Фантомные боли Германии

Ни для кого не секрет, что и немцы не отказались бы от возвращения марок, которые объединяли Германию: ими гордились немцы западные, к ней стремились немцы восточные.

Около года назад в сильной экономически Германии проводили опрос, в котором 42% проголосовали за восстановление дойчмарки. Оно и немудрено. Сколько денег пришлось потратить немцам, на «помощь попавшим в беду» соседям?

«Если Греция спишет 50% своего долга, то следующими на очереди окажутся Италия, Испания и Португалия. В итоге потери финансового сектора Германии могут составить около 500 миллиардов евро, что вполне достаточно, чтобы уничтожить всю банковскую систему страны», - писали в докладе «Германия – реальный риск», подготовленном консалтинговой компании Gavekal Dragonomics.

Сейчас в немецком правительстве царит уныние, там опасаются того, что дальнейший приток беженцев приведёт к восстановлению постоянного контроля над границами в ЕС.

«В этом случае придется похоронить шенгенскую систему, а с ней, возможно, и другие достижения Европы.

По мнению Юнкера, без Шенгенской зоны не имеет никакого смысла обращение евро», — пишет Der Spiegel.

И еще немного…

Помните, как Сильвио Берлускони предлагал ввести в Италии собственную национальную валюту? А как пару лет назад с предложением вернуть родные франки выступала председатель Национального фронта Франции Марин Ле Пен?

В Финляндии экономисты подсчитали, что с финскими марками ВВП страны был значительно выше.

К слову, у той же Греции был шанс стать независимой и вернуться к национальной валюте, но чем кончилась эта история, вы прекрасно знаете. Можно поговорить о других проблемных странах ЕС Италии, Испании, Португалии… Можно вспомнить Латвию и Эстонию, чьи экономики держались на торговле с Россией.

А ведь никто из лидеров этих стран даже не задумывается о том, что будет, если рухнет евро… Ведь страны-доноры будут озабочены собственным выживанием.

Не зря в народе говорят, что реальная беда приходит не с той стороны, откуда ее ждешь. Реальная беда непредсказуема.

Вот так пока приезжие ищут способы поскорее попасть в Евросоюз, кое-кто из стран-участниц все больше задумывается над тем, как бы им из еврозоны выйти и оставить все проблемы позади.

И снова Британия

Впрочем, эксперты Соединенного королевства уверены, что пока можно и приостановить спешку с выходом — ЕС прекратит существование при нынешнем поколении.

«Проблемы экономического неравенства членов ЕС никуда не делись. <…> Евросоюз начинался с Союза угля и стали. Потом он перерос в финансовый союз, когда добавились новые члены. Потом случился кризис. И стало понятно, что Евросоюз нежизнеспособен. Кризис 2008 года обострил противоречия между «метрополией» в лице Франции, Германии и «периферией» в лице Греции, Италии, Испании и стран Восточной Европы. Разногласия настолько глубоки, что сложно ожидать компромисса. Со стороны объединение выглядит прочным, а по сути у каждого государства свои интересы и цели. <…> Так и придем к моменту, что нет другого выхода кроме отказа от евро», — пишет обозреватель издания The Spectator Джеймс Форсайт.

Впрочем, загадывать не будем.

The geographical position of the Germanic languages is such[183] as to make it highly probable that they represent but an outlying transfer of an Indo-European dialect (possibly a Celto-Italic prototype) to a Baltic people speaking a language or a group of languages that was alien to Indo-European.[184] Not only, then, is English not spoken by a unified race at present but its prototype, more likely than not, was originally a foreign language to the race with which English is more particularly associated. We need not seriously entertain the idea that English or the group of languages to which it belongs is in any intelligible sense the expression of race, that there are embedded in it qualities that reflect the temperament or “genius” of a particular breed of human beings.

Many other, and more striking, examples of the lack of correspondence between race and language could be given if space permitted. One instance will do for many. The Malayo-Polynesian languages form a well-defined group that takes in the southern end of the Malay Peninsula and the tremendous island world to the south and east (except Australia and the greater part of New Guinea). In this vast region we find represented no less than three distinct races—the Negro-like Papuans of New Guinea and Melanesia, the Malay race of Indonesia, and the Polynesians of the outer islands. The Polynesians and Malays all speak languages of the Malayo-Polynesian group, while the languages of the Papuans belong partly to this group (Melanesian), partly to the unrelated languages (“Papuan”) of New Guinea.[185] In spite of the fact that the greatest race cleavage in this region lies between the Papuans and the Polynesians, the major linguistic division is of Malayan on the one side, Melanesian and Polynesian on the other.

As with race, so with culture. Particularly in more primitive levels, where the secondarily unifying power of the “national”[186] ideal does not arise to disturb the flow of what we might call natural distributions, is it easy to show that language and culture are not intrinsically associated. Totally unrelated languages share in one culture, closely related languages—even a single language—belong to distinct culture spheres. There are many excellent examples in aboriginal America. The Athabaskan languages form as clearly unified, as structurally specialized, a group as any that I know of.[187] The speakers of these languages belong to four distinct culture areas—the simple hunting culture of western Canada and the interior of Alaska (Loucheux, Chipewyan), the buffalo culture of the Plains (Sarcee), the highly ritualized culture of the southwest (Navaho), and the peculiarly specialized culture of northwestern California (Hupa). The cultural adaptability of the Athabaskan-speaking peoples is in the strangest contrast to the inaccessibility to foreign influences of the languages themselves.[188] The Hupa Indians are very typical of the culture area to which they belong. Culturally identical with them are the neighboring Yurok and Karok. There is the liveliest intertribal intercourse between the Hupa, Yurok, and Karok, so much so that all three generally attend an important religious ceremony given by any one of them. It is difficult to say what elements in their combined culture belong in origin to this tribe or that, so much at one are they in communal action, feeling, and thought. But their languages are not merely alien to each other; they belong to three of the major American linguistic groups, each with an immense distribution on the northern continent. Hupa, as we have seen, is Athabaskan and, as such, is also distantly related to Haida (Queen Charlotte Islands) and Tlingit (southern Alaska); Yurok is one of the two isolated Californian languages of the Algonkin stock, the center of gravity of which lies in the region of the Great Lakes; Karok is the northernmost member of the Hokan group, which stretches far to the south beyond the confines of California and has remoter relatives along the Gulf of Mexico.

Returning to English, most of us would readily admit, I believe, that the community of language between Great Britain and the United States is far from arguing a like community of culture. It is customary to say that they possess a common “Anglo-Saxon” cultural heritage, but are not many significant differences in life and feeling obscured by the tendency of the “cultured” to take this common heritage too much for granted? In so far as America is still specifically “English,” it is only colonially or vestigially so; its prevailing cultural drift is partly towards autonomous and distinctive developments, partly towards immersion in the larger European culture of which that of England is only a particular facet. We cannot deny that the possession of a common language is still and will long continue to be a smoother of the way to a mutual cultural understanding between England and America, but it is very clear that other factors, some of them rapidly cumulative, are working powerfully to counteract this leveling influence. A common language cannot indefinitely set the seal on a common culture when the geographical, political, and economic determinants of the culture are no longer the same throughout its area.

Language, race, and culture are not necessarily correlated. This does not mean that they never are. There is some tendency, as a matter of fact, for racial and cultural lines of cleavage to correspond to linguistic ones, though in any given case the latter may not be of the same degree of importance as the others. Thus, there is a fairly definite line of cleavage between the Polynesian languages, race, and culture on the one hand and those of the Melanesians on the other, in spite of a considerable amount of overlapping.[189]The racial and cultural division, however, particularly the former, are of major importance, while the linguistic division is of quite minor significance, the Polynesian languages constituting hardly more than a special dialectic subdivision of the combined Melanesian-Polynesian group. Still clearer-cut coincidences of cleavage may be found. The language, race, and culture of the Eskimo are markedly distinct from those of their neighbors;[190] in southern Africa the language, race, and culture of the Bushmen offer an even stronger contrast to those of their Bantu neighbors. Coincidences of this sort are of the greatest significance, of course, but this significance is not one of inherent psychological relation between the three factors of race, language, and culture.

Footnote 183: By working back from such data as we possess we can make it probable that these languages were originally confined to a comparatively small area in northern Germany and Scandinavia. This area is clearly marginal to the total area of distribution of the Indo-European-speaking peoples. Their center of gravity, say 1000 B.C., seems to have lain in southern Russia.

Footnote 184: While this is only a theory, the technical evidence for it is stronger than one might suppose. There are a surprising number of common and characteristic Germanic words which cannot be connected with known Indo-European radical elements and which may well be survivals of the hypothetical pre-Germanic language; such are house, stone, sea, wife (German Haus, Stein, See, Weib).

Footnote 185: Only the easternmost part of this island is occupied by Melanesian-speaking Papuans.

Footnote 186: A “nationality” is a major, sentimentally unified, group. The historical factors that lead to the feeling of national unity are various—political, cultural, linguistic, geographic, sometimes specifically religious. True racial factors also may enter in, though the accent on “race” has generally a psychological rather than a strictly biological value. In an area dominated by the national sentiment there is a tendency for language and culture to become uniform and specific, so that linguistic and cultural boundaries at least tend to coincide. Even at best, however, the linguistic unification is never absolute, while the cultural unity is apt to be superficial, of a quasi-political nature, rather than deep and far-reaching.

Footnote 187: The Semitic languages, idiosyncratic as they are, are no more definitely ear-marked.

Footnote 188: See page 209.

Footnote 189: The Fijians, for instance, while of Papuan (negroid) race, are Polynesian rather than Melanesian in their cultural and linguistic affinities.

Footnote 190: Though even here there is some significant overlapping. The southernmost Eskimo of Alaska were assimilated in culture to their Tlingit neighbors. In northeastern Siberia, too, there is no sharp cultural line between the Eskimo and the Chukchi.