Stalling engine

EU leadership vacuum: Germany thinks southern Europeans don't work, take too many vacations and retire early. It also suspects they aren’t that clean, as shown by the initial doubts cast about Spanish cucumbers in the E.coli outbreak. Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal in return can’t stand Germany’s arrogance and imperialistic designs on European economic policy. European governments are at loggerheads over immigration policies. The Schengen agreements, supposed to guarantee free circulation within much of the European Union, have been criticised and could be revised.

Four years into a major financial crisis, the European cement seems to be slowly dissolving.

Forget about global financial imbalances, protectionist tensions or rising oil prices. In recent months, the real threat to European cohesion has come from the Europeans themselves. The euro zone debt crisis has revealed a major fault line between creditor and debtor countries, and has bared the structural default of monetary union — a lack of common economic policy. But this was well known before the crisis, even though markets failed to notice. What’s new is that the engine driving European integration — which historically has always been powered by political will — seems to be stalling.

Europe’s current lack of strong leaders partly accounts for this existential crisis. Among larger countries, governments are weak in Spain and Italy, and domestically-obsessed in France and Germany. Populist parties are on the rise across the continent, some of them campaigning on fierce anti-European themes. Sitting governments, instead of confronting them head-on, are espousing some of their ideas — notably on immigration or protectionism — thus giving them further credibility.

Europe was built on crisis, conflict, confrontation and compromise. But it currently doesn't have leaders determined to look beyond the next opinion poll. It’s hard to imagine Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, who headed France and Germany in the 1980s and went on to build monetary union, managing the euro crisis as lamely as Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. There’s no doubt people are tired of the efforts required after several years of mismanagement and crisis. But it’s in times like these that fatigue needs to be overcome by that little extra thing called leadership.