Exhibit A: a superb article describing research which shows convincingly how the influence of the bureaucratic-cultural disciplines of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lives on in today’s Europe. Thus:

Our results show that past formal institutions can leave a long-lasting legacy through cultural norms – even after some are generations of being governed by other authorities…

Comparing individuals living on either side of the long-gone Habsburg border within the same modern-day country, we find that respondents in a current household survey who live on former Habsburg territory have higher levels of trust in courts and police.

They are also less likely to pay bribes for these local public services, demonstrating that the institutional heritage influences not only preferences and unilateral decisions but also bilateral bargaining situations in citizen-state interactions.

… the cultural norms of behaviour are unlikely to have survived solely by intergenerational transmission within families. It rather seems that such channels as the persistent nature of continuous reciprocal interactions in local communities, the content of knowledge and behavioural patterns conveyed in schools, and the quality of human capital of bureaucrats and citizens may have also played a role.

This sort of thinking – that ‘civilisational’ characteristics and trends have an existence far beyond immediate day-to-day politics and even medium-term economic development – lay behind Sam Huntingdon’s famous but controversial book ‘The Clash of Civilisations’. 

Sweeping and brilliant and provocative as it was, fashionable opinion did not much like it: too pessimistic about human progress and with a scarcely hidden anti-Islamic tone (they said).

Yet for me as a Balkanite, much of whose professional life had been spent on and around the historic faultlines of imperial Europe, he was on to something very profound.

Drive up towards Sarajevo from the Croatian coast and almost within a few hundred metres there suddenly comes a point where you cross from Austro-Hungary into Ottoman. The landscape and its mood changes. The attitude to roadside tidiness, gardens, public and private property, trust in government – they are all just ‘different’.

Likewise in Belgrade. On the ‘main’ side of the river you’re on the edge of the greater Ottoman space. Across the river and on up into Vojvodina the landscape and ‘society’ visibly changes. Part of this is (it’s said) directly and literally connected with differing imperial legacies: property rights tended to be codified under the Hapsburgs, whereas under the Ottomans land ownership was far less systematic and untransparent. The result today is that land and investment decisions are much harder in central and southern Serbia, which duly stays poorer.

The authors of the study rightly mention Poland. At the 2005 elections clear voting tendencies emerged which could be mapped neatly against the boundaries of Poland’s areas when Poland was partitioned up to WW1. People in Poznan (long part of the Germanic civilisational space) titter at the unpunctuality and unbusinesslike sloppiness of people in Warsaw (long part of the Russian civilisational space). And so on.

Read the whole thing. Most impressive.

And then read Exhibit B, Megan McArdle on the grisly problems of the Eurozone:

Europe has two choices: tighter integration, or partial dissolution.  I agree, but I just don’t see how the former can work.  The Irish and the Germans and the Portuguese and the Greeks do not identify with "Europe" the way 1930s Americans identified with "America"; neither group is going to readily sacrifice its own self-interest for the others.  

The elites have gotten around this so far by leaning heavily on unaccountable institutions like the central banks, but as Wolf shows, this cannot last forever. 

Unless their economies rapidly start to mend, continuing in the euro will be economic suicide for the PIIGS once the backdoor subsidies stop.  In this week’s column, Robert Samuelson notes just how dire things are "Already, unemployment is 14.1% in Greece, 14.7% in Ireland, 11.1% in Portugal and 20.7% in Spain.
 
What are the limits of austerity? Steep spending cuts and tax increases do curb budget deficits; but they also create deep recessions, lowering tax revenues and offsetting some of the deficit improvement."  Add on top of this the drawbacks of an expensive currency and a tight monetary policy for a troubled economy, and they’d have to be crazy to stay…
The real problem facing Europe is all about psychology and deep political culture. When the Eurozone was set up, the Germans insisted on stiff rules for all to make the new structure credible. These rules and European solidarity would suffice – Garliczone countries which hitherto had played fast and loose with public finances would realise that they had joined the grown-ups now and would have to behave themselves. Or else!
 
But as one senior German expert who worked at the heart of this project told me, the Germans got it flat wrong. It just did not occur to them that, say, Greece would actually lie to its EU partners about the state of its public finances. Yet they did.
It’s a bit like a smart hotel where a strict no-smoking rule applies. The hotel admits all sorts of carefree party-loving guests who dutifully promise not to smoke. Some of them break the rules. Yet such is their insane irresponsibility that they don’t even tell the hotel management that they have set the building on fire through their bad behaviour. When the smoke starts pouring from many large windows simultaneously, it may in fact be too late to save the building however soundly it was designed!
 
All this ties to a somewhat rambling piece I wrote over at Business and Politics: 

And see the Eurozone’s problems. Millions of Greeks cry out: “How dare the state/government/EU take away our rights!” But by what moral or political principle can Greek ‘rights’ to receive subsidies take precedence over the rights of non-Greeks to choose not to pay them?

Conclusion?

Neither conservatives nor liberal-progressives in the West have any coherent philosophy helping them decide which institutions, organisations or even values should best be ‘conserved’ by collective action, or how best to do it by suppressing X’s free choice to uphold Y’s privilege. Instead we get little more than mutually abusive political squawking and improvisation which look increasingly and annoyingly detached from reality.

Perhaps in these profoundly unsettling times it is no surprise that the British public show such Euroscepticism counterpoised by general support for the Monarchy which, for all its silver stick flim-flams and illogicalities, represents our best collective hope for some minimal sense of psychological continuity and shared experience?

The fact is that for reasons which are almost impossible to identify and maybe are highly unpopular to articulate, some things ‘fit’ and some things don’t. It looks increasingly as if the EU itself as currently constituted is not a viable fit – the expectations and attitudes in different parts of the EU are simply not manageable within the over-rigid, prescriptive top-down format we now have.

And the more our UK and EU elites tell the public that it is all for the best when it clearly isn’t, the more a deep-seated public unease will grow across Europe in a populist and increasingly incoherent way.