Victor Davis Hanson‘s latest National Review Online column explores today’s European turmoil from a historical perspective:
Most European grandees recently felt that the American cowboys got what they deserved in Iraq and during the financial panic of 2008. Then they blamed their own fiscal meltdown on imported Wall Street viruses — only to appeal for bailouts when southern European defaults threatened to destroy the European Union. In response, we habitually declare our independence and isolation. We promise never again to get involved in their squabbles and wars — only to find ourselves drawn knee-deep into them.
Like clockwork every few decades, some self-described European “visionaries” swear that the continent can either live in peace under utopian protocols or, more darkly, be united under one grand — and undemocratic — system, willingly or not. But for all the noble pretensions of the Congress of Vienna and the European Union — and the nightmarish spread of Napoleon’s Continental System and the Third Reich — and for all the promises of European-born fascism, Communism, and socialism, the result is always the same: disunion, acrimony, and infighting.
That schizophrenia is what we should expect from dozens of cultures and histories squeezed into too small a continentfull of lots of bright — and quite proud — people. Every new Europe always ends up as old Europe.
