My hometown Kilkenny has the Irish festival game sewn up. Comedy, art, folk music, animation, and, since 2010, economics. “Kilkenomics” has become an obligatory pilgrimage for paddies who self-identify as European. “Davos with jokes” sprang from a comedy show where cuddly economist David McWilliams mixed money and mirth. It still bears the imprint of that genesis, with a presiding comedian to keep discussions of Keynesianism, capitalism, and crypto light and lively.
Kilkenomics attracts big brains. Previous headliners include Paul Krugman, Peter Schiff, and Jeffrey Sachs. Another festival regular is Yanis Varoufakis. Indeed, groupies chase Greece’s “financial rockstar” through Kilkenny’s medieval laneways with copies of Das Kapital to sign. It’s predictable that this Woodstock of centrist dads leans Left but the chat remains mostly grounded because the subject is, well, money.
I go not to study economics but Economists — that priestly caste who set the mood music of the managerial state. This year’s star was Nassim Nicholas Taleb, cantankerous author of Black Swan and Skin in the Game. Taleb’s advice to trust no one who won’t back their opinions with hard cash is a foolproof bullshit detector. Ass that I am, I waited too long to book my ticket and had to make do with a lucky dip. One of the shows I picked in haste was a panel discussion in the plush Ormonde Hotel. The title was appealingly apocalyptic: “European Carnage: Why Europe is Failing and What It Means for You.”
If fixing a problem requires admitting there is one, the agenda was promising. “Europe is facing turbulent times,” went the blurb, “from economic stagnation to political fragmentation.” A panel, consisting of two think tankers and two economists, would take “a hard look at why Europe seems to be struggling and what this means for the average citizen.”
Alas, one can’t look hard through rose-colored glasses. Instead of the promised orgy of doom-mongering, I found myself listening to a panel of resolute optimists. It was quite dispiriting. The lookers in question were Mary Fitzgerald, Cormac Lucey, Peter Antonioni, and Andrea Binder. One might suppose, based purely on geography, that two Paddies, a Brit, and Kraut would see Europe differently, but they mostly agreed on everything. We — my brother had come along — were treated not to a debate so much as a recitation of an increasingly shopworn catechism. You know the tune. Brexit, Borders, and Orbán = Bad. Monetary Union, Migration, and Macron = Good.
The genial host, Gearóid Farrelly, kicked off with a big question, “Is the EU broken?” Love or hate the EU, the only honest answer is surely, “Well, duh.” The Eurozone’s GDP today is 30 percent lower than America’s. But the panel rejected the blasphemous notion. Mary Fitzgerald, a former foreign correspondent for the Europhile Irish Times, admitted that, yes, the EU had challenges — separatist blocs, economic stagnation, a looming trade war with America, and an actual war in Ukraine — but it weathered past crises and would again.
Her certainty stemmed from the fact that European unity is, in principle, a good thing. “If the EU didn’t exist,” agreed her compatriot Cormac Lucey, “we’d have to invent something like it.” Quite right too, but the part of that truism that struck me was something like it. Whisper it, friends, but the EU is but one version of European unity. Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Hitler all tried to crack this particular nut.
The League of Nations was another supranational project that did some of the things the EU tries to do now. It lasted just over two decades. Its successor, the UN, has survived eight. Perhaps the EU is, like the League, a failed experiment, a wrong answer to an important question. Better answers may exist.
The panel’s faith in the current dispensation was especially odd the week after Donald Trump won. Normally, this would be an occasion to mock gauche Americans — and there was some of that — but the Orange One’s re-election is an emphatic embrace of economic nationalism by the biggest economy of the world. It’s especially hard to be smug in a year when the Deplorables are on the march in Europe too. Democratic success by Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, and Geert Wilders as well as the collapse of Germany’s center-left coalition may be cause for concern in Brussels, but why is it never cause for self-reflection?
After all, one obvious solution to the EU’s democratic deficit — a problem frankly acknowledged by the panel — would be to treat the unwanted election results as legitimate. A union that was looser, less obsessed with regulatory homogeneity, and more tolerant of nationalism would still have Britain. But no, anyone who lived in London after Brexit knows what the bunker mentality sounds like. Populists are wicked and those who vote for them are dupes. Mary Fitzgerald, fishing for applause, boasted that she would never call the French National Front by its new name. This is a party, note, that won a 31.4 percent landslide in this year’s European Parliament elections.
The wishful thinking went up a gear when Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness was broached. The central banker’s damning report resembles one of those jeremiads about the U.S.S.R. in the 1970s that fell on the deaf ears of an aging politburo. The European bloc is mired in red tape, falling behind China and America in productivity, and has “missed out on the digital revolution.” Like the Soviet Union, Europe’s union is committed to a bizarre ideology that renders real reform impossible and decline inevitable.
Draghi ventures into magical thinking when he talks about decarbonizing while keeping energy prices low. The reforms he advocates should be paid by pooling EU debt — another way of saying Germany. This is an especially hard pill for Germany’s remaining fiscal conservatives to swallow, especially when Greta Thunberg continues to run their energy policy.
My brother, an engineer working in renewable energy, rolled his eyes violently as Andrea Binder confidently described getting to Carbon Zero as “an exciting challenge.” I wonder if German factory workers found it exciting watching Volkswagen shut down production of the Polo this year. Peter Antonioni, co-author of Economics for Dummies ironically enough, shared Binder’s enthusiasm. The Green transition, he predicted, would only be painful in the short term. My brother moaned in agony.
The only panelist to stray from the script was Sunday Times columnist Cormac Lucey. A trained accountant, he retains an interest in the bottom line. Germany’s increasingly expensive energy bills, he ventured, were a deathblow to European productivity. One cause of that rise was switching from cheap Russian gas to American LNG, a side effect (entirely accidental of course) of the Ukraine war.
The subject of Ukraine, once raised, derailed the discussion. At the inevitable invocation of Comrade Zelensky, a Churchillian wind seemed to puff up the largely liberal crowd — Irish audiences get very impassioned about foreign conflicts in which they have no prospect of fighting.
A young man raised his hand to ask if NATO’s steady expansion east had in any way provoked the invasion. This scoundrel, clearly a Putin apologist, perhaps a Russian spy, was oblivious to the mood change. There were appalled gasps from the crowd and scoffing from the panel. Peter Antonioni established himself as a serious foreign policy thinker by comparing Vladimir Putin to Sauron from The Lord of the Rings.
Again, it was Irishman Cormac Lucey who demurred. The continued prosecution of a war that was obviously lost was senseless. He worried that no one in Europe dared discuss the deal that must eventually be cut. I checked the emergency exits. Ireland’s most famous witch was burned in Kilkenny in 1324. I worried that Lucey would be our next victim.
Antonioni, a Londoner recall, turned to Lucy in indignation: “What if someone invaded and occupied your country, would you abandon a large part of your territory for peace?”
Without missing a beat, Lucey said, “We did! Micheal Collins made that deal in 1921 and gave you the North.”
An Irish crowd, however cosmopolitan, loves nothing better than seeing Englishmen squirm. In the roar of laughter, Zelinsky and his troubles were temporarily forgotten. It reminded me of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s maxim in Skin in the Game: “Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.”
From energy to migration to war, the panel fairly represented the opinion of European elites, a jet-setting bureaucratic class divorced from the continent as experienced by 99 percent. They can heat their houses, their jobs are secure, and their men will not die in uniform. The EU is dying, of complacency, conceit, and irrelevance. And that’s ok. Europe will find another answer.
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