Italicised comment is from a commentary by Jakob Augstein, the bracketed text is VDH's fisking. rtwt. Haven't read a fisking this good outside the 'burg in a while.
Nevertheless, at least one good opportunity springs from America's fate: The further the United States distances itself from us, the more we will (have to) think for ourselves, as Europeans. The West? That's us.
[As we say in America -- "promises, promises..." Does that "distance" include rejection of U.S. military subsidies -- as in the final departure of the remaining 52,000 American troops in Germany? Given the status of the EU, and what I read in the German papers about Italians and Greeks--and then again in the southern European papers about Germans -- Mr. Augstein should be thinking not of ridding America from the West, but whether the West will still include a united Europe, which is proving as undemocratic as it is unable to continue the basic premises of the welfare state. So the West indeed totters, but the general culprit -- whether evidenced in the North-South divide in Europe, the rancor over borrowing an unsustainable $16 trillion in the U.S., or the dichotomy between the financial health of red- and blue-state America -- is an unsustainable redistributive state.
The desire for "distance" unfortunately is not just confined to European elites like Mr. Augstein himself, but is voiced more often by a far greater numbers of Americans, who cannot quite fathom the premises of postmodern Europe, much less why in tough financial times we should be subsidizing the security of a system that won't pay for what it thinks it requires for its own protection -- is NATO still the old British formulation, as articulated by Lord Ismay, of keeping Russia out, America in, and Germany down? If the French and British military record in Libya or the German-Greek negotiations are a blueprint for a new definition of European singularity, then God help our trans-Atlantic cousins, since America will soon no longer be willing or able to.] |