Brian Wilson: Europe must learn from its history

Where does history end and politics begin? Except on the shelves of bookshops, the lines are never clearly drawn and nowhere can ever this be a more non-negotiable truth, for excellent reasons, than in the heart of Europe.

So, when the new French president, François Hollande, warned in advance of yesterday’s meeting that Angela Merkel could not be “the sole decider of Europe’s fate based on German interests”, his words – even through translation – carried more than one level of resonance.

One way or another, containing the power of Germany has been a recurring theme of post-war European politics, most of which have long since merged into history.

For France in particular, the imperative has been to limit the strength of its neighbour, both politically and economically.

In the late 1980s, the prospect of German reunification alarmed the French president of the day, François Mitterand, to the point that he threatened to veto it within the European Union. It may well be that Helmut Kohl accepted the principle of European monetary union as the quid pro quo for Mitterand’s reluctant acquiescence.

Both men came from the war-time generation which allowed them to understand the unspoken tensions that underlay all such debates. Mitterand genuinely feared the creation of a strong, united Germany at the centre of Europe. His favoured antidote was the establishment of a united Europe, preferably in advance of a united Germany.

The matter may have been settled one brisk January day in 1990 when Mitterand and Kohl walked for several hours along the Atlantic coast at Latché, the French president’s rural retreat. Thereafter, Mitterand dropped his opposition to German reunification and within little more than two years the Maastricht Treaty had been signed, paving the way for the common currency.

If that was indeed the setting for such an understanding, then it seems unlikely that the two men spent these hours talking only of political machinations and economic calculations. It would surely have been a conversation that dwelt heavily on personal experience and the shared imperative of giving reassurance, wherever it was required, that history must never repeat itself.

It may soon be time for Chancellor Angela Merkel to take a long walk in the country with President François Hollande – or whoever else is capable of influencing her. For there is surely once again the need now for a perspective that goes beyond the immediate imperatives of German politics, and beyond the orthodoxies of Frankfurt’s central bankers.

Whatever noble ideals drove the concept of European monetary union, there were also powerful practical arguments against it. And the more the project grew, the stronger these became.

Monetary union between Germany and France made sense and could have formed the basis for an optimum currency area, as it is known in the trade.

However, by the time the euro came to fruition, the concept had grown arms and legs. Anyone who could meet fairly unexacting criteria was in – and no country could join the EU in future without becoming part of the great eurozone experiment.

There was no shortage of warnings at the time about the implausibility of a single currency covering such a diverse range of economic cultures and conditions, but they were dismissed by those who shared the dream or simply envisaged a bigger market. There are now more than 300 million people in the eurozone and it is, by many criteria, a great success story.

But surely the flip side of that euro coin is that those who fall victim to the downsides of membership are not cast into the financial gutter to fend for themselves or indeed are subjected to brutal punishment akin to the old relationship between the International Monetary Fund and its impoverished clients. Expanding the concept of the single currency to fragile, peripheral economies clearly carried risks and also responsibilities which must now be borne.

There is not a shred of evidence to support the view that what Greece requires is further large doses of austerity. The more the pips squeak, the worse things become for the ordinary, largely innocent people who are the victims of this madness.

Whether in or out of the euro, Greeks are being punished for things that not only their own politicians allowed to happen, but also their current persecutors.

And as sure as night follows day, the political reaction is to push some people towards the extremist fringes, if this is the only way to express resistance to the orthodoxy of accepting further austerity measures.

When youth unemployment swells to 50 per cent, as it has done in Greece, the fallout is unpredictable to say the least. Where next will we see the Nazi salutes of Greece’s New Dawn Movement? Should a German Chancellor, of all people, really need to be reminded of such basic history lessons?

Alistair Darling commented this week that Britain and the European Union will inevitably contribute to the cost of bailing out Greece in order to “simply stop people starving”.

It was a stark way of making the point that, in the civilised Europe of the 21st century, that kind of tragedy cannot be allowed to unfold. Yet if that kind of tragedy cannot be allowed to unfold, why is it being precipitated so relentlessly in the first place?

Reference back to Chancellor Kohl reminded me of travelling to Berlin and its environs in 1990 to be part of the team there to observe the first elections for the unified German parliament, which Kohl won by a landslide after announcing that the worthless East German deutschemark would be given the same value as the West’s currency. It was an incredible act of statesmanship which laid the foundation for economic, as well as political, parity.

Some comparable act of leadership is needed now. Nothing is simple and nothing is cheap. But driving millions of people throughout western Europe into poverty – and along with it driving some of them into the arms of xenophobic extremists – as a form of economic punishment, is not good politics. And history tells us that it never has been.