Did a Dutch eurocrat call southern Europeans drunken womanisers?

IN PHILIP ROTH’S “The Human Stain”, a university professor finds himself accused of racial harassment after he jokingly asks whether two black students who fail to attend class are “spooks”. (He means “ghosts”; they hear a 1950s-era derogatory term for African-Americans.) It seems like a ludicrous case of political correctness run amok, until the reader discovers that the professor is himself a black man who is passing as white, and is racked by racial anxiety and guilt. His unfortunate word choice was not an innocent mistake but a sign of subconscious angst.

On March 20th Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister and current president of the Eurogroup (the council of euro-zone finance ministers), had a similar moment. In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German daily, Mr Dijsselbloem said he was proud that during the euro crisis, northern European Union states had shown solidarity with southern ones (for example, by extending them billions in loans). But solidarity, he continued, entails obligations: “I cannot spend all my money on schnapps and women, and then ask for your support.” His point was that countries receiving EU help should end wasteful spending. But he seemed to be endorsing a stereotype of southern Europeans as skirt-chasing drunks.

In short order, the outrage machine that powers modern politics kicked into gear. On March 21st the Eurogroup head was grilled by Portuguese and Spanish members of the European Parliament, who called his remarks insulting. The British press jumped in, ever eager to gin up a fight in Brussels. (“Fury as Eurocrat claims southern member states ‘spent money on DRINKS & WOMEN’”, headlined the Express.) Spain’s finance minister called Mr Dijsselbloem’s remarks unfortunate; Portugal’s said he should resign. Matteo Renzi, the former prime minister of Italy, wrote on his Facebook page that if Mr Dijsselbloem wanted to insult Italy “he should do it in a sports bar, not in his official role.” On March 22nd Portugal’s prime minister, Antonio Costa, called on him to step down.

Mr Dijsselbloem refused to apologise, saying that he had been making a general point about responsibility. On the face of it, he was right. His comment was clearly an analogy: countries that borrow money from allies have a duty to reform, just as individuals who borrow money from friends have a duty not to splurge on a new Jaguar. If Mr Dijsselbloem had wanted to insult Italians, he could have said “grappa” rather than “schnapps”.

Besides, much of the fury directed at the Eurogroup head was calculated. Mr Dijsselbloem’s position has become tenuous since March 15th, when his Labour Party was crushed in the Dutch elections; he has virtually no chance of staying on as finance minister. His term as head of the Eurogroup, however, lasts until January. It would seem odd for him to continue as Eurogroup head when he is no longer a serving finance minister, but the body’s rules are vague. In any case, other countries are eyeing his post, and would be happy to see him chased out. (The Spanish finance minister, Luis de Guindos, is eager to replace him.) As for Mr Renzi, he has been feuding with the Dutch minister for years over his stern enforcement of the EU’s budget-deficit limit of 3% of GDP.

And yet. As disingenuous as some of the fury at Mr Dijsselbloem may be, it gets at something real. His drinking-and-women crack was not just an analogy for poor governance; it also drew on deep cultural assumptions. It was natural for a Dutch minister, speaking to a German newspaper, to compare peripheral euro-zone economies to boozy womanisers—because fundamentally, most northern Europeans believe that southern European hedonism and irresponsibility were the cause of the euro crisis.

Cultural resentment between northern and southern Europeans has always been around, but the euro crisis brought it to a boil. Polling shows that Germans consider Greeks and Italians to be untrustworthy layabouts; anecdotal experience suggests that belief is shared by Austrians, Dutch and Scandinavians. When German populists like Frauke Petry or Dutch ones like Geert Wilders characterise the EU’s response to the euro crisis as “throwing crates full of money to the Greeks”, they are expressing what mainstream politicians privately think (and are sometimes impolite enough to say). Northern Europeans have never accepted the arguments made by Keynesian economists that some of the blame for the crisis lies in their own countries: with northern euro-zone banks whose lending inflated southern euro-zone economies, with northern euro-zone investors who convinced themselves that Greek and Italian bonds were risk-free, with northern euro-zone pension funds whose pro-cyclical savings mandates help exacerbate current-account surpluses (and starve the consumption that southern economies would need to recover), or with northern euro-zone voters who reject any move towards common debt instruments or fiscal transfers. They have always maintained that the crisis and ensuing recession were the fault of the extravagant southerners.

Mr Dijsselbloem embodies this Calvinist consensus. A cheerfully meticulous man, he has been praised since arriving in Brussels for his ability to run a meeting. In politics, however, his sober instincts have not always worked out as well. His Labour Party campaigned in 2012 on a promise to block austerity, but promptly entered a coalition with the centre-right Liberals that raised taxes and cut spending. Its voters never forgave it, and in this month’s elections Labour lost three-quarters of its seats. The Eurogroup head himself was one of the driving forces behind the principle, first implemented in the bail-out of Cyprus in 2013 and later incorporated in EU rules, that creditors of insolvent banks should take a big hit before taxpayer money can be used to rescue them. This rule is now hamstringing Italy’s economy by preventing its government from pumping in state aid to recapitalise its teetering banks, as Spain (and, for that matter, the Netherlands) successfully did during the crisis. Hence Mr Renzi’s anger.

Mr Dijsselbloem no doubt sees himself the way the Dutch and the Germans see him: as an upbeat, conscientious fellow who has reformed the euro-zone and pressed its members to make the painful decisions that have led to economic recovery. But many in southern Europe (and many of those Keynesian economists) see him differently, as a stubborn schoolmaster whose determination to enforce arbitrary rules on the class’s weakest students has only held Europe back. The Eurogroup head’s insistence that the euro-zone’s problem is the moral laxity of its borrowers, not the tight-fistedness of its lenders, comes off as a nervous denial of northern Europeans’ nagging suspicion that they may not be the upright citizens they think they are. Like the professor in “The Human Stain”, Mr Dijsselbloem could explain away the conscious meaning of his remarks. But his listeners understood the subconscious meaning better than he did.