Why Aren't Eurosceptics Celebrating the Eurozone Crisis?

As the Eurozone crisis continues to run its course many eurosceptics have taken to print and the airwaves to point out that what they have been saying for decades about the flaws in the European Project is finally coming to pass.

Perhaps the most wonderful moment to behold in all this "I told you so-ing" was when Peter Oborne of the Telegraph managed to drive away an "idiot in Brussels" on BBC Newsnight and then get former CBI head Richard Lambert in a huff by referring to him as a "guilty man".

The only way things could get any more entertaining is if Norman Tebbit and Margaret Thatcher could theatrically drop-kick Michael Heseltine across the floor and over the woolsack of the House of Lords onto the Labour benches where he belongs. If someone could do the same to Kenneth Clarke in the Commons, so much the better.

The whole Eurozone fiasco does however raise the serious question for eurosceptics as to whether they should enjoy watching the system they hate so much collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

If one looks at the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall for example it might seem that those events were worth celebrating and enjoying as they meant freedom for an awful lot of people and the re-unification of a divided nation.

On the other hand those events also lead to economic chaos for many ordinary people living in Russia, a nation which no longer menaces Britain and the U.S.A. but has not seen any great flowering of democracy and freedom.

The EU is of course not the Soviet Union, or if it is, is only the Walt Disney version of it, and so should eurosceptics be so keen to see it go under?

Interestingly while most eurosceptics are happy to say "I told you so", very few of them show signs of enjoying the near-daily bad news coming from the Eurozone. The latest such news is that Germany is now experiencing bond trouble of its own.

You might have thought that that news would get eurosceptics jumping up and down with glee at the thought that the bond markets, Mola Ram like, might rip what was thought to be the strong German heart out of the eurozone.

Instead there is solemnity and the expression of concern for our European neighbours and their plight. Why is this? Are they being sincere or merely politic?

What a contrast the eurosceptics are to elements of the Left. It's not unusual to read in the newspaper about some Labour councillor, candidate or even MP who gets into trouble for saying how much they will celebrate when Margaret Thatcher dies, while self-proclaimed Marxist Christopher Hitchens has suggested that he was looking forward to the deaths of Henry Kissinger and the current Pope (if only so he could write their obituraries).

So why is it that eurosceptics are not celebrating the possible death of the EU, which to them must surely represent a demonic beast at least as much as Margaret Thatcher does to lefties?

While it seems possible that it's because right-wing eurosceptics (although there are some left wing ones as well) are "too decent, too civilised" to use American conservative David Horowitz's phrase, it seems more likely that the sheer gravity of the situation is behind their cool-headedness.

Thousands, if not millions of people across Europe have lost or will lose their jobs thanks to the problems of the Euro. In Britain the recovery that was believed to have begun this year seems to have disappeared may morph back into a recession thanks (we are told) to the eurozone crisis.

Clearly to be seen to be enjoying a process that leads to suffering would not do the cause any good, even if it is the very policies you oppose that causes the suffering.

So rather than enjoy, or being seen to enjoy, the discomfort of europhiles it appears that some eurosceptics at least have decided not to be complacent and assume things are going their way but to continue arguing their corner.

The latest harangue by UKIP leader Nigel Farage in the European Parliament (which according to some has "gone viral") is not the crowing of victory but a condemnation of the coup's against democracy in Greece and Italy. In fact it's not much different all his previous speeches in which he rails against the anti-democratic nature of the EU.

Perhaps then the reason eurosceptics are not celebrating is because they realise that they have not yet won anything. The EU may collapse as a result of this crisis but it may also survive in an even more powerful and undemocratic form than it already has and no eurosceptic is going to celebrate that.