Toby on Tuesday 

‘A Greek Tragedy’

 

As with so much of Western civilisation, the roots of the word “drama” are Greek.   It means “action” or “fiction represented in performance”.   And historians will see the drama of the Greek debt crisis as the precursor of the collapse of the whole Euro-project.   Of course on the other side of the drama lie the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank and the Berlin-based Euro-project.   I thought of this when I watched the first episode of Channel 5’s “Conspiracy” series on 12th June – “The Death of Hitler”.   Now we all like a good conspiracy theory, but the test is to separate the grain of truth from the rest of the entertainment.   You can watch it online for another year on www.channel5.com/shows/conspiracy – Episode 1.   And the part that I enjoyed most came near the end, when the roots of the EU were examined.   Much of this was presented by a greatly valued old friend of mine, Rodney Atkinson, a political economist with deep knowledge of and love for Germany, who speaks perfect German and taught for many years at the University of Mainz.

 

Now Rodney’s long-held thesis (another Greek word meaning “something put forth”) is that, in 1944, when defeat faced the Third Reich, the great German industrialists met to plan an eventual Fourth Reich based on German manufacturing and a new non-military pan-European project.   The mastermind behind this was a Nazi economist called Walther Funk, Reich Minister for Economic Affairs from 1938 to 1945, whose google entries make fascinating reading.   Just as his brother Rowan Atkinson has pushed the boundaries of comedy with immense success, so Rodney has pushed the boundaries of economic and political thought.   Not all of his intuitive leaps have hit the spot, rather as not all of Rowan’s ventures have succeeded, but those that have done so have broken completely new ground.    Rodney’s many staunch supporters have included leading figures, such as the late Sir Louis Le Bailly, Director General of the Defence Intelligence Staff, who understand fully the career risks that he has taken.   Now events are vindicating much of his work.

 

For my part, I suspect that the Euro-project has a variety of roots, many of them founded in the Cold War after 1945 itself.   But what is clear is that future generations will see it as a model of what to avoid completely in any future union.   By being too rigid, too prescriptive, too ideological, the project has failed on its own terms of uniting the Continent of Europe.   A project designed to bring friendship and prosperity has only brought division and poverty.    The rise of Syriza in Greece, of Podemos in Spain, of the Left Bloc in Portugal and, rather differently, of the Front National in France is due wholly to its inherent design faults.   It is the project’s plain inability to adapt to changing circumstances that has led to the collapse of trust and will ensure its downfall.   As for Britain, we must count our blessings that we avoided the currency union, we must limit the fallout from its looming failure and we must become a safe haven, a voice of sanity as the whole Euro-drama turns from comedy into tragedy!

 

Until next Tuesday!

Toby