The EU will never be one country

As International Secretary of the Labour party after World War II, Denis Healey tried to bring  European socialist parties together, but he concluded that “whether I liked it or not, the basic unit in world affairs was the nation state”.

In modern Europe, he says (writing his memoirs in 1989)

there are many … obvious difficulties in the federal approach – different languages, different cultures, and powerful nationalist traditions.

He suggests national character can change – “and has, significantly, since the war”. (But the war was a political earthquake, and as peace has continued, nationalist traditions have arguably reasserted themselves.)

But the olive line remains as real a frontier as any in Europe. South of the line where olives grow, people have little respect for government and use personal discretion in paying their taxes. So a system which requires the Sicilian landowner to give the same respect to authority as a Dutch manufacturer is unlikely to work.

One can debate whether Catalonia and northern Italy fit this geographical template, but the cultural distinction endures.

As another example of cultural difference, he suggests that

We British still tended to regard a juridical commitment as defining the minimum you guarantee to fulfil. The continentals tended to see it as setting an objective at which you aim, although you may well fail to achieve it.

Now we can see Greek dock workers going on strike against a policy only just confirmed in a general election and Greece’s privatisation timetable already slipping – again.

And the Portuguese general election has produced a Left majority which seems bound to put that country too on a collision course with the German government. By UK standards the Portuguese parties’ programmes are beyond loony left. But circumstances – and national culture – alter cases.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard concludes

Powerful populist forces are waiting in the wings in Spain, Italy, and France. The events in Portugal have shown that every election in Southern Europe is a now an “event risk”. Political chickens are coming home to roost, and economic time is running out.