um espectador

...
This was a problem for me, in particular. Insofar as I understood the economic permutations of what it would mean to be in or out of the single currency, I was vaguely opposed to joining. But my real reason for objecting to our membership of the euro was, and still is, I’m afraid, straightforwardly racist. I didn’t want to have the same currency (or government, effectively) as people in the south of Europe, who I thought were, in the main, lazy, hot-tempered and uncivilised. It occurred to me that we have very little culturally or socially in common with the Greeks (except Taki, of course), the Spanish, the southern Italians, the Portuguese (ancient alliances notwithstanding) and that while it is sometimes nice to meet these people briefly while holidaying in their interesting countries, one would not wish to go into business with them.
Europe seemed to me a potential battleground between the Protestant work ethic and the almost perpetual siesta, a marriage which could not possibly work. If someone had posited a single currency shared by Danes and Germans and Dutch and Flemings and Norwegians and maybe the Milanese, I think I would have been in favour of signing up right away. But that was never on offer back then. Put more seriously, it occurred to me that the cultural, racial and religious differences between north and south would mean that in the end stuff just wouldn’t work out; we do not all want the same things, no matter how often we pretend that we do.
And it seems that this observation, largely unspoken until now for fear of unleashing the wrath of every bien-pensant from here to Muswell Hill, was pretty much correct. For a while now, the Germans, and one or two other beleaguered nations full of hard-working wage slaves, have been talking about the possibility of a Europ-sud, a division of the continent along precisely the lines I have suggested above. The stated reasoning for this is economic, of course; it always is. But it cannot be mere coincidence that the countries in trouble are those in the south, and that the further south you go the worse those problems become, until you reach the dislodged chunks of marble and the flaming fast-food shops of central Athens, where one protestor said to the camera crews: ‘We don’t owe any money, it’s the others who stole it!’.


Rod Liddle, Spectator