Will EU Members Learn to Share?

The latest leaks from high ranking EU officials concerning the sovereign debt crisis hint at the possibility of not one, but two bailout funds. Details are scarce; but maybe that's the idea. They can keep the palaver going as long as you don't ask what army of investors is supposed to step out front and center to fund this financial engineering. That's the key to making the bailout work--or not. Someone has to plop a lot of cold, hard cash money on the barrel head in order to truly end the crisis. S&P, however, is threatening to downgrade most of Europe. Whence will investors find the courage to buy the EU's financial engineering when they see the price of sovereign debt credit default swaps escalating?

This is something the leaders of Germany and other wealthy EU nations spend little time publicly admitting. Instead, they focus on how to impose discipline, austerity and clean living on the profligate. Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain and perhaps other nations would have to earn every Euro they spend, and would pay penalties for deficits, failing to wash behind their ears, and using cuss words. Somehow, enough righteousness is supposed to transport the EU to the utter bliss of true currency union.

But the EU is missing an important point. The world's most successful currency union, the United States, exists perennially in a state of financial imbalance. For over a century, the wealthy states on the East Coast, more recently with the wealthy states on the West Coast, have subsidized less wealthy states in between. These imbalances have existed in the form of federal subsidies to farmers, ranchers, the mining industry, the railroads, and more. The Interstate Highway System was another big subsidy, benefiting large, thinly populated rural states more per capita than it benefited densely populated states. But none of the United States tries to hold others of the United States to fiscal rectitude. Imbalance is implicit in the structure of the Constitution, apportioning as it does two Senators to each state no matter how large or small. And imbalance runs the other way. On a per capita basis, the less wealthy states probably provide more people to serve in the military than the wealthier states, resulting in steeper non-financial costs on the former when America goes to war. Americans tolerate imbalance because national unity is more important to them than any rigorous reconciliation of ledgers.

To make the EU really work, Europeans need more than just their economic welfare. Financial self-interest isn't the superglue required for political union. Neither is sheer power. Rome's legions, Napoleon's armies, and the Third Reich's panzers all failed to hold Europe together. Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy and other proponents of the EU have shrewdly played their cards to keep the crisis from tipping over into financial panic. But the EU needs greatness in its leadership, calls to electorates to seek a new destiny. That's missing, and given the historical divisions among Europeans, a most tribal collection of peoples, it's not surprising that issuers of EU sovereign debt credit default swaps are selling their contracts dearly.