European model a wretched failure

Anarchy and chaos in Athens one week? Cars beyond number burned in Paris in another season? And now this terrible, senseless, causeless violence in London and many other British cities?

And everywhere across western Europe, governments bankrupt or nearly so, living beyond their means, unable or unwilling to tell their people the truth about their finances.

And beyond this the strange, undemocratic and illiberal mechanism, vast and inescapable, but also creaking and slipshod and unreliable, of the European super state, unable to help anything but always able to interfere, taking decisions without any irksome recourse to democracy or national sovereignty, adding a new layer of illegitimacy to societies robbed of trust. London burning like the Blitz, and all of it inflicted by the pride of British youth.

There is nothing good in this for anyone. Surely even the angels weep to see that green and pleasant land so reduced.

There is no occasion here for schadenfreude. Europe's tragedy is a setback for all mankind, and especially for that strange entity that we call the West.

To think coherently of the West, you must conceive of it being led by the US, embracing Canada, central and western Europe, Japan and Australia.

These nations are all meaningfully democratic. They are all rich, or relatively so. They all run mixed, capitalist economies. And they are linked in a common security network, NATO, or the US alliances with Japan and Australia.

They provide the lion's share of international aid and, though hopelessly outnumbered at the UN, they still provide most of what pass for international norms.

But this is a very poor season in the West.

At no time since its core societies were stabilised after World War II has Europe looked so ratty, so impotent, so much at the end of its tether. It still lectures the world on everything from the correct label for cheese to the urgent need to impose more taxes, carbon or otherwise. But it can no longer run its own still fabulously rich societies with even a modicum of efficiency or legitimacy.

The European model right now is a wretched failure.