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Such a precipitous descent into rank populism would be horrid. It would 
unravel generations of hard-won diplomatic progress, as European elites 
would have new incentive to indulge the chauvinism of their people. 
Relations between European countries would harden and become bitter. 
What will eventually bring this to a halt will be Europeans' instinct for self-
preservation. Indeed, this faint pulse of enlightened self-interest will also 
motivate their tentative rediscovery of the virtues of continental unity. 
As eager as Europeans might be to abandon cosmopolitan pretensions and 
international exertions of soft power, they will definitely want to maintain 
their standards of living. And they would soon discover that this is a goal 
incompatible with the old system of passport checks and customs duties. 
So they will remember the reason they sought economic integration in the 
first place --small countries need many trading partners to maintain 
economic growth, and the more tightly integrated they are, the better. The 
isolated, economically depressed, independent nations of post-EU Europe 
will come to miss the economic coordination that they once had --not least, 
because they will have replaced it with the anxiety of persistent low-level 
tension with their neighbors. 
Of course, having suffered the turbulence of disbanding the European 
Union, there will initially be resistance on the Continent to starting the 
experiment anew. But after a number of years, maybe even decades, when 
the pleasures of unimpeded sovereignty have been exhausted, and the 
lessons of its limits have been learned, there will be another attempt to 
pursue European integration. 
It's possible that, having learned from the mistakes of the past, Europeans 
will reach farther back in seeking a model for their future attempts at 
integration. Some might evoke the model of the Hanseatic League, which 
existed from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. (The name survives 
in some unexpected ways; the car registration tag of the city of Hamburg 
reads "HH" to this day --Hansestadt Hamburg.) The Hanseatic League had 
a considerable reach, from Scotland to Novgorod in Russia, but its purpose 
was mainly to facilitate trade, though it also had its own legal system and 
provided some mutual help and security. If a "core Europe" does stay intact 
after the dissolution of the currency, it's likely to be in such a stripped-
down capacity. And it would be precisely such a system that chastened 
former EU countries could be tempted to join. 
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IT SEEMS SAFE TO say, however, that Europe's future advocates of unity 
will be struggling against compatriots radicalized by the experience of 
prolonged recession. This could mean the Continent will experience a 
generational conflict of unprecedented ferocity. It would also mean the end 
of a Europe that could pursue unity on the basis of a common, and 
implicitly understood, commitment to democracy. 
That is why it is not enough for European elites to simply expend energy 
defending Europe's current institutions. Europe will only be secure in its 
unity if it can achieve a measure of solidarity. This was clear even in the 
darkest depths of the '30s, when the aristocratic Austrian politician and 
publicist Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi intuited that the rise 
of fascism demanded an even louder propagation of the pan-European 
cause. 
In the same way, the greatest unanswered question confronting the 
Continent today is not about the mechanism of a bailout, nor the 
sustainability of sovereign debt, but the Continent's great solidarity gap. 
Those ties that currently bind Europeans to Europe are composed not of 
genuine sentiment, but rational argument. Even the most fervent supporters 
of unity are Vernunfteuropaer, to borrow a term coined in the days of the 
Weimar Republic. They endorse Europe but do not particularly love it and 
feel only a limited duty to support it. This is a pale imitation of the spirit 
that once moved a Giuseppe Mazzini or a Victor Hugo to mount the 
barricades on behalf of a united Europe. 
The challenge in the years ahead will be for influential Europeans to take 
this cause and make it their own. The German philosopher JYrgen 
Habermas has tried for years to outline a concept of European nationalism, 
but he has been a lonely voice. Such appeals would resonate more widely 
in a general atmosphere of dire necessity. Historical experience shows that 
radical change usually occurs as the result of a deep crisis. This fact was 
well-known to Jean Monnet, the architect of the European Union. As he 
was famous for saying: Crises are the great federators. 
In that sense, it is unfortunate that there has still been no palpable feeling 
of crisis this summer in most EU countries (other than the few most 
severely affected by the recession). Europeans have been content to devote 
more attention to the queen's Jubilee, the European soccer championship, 
and the run-up to the Olympic Games than to the news bulletins about 
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Continental summits and bailout meetings. We should hope that these 
distractions do not prove fateful. 
What was said at one stage about Italy ("We have created Italy, let us now 
create Italians") has always been true of Europe. The current European 
Union is now on the precipice of falling apart because Europe's leaders 
refused to recognize the importance of the task. But there is nothing 
preventing Europeans from trying once again. Sometimes the energy to 
overcome great collective difficulties can only be forged in great collective 
failure. 
Walter Laqueur is a Distinguished Scholar at the Center for Strategic and 
International Studies in Washington. His most recent book is HARVEST OF 
A DECADE. 
NYT 
Why Our Elites Stink 
David Brooks 
July 12, 2012 -- Through most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the 
Protestant Establishment sat atop the American power structure. A 
relatively small network of white Protestant men dominated the 
universities, the world of finance, the local country clubs and even high 
government service. 
Over the past half—century, a more diverse and meritocratic elite has 
replaced the Protestant Establishment. People are more likely to rise on the 
basis of grades, test scores, effort and performance. 
Yet, as this meritocratic elite has taken over institutions, trust in them has 
plummeted. It's not even clear that the brainy elite is doing a better job of 
running them than the old boys' network. Would we say that Wall Street is 
working better now than it did 60 years ago? Or government? The system 
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is more just, but the outcomes are mixed. The meritocracy has not fulfilled 
its promise. 
Christopher Hayes of MSNBC and The Nation believes that the problem is 
inherent in the nature of meritocracies. In his book, "Twilight of the 
Elites," he argues that meritocratic elites may rise on the basis of grades, 
effort and merit, but, to preserve their status, they become corrupt. They 
create wildly unequal societies, and then they rig things so that few can 
climb the ladders behind them. Meritocracy leads to oligarchy. 
Hayes points to his own elite training ground, Hunter College High School 
in New York City. You have to ace an entrance exam to get in, but affluent 
parents send their kids to rigorous test prep centers and now few poor black 
and Latino students can get in. 
Baseball players get to the major leagues through merit, but then some take 
enhancement drugs to preserve their status. Financiers work hard to get 
jobs at the big banks, but then some rig the game for their own mutual 
benefit. 
Far from being the fairest of all systems, he concludes, the meritocracy 
promotes gigantic inequality and is fundamentally dysfunctional. No 
wonder institutional failure has been the leitmotif of our age. 
It's a challenging argument but wrong.. say today's meritocratic elites 
achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by 
being ambitious and disciplined. They raise their kids in organized 
families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment. 
They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving 
their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the 
waiting room. 
Phenomena like the test-prep industry are just the icing on the cake, giving 
some upper-middle-class applicants a slight edge over other upper-middle-
class applicants. The real advantages are much deeper and more honest. 
The corruption that has now crept into the world of finance and the other 
professions is not endemic to meritocracy but to the specific culture of our 
meritocracy. The problem is that today's meritocratic elites cannot admit to 
themselves that they are elites. 
Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the 
true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails 
in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television 
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studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the 
establishment. 
As a result, today's elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the 
racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys' network did possess. If you went to 
Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how 
morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. 
You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for 
the rigors of leadership. 
The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were 
temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They 
cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly 
conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, 
but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service. 
Today's elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious 
leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has 
eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, 
for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and 
character. Most of their problems can be traced to this. 
If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation 
you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people 
are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the 
world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role. 
The difference between the Hayes view and mine is a bit like the difference 
between the French Revolution and the American Revolution. He wants to 
upend the social order. I want to keep the current social order, but I want to 
give it a different ethos and institutions that are more consistent with its 
existing ideals. 
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