It also creates unrooted young people full of energy and anger. Unemployment is a root of anti-state movements on the left and the right. The extended and hopelessly unemployed have little to lose and think they have something to gain by destabilizing the state. It is hard to quantify what level of unemployment breeds that sort of unrest, but there is no doubt that Spain and Greece are in that zone and that others might be.
It is interesting that while Greece has already developed a radical right movement of some size, Spain's political system, while experiencing stress between the center and its autonomous regions, remains relatively stable. I would argue that that stability is based on a belief that there will be some solution to the unemployment situation. Its full enormity has not yet sunk in, nor the fact that this kind of unemployment problem is not fixed quickly. It is deeply structural. The U.S. unemployment rate during the Great Depression was mitigated to a limited degree by the New Deal but required the restructuring of World War II to really address.
This is why 2013 is a critical year for Europe. It has gone far to solve the banking crisis and put off a sovereign debt crisis. In order to do so, it has caused a serious weakening of the economy and created massive unemployment in some countries. The unequal distribution of the cost, both nationally and socially, is the threat facing the European Union. It isn't merely a question of nations pulling in different directions, but of political movements emerging, particularly from the most economically affected sectors of society, that will be both nationalist and distrustful of its own elites. What else can happen in those countries that are undergoing social catastrophes? Even if the disaster is mitigated to some degree by the shadow economy and emigration reducing unemployment, the numbers range from the painful to the miserable in 14 of Europe's economies.
Europe's Crossroads
The European Union has been so focused on the financial crisis that it is not clear to me that the unemployment reality has reached Europe's officials and bureaucrats, partly because of a growing split in the worldview of the European elites and those whose experience of Europe has turned bitter. Partly, it has been caused by the fact of geography. The countries with low unemployment tend to be in Northern Europe, which is the heart of the European Union, while those with catastrophically high unemployment are on the periphery. It is easy to ignore things far away.
But 2013 is the year in which the definition of the European problem must move beyond the financial crisis to the social consequences of that crisis. Progress, if not a solution, must become visible. It is difficult to see how continued stagnation and unemployment at these levels can last another year without starting to generate significant political opposition that will create governments, or force existing governments, to tear at the fabric of Europe.
That fabric is not old enough, worn enough or tough enough to face the challenges. People are not being asked to die on a battlefield for the European Union but to live lives of misery and disappointment. In many ways that is harder than being brave. And since the core promise of the European Union was prosperity, the failure to deliver that prosperity -- and the delivery of poverty instead, unevenly distributed -- is not sustainable. If Europe is in crisis, the world's largest economy is in crisis, political as well as financial. And that matters to the world perhaps more than anything else.
