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March 19, 2010
JWisdom.com Stewards of sacrifice
with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Why Obama is waging war on Israel
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JWisdom.com Love me not?
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Anne Bayefsky: Behind Obama's Dangerous Overreaction on Israel
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Paul Richter: Biden promises 'viable Palestine' is in the offing
March 10, 2010
JWisdom.com How To Get A (Real) Life
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Paul Richter: Israel exerts soverign right to its capital as Biden looks on astounded
March 9, 2010
JWisdom.com Free To Be (Responsibly) You and Me!
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David G. Savage: Supreme Court to rule on free speech in case of soldier's funeral
March 8, 2010
JWisdom.com Finding or Losing Yourself? Here's How!
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Steven Emerson: America must learn from the UK about the future of Islamist subversion
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JWisdom.com The Limits of Eternity
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March 4, 2010
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JWisdom.com Grasping The Name of Your Life Game
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March 2, 2010
March 1, 2010
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Feb. 26, 2010
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Feb. 25, 2010
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Feb. 23, 2010
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Feb. 19, 2010
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Caroline B. Glick: Israel and the West are perpetrators of a myth that endangers the Jewish State
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Feb. 17, 2010
JWisdom.com Think your life is messed up?
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Feb. 16, 2010
JWisdom.com Feet On The Street Spirituality
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Marty Peretz: Let Europe Mind Its Own Business. It Brings Nothing To The Table Save For Mischief
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Susan King: 'Wolf Man' reflected writer's wartime Jewish experience
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Jewish World Review
March 3, 2009
/ 7 Adar 5769
European Disunion
By
Anne Applebaum
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
"Growing Economic Crisis Threatens the Idea of One Europe." "Members Sharply Split Over Economic Action." "Europe's Family Squabbles." Reading the headlines in recent days, one would be tempted to conclude that the European Union, which has so long promulgated an earnest ideology of ever-closer, ever-greater European economic cooperation, is in troubleand one would be right. One might also conclude, reading the stories themselves, that the biggest obstacle facing united Europe is the economic crisis in the eastern half of the continent, where the weaker ex-Communist economies are dragging down their richer Western neighbors. But one would be wrong.
In fact, it is impossible to understand what is happening in the somewhat surreal world of European political economy at the moment without first tossing out every stereotype, every cliché, and every assumption that has ever been made about Europe's political geography: East, West, North, Southnone of it helps make sense of what is going on. Look harder: The first and sharpest economic crisis on the continent was not in the East but in Iceland, far to the west. The deepest recession is not in the traditionally slow South but in Ireland, part of the recently dynamic North.
Look harder still: While the bankrupt government of Latvia, a new member of Europe, has been besieged by angry demonstrators, far more violent demonstrations have engulfed the government of Greece, a much older member of the union, which is also a member of the common European currency. While the Hungarians have, it is true, requested, and been denied, an extraordinary $240 billion loan, a single British bankthe Royal Bank of Scotlandhas requested, and will receive, a far more extraordinary $425 billion bailout from the British government.
For that matter, the bad debts accumulated by British financial institutions alone far exceed, by many tens of billions, the governmental debt of the Poles and the Czechs, two countries that have had no domestic banking failures to speak of. (Czech banks are net lenders to their mostly foreign owners.) Which leads me to an interesting question: Who proved, in the end, to be the most responsible capitalists? The London bankers who spent the 1990s dispensing expensive privatization advice in Warsaw and Pragueor the newly elected, shabbily dressed politicians who paid them for it?
In fact, what this crisis has revealed is not an old fault line between East and West (let alone a "new Iron Curtain," as the petulant and ineffectual Hungarian prime minister put it) but an even older and more obvious truth: Most people prefer to blame their problems on somebody else, even when those problems are clearly self-inflicted. Thus, the French president has been hinting that his country's weak industrial output is somehow the fault of the Czechs because they build cheaper Renaults; the Hungarians are angry that their richer neighbors won't rescue them from years of irresponsible public spending; British workers demonstrate against the foreign workers who mostly do jobs they long refused. There is something similar going on in the United Statespeople who shouldn't have taken loans are furious at the people who shouldn't have offered thembut in Europe, these passions inevitably have national overtones as well.
Which means, of course, that they could indeed break the European Union, though not along an East-West axis. For yearsdecades, reallya deep hypocrisy has permeated European institutions: While European leaders used the language of international cooperation in public, they funneled money to pet national causesFrench farmers, Spanish highwaysbehind the scenes. While they spoke of giving Europe a greater international role, they refused to create truly European foreign or energy policies, preferring instead to issue regulations and jockey for advantage. Now that there is a crisis, they can't break those habits. Some thus want to use "Europe" to create illegal protectionist havens, others treat "Europe" as a lender of last resort, and still others prefer to shout loudly that their problems started in "Europe" and not at home.
What the European Union should do now is very minimal. Europe's leaders should, above all, enforce the rules of trade and competition. They should stop pretending that their neighbors are responsible for the unemployment rate. They should remind their citizens that neighbors buy their products and subsidize their banks. They can't bail out everybody: National governments are still responsible for keeping their debts under control and their finances strong. But they can behave as if their rhetoricphrases like single market and free trade zoneactually signifies something real.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
APPLEBAUM'S LATEST
Gulag: A History
Nearly 30 million prisoners passed through the Soviet Union's labor camps in their more than 60 years of operation. This remarkable volume, the first fully documented history of the gulag, describes how, largely under Stalin's watch, a regulated, centralized system of prison labor-unprecedented in scope-gradually arose out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution. Fueled by waves of capricious arrests, this prison labor came to underpin the Soviet economy. JWR's Applebaum, a former Warsaw correspondent for the Economist and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, draws on newly accessible Soviet archives as well as scores of camp memoirs and interviews with survivors to trace the gulag's origins and expansion Sales help fund JWR.
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Comment on JWR contributor Anne Applebaum's column by clicking here.
Previously:
02/24/09: Who cares what Hillary Clinton says to China's leaders about human rights?
02/17/09: Witless protection
02/10/09: Our Ticket Out of Afghanistan
01/27/09:Why some foreigners can't believe Obama won the presidency fair and square
01/20/09: A Flight Test for All of Us
01/14/09: Europe's New Cold War
01/07/09: Pointless Peace Proposals
12/30/08: The magnificent rhetorical legacy of the Founding Fathers
12/23/08: Do riots in Athens portend demonstrations in Paris and Cincinnati?
12/16/08: Breach of Trust: Bernard Madoff's massive fraud will cripple American capitalism
12/09/08: In praise of charismatic politicians
12/03/08: Moscow's Empire of Dust
11/20/08: Getting Past Mythmaking In Georgia
11/12/08: In Praise of Political Rock Stars
10/03/08: Election Day myths you must resist
09/30/08: Not just a metaphor: Lehman Brothers was economic's 9/11
09/04/08: Class of '64
08/28/08: Did Hillary really help the Barack cause?
08/27/08: Show of Power, Indeed
08/19/08: What Is Russia Afraid Of?
08/13/08: When China Starved
08/11/08: Two of the world's rising powers are strutting their stuff
08/05/08: How Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago changed the world
07/29/08:The Hour of Europe Tolls Again … But are European politicians up to the task?
07/15/08: Why Does Obama Want To Campaign in Berlin?
07/01/08: Citizen Athletes: How did a guy who can't speak Polish end up scoring Poland's only goal of Euro 2008?
06/24/08: Why do we expect presidential candidates to be kind?
06/17/08: Pity the Poor Eurocrats
06/12/08: Is the World Ready for a Black American President?
05/28/08: The Busiest Generation: America seems to value its children's status and achievements over their happiness
05/20/08: Leave Hitler Out of It: The craze for injecting the Nazis into political debate must end
05/13/08: A Drastic Remedy: The case for intervention in Burma
05/07/08: A Warning Shot From Moscow?
04/23/08: Radio to stay tuned to
04/17/08: China learns the price of a few weeks of global attention
04/01/08: Head scarves are potent political symbols
03/26/08: The Olympics are the perfect place for a protest
03/19/08: Could Tibet bring down modern China?
03/12/08: Have political autobiographies made us more susceptible to fake memoirs?
03/05/08: Why does Russia bother to hold elections?
02/20/08: Kosovo is a textbook example of the law of unintended consequences
02/06/08: A Craven Canterbury Tale
02/06/08: French prez' whirlwind romance reminds voters of his political recklessness
© 2008, Anne Applebaum
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