It is natural that international attention should focus first on the economics of the crisis in Europe. But there are also broader, if less immediately obvious, political consequences. It is easy to mock the pretensions of the authorities in Brussels. But the fact is that the EU does – or perhaps did – stand for something important on the world stage.
What Europe represents is not so much raw power as the power of an idea – a European dream. For internationalists everywhere, for believers in much deeper co-operation between nations, for those pushing for the establishment of an international legal order, the EU is a beacon of hope.
If the European experiment begins to unravel – after more than 60 years of painstaking advances – then the ideas that Europe represents will also suffer severe damage. Rival ideas – the primacy of power over law, the enduring supremacy of the nation state, authoritarianism – may gain ground instead.
It should be noted that the "European dream" that Rachman semi-eulogizes is not real political union -- a United States of Europe. Rather, he admires the model of increased cooperation among nation-states, a kind of multilateralism-on-one-continent or U.N. of the future. He fears that the current crisis is devaluing the demonstration effect of the model. Beyond that modest correction in intellectual markets is a darker fear, expressed in a prior column (March 2, 2009):
