Old Europe is gripped by a delusion. Get real before it’s too late
The West is living in a fantasy land of free money. Our friends watch in horror, our enemies in delight
What will perhaps confound future historians most is how loudly the alarm bells have been ringing. France, the UK and Germany — the great pillars of the old European order — are crumbling. The rest of the world (and I have family and friends in almost every corner, including some of the fastest-growing challenger economies) can see this, is talking about it and is, frankly, astonished by it.
After the collapse of the Scholz coalition, the defenestration of Michel Barnier and the absurdist relaunch of Sir Keir Starmer last week, I noted one wag on X posting: “It’s like witnessing the fall of Rome but with wifi.” Obviously that’s overegging it a bit, but what astounds this commentator observing from inside the edifice, as it were, is how incapable the peoples of old Europe are at even diagnosing the rot, let alone addressing it.
France is a chastening case in point. I listened to a debate featuring three pundits, including a journalist from Le Monde, as they sought to deconstruct the fall of the PM and possible demise of Emmanuel Macron, and it was like an excerpt from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. They calmly (and not unintelligently) talked about the constitutional order, polarisation and the rise of “extreme” parties but didn’t seem to grasp or even glimpse the underlying cause of the problems. This has nothing to do with left or right, Macron or Le Pen, the Fifth Republic or popular divisions. The problem is the French people — the demos, if you will.
• How France fell apart: bitter, bloated and blamed on Macron
France, you see, has had governments of left and right and everything in between while delivering policies of stunning consistency for five decades. Since 1974 the state has run fiscal deficits every year. And the reason for this is obvious to everyone except, seemingly, those living inside the dreamworld. It is the settled and immoveable will of the French people to live beyond their means; to enjoy ever-rising welfare, social spending and subsidies while balking at the higher taxes, longer working hours and delayed pensions required to pay for them. The sovereign debt now stands at 120 per cent of GDP.
There is a word for this, and it is what historians such as Spengler and Gibbon sought to convey in their depictions of the dynamics of civilisational decline: delusional. Barnier’s rather anaemic budget plan was merely to reduce this year’s overspend from 6 per cent to 5 per cent of GDP, but even that led to howls of outrage. Parliamentarians — ventriloquising for an electorate, every section of which has drifted into a state of endemic entitlement — offered a resounding “non!”. So the debt will keep rising, the population will keep ageing, the dependency ratio will keep narrowing and we will find out how deep the rabbit hole goes only when the inevitable bond crisis ignites, with potentially calamitous consequences for France, Europe and, if war by that stage is imminent with the revanchist powers, the world.
The UK electorate is, if anything, even more out to lunch. Not unlike the French, we like to blame “useless” politicians, the electoral system or being inside or outside certain trading blocs, but it’s largely a distraction from the fact that voters have become ever more detached from empirical reality; voters who (as polls consistently reveal) demand Scandinavian public services with American levels of taxation, gleaming new energy infrastructure but not in my backyard, new housing while retaining the local right to veto and triple-locked pensions but not the bill. Look at our anaemic growth, frighteningly expensive electricity and debt interest payments soaring above defence expenditure and behold the wonder of democracy. This is the logical consequence of electoral choices — a feature of our system, not a bug.
Germany has the same root problem, albeit with a Teutonic twist. The nation of Bismarckian realism has spent 30 years ripping off America, the nation on which it relies for its defence, while colluding with the nation that most threatens its security: Russia. Successive leaders have embraced this strategic Ponzi scheme because it enabled them to rig growth figures by outsourcing the costs of protection while embracing dependency on cheap Russian gas, which Putin pitilessly weaponised to weaken European resolve against ever more heinous acts of atrocity. The collapse of Scholz’s coalition is not the cause of the problem; it’s a symptom. Like France and the UK, Germany is an old nation (albeit not unified until the late 19th century) that has drifted into a dreamworld.
And this is what the world sees when looking at us: a civilisation that has lost the very qualities that fuelled its rise. Work ethic. Realism. An inspirational future orientation. Today the UK presides over ever-rising numbers of people on incapacity benefit while scarcely debating the (un)affordability of it. Stats from the World Bank a few years ago (albeit disputed) suggest Europe has 10 per cent of the world’s population, 30 per cent of its economy and 58 per cent of social protection spending.
When reading recently about public sector unions proclaiming the “right” to a four-day week despite collapsing productivity (and our enemies working harder and longer), I couldn’t help reflecting on the work of the historian and general Sir John Glubb. In The Fate of Empires, he noted that it was at the moment of peak vulnerability for the Abbasid caliphate in 9th-century Baghdad — after military takeover and looming bankruptcy — that the people demanded a shorter working week.
Looking around the world merely amplifies one’s sense of the creeping unrealism in old Europe. India may be poor and hamstrung by the iniquitous caste system but it is building like crazy and determined to become a dominant power. Vietnam is a one-party state but securing huge inward tech investment and growing faster than England in the 19th century. Poland and Romania have been backwaters for centuries, but they feel their time is coming. You go to these nations and hear people talking not about rights and entitlements but responsibilities and duties — and defence. They are not looking in the rear-view mirror or cowering in simpering guilt about histories long gone but reaching into the future with courage so palpable you can touch it.
I should note three additional points, which space prevents a fuller examination of. Uncontrolled immigration — legal and illegal — has compounded Europe’s problems, but this policy was emphatically not the will of the people. The utter failure to control borders was not an expression of democracy but its greatest modern betrayal — and it will reverberate decades into the future. One also notes the bureaucratic overreach of EU institutions and ever more visible signs of corruption — this, too, cannot be omitted from any analysis of Europe’s travails. Neither can the increasingly brazen offshoring of the super-rich, who leverage the institutional collateral of Europe to secure vast wealth while siphoning off their tax liabilities.
But I hope it’s possible to be aware of those problems, and to think deeply about how to tackle them, while recognising this column’s takeaway point. Old Europe remains a great power and (to my mind) the best place in the world to live, but its people have drifted into a fantasy land from which they — we — must awake or the world will race ahead of us. And we will be left — with our guilt, culture wars and cat videos — wondering how on earth we let it happen.
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