In Europe, Change Just Means More Of The Same

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

Nearly 10 years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld provoked outrage by referring to "Old Europe." How dare he, snapped the French and Germans, call us "old" when the utopian European Union was all the rage, the new euro was soaring in value and the United States was increasingly isolated under the Bush administration!

Yet the more things change in Europe, the more they stay the same.

The island of Britain usually is, and is not, a part of Europe — carefully pulling out when things heat up, terrified that it will be pulled back in when things boil over. British Prime Minister David Cameron knows the old script well, as he adamantly and publicly insists that Great Britain is still a part of the crumbling European Union while privately assuming that it is not.

No need to mention the German "problem": Whether the year was 1870, 1914, 1939 or 2011, Europeans always have feared a united Germany, whose people, for a variety of cultural reasons, produce more wealth than the nation's size might otherwise suggest.

In that regard, the more France talks of the glory of Gallic culture, the more it seeks to restrain its too-powerful next-door neighbor or, in humiliating fashion, seeks to appease Germany. No surprise that French President Nicolas Sarkozy now seems to be pursuing both tracks simultaneously.

For centuries, Mediterranean Europe — the original dynamic birthplace of Western civilization — has stagnated in comparison to the north. The sunny south's doctrinaire Catholicism and orthodoxy, greater vulnerability to nearby militant Ottomanism, and lack of Atlantic ports that looked out on the New World long ago relegated the Mediterranean nations to comparative stagnation.

Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain were always considered nice warm places to vacation or retire, but not in which to work, live and raise a family. That stereotype is as alive in 2011 as it was in 1880.