Tom Gallagher - Europes Path to Crisis: Disintegration via Monetary Union

Europes path to crisis

Europes path to crisis

Disintegration via monetary union

Manchester University Press

Manchester and New York

Copyright Tom Gallagher 2014

The right of Tom Gallagher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 9603 7 hardback

978 0 7190 9604 4 paperback

First published 2014

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by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester

For my mother and my brothers and sisters

Euroquake is a vivid phrase that does not underplay the scale of the crisis facing the European Union today. Monetary union was meant to be the decisive stage in the 50-year march towards a European state run along postnational lines. Instead, it has plunged the EU into a crisis with calamitous effects not just for many of its members but for the entire global economy. Faulty design and implementation ensured that ideology took priority over practical measures in the affairs of the currency union. During nearly five years of continuous economic crisis the emphasis has been on shielding special interests and intensifying efforts to concentrate power in the hands of the very officials who have primary responsibility for the debacle. Advocates of a supra-national Europe now find it virtually impossible to point to common benefits arising from their preference for concentrating power at the apex of unaccountable power structures. They also increasingly disagree among themselves about how to move on from an impetuous experiment the European single currency that has created more ill-will in Europe than any event since the EUs formation.

This book shows how todays crisis is very much rooted in the decisions and mindset that have shaped the EU from its earliest years. A democratic partnership involving the nations of Europe and its citizens was rejected by its architects. Such a course could have created a stronger and more genuinely cooperative Europe able to avoid the acute errors committed by isolated elites convinced that destiny had entrusted them to totally re-order European societies.

The EUs decision-makers form an oligarchy with favoured economic interest groups and activist groups with social agendas that favour accelerated European integration. Like other closed elites, there is no willingness to review the failures, biases and broad choices taken by the EU. Top-down efforts to create a borderless Europe around an agenda which only vested interests desire continue, despite their impracticality and potential for serious strife.

The people whose taxes fund the EUs activities continue to be overlooked and often disparaged. Indeed, not just in Britain, they are seen as increasingly unreliable because of their refusal to abandon national loyalties for pan-European and indeed global ones. Nationalism continues to be the official enemy which fully justifies the EUs existence, however much the policy failures accumulate. But there is a huge paradox to be found here.

Nationalism has flourished within the EUs very own power structures as France and, more recently, Angela Merkels Germany seek to use the EU to project their own national influence and interests, and more recent members follow their examples. Pro-integration efforts by France and Germany have been handicapped because of the different political and economic conditions in both countries and their contrasting visions of how the EU should evolve. Both of them, first France and much later Germany, have been unafraid to use the power that they wield in the EUs institutions to buttress their own positions.

The EU, for many of its 500 million citizens, has become synonymous with centralisation and tight regulation, disconcerting levels of social change, numbness towards democracy and, finally, with a menacing economic crisis and low-grade efforts to solve it. The book argues that building Europe without Europeans will rob the EU of its remaining legitimacy and plunge the continent into renewed strife in the name of an unloved ideology whose failures easily outweigh its successes. It places the EUs current difficulties in a long-term explanatory framework and argues that peace and stability in Europe cannot endure if the people have such a meagre voice in its governing arrangements.

The traditional nation-state has often been ill-equipped to handle globalised economic forces. But in the marathon post-2009 crisis the European Union has demonstrated that it lacks the necessary skills and resources to an even greater degree. Furthermore, it has been ready to tear up the social contract between citizens and their rulers with more alacrity than is usually the case with national decision-makers. The need for the EU to re-design itself as an entity concerned to identify and defend a European common good has never been more pressing. The prevailing posture for almost half a decade has been to defend, with startling rigidity, a failed blueprint for European convergence that benefits only a tiny proportion of a fast-diminishing pro-integration constituency in Europe.

There is now a need to discard the elite evangelicalism about more Europe in all seasons and instead have a transparent debate about what models of economic coordination are viable for increasingly daunting times. No shortage of precedents reveal the harm that can be caused by doggedly persisting with strategies or models which leave a daunting human casualty level as their goals slip ever further out of reach.