COMMENTARY: What the Euro really means?

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ Someone should make a rule that journalists who pontificate about world events […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ Someone should make a rule that journalists who pontificate about world events pass a comprehensive exam in history.


Consider the coverage of the establishment of the European Central Bank last week. Three ideas dominated:”Last Minute Fight Jeopardizes Euro!,””Doubts about Monetary Union!”and”Monetary Union a Threat to American Power?”Op-ed pages were decorated with articles insisting the union wouldn’t work and that it shouldn’t work.

No one seems to have noticed the epic character of this historical event.

Since the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire in the 9th Century, the various European principalities have been making war on one another. During this century they have fought the two most horrible wars in history, the latter within the memory of many of us.

Perhaps 200 million people died in those wars. As recently as 1945 these countries were exhausted by devastation and still threatened by violent internal strife in which both Communist-dominated working classes and right wing nationalist militants threatened to tear apart fragile democracies.

The outlook for Europe was grim. Only naive fools would have believed that by the end of the century a United States of Europe could emerge.

Yet it has.

For the first time since the barbarian armies swept across the Rhine and the Danube to end the dominance of the Rome, much of Europe is part of a single, over-arching structure. War among the European countries, always probable over the last millennium, is now virtually unthinkable.

Europe west of the Oder and north of the Danube is now a confederation of civil, democratic, liberal, and prosperous societies.

How did this come to be?

It was not an automatic and inevitable historical development. Great men believed in it _ Maurice Schumann, Guy Mollet, Jean Monet, Conrad Adenauer, Charles DeGaulle, Alcide de Gaspari.


The utterly unexpected post-war prosperity was a big help and the emergence of the Christian Democratic parties as a center force _ everywhere but in France _ provided a home for those who were sick of war and sick of ideological confrontation. The Social Democratic parties moved to the right, even in Germany, and became pro-European. Spain and Portugal slipped out of Fascist control.

The ordinary people of Europe wanted neither war nor ideologically-generated violence to interfere with their surprising affluence. Residual nationalism still keeps some nations out of the Monetary Union _ most notably Britain _ but others desperately want in: Slovenia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. From the Blasket Islands to beyond the Vistula, from Lapland to the Mediterranean, Europe is essentially united.

Rome in all its glory could not have dreamed of such a union. The Monetary Union is the heart of the new European federation. From the perspective of 1945 this outcome would have seemed miraculous. To anyone who knows any history it still does.

No one is about to give the United States credit for this achievement. Certainly not the America-hating European intellectual elite and certainly not our own semi-educated pundits. Yet, in fact, without the United States this miracle simply could not have happened.

American economic aid jump-started European recovery and NATO provided a military umbrella under which the new democracies could spend their own resources on consumer goods.

With American guidance, the German Federal Republic became a democratic society and the engine which propelled the search for unity. American firmness and eventual victory in the Cold War ended the threat of the Soviet empire.


Despite foolish claims by some people, neither the pope nor Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. It was, rather, the policy of”containment”pursued by every president since Harry Truman that toppled the Soviet system.

If there was any sense of history in this country there would be dancing in the streets over the European Monetary Union. We won the double header.

DEA END GREELEY

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