If we are witnessing the euro being saved, this is a triumph of fear, not of hope. Other great moments of the European project – the introduction of the single market, successive enlargements, the launch of the euro itself – were driven by hope. Here, it is fear that has led Germany and others to do the minimum necessary: fear that the costs of collapse would be higher than the unpalatable, resented alternative of bailing out the countries in trouble.
If the euro zone does not return to growth, or does so only in a few better-placed countries, these resentments will multiply. Even if it does, there will be legacies of bitterness. More and more people will ask, “What is this Europe really for?” (Remember that the European monetary union was conceived of not just as an economic step but also, perhaps even more so, as a political one.)
There are good answers to this question, and they urgently need to be spelled out. They have to do with our negotiating power in the 21st century world of emerging, non-Western giants such as China and India; global challenges like climate change; the Arab spring, the most hopeful development of this decade; and defending (with the help of essential, managed immigration from the Arab world) the domestic achievements of the last half-century, including a certain European mix of relative prosperity, quality of life, social justice and security.
It would be foolish to pretend that the euro has been the best and straightest path to those larger goals. If the euro did not exist, it would not yet be necessary to introduce it. But it does exist, with all the design faults that have now become evident. We have to start from where we are. To go back now would be worse than to go forward. Difficult though it will be, Europeans have to correct those design faults as they go along, working within the necessary constraints of national democracies, and adding a strategy for growth.
Above all, we have to recognize that saving the euro is no substitute for the larger political project, of which it was once meant to be both core and catalyst. The politics of fear may have saved the euro. We need a politics of hope to find a European answer to the Arab Spring.
Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University.
