Europe’s post-war recovery holds valuable lessons
He campaigned from 1944 across north western Europe where he comforted the wounded and prayed for those who died.
There are pictures of him on the banks of the Rhine, celebrating Mass in a bombed out Cologne church and sitting in the cockpit of an abandoned Stuka bomber.
He was part of the team that ended up liberating one of the hell-holes of Europe — Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He never talked about it but we all knew he had eye-balled evil there.
I was reminded of him last week on hearing that the Dutch government had decided to hand back two valuable paintings to a French Jewish family.
Hermann Goering had confiscated them and 1,800 other pieces of work as his underlings shipped men, women and children to places such as Belsen. Nazi destruction of large swathes of Greece and the annihilation of millions of Jews all took place a short 70 years ago.
It may be impolite to point out these hard facts in 2012 but I wonder about them when listening to lectures about how small, and not so small, countries in Europe should now restructure amid a financial and economic crisis. The short-hand narrative appears to be that the peoples of countries such as Greece and Spain cannot be trusted with economic sovereignty and must be brought to heel on budgetary disciplines while a gut-wrenching adjustment of spending and taxes takes place within their borders.
Calls for forgiveness of excessive debt levels (especially within a banking system that was not elected by the people) are shunned on the altar of economic rectitude. Yet who was it that handed out gigantic amounts of forgiveness for something far more egregious than money just 70 years ago? Was it not the peoples of Europe, supported massively by our friends in the US, who picked up the wreckage that was the European economy and started rebuilding? Did those same people not put aside all the venom and resentment caused by death and destruction and agree to create a borderless society in which those who did the killing were embraced by relatives and friends of those who were killed?
Readers of this column will know that I’m a huge advocate of the basic economic principles that Germany is laying down as Europe undergoes its latest iteration. Spending largely what you earn is a worthy mantra that must be learned by all nations, including Ireland. But all that is taking place against a tapestry woven in complexities of blood and culture that transcend economics. Germany may have financial hegemony in the strategies now being adopted across Europe but she must tread carefully when lecturing others about forgiveness not being a policy option.
In the middle of all this, Ireland must make her way. The mountain of debt that hangs over us is gargantuan, and working our way through that will require deftness by the Troika and ultimately Germany. To date, this population is backing a Government with a material majority while it takes hard decisions about everyday life.
The same is underway in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Sustaining a stable society while radically converting an economy will require all the skills of Realpolitik and ultimately an acknowledgement that forgiveness is a two-way street. History has lessons for all of us, but especially inside Europe.
* Joe Gill is director of research with Bloxham Stockbrokers
