Birthdays are fun; a birth itself is not. There’s a lot of screaming and groaning, and even in the easiest deliveries, there’s always the fear that something will go wrong.
The birth of a state is no less difficult. Indeed, what pessimists ”” including many here in Germany ”” see as an existential crisis for the continent is really just the latest stage in the birth pangs of a new country. While we should of course worry about Greek debt, we should also have hope that we are witnessing the end of the euro zone as an abstraction and the birth of the United States of Europe.
Europe’s movement toward unification has always been the product of crises.