Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Closed for Remodeling

Robert Samuelson in today's Washington Post:
Europe as we know it is slowly going out of business. Since French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed constitution of the European Union, we've heard countless theories as to why: the unreality of trying to forge 25 E.U. countries into a United States of Europe; fear of ceding excessive power to Brussels, the E.U. capital; and an irrational backlash against globalization. Whatever their truth, these theories miss a larger reality: Unless Europe reverses two trends -- low birthrates and meager economic growth -- it faces a bleak future of rising domestic discontent and falling global power. Actually, that future has already arrived. . .

It's hard to be a great power if your population is shriveling. Europe's birthrates have dropped well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children for each woman of childbearing age. For Western Europe as a whole, the rate is 1.5. It's 1.4 in Germany and 1.3 in Italy. In a century -- if these rates continue -- there won't be many Germans in Germany or Italians in Italy. Even assuming some increase in birthrates and continued immigration, Western Europe's population grows dramatically grayer, projects the U.S. Census Bureau. Now about one-sixth of the population is 65 and older. By 2030 that would be one-fourth, and by 2050 almost one-third.

No one knows how well modern economies will perform with so many elderly people, heavily dependent on government benefits (read: higher taxes). But Europe's economy is already faltering. In the 1970s annual growth for the 12 countries now using the euro averaged almost 3 percent; from 2001 to 2004 the annual average was 1.2 percent. In 1974 those countries had unemployment of 2.4 percent; in 2004 the rate was 8.9 percent.
Inaction will be fatal. A new and more flexible Constitution would promote flexible and creative experimentation that might solve the problem.

More:

Before the French and Dutch referenda, former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing defended the Constitution, saying, "The text is easily read and quite well phrased, which I can say all the more easily since I wrote it myself."

Now that the document's dead, in part because it's incomprehensible, Mr. Giscard blames Europeans, not himself in today's NY Times:
Mr. Giscard d'Estaing said that until the end he believed the French people would vote "yes," and pointedly criticized them. "I thought at the end the French people would be rational people," he said.
Elites, heal yourselves.

(via Tim Blair)

Still More:

Bloggledygook: "The EU is not dead, of course, but it is very sick."

2 comments:

SC&A said...

I'm not as smart as all these brilliant pundits.

All I know is that not much in Europe has changed.

The English still hate the French, the French have no use for the Germans and the Poles, well, they just want to work, to make money.

Kumbaya time in Europe? Right. If you believe that, there's some land I'd like to talk to you about.

Real European integration has to come from the bottom up- not the other way around.

@nooil4pacifists said...

SC&A:

I agree "reuniting" Europe would be difficult, especially since it never was united before. Though Poles aren't French clones -- thank god! -- "killing" Europe would be more difficult still; politics alone is too underpowered. If Europe is to disappear, it will be with a whimper, not a bang, the victim of slow demographic suicide.

You're right, of course, that any workable political solution must come from bottom-up. But how will demographic trends change? How will Europe reverse the ennui and nihilism -- and the near rout of Christianity -- that make them so gloomy they eschew responsibility for any next generation? Reversing the anti-democratic siphoning of power to centralized bureaucrats will help of course.

The curtain hasn't opened on the final act in the play of Europe. But the razor remains in the medicine cabinet. Europeans have a choice: perpetual pessimism or, as Winston Churchill urged, a path were "Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands."