Why Europe careens from one disaster to the next

For the past six decades, Europe has been relatively stable, suffering only the occasional war (Balkans), invasion (Prague '68, Hungary '56), or military coup (Greece '67).   Looked at over the longer term, Europe's history is one of  prolonged (Hundred Years' War) and widespread (Napoleon, Bismarck, WWI, WWII) war.  (For a list of Europe's wars by year, click here.)

To understand why their history is so troubled, one just has to look at why they like Obama.  Reuters reports:

In private, many EU diplomats have no qualms about saying they want Obama re-elected.…

Washington has also applied quiet pressure on Europe in recent months about the need to avoid a major blow-up in the debt crisis ahead of the election, in part so as not to rattle the U.S. economy, several EU officials have told Reuters.

Europe's leaders have good reason to go along; they want to keep a politically risky crisis under wraps, too, and they want to expand the close working relationship they have developed with Obama's administration over the past four years. [Emph. added]

In other words, just like Obama, they do not want to face clearly the financial crisis that they are in and deal with it.  Instead, they want to pretend it is not happening.  This resembles Mary Antoinette's view of the peasants in pre-revolutionary France or Chamberlain's view of Hitler in the 1930s.  What they all have in common is that their policy is denial.  History shows that denial leads to disaster.