Twenty-seven European countries belong to the so-called European Union (EU). They include Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain. All of them are in the three of an economic crisis. But right in the middle of Europe, there is a small country that is not a member of the EU but is doing quite well: Switzerland. Why are all your bigger neighbors in trouble? There is a simple answer:
The dominant EU countries have allowed their dream of rivaling the US as a powerful federal state to blind them to economic, democratic and political reality. They took their eyes off the ball.
The name of the game at the founding of the EEC (European Economic Community, forerunner of the EU) was economic cooperation between autonomous independent nations. The nations of Europe speak English, Spanish, German, French and Italian and the languages of many smaller countries. And they have various systems of government. So you can’t create a single patriotic nation like the United States of America by sitting down and writing a European constitution. But this is what France and Germany have tried to do: they have created a European Parliament (EP) whose aim is to overturn centuries-old national parliaments. But it does not work. The people of Great Britain, for example, only realize they exist when they receive a ballot paper asking them to choose their “Member of the European Parliament” from a list of candidates few of whom they know. or none. The turnover for the elections is small. A United States of Europe (USE) may be a reasonable aspiration, but only on a time scale of many decades, one small step at a time, responding to democratic demand, not imposed on reluctant peoples.
Not satisfied with the paper European Parliament (which absurdly and expensively meets in two places, Brussels and Strasbourg), they have created a European Central Bank (ECB) to oversee a new “federal” currency, the euro. Of the current 27 EU member states, 17 have ditched their national currencies for the euro. It was meant to be one more step towards a federal Europe, but they have put the cart (a single currency) before the horse (democratic desire for federation). The result is an economic and political crisis.
This was predictable. How can a single bank, the ECB, be expected to protect the individual national interests of 17 different countries? Before the merger of currencies, each country had its own Central Bank that cooperated with its national government to regulate the currency according to the economic interests of that country. That power is now gone and we see the disastrous result in the current Euro Crisis. The interests of Germany and Greece are in opposition. Germany experienced terrible inflation in the 1920s and is determined not to let something like this happen to them again. That is why they insist that the Greek government must balance its budget by cutting jobs and pensions, regardless of the political consequences. But Greece is already experiencing public protests against the cuts and wants the ECB to come to its rescue. At present there is deadlock. In the old days, Greece could have devalued the drachma to become more competitive and grow again. Now they share their currency with Germany. The EU’s solution to the problem seems to be to override Greece’s hitherto sovereign rule and let the EU commissioners tell them what to do.
Welcome to the budding USE; Farewell to European democracy.
