Why borders matter

There is no better way of discrediting an opinion than by attributing it to a psychological quirk or peculiarity. The task is then not to refute it, but to explain it away by reference to its murky psychic origins. For a number of years, doubt about the wisdom of a European project (whose end can only be seen as through a glass, darkly) was attributed by its enthusiasts to precisely such a quirk: one that combined some of the features of mental debility, arachnophobia and borderline personality disorder. One would not be altogether surprised to learn that the European Union had sent lobbyists to Washington to have Euroscepticism included in the forthcoming revised version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as a new diagnostic category.

By now, even the most convinced European projectors (to use a Swiftian term) must have noticed that their project is not going swimmingly. But every economic and political phenomenon is capable of more than one interpretation and explanation, and the projectors suggest that the solution to the current difficulties is the granting of even more powers to themselves or to people very like them, that is to say those who conjured up these difficulties in the first place.

For example, an article in Le Monde for 27 August, by Peter Bofinger, Jürgen Habermas and Julian Nida-Rümelin, translated from the German, is headed ‘More than ever, Europe’. It is every bit as stilted as the thought behind it, as if almost every sentence concealed a guilty secret:

There exist only two coherent strategies to overcome the crisis: the return to national currencies in the EU, which will leave each country on its own to face the unpredictable fluctuations of the highly speculative foreign exchange markets, or the institutionalised protection of a common fiscal, economic and social policy, having for its more ambitious goal the recovery of the capacity for influencing the markets that has been lost at national level.