A commentary on Europe by an American politician with presidential aspirations. “An enervated body, unable to regulate the parts of him. Insecure about external dangers and agitated by continuous and growing upheavals in his belly. A long history of confusion, of weakness towards the strong and oppressive force towards the weak. In short, a deformed political monster”. So wrote James Madison in the Federalist in 1787 referring to the European Union of his time, the Holy Roman Empire.
Madison, who would become president in 1809, pointed to the empire, a shapeless jumble of states and statelets with continuously variable geometry and geography stitched together with a useless expenditure of legal science, the federal model not to follow. Madison managed to see the inglorious end of the empire, overwhelmed by a France that was lighting nationalist fuses across the continent and hastily dissolved by Francis II of Austria in 1806. And yet, in the thousand-year history inaugurated by Franco-German Charlemagne, the empire had often exercised a positive and stabilizing function in the most politically restless area of the planet, Europe.
Empires, historically, have always been more fluid entities than states. They have always had a central ethnic nucleus which possessed the potestas (the Italians and then the Greeks in Romània, the Germans in the Holy Roman Empire, the English in the British Empire up to the Russians in the Third International) but the imperium has always had to derive from a socially recognized auctoritas, or rather the sense of a shared universal mission. Gauls and Britons were glad to be Roman citizens. The Italian Dante admired the empire and didn't mind its German imprint. Young Gandhi was proud to be part of the British Empire.
The empire, as de Benoist notes, is a mystical body. It can juridically be a complicated and opaque irregular corpus, but it must guarantee not only well-being and security, but also the sense of a common project, civilization towards barbarism. If these conditions fail, if security, well-being and projects weaken, the empire becomes imperialism and Gandhi agrees to pay the price of civil war in order to free himself from the British. After Brexit, some in Italy returned to speaking of Europe as the Fourth Reich, probably with a controversial allusion to Hitler's Reich.
In reality, today's Europe resembles the Holy Roman Empire in one of its long cycles of decline, those phases in which the distant provinces begin to resent the German potestas and cherish dreams of independence. Europe, despite having made a formidable contribution to well-being until 2008, has been the continent that has been growing the least for seven years (with the exception of Antarctica, as the British Leave say). As Richard Koo notes, there are 4.5 million more unemployed than in 2007, while America and Japan (and the UK) are in full employment. It should also be noted that there is an asymmetry between the English pensioners who live in Spain, bringing consumption and not taking away jobs from the Spaniards, and the three million Europeans who live in the United Kingdom, mainly young people who work and who, were they to return, would go to swell the ranks of our unemployed.
As for security, it is known that for the average voter it is a subjective fact and it is well known that the average voter accepts immigration in periods of growth and prosperity and tends to reject it in phases of stagnation. Proposing austerity and immigration (and now also bail in) in a difficult economic phase was objectively destabilizing. This is why we continue to be more concerned about Europe than the United Kingdom. It is no coincidence that the British stock market is up 2 percent since the beginning of the year while the Euro Stoxx loses 13. London is doing better even if you take into account the devaluation of the pound, a blessing for a deficit-running UK current account equal to 7 per cent of GDP.
Mind you, the concern for Europe is not for the short term. The ECB goes ahead with its programme. Growth will lose
a few decimals but no recession is foreseen. The Fed is more dovish than ever. The valuations of the mainland exchanges are reasonable. The post-Brexit instability was managed very well by the central banks, which only allowed a realignment of the pound and a more modest realignment of the renminbi, which went almost unnoticed. As for the political plan, it will take at least a year before it is truly understood whether the United Kingdom really wants to leave or not. The chances of anti-Union or anti-euro referendums across the continent are currently very remote, because almost everywhere they require legislative or constitutional changes which in turn require Eurosceptic forces to win absolute majorities in their parliaments.
And then, as we have seen in Spain, the desire of some to imitate Brexit is balanced by the fear of taking leaps in the dark by decisive sectors of the electorate. The navigation of the markets between now and the end of the year, provided our banking issues are sorted out, may not be particularly rough. Brexit is a divorce case, not an asteroid that has fallen to Earth. The causes of divorce are potentially controllable events and not necessarily bleeding provided that the parties have a minimum of practical sense and do not want to fight battles of principle. As for other possible problems, a possible Trump victory in November will produce some turmoil on the markets but, as in the case of Brexit, it will only be temporary.
It will be by looking at the concrete developments, and not the imagined ones, that we will be able to evaluate things. Europe still has time to reform. No irreversible disruptive process has begun, pace Soros, for the simple reason that there are no irreversible processes in history. This is demonstrated by the fact that until recently many thought that it was precisely European integration that was irreversible. Of course, it is not very encouraging that Europe, which has spent many tens of billions and an infinite number of agitated summits to keep Greece, is only showing anger towards the United Kingdom (see the childish abolition of English) and close the door on Scotland who would like to stay. Even better, it will be said, than the imperial Barbarossa who razed rebellious Milan to the ground. Except that the rebel Milan was destroyed yes by Barbarossa, but at the request of the other Lombard cities. Europe has always been a thing
complicated.
