already ready already, and countries like Montenegro and Macedonia which for various reasons it would be better to bring in sooner rather than later (while it is tempting to use the crisis to force Greece to abandon its childlike position on Macedonia’s name, this is probably not possible because the country’s leaders are expending so much political capital on austerity measures).

Germany’s inward focus on this crisis only exemplifies what has become a problem for the European project in recent years. Leadership by the big three countries is necessary in enacting changes in the structure and size of the European Union. Britain is perpetually wary of Europe. A referendum on EU membership (actually promised by the pro-European Nick Clegg, who unfortunately doesn’t have a chance of becoming First Lord of the Treasury even if the Liberal Democrats win the most votes May 6, rather than by David Cameron, leader of the Euroskeptic Tories) would likely lead to withdrawal from the Union. Britain has however been a force for widening the union, while fighting against deepening. (This eurozone crisis, by the way, has for the first time convinced me that Britain’s hesitancy to join the euro might not be stupid). The elite of France are quite committed to the European project and deepening the Union and playing an important role in the world, even if the French people themselves are more skeptical. However, France worries that enlargement of the EU dilutes its voice and thus only went along with the 2004 big bang enlargement to the east and strongly opposes Turkish membership. Germany is the most important country in Europe because of its size and economy, and it is the key swing vote between Britain’s widening strategy and France’s deepening; having ambitiously pushed for both widening and deepening in the past, under Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer’s Social Democratic-Green government, it has turned against both under Chancellor Merkel, particularly in her second term with the FDP as her partners instead of the Social Democrats. Only Croatia has a good shot at getting into the EU in the next five years because of its Habsburg history and the fact that Germans like Adriatic beaches. Merkel’s hesitancy to help Greece has only exposed the fact that her pro-European image has been declining since her reelection.

Which brings us back to Greece. Italy is often seen as a joke because of its unfunny clown of a prime minister and its inability to consistently match its economic and demographic weight in Europe with equivalent political weight. But Italy is actually less likely to default than other countries in Europe’s periphery due to high private saving and it actually made some heroic economic adjustments to prepare itself for eurozone membership in the 1990s, even if it has not sufficiently dealt with its large debt (117% of GDP). Greece does a much worse job fitting in with its European partners. Greece has not sufficiently reformed its economy while lying about its numbers. Greece is a beautiful place with a nice culture, but it is not a Western European country and it was and is not prepared for membership in the eurozone. The modern country holds far more the legacy of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. Along with the Greek Cypriots, the Greeks are Russia and Serbia’s best friends within the EU. Greece belongs in a wider conception of Europe that has room for less dynamic economies and Orthodox and Muslim cultures. The behavior and statements of continental Western European statesmen and stateswomen in recent years, from Sarkozy to Merkel to EU President Herman Van Rompuy, has called into question whether that is the Europe that Paris, Berlin and Brussels want. The question of European identity is one that will never be resolved, but the debate is one Europe needs to have. We have a fairly good idea of the dominant British and French viewpoints. The German one is less clear.

Greece gave birth to Europe with Periclean Athens in the 5th Century B.C., seen as a wonderful model by Brits, French and Germans in the 18th and 19th Centuries. It now looks like Greece might well destroy Europe. By the way, does anyone know what image Greece chose to put on their two-euro coin when they dishonestly qualified for the euro back in 2001? The Rape of Europa.