Europa literally a mythical entity

Submitted by fotios on Thu, 2010-02-25 23:38

We've had the first visible cracks on the wall some years ago when certain EU countries categorically refused to ratify the proposed EU constitution. Still, that was just a technical matter that did not directly touch on the essence of the Union; the essence being that EU aimed to not just be a common market but a strong, well-organized political union stemming off a presumed existing or potentially cultivable overarching European super-ethnic nationality.

I say "presumed" and I am being kind as it really was not merely imagined but rather imaginary. How can you bridge the cultural gap among the European peoples when you literally invest billions in maintaining huge walls of isolation, like an ever growing number of European languages that were invented to divide and not unite? How can you bridge the cultural gap of peoples when the overwhelming majority of each and every one of these populations do not want it bridged? How can you unite when Europeans in their majority have not yet been convinced that race and nationality do not directly control the intellectual characteristics of individuals? How can you do it when the EU, instead of trying to expose the hollowness of the various European ethnogenetic mythologies actually backtracks in history and tries to reinforce them? Could this ever work? Could you work with people who in their majority religiously maintain in their brains a rigidly structured hierarchy of value and worth of European peoples that is, without hesitation, extended to individuals as well?

In my opinion this could never work and I believe it actually never will; especially when Europe is in trouble because of other reasons like the end of historical period of about a millennium that heavily favored it and a serious global financial crisis that will likely never leave most EU member states although it may temporarily improve in some. Reasons for that are quite simple and obvious to anyone who cares to look without fear.

First, there's the fact that Europe's advantage up to now came from its huge scientific and technological superiority that compensated for its lack of natural resources; to make a long story short, historically what Europeans did not have they simply took from others and they could do that because of their technological superiority. Today, and because it turns out that scientific and technological revolutions with power-shifting potential have been on shortage for the past 50 years, Europe has lost its clear technological and military advantage not to just the US but a number of other countries while their natural resources are not getting any richer.

Second, hundreds of years in an inherently non-meritocratic social system that considers selfishness an acceptable human trait has brought such widespread corruption that Europe actually has a huge percentage of people that consider it their birth-right to be paid well for either doing nothing or doing what they like regardless of practical value. There are huge portions of European populations that live off highly-priced European property that they have inherited and that is well-priced because of certain favorable historical and geographical contingencies.

Third, Europeans have failed to learn from their mistakes. Huge mistakes like the ones that led to two world wars and especially the ones (see nazism, fascism, racism) that led to WWII just 70 years ago. Today fascism and racism is once more on the rise in countries like Italy that in all their purported love for democracy and freedom have once more started to give real political power to overt fascists and racists.

Today, in all our imaginary enlightenment, the British still hate the French (and vice-versa), the Italians love Mussolini, Spanish do not want to admit that they are partly Arab and the "Greeks" want to convince the world that they directly hail from Socrates and Alexander the Great while in just the past 20 years (under rule of law and established borders) they have absorbed more than 15% of their population in non-Greek immigrants.

The recently exposed case of the state of Greek economy served both as a confirmation of my assertions above as well as a taste of things to come. Yes, more overspending, corrupt, increasingly non-competitive EU countries will go bust and will never quite recover to their previous glory. Today I saw some Greeks burning the EU flag in the center of Athens. This is happening while German media post offensive articles about Greece and the Greeks and the Greek media talk about the still unpaid debts of Germany to Greece because of the bloody and immensely destructive occupation during WWII. So much for European solidarity and cohesion! But then again, maybe only God can make something out of nothing.

Greece is just the beginning my friends. Look at the finances of countries like the UK (just recently an Empire but currently each UK citizen owes 150K USD to the world), Italy (with a public debt bigger than Greece's) and Spain, not to mention smaller fish. Greece, is just an early precursor of what is to come and that is nothing less than the shrinking of Eurozone and devaluation of the Euro, the breakup of the EU (or its backtracking to merely a common market) and eventually Europe's demise to something non-important on the world stage.

Those who can feel the coming storm already make plans to flee for those countries that will be on the rise while Europe is on the fall. I just hope that the rest of the world will be more gracious to Europeans while they're weak than they have been to them.

Link1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_debt

Link2: http://www.flickr.com/photos/teacherdudebbq2/4387053442/