Roger Cohen: The Conscience of a Bureaucrat

The Beauty of Institutions

By ROGER COHEN

Published: October 24, 2011

LONDON — Jean Monnet, the postwar architect of European unity, once wrote: “Nothing is possible without men,

Except growth, decay, life, death, nature, change, termite colonies, hurricanes, asteroid collisions, sunrise, sunset, the tides, migratory birds, and literally any of a hundred thousand things that you can think of that doesn’t involve man.

but nothing is lasting without institutions.”

Again, with the exception of gravity, time, magnetism, and the thousands of other natural truths we have uncovered over the millennia.

So upon even a cursory examination of its two assertions, neither holds to be anywhere close to true. And yet, this is the type of thing that you want to build a column off of? Have at it, hoss.

When humankind fails, the best institutions save it from the brink.

Ah, so this is a defense of the Catholic Church vis-à-vis the litany of child molestation scandals that have peppered the institution for decades?

No?

Then certainly it’s a fawning declaration of industrial prowess under Fascism?

No?

An ode to organizational efficiency at the DMV? A rousing defense of the corporate responsibility of the oil industry? An essay praising the traditional nuclear family?

Of course not.

The forging of the European Union is up there with the U.S. Constitution as an act of creative genius.

No. Now you’re deliberately trying to piss me off. This is precisely what conservatives mean when they argue that liberals are disdainful of American exceptionalism. Comparing the United States to the EU would be hurtful if it weren’t so ludicrous.

Loving an entity is hard, given the intangibility of the thing,

No. It isn’t. Patriotism is easy—or it should be. It’s quite easy to love a sports team or a church or a school or a brand—all institutions. In fact, the intangibility is what makes the love easier. Loving tangible government—with its corruption, inefficiency, factionalism and petty egos--is both weird and foolish. Loving country and the promise it holds is an instinct that only grows stronger with understanding.

but I love the bland Brussels institutions that gave my generation a peace denied its forbears —

…seriously? That is what you love? You need to start watching football.

all those young men engraved in stone and granite on melancholy town squares across Europe. It’s a measure of the success of the European Union that peace is now taken for granted by its half billion inhabitants.

That’s wasn’t the EU. It was postwar demographic and economic shifts away from European power, Cold War-era mutually assured destruction, and stringent military prohibitions from Europe’s transatlantic victors.

Nobody pauses at the memorials. These days I find myself wanting to shout: “Remember!”

You self-important dolt. You write for one of the most widely circulated papers in the country and you find yourself compelled to get the message out by shouting? Even if you were that dumb, I would shout back “Remember what? Be more specific.” You’re a professional writer for God’s sake. The very idea of making a vague proclamation or an unsubstantiated assertion ought to be hateful to you.

I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised; you’re not very good at your job.

That’s a tall order when people glide from France to Germany and onto Poland, across the killing fields of old, without pause for a border, and the Basque separatists of ETA have just laid down their weapons in Europe’s last armed confrontation.

If you’re going to give the EU credit for disarming the Basque separatists, will you also fault them for Bosnia and Kosovo (and pretty much all of the ethnic cleansing shenanigans that go on in the Balkans?)

Yet I detect a dawning sense of the gravity of Europe’s crisis — its political rather than financial peril — in the parallels being drawn between dying for Danzig in 1939 and paying for Athens in 2011.

If this financial crisis can so easily turn into a political one, a rational observer would underscore the necessity of conservative fiscal policy that frowns upon deficit spending. Cohen, being both dangerous and a buffoon, is going to propose hyperinflation.

These are dangerous times. Helmut Schmidt, who as a German is hardwired to the nature of cataclysm

The German people appreciate you distilling their national identity from six thousand miles away. (Not only distilling their national identity, but giving them “cataclysm” as a national identity. Then again, I’m itching to machete some video game zombie-Nazis tonight, so I suppose it’s justfied.)

and at 92 knows what sacrifice brought a borderless Europe,

Exchanging the Lira for the Euro was hard for us all. VIVE LA FRANC!

declared as much the other day, lambasting “anyone who considers his own nation more important than common Europe.”

What a buffoon.

There are plenty of such people these days, driven by frustration or boredom or pettiness to the refuge of the tribe.

The people of Germany are not the people of Greece. They have different languages, cultures, politics, traditions, religions, histories and virtually everything else that ties a people together in common identity. And yet, the sins and excesses of the Greek people are expected to be funded by the Germans? Or French? This is a clear highway to resentment, and will do more to foment aggression than to promote harmony.

The euro’s creation was an irrevocable political decision.

Um…it’s pretty revocable. A sovereign country simply just needs to pull its funding and cash out. It would require recreating a central bank and currency, but these are pretty manageable feats when confronted with the alternatives of hyperinflation and social collapse.

The currency, however, had the misfortune to be birthed just as the idealism that fired Europe’s integration sagged.

In other words, the groundswell of pan-Europeanism that birthed this “irrevocable political decision” was pretty temporary.

The federalist implications of a common currency met the fissuring rancor of complacent Europeans.

Leaning pretty heavy on the thesaurus, huh?

They had been lulled by the end of the Cold War, irked by European bureaucracy and wearied by the E.U. expansion to post-Communist states. The bad history uppermost in the minds of François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl had faded. If ever a crisis was foretold, it’s the euro crisis.

The only thing predictable is that internationalism will always fail. Always.

But the danger is broader. European frustration with remote, seemingly unaccountable institutions

Remote and unaccountable is a veritable definition of the European Union.

has spread into a wider anger against the impunity of the powerful and the richness of the ever richer.

As I have said before, the Occupy protests stem from the larval form of conservative thought.

Growing numbers of people feel that the levers of globalization’s compounding advantages are manipulated by the privileged few. From Manhattan to Milan, the Occupy movement is saying “Enough Already!”

And much like Richard Cohen shouting “remember,” the rest of the world is screaming back: “be more specific! (And take a shower!)”

No, European leaders retort, we need more — more budget-cutting, more sacrifice to set our houses in order after the debt-driven binge of this century’s first decade.

We have a fundamental definition of what “more” means. “More” does not mean “less” government. This isn’t some sort of Orwellian thought exercise or an appropriated architectural slogan from the 60s. This is just stupidity.

Just as the euro had to row against an unraveling tide,

This should be obvious, but tides most certainly do not “unravel.”

so the austerity prescribed to save the currency now has to row against a tide of skepticism.

Europe isn’t embracing austerity to save the currency. They’re doing it because they simply can’t continue to self-finance at their prior spending levels. The market for their debt securities would balloon more than Violet Beauregard. That’s right, it’s a Willy Wonka reference. Want to fight about it?

Jean Arthuis, a French senator, gave this recent assessment of the state of the West: “Globalization led us, through outsourcing, to give up our productive substance and opt for the comfort of consumption, while other states became the producers of what we consumed on credit: on our side sovereign debts, on the other sovereign wealth funds.”

Tying debt to manufacturing outsourcing is pretty much retarded, but hey, they’re French. The nation of Camus has different standards for logical cohesion. Have I mentioned that I disdain Camus?

Many Europeans and Americans experience that shift day to day as lost jobs, the disappearance of the credit that cushioned relative decline, growing disparities between rich and poor, a feeling of powerlessness, too many bills to pay, a gathering sense of injustice, and growing anger toward hapless politicians outstripped by markets they cannot control.

Recessions blow. We get it. But it has very little to do with globalization. If you want proof, ask yourself why China continues to attract manufacturers despite having almost completely lost its labor wage advantage over some of our less crazy/communist neighbors like Brazil, Mexico, or Colombia.

“Capitalism is crisis,” says a big banner of the Occupy movement at St. Paul’s in London. Indeed it is.

I told you before why conservatives think liberals have no regard for American exceptionalism. This is why we feel confident in calling the rest of you socialists. If you don’t believe that capitalism is the most efficient economic system, the alternatives are socialism (or it’s synonyms—and yes, they are synonyms--Marxism and communism), fascism, feudalism or...uh…mercantilism? Syndicalism? Honestly, I think we’re being kind.

As Joseph Schumpeter noted, “Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.”

Turmoil is not the same as crisis.

The trick

Trick? A trick is something a whore does for money. This is an illusion.

is to convince people that crisis is creative more than it is destructive —

As opposed to literally every other economic system ever devised, each of which has been empirically proven to be destructive.

and that’s not happening right now. The European Union was created for such a moment.

And yet it continues to fail spectacularly. Can we finally put to rest the unjustifiable reverence for international organizations like NATO, the EU, or the UN?

It was meant to guarantee the impossibility of the worst — not to deliver Europeans to postmodern bliss but to save them from the hell that began almost a century ago in 1914 and did not really stop until the Continent lay in ruins in 1945.

This is like asking an electrician to fix your toilet. Unless you live in Japan, where basic household appliances have the computing power of the WOPR from War Games, he simply doesn’t have the right tools in his belt. Similarly, you can’t promote responsible representative democracy by centralizing power abroad. You can’t purify capitalism with government involvement.

That metaphor may have gotten away from me.

Now, thankfully, the big bazookas are financial. Roll them out, whatever the subsequent cost in inflation. Irrevocable means just that: The euro cannot be turned back.

If you’re trying to prevent the re-implementation of Nazism in Europe, which is firmly entrenched as a “worst-case scenario” behind only pterodactyl invasion in calamitous repercussions, you might want to do a little research into the Weimar Republic’s policies on inflation. Inflation isn’t a bazooka; it’s a kamikaze.

There is no soft euro exit imaginable, only mayhem and danger.

Why? Why is there danger? Obviously there would be some pain in reestablishing national central banks and currencies. The alternative, however, is tying a rope around a group of shipwreck survivors floating in the ocean. When one of the frail, exhausted bodies stops kicking, his weight invariably pulls the others under.

Recapitalize the banks.

With what? Worthless paper?

Bulk up on the rescue fund.

Again, how do you do that without inflating or begging?

Turn bankers’ Greek haircuts into buzz cuts.

At first I confused this call for higher taxes with support for austerity. I nearly had a heart attack.

Do whatever it takes.

This is just sad.  Very few financial crises have been known to be avoided by begging, desperation, or shamelessness.

Germany, ushered from ruin by the European Union, must lead the safeguarding of the euro or risk the loss of the stability that it prizes above anything.

Stability is overrated; existence is not.

The best institutions are also self-correcting mechanisms.

The self-correcting mechanism here would be for Greece to become a subjugated client-state of Germany and/or France. As much as the idea of German territorial expansion horrifies me, Greece has forfeit the right to exist as a sovereign nation. It is their citizens that must pay the price for their bankruptcy.

They work like the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution. They turn crisis into opportunity. In time the euro’s defense will demand a federative leap forward. That will be good for Europeans even though they cannot see it now.

So all of this—the crisis, the defense of Greece—is all just a guise for an pan-European central government. National sovereignty still means something. This article is titled “The Beauty of Institutions.” There has been no espousal of beauty. Only a grim, dystopian future of European inflation in which, at the end of the trials of financial collapse, the entirety of Europe congeals into one federal government. This is some weird mix of a Bond movie villain’s plot, a UN ambassador’s wet dream, and Napoleonic conquest. To Cohen, that is what beauty looks like.