A French soldier patrols at Charles de Gaulle airport, in Roissy, north of Paris, Wednesday, March 23, 2016.Michel Euler/The Associated Press
There is nothing like a crisis to concentrate minds. Within the mayhem of blasted infrastructure in the political capital of the European Union, one can see the beginnings of a solution to its problems, both political and economic.
It's not what the markets are seeing. Last week's terrorist outrage in Brussels has shortened the odds on a Brexit, say Europhobic bears.
It's just more gasoline for a bonfire of European vanities already flaming with a million migrants and a fuel dump of eurozone sovereign debt. Europe is doomed anyway and Britain is doomed if it quits the EU, according to their ursine logic. So the hedge funds are shorting the pound.
Call me optimistic, but I reckon the hedgies will be disappointed and, more importantly, I don't think the horror in Brussels will lead to a breakup of Europe. On the contrary, I suspect it will build more cohesion by forcing Europe's political class to collaborate for mutual benefit – not with ideologically driven projects and grand institutions, but practical co-operation over security and economic reform.
Co-operation between police forces and security services across Europe is now intense. Salah Abdeslam, the fugitive accused of plotting the Paris bombings, was arrested by Belgian police.
As the bombs went off in Brussels, two Islamic State operatives were convicted in London of a plot to murder police and soldiers. Both were students – one born in Saudi Arabia, the other in Iraq – but they were both raised and educated in London, and there they drifted into the world of jihad.
Slowly but surely, Europe is waking up to the need to defend its society, its culture and its economy from an enemy that is violent. We now know that even if the ideology is foreign, the rot that feeds terror begins at home. We should not be surprised that the suburbs of Paris and Brussels are shown to be fertile breeding grounds for Islamist terrorism, because the French and Belgian states have abjectly failed to do their job. Youth unemployment generally in France and Belgium is 20 to 25 per cent, and among young Muslims it can be as high as one in two.
There are too many EU countries where the state has become a leviathan that no longer helps but crushes the weak through the sheer weight of the numbers of privileged people who inhabit the public-sector beast, feasting on its entrails. By coincidence, France's air-traffic controllers – a pampered and privileged guild of state employees who work only one day in every two – were enjoying their ritual strike last weekend. The strikers were due to resume duties on Tuesday morning, but in the wake of past experience, airlines that use French airspace warned that more delays should be expected. Surprisingly, however, as the horror at Brussels airport unfolded, flights across France began to move like clockwork, as if a hidden hand had suddenly descended to untie the knots.
It's too soon to celebrate the end of the Fifth Republic's stranglehold over French enterprise. In late recognition that France has a problem, even French President François Hollande has conceded the necessity to reform France's labour laws, and his blundering and insincere efforts at reform are crawling though the legislature. He is under huge pressure from the European Commission to bring down the unemployment rate, which exceeds 10 per cent and is still climbing. More importantly, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made it clear to the French President that she expects him to follow Germany's lead in making Europe's labour market more flexible.
But Mr. Hollande made rash promises to unions and socialist fellow-travellers to get elected, and his reformer in chief, Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron, faces a rear-guard reaction from left-wing deputies in parliament and street protests from labour unions and, bizarrely, students. They protested last week to protect the 35-hour week and employment benefits, pensions and privileges that will cost their generation heavily in taxes but which few if any can ever hope to enjoy when they finally secure a job.
Still, the reform bill is still alive and SNCF, the state railway, is preparing to do battle with its unions over the cost of the 35-hour week. French taxpayers will this year underwrite a €4-billion ($5.9-billion) boost to the pension coffers of the state railway workers. Few of these "socialists" seem to notice the millions of their fellow citizens who sit outside the protective embrace of the state until the ritual burning of stolen cars begins every summer in the suburbs of Paris.
Many of these unprotected people are Muslim, and one can finally detect in European political discourse some recognition that real changes must now be made in the social contract between the state and its citizens. If the doors are not opened, the privileges abolished, the protected jobs, industries and professions of the European state not opened to real competition, then the other voice will get even louder.
Carl Mortished is a Canadian financial journalist based in London.