Our Child is Unwell

We brought her to the world with such high hopes. After many acrimonious centuries, finally something blossomed that would bind us closer together. Our European Union. After an extraordinarily promising childhood, she has now hit puberty with a bone-jarring bang. There she sits, despondent, bewildered, hurting everywhere. Our poor child.

She started out as a humble coal and steel union. Well, you have to start somewhere. But then, oh boy, how she flourished. Seemed like she just couldn't stop growing. Everyone wanted to be a part of her. She found not only her inner peace, but inner harmony and freedom too.

Like any child, she was sure she would save the world. Just look how I throw down my inner barriers, she proclaimed, how I preserve my diversity while I become ever more alike. World, envy me. Here I stand for my three Ps: peace, prosperity, power. Of the soft kind, of course.

And then it hits: reality. First with the financial and euro crisis that tore her asunder between core and periphery, then with Putin's aggression first in Georgia and then in Ukraine, which exposed our child as weak, indecisive, divided. And now the refugee crisis, splitting her right down the middle and making her fear for her very identity. Worse, fear of falling back to those dark, ugly times before she was born, those days of the national states.

How did it get this way? There were always those symptoms, true. A tendency to muddle through, to fudge and beat around the bush. But as long as the going was good, it didn't really matter.

But now that she has been challenged, the one thing, the one unsaid thing, that she was called upon to do, namely bind Germany so tightly to the Union that it could never again amass too much power and use it so horridly as before, is unravelling. Grudgingly, almost by default, Germany is taking on the leading role in the Union, much to the chagrin of its hitherto tandem partner, France.

And, Germany being Germany, it doesn't seem to do anything right. Its chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been berated from within and outside the Union for deciding too much with her brain, in particular during the euro crisis. Now for once she decides with the heart, welcoming wave after wave of refugees, and she is berated twice as strongly. Even by members of her sibling political party. In fact, there are members of the opposition that are more amicable to her policies than one particular member of her governing coalition.

In the meantime, the crisis is driving voters in droves towards extremist parties on the right that hanker for the old days of purely national policies. At the same time, a bastion of liberalism, the UK, is threatening to walk away, while the Union's role model, the United States, is itself being riven by two increasingly irreconcilable political camps. Voters are facing a choice between two of the most loathed politicians in recent memory: a former first lady who played a bit loose with her official emails while running the country's foreign office, and a tycoon with the most lunatic ideas on the economy and foreign policy. So much for a role model.

Better, perhaps, to look at Switzerland, an island of prosperity and stability, and filthily rich to boot. Disturbingly, it has turned down every invitation to be one with our child.

So what now? Is this a terminal illness? Not so quick. The US took about a quarter of a century to become the monolithic nation it is today, and Switzerland some 600 years. By comparison, our baby is but a toddler.

In the end, if the current malaise doesn't kill her, it will make her stronger. The alternative would be going back to square one. The one with the nation states. With nation states at each others' throats.

God forbid.