Othello. “What’s the matter, think you?”
Cassio. “Something from Cyprus, as I may divine;
It is a business of some heat.”

Shakespeare is on the money. Then, as now, Cyprus was the toy of foreign powers. Othello was sent there from Venice to repel the Turks, though luckily they all got blown away in a tempest. Since then, Russia, Britain, Greece and, always, Turkey, have taken an interest. Even today, Britain has an important listening post for the Middle East there, 60,000 expatriates, 3,500 troops in our sovereign bases and a continuing role as a guarantor power. Cypriots still drive on the left. [...]

Now it is the Germans’ turn to exercise an imperium. Their re-entry into the comity of nations has been based on the idea that they are peaceful, law-respecting, internationalist, politically vegetarian. They support an ever-closer European Union because they want to be a “European Germany” to avoid a “German Europe”. They are perfectly genuine about wishing to overcome what is euphemistically called “the problem of history”. So they are obsessed with the importance of rules, of obeying them and being seen to obey them. They have been good boys, and by doing so, they have prospered mightily.

But as they have grown stronger, their love of rules has turned into an instrument of their power. We are good European citizens, the Germans argue, and we have done well. So the answer is for everyone in the eurozone to behave just like us and they will do well too. One size must fit all, and that size is made in Germany. What the Germans leave out of account is that the single currency which, for them, is artificially low in international value is, for most of the rest of the eurozone, punitively high. What helps them crushes others. After victory in 1945, Churchill broadcast that Germany “lies prostrate before us”. Today, most of southern Europe lies prostrate before Germany.

Mrs Merkel does not see it this way, but if she were to impose upon her own country the levels of unemployment which her eurozone policies inflict upon Spain or Greece or Italy, she would be out of office tomorrow. It is in the nature of imperial power that it is very much slower to feel the pain of those it rules at a distance than that of its own people. That is why its colonial subjects tend to dislike it, even when it is well-intentioned and orderly.