Tim Bale: Whatever is wrong with Europe, it won't disintegrate

Tim Bale

Herald columnist Garth George managed a bizarre interpretation in linking the supposed breakup of the European Union with Marxism and multiculturalism.

His article, headlined "Why Europe will self-destruct just like the Soviet Union", also vastly overstated the problems facing the EU.

I'll just go through it in turn, shall I?

The EU is not a house of cards. Like it or not - and many of us don't - it is an institutionalised entity built on common sense and legally enshrined co-operation between nations that do the vast bulk of their trade with each other and are destined (or condemned, depending on how you look at it) to live cheek by jowl with each other in one of the world's most crowded, rich, peaceful and democratic continents.

In other words, it may be a long way from being a United States of Europe (thank goodness) but it is about as likely to collapse as the United States of America.

On to George's poisoned pen-portraits of individual European countries. First, I'm no meteorologist but I suspect that the Netherlands is no more "a damp little patch of dirt" than New Zealand.

Secondly, the survey evidence suggests that the French are not "the most nationalistic, insular and xenophobic of all Europeans"; they are about average - and probably no worse than most New Zealanders.

Thirdly, neo-Nazism does not "flourish" in Germany, at least no more than it does elsewhere - you just hear more about it there than in other countries, for obvious reasons.

Next, the EU wasn't founded by "post-modernist Utopianists" but by Christian (yes Christian) Democratic politicians determined to lock together the enterprises of European nations in order not just to achieve obvious economies of scale and a profitable single market but to make it irrational and materially difficult for them ever to go to war with each other again.

Whatever else is wrong with Europe, this mission has been accomplished.

Only the wildest of wide-eyed idealists thinks that "nationhood, race, ethnicity and culture" will or should be erased.

Most Europeans are proud of their heritage - mixed and shifting though it is in reality - and want to maintain that diversity.

Few see the EU - or even immigration as long as it's within reasonable limits - as an imminent threat to their way of life.

And many are all too aware that without free movement of people, their ageing populations are going to find it difficult to staff and pay for the services - public and private - on which that their hitherto high standards of living depend.

So, while the "No" votes in France and the Netherlands were a welcome kick up the backside for political elites, they have to be put in some perspective.

Things aren't so great economically at the moment. Some of that may have to do with European red tape and even the single currency. So some kind of message needed to be sent. Let's hope they listen.

But the EU is not the USSR and never will be. Don't make a drama out of a crisis.

* Dr Tim Bale teaches international relations and politics at the University of Sussex's school of social sciences and cultural studies. He is responding to Garth George's view that history belies the belief that all cultures are equivalent and can live in harmony.