European Fantasy Land

 What will perhaps confound future historians most is how loudly the alarm bells have been ringing. 

The Bells of St Mark's, Venice
Edward John Poynter (1836-1919)
Photo Credit: Birmingham Museums Trust [Public Domain]

France, the UK and Germany - the great pillars of the old European order - are crumbling... but what astounds this commentator observing from inside the edifice, as it were, is how incapable the peoples of old Europe are at even diagnosing the rot, let alone addressing it.

France is a chastening case in point... This has nothing to do with left or right, Macron or Le Pen, the Fifth Republic or popular divisions. The problem is the French people; the demos, if you will...

It is the settled and immoveable will of the French people to live beyond their means; to enjoy ever rising welfare, social spending and subsidies while balking at the higher taxes, longer working hours and delayed pensions required to pay for them. The sovereign debt now stands at 120 per cent of GDP...

The UK electorate is, if anything, even more out to lunch. Not unlike the French, we like to blame "useless" politicians, the electoral system or being inside or outside certain trading blocks, but it's largely a distraction from the fact that voters have become ever more detached from empirical reality; voters who (as polls consistently reveal) demand Scandinavian public services with American levels of taxation, gleaming new energy infrastructure but not in my backyard, new housing while retaining the local right to veto and triple-locked pensions but not the bill...

Looking around the world merely amplifies one's sense of the creeping unrealism in old Europe. India may be poor and hamstrung by the iniquitous caste system but it is building like crazy and determined to become a dominant power. Vietnam is a one-party state but securing huge inward tech investment and growing faster than England in the 19th century...

One also notes the bureaucratic overreach of EU institutions and ever more visible signs of corruption - this, too, cannot be omitted from any analysis of Europe's travails. Neither can the increasingly brazen offshoring of the super-rich, who leverage the institutional collateral of Europe to secure vast wealth while siphoning off their tax liabilities...

Old Europe remains a great power and (to my mind) the best place in the world to live, but its people have drifted into a fantasy land from which they - we - must awake or the world will race ahead of us. And we will be left - with our guilt, culture wars and cat videos - wondering how on earth we let it happen.

(Matthew Syed, The Sunday Times, 2024)

An illuminating article which highlights some of the problems we have, here in the UK.