You go to an Italian wine town and think, “Wow! Now I’m in the real Italy!” But then you realize the winery is owned by Germans, the town is inhabited by English vacationers, and the people who clean the dishes in the French-owned restaurant are all Romanians. The Italians who used to live there have had to move to poorer towns, maybe along some highway near fast-food restaurants.
From: Raymond Aron and the End of Europe, by Christopher Caldwell.
Quiz question: How does this comment apply to our recent discussions about the EU?
Unfortunately, this is an example of what is good about the EU, but it is also what the French at least were fretting about.
One of the more interesting papragraphs from Calwell’s essay:
“There are two powers in the twentieth century, Aron thinks, that wreaked havoc by–as a matter of ideology–taking the insights of the industrial age and put them to the service of primitive barbarism: Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. Like al-Qaeda today, they assumed technology brought only quantitative changes. They wanted to pursue an archaic, tribal kind of power politics, but with modern implements. Here Aron’s thinking anticipates that of Robert Cooper, the adviser to Tony Blair who is one of the EU’s most sophisticated foreign policy thinkers. Out of WWI, Aron insisted, Europe drew the lesson that war doesn’t pay. But there was a hitch. Paradoxically, the more people draw this lesson, in fact, the more war does pay for those willing to pursue it.”