Editorial II February 2010GREEK SYNDROME
It was in some ways inevitable that European public opinion should focus on the financial collapse of Greece, a member of the Euro zone and now emblem of what may be the decisive challenge facing the Union. This is not just a simple crisis of Greek public finances but a clear case of misgovernment. It has been winked at for years and now becomes a problem to deal with, despite repercussions to the whole balance of European institutions. One may rail at the “olive gatherers”, to use someone’s scathing term for the plentiful crop of incentives to “weak” Mediterranean agriculture which have all too often been embezzled, and not just in Greece. But the weightier issue is how our present institutions can contain the nose-dive of a fully-fledged Union member. From the “top of the class” the answers have been quite unrealistic. Juncker suggested to Eurogroup that member state budgets should be vetted by Europe (meaning Eurogroup) before being debated in national parliaments. How odd that someone meant to be an authority has not yet learnt that fiscal independence is a pillar of western national constitutionalism. Surely Juncker has come across the formula taught to all students of political history, "no taxation without representation"? If he has, how then does he presume to show that prior vetting by a weak European institution based on member-state governments would carry more representative legitimacy than the parliaments of the countries themselves? Budgets are necessary, after all, to justify and distribute the fiscal burden. Greater realism has been shown by erstwhile German foreign minister Joschka Fischer who wonders who has the authority to demand measures in Greece that would inevitably jeopardize the country’s social and political system. There, indeed, is the rub: after all the abstract talk of “yielding sovereignty”, here is a concrete instance. Another top of the class, Belgium’s Verhofstadt, resorts to flights of ideology, heatedly joining in an admittedly claustrophobic French debate. Verhofstadt argues that identity issues are untenable in a national framework and should be shifted onto a post-national one. Sound and fury, signifying little. It was the German Constitutional Court that faced the issue with brutal frankness: there must be limits to action that lacks a ‘demos’ behind it and hence falls short of the legitimizing principle that underpins our various national constitutions (Germany’s to the fore). To step beyond those limits would entail constitutional revolution by every member state. One possible solution may be a bland “European economic governance” using the intangible methods of pressure by the bigger countries in the hope of winning the recalcitrant round. This is the line most favoured by the ECB, as Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, one if its top brass, explains. A line fraught with good intentions and all that they entail. But checking up on one another is hardly an option, what with sensitivity about sovereignty and tensions among the larger states and the political forces within them. One can only hope such a model stands the test of further crises which many fear. As it is, we know of various countries struggling even inside the Euro area, and that area fails to cover the whole Union (there is Great Britain, for one), which only adds to the complications. The structures of the new ‘governance’ are rickety, as the newspapers once again remind us. We have a ghost for a Commission, with Barroso intent on poaching diplomatic corps jobs from Ashton (deemed a failure by one and all), Van Rompuy beyond all description, and our current Spanish presidency rivalling him in inefficiency (the fiercest critics here being the Spanish press). With ever-greater urgency we need to define the concrete (not abstract) powers of our governance system; above all how to obtain qualified upper echelons, not stooges put in to appease the vanity of various partners. It is becoming plain that Lisbon has not delivered the solution. From a glance at the newspapers this fact stares us in the face. The short-sighted failure to see as much is a malaise we still have to fathom.
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