Today I am sharing this space with my dear friend Bettina. Which is really exciting. Because Bettina is way smarter than me an can put her amazing thoughts into really pretty words whereas I just make it up as I go along. In real life, Bettina is a political scientist and has a passion for Europe and Latin America. Her second passion is literature which she is channeling into her own literary blog - liburuak. Today, Bettina is writing about the Euro Crisis and how it is about a lot more than just our shared currency or about a mountain of bureaucracy but how we are in danger of giving up on ideals that should unite us and a system that most young people seem to take for granted (and that both Bettina and I were able to take advantage of when we went and did our undergraduate degrees in this place far far away called St Andrews). I hope you enjoy today's post!
First of all, let me thank Katharina
for hosting my rant on here. I've been waiting to get this off my
chest for a while, and with this, I had an excuse.
Let me start with the obvious. A lot is
wrong with the Euro, a lot is wrong with the EU, and a lot is wrong
with how the crisis is being dealt with. I have to admit I have no
idea how to fix it and, most likely, neither do the "experts",
really. The Eurozone, and more importantly the world economy is one
of those complex systems where if you tighten one screw, another one
will come loose somewhere else.
The economic effects of the crisis are
frightening, but what frightens me just as much or perhaps even more
at this point is how easily we have let go of a dream Europeans had
previously been constructing for six decades.
Before all economic hell broke loose, I
never thought we could go back to old stereotypes so easily. Anyone
not living under a rock will have known that they were still around
within Europe, but I honestly never thought they would get this nasty
again this quickly. From German "newspaper" Bild naming the
Greeks almost exclusively with the word "bust" in front,*
to Greeks burning German flags and equating Merkel with Hitler,
negative national stereotyping has become wide-spread in Europe at an
alarming speed. You see, Bild is the most-read "newspaper"
in Germany. It's not just some idiotic right wing nutters who are
going crazy here, it's a mass phenomenon.
Equally fashionable, closely related
and nearly as scary is the Europhobia - because what we are seeing
here is beyond Euroscepticism - that is spreading like wildfire
across Europe. The crisis-ridden countries of the South blame
"Europe" for strangling their economies, while the less
afflicted countries blame it for having to fork out "their"
money to finance Southern mismanagement. It seems as if many, if not
even a majority of Europeans couldn't care less if Europe were to
fall apart. And nowhere have politicians risen above exploiting the
crisis for national and even sub-national electoral purposes.
What worries me most is that for the
first time, Europhobia is gaining a strong following in Germany,
traditionally a very pro-EU country, and for good reason: the
standing we have in the world, economically and politically, we have
thanks to European integration. And we are forgetting that.
This is not only a German phenomenon,
though. All over Europe, we are forgetting what Europe really is: an
idea, a dream. A dream that we can work together to live in
prosperity and in peace, in tolerance and in freedom. What is at
peril in the crisis is a European Dream that is just as great and
possibly even more ambitious than the American Dream. Because while
the American Dream is about achieving your aspirations by working by
yourself, in Europe for decades we have dreamt of achieving them by
working together.
We have good reason to be proud of
Europe and its achievements. Because apart from creating a number of
bureaucratic monsters - although bans on bendy bananas and curvy
cucumbers are largely mythical -
Europe has done an awful lot for each and every single one of us. We
have come to take these achievements for granted, and it seems to me
that people are just not aware of all the amazing things that would
disappear if the European Dream were to break down. Let me give you a
few mundane examples.
Thanks to the European Dream, can
travel freely across Europe. Wherever you go, you are covered by
health insurance just by waving a little blue card with the sexy name
EHIC (if you're interested, it stands for European Health Insurance
Card). You can work in another country, earn pension rights, and take
them with you when you leave. Granted, it's a little complicated in
practice, but at least you can do it at all. Thanks to the EU,
my boyfriend and I can live in the same country without one of us
having to worry about residence and work permits or visa. We just
live.
You can study abroad thanks to an
elaborate party scheme called Erasmus. You can study abroad outside
the Erasmus framework and be spared having to pay ridiculous overseas
fees because the European Union deemed discrimination among different
EU nationals illegal on your behalf. If you return to your home
country or move somewhere else, your university degree will be
recognised. You may have to jump through some hoops, but you will get
there in the end.
Throughout the Eurozone, you can pay
with the same currency. If you're a little older than the Euro,
you'll have (hazy) memories of how much of an enormous pain it used
to be when you had to exchange money everywhere you went. In fact, if
you've recently travelled outside the Eurozone, you will have quite a
vivid memory of it. Thanks to the European Commission's "regulation
fever", mobile roaming fees are getting lower and lower (they
are still excruciatingly expensive, but we're making a start).
If you are travelling outside Europe
and find yourself in trouble - say, you've been robbed or lost your
passport - in a country where your home country doesn't have an
embassy, you're not alone. You can go to any other EU country's
embassy and they will help you as if they were your own. The idea is
so awesome it gives me goose bumps.
Listing these things harbours the
danger of boiling the European Dream down to a few practicalities.
These are just a few of the achievements the European project has
brought to our everyday lives in the EU.
But the European Dream is so much
bigger than that, and we are watching it crash and burn without doing
much about it, indeed some seem to be betting on its failure and
spurring it on. At the first sight of adversity, we are letting the
dream that we can live together in a space free of borders go in
favour of a bunch of narrow-minded, simplistic stereotypes.
And the world is watching us, with many
onlookers shaking their heads in disbelief. Because here's the thing:
the European Dream is not just our dream. In many places, more
or less successful attempts have been made to recreate what was
perceived as a zone of economic prosperity, democracy, and personal
freedom. We're not just endangering our own dream, we're destroying
the aspirations of many who wanted to live in an environment a little
more like Europe.
Believe me, I am aware of a lot of the
one-size-fits-all, sometimes neo-colonial external relations the EU
has been involved in where it hasn't exactly covered itself with
glory. I am also aware of "fortress Europe" that has sought to shut others out of our prosperity and freedom by
building high external walls.
But even so, it is my belief that if we
continue to watch the European Dream shattering around us, we make
ourselves responsible for other, similar and more fragile dreams
being suffocated before they have even been fully born. As European
citizens, we bear a responsibility that goes beyond our own borders.
Let's keep dreaming, and let's work to
rescue our European Dream. Let's rescue Europe.
* I tried hard and unsuccessfully to
find a translation that would even come close to the demeaning term
"Pleite-Griechen" Bild is using. There's a linguistic
connotation here with the word "Pleitegeier", originally
from the Yiddish and meaning someone who goes bust (Wikipedia enlightened me on
that one). "Geier", however, also means vulture in German.
Mix that together and you hopefully get exactly the yucky feeling
that overcomes me when I hear the term "Pleite-Griechen".
