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Can Angela Merkel hold Europe together?
This may be remembered as the week Europe began to split apart. One woman could stop that
GERMANY’S chancellor, Angela Merkel, has the future of Europe in her hands. As the biggest creditor country, Germany holds the key to resolving the euro zone’s sovereign-debt crisis. As the continent’s economic giant, it is the biggest determinant of the European Union’s direction. And right now Europe may be embarking on a path that could tilt the union away from economic liberalism, risking a split and, ultimately, even a British exit.
Mrs Merkel seems to be sleepwalking into this danger. For all her sound instincts and skills as a politician, she appears to have no vision for the EU. She has been woefully slow to get to grips with the euro zone’s troubles, largely because German voters do not want to bail out weak countries such as Greece, Ireland and potentially Portugal. And, in her efforts to assure her countrymen that she is imposing Teutonic discipline on the profligate peripherals, she is allowing the euro zone’s role in forming the EU’s economic policies to be greatly enlarged.
Two meetings this week illustrate this worrying development. A summit of 27 EU heads of government will be followed by a euro-zone summit that omits ten of them (see Charlemagne). This might seem an arcane bit of Brussels procedure. Indeed, the British, normally the most suspicious of euro-integration, are pretending that it does not matter. But other “out” countries are up in arms. Historians may come to see this as the moment when the EU split into a dominant, corporatist euro area and a smaller, more liberal outer zone. Mrs Merkel is clever enough to realise this and dislike it, but she has not been brave enough to stop it.
Read more: http://www.economist.com/node/18332786
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Originally Posted by Breedingvariety
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