The Seeds of the EU’s Crisis Were Sown 60 Years Ago

May 24 (Bloomberg) -- The arc of Europe’s postwar historyis turning toward tragedy. It isn’t just that much of thecontinent has fallen into a new Great Depression, or that insome countries things will get worse before they get better. Itisn’t even that the whole mess was avoidable. It’s that thecrisis is dividing Europe along the very lines the Europeanproject was intended to erase.

Decades of cliches about European solidarity and theEuropean idea are being held up to ridicule. The argument thatBritons, Germans, Greeks, Italians and Spaniards are instinctivecultural partners whose commonalities transcend their obviousdifferences and historical enmities -- that “Europe” is a realcommunity, not just a heavily worked-over Brussels blueprint --turns out to be, let’s say, disputable.