Non! Right Decision, Wrong Reasons
France has made the right decision for the wrong reasons on the EU Constitution. As David Carr puts it:
To all French crypto-communists, syndicalists, marxists, trotskyites, leninists, stalinists, national socialists, socialist nationalists, primitivists, Trade Union dinosaurs, student activists, greenie nutters, neo-fascists, old fashioned fascists, quasi-crypto-troglodyte-Pol-Pottist-year zero-flat-earthers, looney tunes and enviro-goons….Merci Beaucoup!!!!
I could kiss every single one of you.
You first Dave! Unfortunately, we can take little comfort from the result because, as incredible as it may seem, many French people saw a ‘no’ vote as a rejection of market liberalism.
It is disturbing the extent to which the EU project is still taken as given among elite opinion, despite being rejected on most occasions when EU institutions are actually put to a popular vote and growing evidence that foundational EU institutions like the euro are hopelessly flawed. A good example of this thinking is Anatole Kaletsky’s analysis attributing the failure of the referendum to the European Central Bank’s monetary policy:
Europe’s economic failure can be blamed largely on the mismanagement of the euro project and the incompetence of the European Central Bank (ECB)…[and] do-nothing monetarist dogmatism of the ECB…The next recourse should be to call for the resignation of the ECB management, since they should be held accountable for the public rejection of the European project.
It apparently does not occur to Kaletsky that problem is the euro project itself, no matter how well managed, and that maybe the ECB is doing the best we could reasonably expect within the constraints of a single currency. Critics of the euro having been warning of these very outcomes for years. An easier monetary policy would do nothing to address Europe’s structural problems.
The danger is that the more EU institutions fail, the more politicians will resort to ad hoc fixes, rather than re-thinking the EU project itself. The euro has already seen the Stability and Growth Pact effectively junked, removing an important institutional protection of monetary stability in Europe. Kaletsky calls for European finance ministers to direct the ECB to engage in foreign exchange market intervention and even goes so far as to suggest that the legislative basis for ECB independence should be renegotiated. It is in fact Kaletsky who is blinded by dogmatism in refusing to see that the euro project is fundamentally flawed. In Europe, nothing succeeds like failure.
posted on 30 May 2005 by skirchner
in Economics
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Comments
What is this “fundamental flaw of the European project” of which you speak? And why did nearly a dozen nations of Eastern and Southern Europe manage to overlook this flaw in their scramble to hop on board. As a classical liberal I would have thought that I-E would favour all the growth of federalism.
Posted by Jack Strocchi on 05/31 at 08:21 AM
The popular opposition to the USE has little to do with economic policy arcania. The overall productivity and per capita income growth of the European economy since Mastricht has been satisfactory, although nothing to write home about. Problems of integrating former Soviet bloc nations were always going to be thorny.
Europhobia mostly relates to the continued desire of the several European peoples for national statism: nationalism in communal identity (eg soccer) and statism in commercial propriety. Given that I-E is a classical liberal I find his Euroskepticism to regionalism in cultural and financial matters a little puzzling.
The major structural problem with the USE is demographic: the declining native birthrate. This is more or less independent of economics although it has profound economic implications. Hedonistic females living it up in expensive metros are what keeps birth rates down. Its hard to see any objection to this in economic terms, indeed it seems to be Femmo Economicus in person.
The EU’s low participation rates, shorter working hours and higher unemployment rates mostly reflect the desire of Europeans to enjoy Europe, a desire reflected in about tens of millions of foreign tourists per annum.
Posted by Jack Strocchi on 05/31 at 08:40 AM
“The EU’s low participation rates, shorter working hours and higher unemployment rates mostly reflect the desire of Europeans to enjoy Europe”
Ever thought of going to Europe and telling the Italian, french, German unemployed (and rising by the day) they should enjoy their time on the dole and that they ought to be showing more desire to enjoy Europe: those ingrates!
We enjoy the beach here in Australia. I don’t think it means I ought to be working less unless we want to and then not on public expense.
Europe’s participtation rates are very low because there is virtually no hope of getting job. They have been priced out of work.
“I find his Euroskepticism to regionalism in cultural and financial matters a little puzzling”.
It is not puzzling at all to those who are in touch with reality. Europe in the EU sense is an artifical construct created by elites in a way which doesn’t demonstrate reality. There is no such thing as Europe other than a geographical area. The similarities between an Englishman to an Italian is far more than the food they eat.
The tragedy of the EU mess is the time wasted in people’s lives caused by a bunch of elitists across this region who are persuing policies at odds with reality.
The Euro will self destruct in the next few years and then the abomination of the EU. We should cheer when that happens.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 06/08 at 02:47 AM