The Crisis of Europe
How the Union Came Together and Why It’s Falling Apart
Article Summary and Author Biography
After World War II, Europe began a process of peaceful political unification unprecedented there and unmatched anywhere else. But the project began to go wrong in the early 1990s, when western European leaders started moving too quickly toward a flawed monetary union. Now, as Europe faces a still-unresolved debt crisis, its drive toward unification has stalled -- and unless fear or foresight gets it going again, the union could slide toward irrelevance.
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. © Timothy Garton Ash.
May 10, 1943: German forces are destroying the Warsaw ghetto. Facing armed resistance from Polish Jewish fighters, they set fire to it house by house, burning some inhabitants alive and driving others out from the cellars. "Today, in sum 1,183 Jews were apprehended alive," notes the official report by the SS commander Jürgen Stroop. "187 Jews and bandits were shot. An indeterminable number of Jews and bandits were destroyed in blown-up bunkers. The total number of Jews processed so far has risen to 52,683." An appendix to this document contains the now-famous photograph of a terrified small boy in an outsize cloth cap, his hands held high in surrender. Marek Edelman, one of very few leaders of the Warsaw ghetto uprising to survive, concluded a memoir published immediately after the war with these words: "Those who were killed in action had done their duty to the end, to the last drop of blood that soaked into the pavements. . . . We, who did not perish, leave it up to you to keep the memory of them alive -- forever."
Fast-forward exactly 60 years, to May 10, 2003, a month before Poland holds a referendum on whether to join the European Union. At a "yes" campaign rally in Warsaw, a banner in Poland's national colors, red and white, proclaims, "We go to Europe under the Polish flag." Outside the rebuilt Royal Castle, a choir of young girls in yellow and blue T-shirts -- echoing the European flag's yellow stars on a blue background -- breaks into song. To the music of the EU's official anthem, which is drawn from the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, they sing, in Polish, the words of the German poet Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy." Soon these young Poles will be able to move at will across most of a continent almost whole and free, to study, work, settle down, marry, and enjoy all the benefits of a generous European welfare state, in Dublin, Madrid, London, or Rome. "Be embraced, ye millions! This kiss to the entire world! Brothers, a loving father must live above that canopy of stars!"
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