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....It is this desire for solitude...prompting Stephan Richter, director of The Globalist, a site that analyses global trends in the era of globalisation, to put forward the hypothesis that if the sixteenth-century German theologian Martin Luther could have been present at Maastricht in 1992 when the foundations of the monetary union were laid, he would have “nixed” the candidacy of the Mediterranean countries. Richter goes on to imagine that Luther would have declared that “no unreformed Catholic countries” that had not gone through the Protestant Reformation could enter the euro.
Richter is a Catholic commentator, and most importantly, he is German. According to his theory, “an excess of Catholicism has distorted the fiscal health of nations, even today in the twenty-first century." The current bitterness of northern Europe towards the "other Europe" thus lies in the failure to uphold the "law of Luther," the violation of which has brought about our ills. If, in contrast, his imaginary exhortations had been heard correctly, "the euro would be more cohesive, and the European economy in far less trouble."
In brief: to size up the capability of a nation to join the single currency, it is not its finances that have to be vetted, but its religious chromosomes – that would have been easier. The premise is very simple: the so-called Pigs, an acronym formed from the first letters of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, which with the double ‘i’ in ‘Piigs’ also takes in Italy, are – apart from Greece, which is Greek Orthodox – all countries with a Roman Catholic majority....
....Currently the controversy is driving some economists, mainly Spaniards, to trace the origins of capitalism in order to refute its Protestant backgrounds and advance, in contrast, the dynamism of capitalism in Catholic Spain precisely at the time of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
Got it. Forever and a day.
And I stick to what my granddad told me.
The EU. They forced themselves into an uncomfortable bed.
Now, at least, but becoming forthright, they will blame the muzzies.
They ain’t gonna take much more.
Like us. The United States. Given the choice to obey.
Or be free.
Not much of a choice.
The old protestant work ethic thing, pulled out of the dumpster, brushed off and repainted. Never gets old.
I’m not quite as versed in history as the author so I’ll have to give my condensed version.
It appears the ants are being asked to save the grasshoppers and the ants aren’t happy about it.
Austria is predominantly Catholic, as is Poland. These countries are plenty industrious. Greece is not predominantly Catholic. Iceland is not Catholic, but her debt problem was quite serious (admittedly, they are taking serious steps).
I think these prognosticators ought to take more factors into consideration before assigning a spread.
Blew it and failed right there. The German word for debt is "Schulden" not "Schuld" other than in some compound nouns. No native speaker would equate the two terms in the sense the author implies.
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Spain was outside the Marshal plan when it came to redevelopment and spent years in isolation, then got a big influence of EC money -- to their credit they didn't get as tax-fraud like as the Greeks did, but then the Greeks had a communist problem until the 70s and then got a lot of free money.
Free money with no strings is the root cause of Greece and Spain's problem.
Italy's problems are more complex -- the north is productive, the south is not.
Ireland's problem was that it took on bank debt, not letting them fail like the Icelanders did (well the Irish couldn't do that, the British and others wouldn't let them)
Portugal's problem is different -- they haven't industrialized to any great sense.
I agree with the article on several points. I would propose several theses along the same line.
1. Any thinking person, not only Luther, should have opposed the creation of European Parliament as a law-making body and the European currency union, and most thinking people did.
2. The present decline of the Western Civilization is a fault of the weakened Catholic Church in Europe, and especially the loss of Northern Europe to the Reformation.
3. Socialism is poison to Christian ethics in general, but different forms of Christianity suffer in different ways. When a socialism model is adopted in a Protestant country, the outcome is loss of faith altogether, but when socialism is adopted in a Catholic country the outcome is retreat of the faithful from the institutions of power, which then become corrupt. So, while Protestant countries continue to produce people who seem to be people of integrity like Cameron or Merkel, Catholic countries are run by dregs of society like Sarcozy (sp?) or the line after line of outright thugs in the Mediterranean democracies.
I also think that framing the discussion in terms of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation is short sighted.
Cultural rivalries between northern Europe (even before there was a "Europe") and southern Europe go back much further than that.
The Germanic barbarian hordes enjoyed military victory with Alaric's sacking of Rome and all the succession of tribal victories that followed. However, the barbarians were culturally assimilated into the classical cultures of the Christianized south.
Since those early centuries, there always has existed a competitive relationship between northern influences and those of the south which have become less religious than they are cultural. I believe some of these influences were responsible in the Reformation. While not causing it, they certainly contributed to it.
What we are talking about today in the European economic debate is driven by productivity issues perhaps complicated by cultural ones but certainly not about post-Reformation religious thinking.