‘Forged in Crises’

Belgium recently unveiled a new coin celebrating one of the most significant events ever to happen in its territory—or in Europe, period. But soon after, it scrapped it—destroying the 180,000 coins that had already been minted, at a cost of about $1.6 million.

The event Belgium chose to commemorate was the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. And no wonder: That battle changed history and led to the independence of the Kingdom of Belgium.

But the French were not so nostalgic. They did not want euro coins that celebrated the defeat of Napoleon, one of their most revered heroes.

At the heart of this comparatively insignificant “second battle of Waterloo” lies the reason why the European Union struggles to act with unity on any important issue. It’s not that the states don’t share a heritage. It’s that this heritage is largely a history of invading each other.

This is why so many observers predict that the European Union is doomed to failure. With no history of common commitment or shared glories, no track record of unity through adversity, how can the different nations of Europe stand together through any major test? Especially the test Europe is facing right now?

The Euro Crisis

Since the global financial crisis struck in 2008, the EU has yet to stabilize its financial structure. As a result, unemployment in many southern European countries has reached epic levels. In Spain and Greece, around a quarter of all adults willing and able to work are unemployed. For youth, that figure rises to half.

European bureaucrats have proved excellent at kicking the can down the road. But each time they do, the problem intensifies and the anger grows.

Since 2008, the Greeks have ousted the entire political class that ruled the country for a generation. Athens is now led by a party that won only 3.3 percent of the vote before the crisis. Clearly Greek voters are angry with their old leaders, and with those of the EU—meaning Germany.

Greece’s new leaders reflect this hostility. “If Europe leaves us in crisis, we will flood it with migrants,” Greece’s new defense minister threatened. “Too bad for Berlin if there are some jihadis from Islamic State in that wave of millions.”

Bureaucrats in Berlin are scrambling to keep Greece in the monetary union, yet opinion polls indicate that over half of Germans would be happy for the Greeks to quit the eurozone. Another poll found that 80 percent want to stop sending money to Greece.

The result is a series of angry clashes between Greece and Germany. The most bitter is over Greece’s claim that it deserves compensation from Berlin for German aggression during World War ii. The claim—for $368 billion—would be enough to pay off nearly all Greek debt.

But pushing back against Berlin—and then bringing up World War ii—is a sure way to anger the Germans. “They won’t get their debts paid by conjuring up German obligations from World War ii,” said German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. He said that trust in the Greek government had been “destroyed.”

Now the Greek government is threatening to seize German properties—right down to holiday homes owned by individual private German citizens—in order to recover the money.

“Relations have reached a new low,” warned the director of the Open Europe think tank, Mats Persson. “It’s turning into an arms race.”

The relationship is still at a stage where this can be fixed. Prominent German leaders, for example, have agreed Germany may indeed need to pay Greece more compensation from World War ii. Chancellor Angela Merkel can still make a few phone calls and calm things down.

But if it is not fixed soon, more than the euro is at risk. The emotions involved are strong enough to tear apart the EU itself. If Greece followed through with its threat to flood the EU with migrants, for example, it would be one of the last things it did as an EU member state.

Nor is this a solely Greek or solely German problem. These nations are just at the extreme ends of the divide. If Greece angrily slams the door and walks out, more divisions between debtor and creditor in Europe will appear.

Russia

As Europe’s economy wobbles, the crisis in Ukraine slogs on. For the first time in a generation, a European nation has been invaded by force and seen parts of its territory annexed by an invader. After invading Georgia and then Crimea (with no response from the West), Russian troops are blasting away at Ukrainian soldiers on their home soil in the eastern part of Ukraine’s mainland. It’s the biggest act of aggression Europe has seen since the forcible breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Russia continues to deliberately keep tension high, flying warplanes, warships and submarines in or near the airspace of European nations, and holding military exercises on its western frontier.

The West’s response has been weak. Only after Russia-backed separatists took the lives of EU citizens by shooting down a passenger jet did Brussels enforce meaningful sanctions—which are on track to expire this summer.

Now Vladimir Putin is swaggering onto Russian tv, boasting of how he tricked the West and planned the whole thing; he even claims he was prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Eastern Europe is not the only area where Putin is pushing. In Cyprus, Russia is also advancing, albeit with different tactics. In exchange for reducing the interest rate for a 2011 loan of $2.7 billion, Cyprus has allowed the Russian Navy use of its ports. Perhaps more disturbingly, since its bailout Cyprus has been drawing steadily closer to Russia.

“It’s quite a coup for the Kremlin. Cyprus was British until 1960; now it has been absorbed into Putin’s new empire,” wrote the Spectator’s Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph. “It’s not an empire that nato, with its Cold War mind-set, would recognize; it’s not one that can be described by coloring in nations on a map. This is an empire of influence—far cheaper to acquire, harder to spot, and easier to maintain” (February 27).

Cyprus is a key strategic base for the EU—essential for the EU to project power into the Middle East. If it can’t hold on to this island a few hundred miles off its Mediterranean shore, what can it secure?

A group of over 100 Czech and Slovak academics penned a warning, drawing on the experience of the West’s betrayal of their nation to Hitler in 1938. “It troubles us that, although according to various sources anywhere from 6,000 to 50,000 citizens of Ukraine and Russia have died in Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine, the democratically elected leaders of the West actually continue to engage in a policy of appeasement,” they wrote. “It troubles us that almost 80 years after Munich, the situation is repeating itself. In 1994, Ukraine gave up its arsenal of nuclear weapons and, with the signing of the Budapest Memorandum, the United States of America and Great Britain became the guarantors of its territorial integrity and independence. The insufficient military support from the U.S.A. and UK to an embattled Ukraine is a sad reminder of the failure of Western democracies to defend Europe against Hitler and casts a shadow of doubt on the credibility of other international guarantees and agreements, including the security guarantees, which membership in nato theoretically provides to the countries of Europe.”

This criticism exposes why the Ukraine crisis is an existential threat to the EU. Many Central and Eastern European nations joined the EU almost solely to guarantee their position in the Western world—to ensure they could never again be sucked into Russian domination. With their national survival staked on their EU memberships, they have been the EU’s most enthusiastic supporters. But if Europe’s response to Russia is so weak that they don’t feel protected, their whole reason for joining the EU is gone.

Ukraine proves that Europe is failing these former Soviet satellites. Central and Eastern European leaders don’t have the luxury of delusion—Putin is coming.

The EU in its current form cannot endure.

The ISIS Crisis

While Putin rampages to the east, the Islamic State rampages to the south.

This is merely the most prominent of many problems that now demand European attention, problems that a generation ago—or a decade ago or an administration ago—the U.S. would have handled. America’s retreat from the world is obvious, and it is being felt acutely in Europe.

Several terrorist attacks have been perpetrated in Europe in the last few years, and many European Muslims have expressed solidarity with the most extreme terrorist groups in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Iran is still developing nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles capable of detonating them over Paris, London and Berlin. And now the United States is not only failing to stop Tehran, it’s failing to even want to.

“Rather than being surrounded by a ring of friends, the EU is surrounded by a ring of fire stretching from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa, through the Middle East and the Caucasus up to the new front lines in Eastern Europe,” wrote Javier Solana, former EU high representative for common foreign and security policy and former nato secretary general.

Once again, Europe is not equipped for this situation. When France deployed 4,500 soldiers to Mali to curb the rise of al Qaeda-backed Islamists, European nations lacked the logistical backbone to support the mission. France borrowed planes from the British, Danes, Belgians and Canadians, but even then it didn’t have enough transports for its troops—it still needed the Americans. With 50 Royal Air Force transports, Britain fields one of the most capable European airlift fleets. But the Americans have more than 700.

Washington, however, is sending smoke signals that it is dialing down its readiness to protect the Europeans from new threats beyond its borders. Yet Europe is not equipped to deal with those threats itself.

Is Europe Doomed?

Many feel European unification cannot survive. Forget economic hopes and political integration: If Putin or Khamenei get nuclear trigger-happy, Europe may not survive, period.

But Europe’s founders would see this differently. “Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises,” wrote one of these founding fathers, Jean Monnet.

These crises are indeed dangerous—but they represent the only way Europe can unite. How else could this continent of independent nations with conflicting histories of conquering and being conquered by each other be forged into a united power? It will take the heat and pressure of a major crisis.

This view of European unity did not die with Monnet. Wolfgang Schäuble, who is now involved in fixing the Greek crisis, said in 2011, “[C]risis represents an opportunity. I’m not saying that I enjoy being in a crisis, but I’m not worried. Europe always moved forward in times of crisis. Sometimes you need a little pressure for certain decisions to be taken.”

Europe’s bureaucrats excel at compromise and delay. They may well be able to put off Europe’s moment of decision for some time yet. All these crises will have to get much worse before Europe has to act—but with no one in a position to solve them, get worse they will. Thus, Europe’s course is clear. It must either unite or fall apart—or some combination of these two, with some nations walking off while the remainder create a superstate.

In times of relative prosperity and peace, incentive to unite is weak. But in crisis, there arises the powerful catalyst of self-preservation.

Consider the two principal adversaries in the battle of Waterloo: Britain and France. Few countries have a longer history of mutual hostility. Yet in 1940, the British government was fully prepared to unite these two nations into one state in the face of Nazi Germany.

The French were unwilling to take that step, but even so, the fact that one side overlooked centuries of division demonstrates the power of crisis as a unifier.

The euro crisis is self-inflicted. Europe’s leaders assumed that creating a common currency would lead to a common government: The currency would be so unstable that the EU would be forced to unify. Europe might be able to solve this crisis by dividing just as easily as uniting.

But the other crises are different. If the EU falls apart, Russia will still be there and still be aggressive. Radical Islamists will still live in Europe’s cities. The Islamic State will still stalk North Africa. Iran will still be building its bomb.

Facing these threats, EU nations have every interest in making the Union work.

The Glue

There is another force with powerful potential to drive unification. Despite Europe’s conflicting history, one institution can claim to be able to bring all Europe together: the Catholic Church. Every European nation has deep Catholic roots. In the Middle Ages, religion dominated almost every aspect of life. Catholic fingerprints can be found on the artistic, scientific, architectural and cultural histories of every European nation.

The Reformation divided that Catholic legacy in a spiral of war, persecution and counter-persecution that ended up claiming the lives of over 10 million people. But the various protesting divisions, like Lutheranism and the Church of England, all trace their roots back to the Catholic Church. And today, these churches are no longer providing any real check on Roman Catholic influence. In fact, they are returning, gradually but inexorably, to the Catholic fold.

No other institution has the potential to unite Europe like the Catholic Church. It was one that the early leaders of European integration drew on constantly. Almost all of the EU’s founding fathers were staunch Catholics. Men like Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Alcide De Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer saw the European project as not just a political duty, but a religious one. The church even looked into canonizing Schuman, De Gasperi and Adenauer. The Vatican recognized Schuman as a “servant of God” a few years ago and is researching into canonization. The last time the Catholic Church canonized someone for political work was Sir Thomas More for his opposition to Henry viii’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. More was executed in 1535.

The European project received the full backing of the Catholic Church. “The Vatican, usually cautious over political changes not of its own inspiration, now considers the Common Market the work of Divine Providence,” wrote a prominent British newsmagazine, Topic, in 1962. “Not since the times of Spain’s Charles v has a Roman Catholic political force been so strongly welded. Not since the end of the Holy Roman Empire has the Holy See been offered a Catholic rallying point like the Common Market. If the ‘Pact of Rome,’ which created the Common Market, had been signed within the Vatican walls, it could not have favored the church more.”

But as the EU grew, so did the trend toward secularism. Some of the Union’s religious imagery—like the 12 stars on its flag, taken from Revelation 12:1—remain, but the EU has largely considered itself beyond needing the Catholic Church.

Crisis will also change that.

The Trumpet has forecast the formation of this much closer union for years. But it has also foretold its weakness. The Bible gives the outline of European history and the rise and fall of successive attempts to unite the Continent. The last attempt it symbolizes as being made “part of iron and part of clay” (Daniel 2:33).

The Bible explains the symbol. “[T]he kingdom shall be divided,” states verse 41. “[T]here shall be in it of the strength of the iron,” it states. But the unstable mixture will mean that “they shall not cleave one to another” (verse 43) and that “the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken” (verse 42).

It is describing a marriage of convenience—proud, independent nations forced together by crises. The situation in Europe is setting up exactly this outcome. We can already see the early stages of this union (“Is Europe Getting Ready to Fight Back?,” page 6).

History warns us to be wary of a united European empire centered on Germany. The Continent has huge resources and potential. In the past, these resources have been spent on fighting each other. United, the European empire will be an almost unstoppable superpower. The superpower is being forged now in the crucible of today’s crises.