Boarding the sinking ship

How Obama drove central and eastern Europe towards the eurozone – at the worst possible time

On 1 January last year, while the euro was staggering drunkenly across the exchanges, the Baltic republic of Estonia joined the single currency. It was like watching a sturdy little lifeboat ferrying new passengers determinedly towards the Titanic after the ship had struck the iceberg. What could they possibly mean by it?

‘For Estonia, the choice is to be inside the club, among the decision makers, or stay outside of the club,’ the Estonian prime minister told reporters. ‘We prefer to act as club members.’ Not just any old EU or euro club either, but the inner sanctum of solvent, growing, and prosperous creditor members of the euro such as Germany and Finland.

In November of last year Radoslaw Sikorski, an Oxford-educated Atlanticist married to a former deputy editor of this magazine, went to Berlin to deliver this appeal: ‘I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say this, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear its inactivity. You have become Europe’s indispensable nation.’

He was speaking about solving the eurozone crisis, which he said was a far greater threat to Poland’s security than the Russian president’s recent threat to station missiles on the Polish border. All the same, I suppose the latter was worth at least a passing ­mention.

Last October a Slovakian government that had rejected one of the periodical bailout fund requests from Brussels fell the following day and was replaced by a government that promptly endorsed it. That was the second time in recent years that a (rather good) Slovak government had fallen in response to pressure from Brussels. Its argument that a poor country like Slovakia that had made painful sacrifices in order to join the euro should not be required to subsidise the profligate Greeks was sympathetically ignored.