Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Laughter of the gods

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Mike Peterson Published: June 18, 2012 1 minute 2 comments

Finally, a cartoonist sensibly captures the economic problems of the European Union.

Petar Pismestrovic avoids prescription in favor of description, which I think is wise in that most cartoonists don't know very much about macroeconomics and so just end up parroting a party line about austerity or the need for spending or whatever the objects of their political loyalties insist is the answer.

Not that objects of political loyalty don't deserve good graphic backup, but it's more illustration than commentary, isn't it?

Either that or they draw Greek ruins or the Leaning Tower of Pisa to show that, yeah, things are a mess. Which, in turn, is less illustration and more like the marginalia in the New Yorker. And not the more imaginative examples.

The Tower of Babel, however, brings up the fundamental question at the heart of the EU's economic crisis, which is, "What the hell were we thinking in the first place?"

I used that link to refresh my memory of the story of the tower and came away more puzzled than refreshed, but, however many variations and inconsistencies attach to the story, it's reasonable to see an element of hubris and of slapdown in the whole thing. At the very least, "Man plans and the gods laugh."

The big difference being that, when mankind began the Tower, we all spoke the same language and shared the same culture.

The EU has been sort of the opposite storyline: Instead of a unified effort that results in chaos, the intent was to begin with chaos and form a unified economic culture.

I don't think you need an Olympian perspective to find that amusing.

At first, it seemed an extension of the Common Market, which began in 1957 as Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Not to suggest that those six don't have a history of rivalries, but they did have a fair amount of shared culture and, in any case, the degree of "unification" involved was pretty limited.

Certainly, the loss of sovereignty was extremely limited, compared to the new, improved and much-expanded version.

What has been interesting over the past decade or so has been watching Turkey attempt to position itself to enter the EU, the two biggest factors being human rights issues with the Kurds (and, somewhat more theoretically, the Armenians), and the challenge to the government's secular constitutional structure by rising Islamist sentiment.

The Turks may be watching all this and thanking their lucky stars it didn't work out.

In all, it has been a process similar to the expansion of free trade in the United States: When the US and Canada negotiated their Free Trade Agreement, there were certain specific issues — notably the difference in how the timber industry operates with regard to national forests. But the two nations had so much in common that it was felt those details could be worked out. (Many haven't, most have.)

Shortly after the FTA was signed and Mexico was brought into discussions of what was now NAFTA, however, there was considerable doubt and discomfort over the glaring disparities in wages and working conditions. But, by then, the camel's nose was already under the tent flap.

And the camel's nose seems to be the dominant factor in international economics these days.

The shared currency of the EU raises issues not simply of "sovereignty" in a cultural, nationalistic sense but of local control, and not every nation that was invited to the party chose to come. When the euro was first issued, there were Cassandras who questioned the move.

Funny thing about ol' Cassandra: Her name has come to mean "pessimists, wet blankets and people who bitch about stuff" in a kind of Chicken Little sense. It's true that, like King Canute's attempt to command the tides, Cassandra's warnings were futile.

But she was no Chicken Little: She had the situation pegged correctly, and every one of her prophecies came true.

To call the nay-sayers on this one "Cassandras" may turn out to be more accurate than the boosters intend.

The story of the tower in Genesis suggests that, once God confounded mankind by mixing their language, they wandered off to the four corners of the world, simply abandoning the project.

There may be a few lightning bolts hurled before this one ends.

 (Not the first time this image has been invoked to illustrate this sort of project, by the way. This is where I first encountered it, the difference being that More was only joking.)

Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.