EUROZONE CRISIS A new war of religion

http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/2652561-new-war-religion



Perhaps you don’t know it: in northern Europe many people think that the "spread", the difference between the interest rate for the soverign debt of his own "virtuous" country and the rate for those countries in a sorry state to the south, is the fruit of a Catholic sin. In German the word “Schuld”, for debt, also means ‘fault’. This semantic nuance reflects profound cultural differences and helps to better understand the distrust – or prejudice – of some nations of northern Europe towards countries considered members of a blithe "Club Med".

The spread between Spanish and Italian bonds on the one hand and German bonds on the other leads in the end to assumptions of implied ethical superiority, far more discriminatory than the budgets of the states in question, throwing us back – indeed, one almost fears to say it – to values that intertwine culture and religion and injecting ancient poisons into the tired veins of Europe.

In fact, a taboo has been broken, bringing to the front of the stage ghosts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, of European wars fought in the shadow of God. This aspect of the controversy has hardly been mentioned in recent months. Yet it crops up repeatedly, while the euro has begun to evoke not wealth and stability but unemployment, poverty and decline.

The anti-Italian and anti-Mediterranean rhetoric, and the rhetoric flying back against the Germans, unconsciously nourishes stereotypes that are both cultural and religious – stereotypes of ancient “truths" buried in the memory of the Old Continent that it would be best not to exhume, under penalty of wrecking the difficult compromise between the European nations that has kept the social and political peace for decades. The present uncertainty, however, is bringing those stereotypes to the surface in the minds of those pushing for new isolationisms in the illusory conviction that, alone, one can save oneself more assuredly than in a crowd.