Summer 2011: Greece on the brink of banruptcy from June onwards. Rain all through July. Crazy extreme-right conservative kills over 80 people which he sees as a way to "rescue" his country. August: Spain and Italy nearly drag the EU into an economic abyss that it won't be able to crawl out of. Like the USA, the EU has the greatest trouble to find a politically workable solution. European leaders pose unconvincingly, late, and half-hearted. And now: London and other English cities burning and looted, for several days on end. Is this summer an exception, or part of a pattern?
What does it all mean?
So the question is: is this crazy nightmarish dream that we will wake up from in the autumn? Or is it the sign that Europe is increasingly able to keep its act together, and to find a concerted way of dealing with the problems of our time? So far, I'm only seeing the latter: signs of embattled groups put against each other. The elites have done it, the immigrants have done it, the conservative right created this atmosphere, the social-democrats have sold out our civilisation. Polarisation to the extet that we haven't seen since the 1970s. At least, judging from the history books, because I've never seen it before, period. Simple solutions abide, but they all involve portraying certain groups as caricatures to their exclusion.
If we want Europe to be a nice place again, it's time to start taking each other seriously again, to act responsibly, and to get over the atmosphere of suspicion and cynicism. I, at least, am pretty sick of it.
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