Searching for Wally

It doesn't all have to be depression and the defeatist melancholy we have been wallowing in for many months. Spain's soccer team has given us a few days break in the moping; and the physicists have found a thing that answers to the name of God particle: the key to an understanding of the universe. An achievement of European scientists joined in a fantastic project, causing particles to collide at a speed near that of light, in a super-accelerator 27 kilometers in circumference, buried on the French-Swiss border.

But in the EU's fight to defend the euro zone and the common currency, the eurobond question and the social-spending cutbacks, we have so far failed to come up with the God particle. We cannot find the missing link -- the light at the end of the tunnel.

In Geneva they have demonstrated the existence of an elementary particle which "enables us to understand with uncanny precision what all particles are, and how they function." This is the Higgs boson, which, interacting with other particles, causes space to be filled, ceasing to be mere nothing. If these particles had no mass they would not form atoms, and there would be no sun, no people. The matter we are made of accounts for only four percent of the universe. The rest is dark matter.

The Arab revolutions have found their particular boson; political Islamism is winning elections

If we found the God particle that would enable us to understand what is happening at the economic, social and political level, would we finally understand international relations? It is very difficult. We are surrounded with dark matter. It was not the Merkel boson, destroyed first at Euro 2012, and later in the EU corridors in Brussels, on both occasions by Italy. Germany backed off. Its prescription of relentless austerity for the troubled countries causes a huge EU vacuum. Nor is the Franco-German axis the awaited particle, even if expanded to Italy and Spain. Only a week after thinking he had found the God particle, Rajoy finds it is a mirage. The fine print is still unknown, and Madrid and Rome seem to have only gained a little time.

More dark matter: the vacuum of a monetary union without economic government, of a euro without a central bank to act as lender of last instance; the economic divergences that are widening the breach between the north and south of Europe; the vacuum of the 25 million unemployed, most of them young; the dark matter of the lack of growth, a poor demography and a population that wants earlier retirement. How to get the European middle classes to have more children? The vacuum of the children who are better educated but who know they are not going to enjoy the living standards of their parents. The immense hole left by a political world taken over by the markets. The financial wreckage is far greater than we had been told. Barclays and other banks fiddle the Libor, the interest rate at which they lend each other money. A repeat of the implosion of Wall Street in 2008, with the fall of Lehman Brothers: enrichment of managers, contempt for the client, deceitful accounts, supervisors who do not supervise and regulators who do not regulate. All dark matter which does not support reality.

Then there is the vacuum in world leadership left by the pullback of the United States and the dark matter which the United Nations, a Cold War organization, has become. The Arab revolutions have found their particular boson, with its own mass. Political Islamism is winning elections. We may not like it, but it is going to govern. Doubt remains whether they will follow the model of Turkey, or that of Afghanistan. Egypt, with all the problems of a transition still in the grip of the army, remains the laboratory.

To dispel the dark matter is as unlikely as finding the face of a friend among the crowd in the Bernabéu stadium. Meanwhile, all we can do is go on searching for Wally.