It Takes a Crisis to Make a Continent

By GABOR STEINGART
NYT

Berlin

BIRTHDAYS are fun; a birth itself is not. There’s a lot of screaming and groaning, and even in the easiest deliveries, there’s always the fear that something will go wrong.

The birth of a state is no less difficult. Indeed, what pessimists — including many here in Germany — see as an existential crisis for the continent is really just the latest stage in the birth pangs of a new country. While we should of course worry about Greek debt, we should also have hope that we are witnessing the end of the euro zone as an abstraction and the birth of the United States of Europe.

Europe’s movement toward unification has always been the product of crises. The catastrophes of World War I and World War II convinced the continent’s leaders to cast aside the solidity of fixed borders and with them the old nationalism and isolationism that led to repeated conflict.

And yet idealism was only a small part of the urge toward cooperation. By the early 1950s, the threat of Soviet communism loomed much larger. Common fears as much as a collective vision united us; as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of Germany once said: “European unity was a dream of a few. It became the hope for many. Today it is a necessity for us all.”

(More here.)