Victor Davis Hanson wonders why as Europe discovers that Socialism is a failure – America decides (or more precisely Obama decides) to embrace it. Utopianism never works because human nature is what it is.
by Victor Davis Hanson
Vienna — Walk the beautiful streets in Munich, Strasbourg, and Vienna, and you can see why Europeans thought in the last decades that they had reached the end of history. There is not a soldier to be seen. Sidewalk cafes are jammed midweek with two-hour lunch-goers. Fashion, vacations, and sex dominate the ads and billboards.
Bikers, electric commuter trains, and tiny fuel-efficient cars zoom by in a green contrast to our gas-guzzling Tahoes and Yukons.
Naturally, there is a general sense of satisfied accomplishment among European social democrats. They believe that finally a quiet sameness across their continent has replaced two millennia of constant European warring and revolution. Now, everybody seems to get an apartment, a small car, a state job, a good pension and peace — and in exchange, all voice comfortable, center-left consensus politics.
But beneath the genteel European Union veneer, few remember that human nature remains constant and does not give even nice Europeans a pass from its harsh laws.
Suddenly, the Greek financial meltdown and the staggering debts that must be repaid alternately enraged and terrified northern-European creditors. Even the most vocal Europhiles are quietly rethinking the entire premise of a European Union that offers lavish benefits but has no sound method of paying for them.
After all, it is one thing to redistribute income by taking money from richer Germans and Austrians to give to poorer Germans and Austrians. But it is something else for all Germans and Austrians to extend their socialist charity to siesta-taking Greeks, Italians, and Spaniards. For all the lofty rhetoric of the collective European Union, age-old culture, language, and nationalism still trump the ideal of continental unity.
Read the rest History returns to Europe
