Hollande’s initiative - A chance to blend hope and discipline

It is not overstating the case to say that the measures announced after yesterday’s meeting between France’s new president, François Hollande, and German chancellor Angela Merkel are the most important since the Marshall Plan — officially the European Recovery Program — was announced and sponsored by America in the rootless and hungry days after the Second World War.

The prosperity enjoyed by Europe in the decades after the war was a direct consequence of that 1948 stimulus package administered and funded by America. Its enduring dividend is the peace the great majority of Europeans have basked in since 1945. Though primarily designed — from an American perspective at least — to block Soviet communism, the ensuing stability built economies and markets that allowed millions of Europeans to enjoy social and material advances that might have prevented the Second World War had they been available to earlier generations. This applies particularly to the millions of Germans condemned to terrible austerity and inflation by the penal Treaty of Versailles after the First World War. This harsh imposition provoked, just as can be seen in corners of Europe today, the rise of irrational extremism.

It may seem vainly disproportionate to compare Europe of 2012 with the wasteland left after six years of the worst human conflict in modern times, but as there has been no crisis comparable to today’s since, it is unfortunately fitting.