The wrong outcome to this crisis will weaken Angela Merkel and jeopardise the prime minister’s European strategyAngela Merkel is very fond of saying it. The old English proverb – maybe it is also an old Teutonic one – is the default response of the German chancellor whenever there is a crisis in Europe. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” That’s her mantra.She says it about keeping the United Kingdom in the European Union. She says it about finding an 11th-hour compromise to prevent Greece from defaulting on its debts and crashing out of the euro. Usually she is proved right. You can even look at the entire history of the European Union, from its inception as an economic compact between the founding six in the 1950s to its expansion into an organisation embracing the great majority of Europe’s population, as the embodiment of the Merkel motto. The romantic “ever closer union” rhetoric of the European ideal, the lofty language of integration that boils the blood of British Europhobes, is utopian. But what has kept the European show on an often bumpy road is prosaic, pragmatic compromise. A voluntary partnership of 28 states can work no other way but through endless give and take. Continue reading...
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