Saving the euro won't save Europe

The euro crisis is the main topic at Davos, but the economic rescue of Europe should not drive the political European project into the background, writes historian Timothy Garton Ash in a guest commentary in the left-liberal daily La Repubblica: "If we are witnessing the euro being saved, this is a triumph of fear, not of hope. Other great moments of the European project - the introduction of the single market, 1989, successive enlargements, the launch of the euro itself - were driven by hope. Here, it is fear that has led Germany and others to do the minimum necessary: fear that the costs of collapse would be higher than the unpalatable, resented alternative of 'bailing out' the countries in trouble. ... Above all, we have to recognise that saving the euro is no substitute for the larger political project, of which it was once meant to be both core and catalyst. The politics of fear may have saved the euro. We need a politics of hope to find a European answer to the Arab spring."

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