Will Europe pull through?

This, in a nutshell, is the questionposed in The American Interest’s issue on the economic crisis, though also on the political, social and cultural crisis engulfing the Old Continent. “Perceptions of Europe have shifted markedly in just the past few years,” preface the editors of this conservative US magazine. “Where once stood an attractive post-nationalist model of peace, prosperity, social justice and ecological virtue now stumbles a larger but seemingly aimless and far more ungainly project.”

“Thanks to the financial crisis and its meandering aftermath,” they continue, “Europe’s problems and limits seem lately to have accumulated into a genuine crisis.” So will Europe pull through? The American Interest asked four American and four European observers to weigh in on the future of Europe.

Among the European commentators, Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev recaps the current state of affairs thus: “As it stands now, Europe has lost its self-confidence, its energy and its hopes that the next century will be the ‘European century’.[…] While America is fighting ‘declinism’ as its worst enemy, Europe has decided to embrace it. In fact,” qualifies Krastev, “these days the European Union is less a declining power than a ‘retired power’ – wise but inactive, prosperous but elastically accommodating.” And that, ironically, “at the very moment when Europeans have good reason to believe that they were right in their criticism of both the Anglo-Saxon economic model and America’s unipolar dreamworld.”

“It is still too early to write Europe off,” Krastev concludes. “But the European model we knew – meaning not just the framework of social democracy but the political-ideological teleology that went with it – is no more.”