Theodore Dalrymple: A Continental Fantasy
On a flight from Copenhagen to Brussels, I read two publications that I see infrequently: the International Herald Tribune and Le Soir, the principal Belgian newspaper in French. Both, not surprisingly, had much coverage of the European crisis, and both used an expression that, to me, has a sinister ring: the European project.
As it happens, I was once interviewed by one of Le Soir’s best-known journalists, who asked me whether I was in favor of the European project. I said that I would answer if she would tell me what it was. She did not, and we moved on to other subjects. Whatever the European project may be, those who don’t embrace it wholeheartedly—with a fervor that can only be described as mystical, considering that no one can explain or define it in simple terms— are depicted not as skeptics, but as enemies. Thus in Le Soir, we read: “Only the enemies of the Euro and of the European political project, notably the City of London, dream of such a cataclysm [the break-up of the single currency]!”
The City of London—Britain’s equivalent of Wall Street—here plays the role of the bloated plutocrat of Soviet iconography or of the Jewish manipulator of Nazi iconography, pulling the strings behind the scenes in order to achieve its malevolent design of controlling the world. One can make many possible criticisms of the City of London, but a determination to destroy the viability of the euro for some unspecified, atavistic reason is certainly not among them…