Only from Christian Roots Can a “Human” Economy Be Born
Professor of Religion, Politics, and Ethics at the University of
Nottingham, JOHN MILBANK explains the paradox of the German diktats.

London has made its great refusal. Of the 27 members of the European Union, Great Britain was the only nation not to agree to the accord on fiscal rigor formulated at the beginning of December. This was a historic stand that in the future could generate a Europe of two velocities. David Cameron, to a certain extent complying with the popular sentiment, seemed to have sought to defend the interests of the London financial world to the detriment of the common interest. And yet, without Great Britain, the new Europe could be born with a limb missing, and London could find itself facing the challenges of globalization by itself. “I don’t think that most British people are anti-European,” says John Milbank, professor of Religion, Politics, and Ethics at the University of Nottingham. “I think they distrust what they see as the non-accountable central bureaucracy, and I think to some extent this is justified, but to some extent it’s also fomented by a lot of inaccurate reporting in the newspapers–an incessant newspaper campaign blaming European institutions for everything.” Prime Minister Cameron finds himself in a very difficult situation. “The hands of the Prime Minister are very severely tied. Whether he really meant to have to exercise the veto is very debatable. I think it was probably a rather poor tactic on his part. [...] On the other hand, I think that probably the British government is quite skeptical about whether the euro will really work in the long run. Maybe they underestimate the will to make the euro work; in Germany, and the German-speaking countries, the will to make the euro work is incredibly strong, incredibly powerful.”
But the big question remains the Franco-German bloc. “It may be that the British are gambling on the idea that in the end France and Germany will fall out with each other. It’s a very dangerous gamble because if we were locked out of a euro zone which had become a fiscal union, I think it will leave us locked out of the center of European power.” According to Milbank, London should unite with smaller countries to forge a new vision of Europe different from that of Franco-German hegemony. “I am thinking of a Europe that is not a centralized nation-state, nor simply an economic union, but something more like a commonwealth of nations, with a shared political culture and a shared development of a political vision. I’d like to see something more like two chambers of the center, something more like a House of Commons and a House of Lords, representing vocational opinion and religious bodies and that kind of thing.”
But Europe can be united only if it does not forget its origins. “If you knock out the Christian element from Europe then the risk becomes that we forget our deep-seated respect for the person and our whole way of life. Asia has borrowed Western technocracy but not sufficiently the Western respect for the person. We have to find a way of having a strong human economy that respects social value as well as economic value. To some extent, Germany has that kind of model, but the danger is that she will be tempted to impose an Asiatic level of discipline on the whole of Europe and [...] that we just pursue a combination of a naked capitalism on one hand, with extreme bureaucratic control on the other hand.” His conclusion is that, “At the moment, unfortunately, there are very, very few politicians taking that kind of approach. All one can do is keep talking, keep trying to educate people.”
(L.F.)