Germany’s Mannschaft has always been a formidable soccerteam. Its chief quality has been a tenacity and tempo capable of overcoming allodds. This is not to say that Germany has failed to produce great footballers “Gerd Mueller, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Franz Beckenbauer come to mind. It ismerely to say collective power has trumped individual prowess. But against oneteam Germany always breaks down as if caught in a web. It pushes, it presses,it pounds “ and it flounders. That team is Italy, whose 2-1 victory over thefavored German side in this year’s European Championship extended a long run ofmajor-tournament domination over Germany. Italian malleability and artistry aretoo much for German diktat.
All of this comes to mind as I watch Super Mario undoGermany with a series of feints that have left hardline Bundesbank bruiserslooking as nimble and effective as beached whales. Little by little, MarioDraghi, the Italian president of the European Central Bank, has taken aninstitution whose overriding mission was to keep inflation in check “ theobsession that built the Deutsche Mark “ and turned it into a lender of lastresort prepared to throw everything into buying the distressed euro-zonesovereign debt of countries like Spain and Italy and so preserve the euro.“Whatever it takes,” Draghi says. He means it.
Many Germans are not happy, convinced an inflationarysouthern rot is setting in, but Draghi is right. Europe is irreversible; forthat, at this point, the euro must be, too. The preamble to the U.S.Constitution speaks of “a more perfect union.” The founding European treatiesspeak of “ever closer union.” For neither has the road to union been devoid ofbattles between north and south. But the cause has been worth the fight on bothsides of the Atlantic: There simply is no greater one. For Europe theapproaching centennial of the outbreak of World War I should be sufficientreminder of that.
But people have short memories. They think the euro is adispensable experiment, a technical construct or a hedgie’s plaything, when itis the solemn gage of German commitment to a united Europe “ a project that,like most great undertakings, comes at a price.
For both Germany and Italy, the European Union was a way outof post-war devastation and shame. For Italy, in addition, it was a way“to scale the Alps,” to tie itself tothe more developed parts of Europe and resist the chaotic tug of its southernhalf. Now a united Germany views Europe more as actuary than supplicant. InItaly, by contrast, a certain European idealism endures. One way to viewDraghi’s battle with Jens Weidmann and the Bundesbank is this: A big idea(Europe) versus a smaller one (price stability).
But what good is a Europe where the treaty-stipulated roleof the central bank is being finessed by Super Mario, where Germany becomes thepermanent subsidizer of debtor nations like Spain and Italy, and wheredepression and unemployment become the enduring lot of poorer countries unableto regain competitiveness through devaluation?
The answer is that this is not a good Europe. The immediatefuture will be very tough, but it is a lot better than the tumultuousalternative of Europe’s unraveling; and in this crisis the seeds of evergreater European integration are being sown. (If the ECB is now the Fed, whatmust the European Union become?) The euro was a hasty marriage precipitated bythe end of the Cold War, the quid pro quo of Germany’s anxious neighbors forits unification. This crisis is a belated post-bubble reckoning with theimplications of that act.
And so the push is now on toward necessary conditions of ashared currency like fiscal union “ Draghi’s unlimited purchase of bonds isconditioned on tough fiscal adjustment programs “ and a banking union builtaround a new eurozone supervisor. The path to both will be rough. Politicians’interests are at stake. Economies are shrinking. But whatever the howls it isclear enough this far into the euro crisis that “ever closer union” is anobstinate idea that has entered the European consciousness, even if it goesunmentioned.
Certainly, it is present in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mind.She lived under Communism in a Germany divided by the consequences of fascismand so knew the two great scourges of 20th-century Europe. Slowly, cautiously,falteringly she has moved in the right direction and deserves credit. Draghithe Jesuit has helped her, with his elliptical phrases and very Italiancapacity to zigzag to the objective. It is tempting to compare him to AlexanderHamilton at the time of the U.S. assumption crisis. But I prefer to see him asAndrea Pirlo, the Italian midfielder with 360-degree vision, never hurried,always assured, master of the short and the long pass, bane of Germany, afantasist who hits the target with precision.
Roger Cohen is a British-born journalist and author. He is acolumnist for The New York Times and International Herald Tribune and hasworked as a foreign correspondent in fifteen different countries
