Bruce Thornton writes: The slow-motion crisis of the European Union is the big story that rarely gets the attention it deserves. On the economic front, the E.U.’s dismal economic performance over the last six years was summed up in a December headline in Business Insider: “Europe Stinks.” The 2008 Great Recession exposed the incoherence of the E.U.’s economic structure, particularly its single currency, which is held hostage by the diverse economic policies of sovereign nations. The data tell the tale. The E.U.’s GDP grew 1 percent in 2013, anemic compared to the U.S.’s 2.2 percent. In December 2014, unemployment in the E.U. averaged 11.4 percent, while in the U.S. it was 5.6 percent. We are troubled by our labor force participation rate of 62.7 percent, a 36-year low. But in the E.U., it was 57.5 percent in 2013. Our recovery from the recession may be slow by our historical standards, but it is blazing compared to the E.U.’s.
The E.U.’s economic woes have many causes, but intrusively regulated economies and outsized government spending on generous social welfare transfers are two of the most important. Despite the rebuke of such policies delivered by the recession, government spending as a percentage of GDP has actually increased in the E.U., from 45.5 percent in 2007 to 49 percent in 2013, even as many Europeans decry the harsh “austerity” measures called for by countries like Germany. Greece, the E.U member increasingly in danger of being forced to exit the monetary union and thus risk its unraveling, has nonetheless raised its government spending from 46.8 percent in 2007 to 59 percent in 2013.
Socially, the E.U. is troubled by two trends: demographic decline and the presence of concentrated populations of unassimilated and disaffected Muslim immigrants. Europe is an aging people; by 2030, one in four Europeans will be 65 years or older, reflecting the Europeans’ failure to reproduce. Not since the 1970s have European women averaged 2.1 children, the number necessary to replace a population. It means fewer workers, a factor in the influx of immigrants into the E.U. over the last several decades.
The result has been large concentrations of immigrants segregated in neighborhoods like the banlieues of Paris or the satellite “dish-cities” of Amsterdam. Shut out from labor markets, plied with generous social welfare payments, and allowed to cultivate beliefs and cultural practices inimical to liberal democracy, many of these immigrants despise their new homes and find the religious commitment and certainty of radical Islam an attractive alternative.
All these economic, social, and political problems are no secret. But the proposed solutions to them usually focus on policy changes or technical adjustments to the structure and functioning of the E.U. Yet this begs the fundamental question that has troubled European unification ever since it began with the Treaty of Rome in 1957: What comprises the collective beliefs and values that can form the foundations of a genuine European-wide community?
A shared commitment to leisure, a short workweek, and a generous social safety net is nothing worth killing or dying for. Neither is the vague idea of a transnational E.U. ruled by unaccountable Eurocrats in Brussels and Strasbourg..
We American should not indulge the schadenfreude aroused by watching our sometimes-condescending older cousins slip farther and farther behind us in global importance and power. Europe is still collectively the world’s largest economy, and its travails will impact the whole globe. More importantly, many of the trends weakening Europe today are active in the US too.
