The European Leadership or Three lessons from Know-It-All Teachers

This is a short and categorical note. Europe’s destiny is in incompetent hands that pretend to be wise. They are like the know-it-all teachers: they want to teach but they do not have school.

In each dimension where they need to act, current European leaders have unfortunately demonstrated indecisiveness, vacillation, befuddlement, holding back, concealment and denial of any challenge, with cruelty disguised as distraction. They have eyes that do not want to see, ears that do not listen, and lips that just articulate euphemisms. We cannot help recalling the image of the three wise monkeys.

Moral fatigue : eyes that do not see.

Their eyes would rather not see the demographic flood that hangs over the Southern coasts of the European Mediterranean Sea. While the European leaders cover their eyes, with their mouths they utter arguments worthy of a business school but this time projected over millions of desperate people that today risk their lives in precarious boats in search for a minimum of security and survival in some European country. They come not only from the North of Africa—a land devastated by civil war—but also from far Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa. Without a State that orders the tribal zone that once was a country in Libya, they become victims of the most vile and ruthless trafficking.

Until last year, the Italian coastguard searched for shipwreck survivors in the high seas, in a rescue operation as generous as it was expensive. Well, The European Union, that brags about its solidarity and human rights defense, decided to cut back the budget on this operation—called Mare Nostrum—with the argument that the rescue, by diminishing the risk of death of the desperate people, incentivized their migration, and a larger flow of refugees would not be welcomed by the budget guardians nor by the European voters that today lean towards xenophobia, racism, and the fear of terrorist infiltration.

It is worth asking if it is with such ingredients that a stronger and more legitimate union is built. The motto, of this European dis-union might very well be “everyman for himself.”

The economic mistake: deaf ears.

The leadership’s ears are deaf to every argument that their economic model for an alleged recovery from the crisis—the so widely proclaimed austerity—is pro-cyclical, generates deflation, produces depression, and ironically increases the burden of the debt on the indebted.

The argument they choose not to listen is neither improvised nor odd. At least two economics Nobel-Prize winners formulated it in a clear fashion, and it can be found in any undergraduate textbook on that field of study.

With their mouth, the wise monkeys reiterate the argument formulated by the North European countries in order to “discipline” the Southern ones. But they deny that they irresponsibly lent large sums of money to those that would not be able to pay them back. They forget that it takes two to dance the debt tango. If recipient countries dilapidated the loans in ill-conceived projects, and greased them with a lot of corruption, their facilitators were aware of that. When the time for the debtors’ bankruptcy came, their creditors used public and collective funds to save their own banks and started to preach to the debtors the importance of moral probity.

There is something even more disturbing in this attitude. Wise monkeys do not want to take cognizance of a whole generation of European youngsters who they left in the most devastating outdoors. For that they unclog their ears just to cover their eyes again. Time passes and soon youngsters are no longer young. A whole generation is lost: it is better not to see it. If they emigrate; all the better.

The strategic falseness: the mouth that does not speak.

With their mouth shut and moving quietly, members of the European Union got closer to Russia behind the shield of NATO, but at the same time they reduced their military budgets. The majority of modern military equipment of the Union could be held in two American aircraft carriers.

When the Russians got alarmed, the Europeans claimed they were coming in peace, knowing very well that a military organization approaching a zone in the Russian security periphery—no matter which regime prevails in such country—would provoke a strong response. When the latter happened, it was done with the swipe of a Russian bear, in Ukraine and with the annexation of Crimea (an essential part of the Slavic foundational myth in the old Russia). Then they opened their mouths to talk about aggression and the imposed economic sanctions (since the military ones would not suffice).

Conclusion

And thus the wise monkeys sleepwalk over a broken roof, without realizing that they can fall. My conclusion is categorical: Europe’s destiny (or what remains of her after the imminent expulsion of Greece and the electoral blow back of several countries) is in the hands of incompetent folk.

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