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  3. One of the fattest canards ever reared in Brussels is the notion that its process of unification has saved Europe from another w

One of the fattest canards ever reared in Brussels is the notion that its process of unification has saved Europe from another w

admin2014-09-09  33
问题     One of the fattest canards ever reared in Brussels is the notion that its process of unification has saved Europe from another war. On the contrary, peace is a question of governance. Democracies do not fight each other. By calling for greater unity while fearing the rise of nationalism, Jean-Claude Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, is conspicuously following the Eurocrat tradition of confusing cause and effect. His words in an interview with Der Spiegel also reflect a state of complete denial about where the problem truly lies. Recent calls for a major centralization of power to deal with the euro crisis will make the EU even less democratic than it is already, thus provoking much more of that militant nationalism that the European ideal wants to make redundant.
    Mr Juncker is understandably horrified at the way that elections in Italy and Greece have brought "national resentments to the surface, which we believed had gone away". He is right to be appalled by the newspapers and posters in Greece that put a Hitler moustache on Angela Merkel and by the anti-German sentiments expressed in Italy. There was a tendency in the Mediterranean countries to blame their problems on Germany, from whose banks they borrowed money to buy its expensive cars and consumer durables. Mr Juncker also said that "anyone who believes that the eternal issue of war and peace in Europe has been permanently laid to rest could be making a monumental error". He went on: "The demons are merely sleeping, as the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo have shown us. I am chilled by the realisation of how similar circumstances in Europe in 2013 are to those of 100 years ago. "
    But we are not about to stumble into another state-on-state conflagration in Europe, although we may see social unrest escalate, particularly in Paris, where street protest has so often forced governments to back down from unpopular measures. It is certainly possible that parliamentary democracy may be gravely threatened, especially in countries with proportional representation and uneasy coalitions unable to take hard decisions as politics fragment and polarise, as happened in the 1930s. Yet the only specific parallel with that period is probably 1938 at the time of the Czechoslovakia crisis, when the British and French governments utterly failed to face the true dangers, misleading their own electorates. Winston Churchill, who had been rejected as a warmonger, came to power only in May 1940 after the crisis had broken in all its fury.
    Politicians, especially today in an age of short-termism, have to sell hope. The media is partly responsible, always searching for cracks and trying to open them further. The crisis of leadership in Europe means that nobody in power dares spell out the consequences of our indebtedness, if only because a Cassandra can never win an election. And the ideology of European unity has been such an article of faith that it has prevented its political establishment from fully comprehending the harsh reality of a wider world.
    I wrote a few months ago that it was surprising how most Germans had not woken up to the fact that their economy had effectively been taken hostage by the southern EU states. The central banks of the stronger economies, especially the German Bundesbank, have a huge "counter-party" risk to Greece, Italy and Spain from the way the payments system in the eurozone works. One consequence of businesses and households transferring money from the deficit countries in the South to Germany, is that the German central bank ends up lending corresponding sums to the central banks of those countries. This system known as "Target 2" makes the Bundesbank balance all deposits received from, say, Greece with an equivalent loan to the Greek central bank. The liability for Germany is mounting.
    Attitudes in Germany are rapidly changing. They now see that although they have indeed benefited greatly over the last decade or so from trade imbalances in Europe, everything is now rather different. A recent poll showed that a quarter of German voters were prepared to support a party such as Alternative for Germany(AfD), which would take the country out of the euro and back to the Deutschmark, or towards a new currency with other "strong" economies in Scandinavia, the Benelux countries and Austria. The latest poll for the German TV channel ZDF shows that nearly two thirds of Germans think the euro represents a serious problem and a half believe Germany would be better off outside. A 180-degree change has emerged with the idea that strong economies should exit the euro, leaving the weaker countries inside. This would devalue the euro, in theory to be based on Milan rather than Frankfurt, and help the Club Med countries to recover their competitiveness.
    All this is striking. The realization that the euro, in the words of AfD, has been "a fatal mistake" is starting to reveal the elephant in the room that Brussels has desperately tried to ignore. And the fact that in the Italian election Beppe Grillo’s Five Star party, which won a quarter of the vote, threatens to default on Italy’ s external debt while other parties openly defy the " austerity cage" indicates that the EU is effectively no longer united, except perhaps in the contortionist rhetoric of summit communiques. It is very hard to imagine another Franco-German conflict, even if the economic fault lines lie west of the Rhine and across the Alps. The tragedy and pain for southern Europe will continue for as long as the European elite refuses to face the fact that the political ambitions behind the common currency doomed it to failure right from the start. That is where the responsibility lies, and the longer they ignore it, the more dangerous the demons will become.
The expression "the elephant in the room"(para. 7)most probably means______.
选项 A、the obstacle hidden in the room
B、the insurmountable difficulty lying ahead
C、the issue avoided by most people
D、the danger confronting European countries
答案C
解析
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