Ferguson’s Forecast
Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard, doffs the prophet’s hat to contemplate the United States of Europe, circa 2021. Here’s the inaugural vision:
Welcome to Europe, 2021. Ten years have elapsed since the great crisis of 2010-11, which claimed the scalps of no fewer than 10 governments, including Spain and France. Some things have stayed the same, but a lot has changed.
The euro is still circulating, though banknotes are now seldom seen. (Indeed, the ease of electronic payments now makes some people wonder why creating a single European currency ever seemed worth the effort.) But Brussels has been abandoned as Europe’s political headquarters. Vienna has been a great success.
“There is something about the Habsburg legacy,” explains the dynamic new Austrian Chancellor Marsha Radetzky. “It just seems to make multinational politics so much more fun.”
The Germans also like the new arrangements. “For some reason, we never felt very welcome in Belgium,” recalls German Chancellor Reinhold Siegfried von Gotha-Dämmerung.
Life is still far from easy in the peripheral states of the United States of Europe (as the euro zone is now known). Unemployment in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain has soared to 20%. But the creation of a new system of fiscal federalism in 2012 has ensured a steady stream of funds from the north European core.
Like East Germans before them, South Europeans have grown accustomed to this trade-off. With a fifth of their region’s population over 65 and a fifth unemployed, people have time to enjoy the good things in life. And there are plenty of euros to be made in this gray economy, working as maids or gardeners for the Germans, all of whom now have their second homes in the sunny south.
The rest is not in Foreign Affairs, but in the (not yet occupied) WSJ.
I love the idea of Europe being ruled from the Ringstrasse by Marsha Radetzky, with Karl von Habsburg backstopping her. And in this who is playiing the role of Johann Strauss? to say nothing of Freud, Schnitzler, Mahler, and all that gang? Should I ever give a course on counter-factual history, the first thing I would do would be to bring back to life the Habsburgs, the Manchu dynasty, the Ottomans and the Romanovs, and then see how things would work out.
On the other hand, minutes before I read this piece in the WSJ, I finished David Bromwich’s in the latest NYRB, taking down pretty thoroughly Ferguson’s The West and the Rest. Unfortunately it’s not yet up on their website.
Nicholas,
I presumed that Gotha-Daemmerung would send you scurrying back to “Le Nozze di Figaro.”
Great Idea. How about having UN sessions held in 3 acts with intermissions and an open bar so everyone could cool down. The participants would be sorted out from basso profundo to coloratura soprano for easy identifiability as to the geopolitcal part each plays. A grand choral finale would bring all together in harmony.
The London Review of Books had an even more ferocious critique of Ferguson’s latest book.
Perhaps the negative reviews have spurred his conversion to comedy.
(Though the transit from Brussels to Vienna has my vote– the pastry is far superior.)
Ferguson has struck me as one of most overrated historians around. I started to read the Wall Street Journal piece but soon gave up. It seemed only another example of his political line, a combination of Colonel Blimp and Otto von Bismarck.