 Übersicht Dossiers Europäische Union Wirtschafts- und Währungsunion 
THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF THE EUROThe euro is more a political than an economic project. It is a political project using economic means that most economists believe are inherently unsuitable.
by Anthony Coughlan, Ireland
The political project is to help turn the European Union into a highly
centralised Federal-style State under the political hegemony of Germany and
France, with the other EU members grouped around them.
"We need this united Europe," said Spanish Premier Felipe Gonzalez on the
eve of locking together the eurozone exchange rates in 1998. "We must never
forget that the euro is an instrument of this project." Commission
President Romano Prodi wrote at the same time: "The pillars of the nation
state are the sword and the currency, and we changed that."
German Chancellor Gerhardt Schröder said in 1999: "The introduction of the
euro is probably the most important integrating step since the beginning of
the unification process. It is certain that the times of individual
national efforts regarding employment policies, social and tax policies are
definitely over. This will require to bury finally some erroneous ideas of
national sovereigntyŠNational sovereignty in foreign and security policy
will soon prove itself to be a product of the imagination."
FRANCE AND GERMANY - MIDWIVES TO THE EURO
The euro would not exist if Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl and France's
President Francois Mitterand has not decided on it in the early 1990s. For
them the euro was essentially a political scheme to reconcile France to
Germany's sudden reunification. "I like Germany so much that I prefer two
of them," France's President Charles de Gaulle said once, referring to the
two States of divided Germany. Now Gorbachev was permitting German
reunification virtually overnight. Mitterand tried but failed to talk him
out of it. To reconcile a worried France to the prospect of a reunified
German State, with 17 million extra Germans on her eastern border, Kohl
agreed to abolish the Deutschemark, the great symbol of post-war Germany's
economic achievement, and share with France the running of a new European
currency.
In return France agreed to closer political union with France, a common EU
foreign and security policy, and in due time an EU army with the
French-German duo effectively commanding it. This was Monetary Union for
Political Union in euro-jargon. Or put crudely, it was the Deutschemark in
exchange for the Eurobomb! Germany was forbidden by the post-war treaties
to have a nuclear weapon of her own. This way she could get her finger on
a collective EU nuclear trigger. Germany and France would captain an EU
world power together, as they could no longer hope to be world powers
separately. As foretaste of the future they established that same year a
Franco-German army brigade, with French and German officers jointly in
command. It still exists as the nucleus of the coming EU army.
Naturally the citizens of the various European countries did not want to
abolish their national currencies. In Denmark and Ireland the people had
to be asked in referendums. In 1992 the Danes rejected the Maastricht
Treaty, which was the legal basis for the euro. Their europhile Government
then pushed it through by making them vote a second time, without making
any changes to the treaty. In France Mitterand held a referendum on
Maastricht, confident that it would easily go through. It was the votes of
France's overseas territories that won him a narrow 51% majority and
thereby helped to abolish the franc. The German people were wholly against
abolishing the D-mark. Indeed recent opinion polls show that they would
very much like to have it back again. Unfortunately their constitution
does not permit referendums, so their eurofanatical political elite pressed
ahead regardless. British public opinion forced John Major's Conservative
Government to opt out of the euro. Sweden has no legal opt out from the
euro, but its government has been unable politically to push it through.
Most people do not know that the "common position" of the 15 EU Member
States in their accession negotiations with the 10 new EU Members from
Central, Eastern and Southern Europe has been that the newcomers must all
agree to abolish their national currencies and adopt the euro in due time -
even though Britain, Sweden and Denmark are keeping their currencies.
There could be no clearer evidence of the EU's anti-democratic,
imperialistic character. When the East Europeans were client states of the
USSR during the Cold War, the Russians never told them that they must adopt
the rouble!
WHY COUNTRIES NEED THEIR OWN CURRENCIES
It is not sentiment, but enlightened self-interest, that makes people want
to hold on to their national currencies. It is democracy in other words,
the desire for national independence and self-rule. All independent States
have their own currencies. All currencies belong to independent States.
Possession of its own currency enables a government to control the rate of
interest, which is the domestic price of a currency, and with that the
money supply and volume of credit in an economy, so that these serve the
interests of its citizens. Or to control the foreign exchange rate, the
price of a currency in terms of other currencies, which governs the terms
on which a country conducts its foreign trade and which can be vital for
its economic competitiveness.
These policies are now decided for the 12 Member States of the eurozone by
the European Central Bank in Frankfurt - theoretically in the interests of
the eurozone as a whole, in practice in the interests of Germany and
France, who make up half the eurozone's population. Thus at present Germany
needs low interest rates to encourage investment and reduce its nearly 5
million unemployed. The Republic of Ireland had an economic boom from 1993
to 2001. It needed higher interest rates to reduce inflation and hold back
soaring prices, especially for houses. The interest rate that suits
Germany does not suit Ireland, and vice versa. The EU Central Bank
maintains the same interest rate across the eurozone for economies at
different stages of the economic cycle, with different levels of
productivity, different resource endowments and different degrees of
exposure to economic shocks. The unsuitability of the ECB's
one-size-fits-all interest rate regime is shown clearly by the contrast
between Ireland and Germany. The welfare of their respective citizens
requires different policies, but they must suffer the same one because the
EU says so.
THE "BLACK HOLE" OF THE EUROZONE ECONOMY
These days the eurozone looks more and more like an economic Black Hole.
Its core economies, Germany's and France's especially, are in poor shape.
When the euro was established Germany insisted that the EU Central Bank be
run like the German Bundesbank. It is independent of political conrol and
its sole brief under the Maastricht Treaty is to keep prices stable and
inflation under 2%. The eurozone economy can slump and job losses soar, but
that is no concern of the ECB. Its deflationary policy mandate encourages
recession instead of countering it. In addition the Germans insisted that
the eurozone members be bound by the Growth and Stability Pact. This lays
down that if countries run budget deficits over 3% of their national
product a year because of falling taxes and rising unemployment, they must
cut public spending further - which makes recession worse - or else face
fines of billions of euros. The irony is that now Germany and France find
themselves in breach of these rules, but one can be certain that the EU
Commission will not try to bully them like it bullied Ireland and
Portugal when they broke the rules.
The other irony is that when pushing for the euro Germany's rulers were so
busy laying down rules for monetary discipline on the Italians and others
that they took their eye off the ball and themselves joined the eurozone
at too high an exchange rate. They exchanged the D-mark for the euro at a
rate which burdened themselves with an implicitly overvalued currency. This
makes it harder for their export industries to sell abroad, and easier for
foreign firms to sell to Germany. That increases German unemployment. All
this is due to the German political elite's love-affair with the euro.
When the euro was launched in 1999 the eurofanatics said confidently that
it would soon become a strong world reserve currency like the dollar, as
people switched from dollars into euros. Instead the opposite happened. The
euro weakened against the dollar and British pound. Indeed in its first few
years it was the euro's weakness this proved to be the one thing helping
the competitiveness of the eurozone economy, Germany's and France's in
particular.
Now this looks like changing. The next couple of years could put the
eurozone under great strain. The Americans want to boost their economy by
acting aggressively to let the dollar fall, so stimulating US exports to
Europe and making EU exports to America less competitive. President Bush's
re-election may well depend on doing this. The euro is now rising against
the dollar, which is lessening the competitiveness of eurozone industry,
but there is nothing individual eurozone countries can do about it, as they
no longer have national currencies of their own. Another cause of strain
is that China's currency, the yuan, is linked to the dollar, so that if
the falling dollar makes US exports more competitive in eurozone and
otherworld markets, it makes China's exports more competitive too.
The 87 billion dollars that President Bush has got the US Congress to
authorise spending in Iraq will not be raised by taxing the American
people. It will be created by turning the printing presses and adding to
America's giant budget deficit. This will send the dollar lower, raise the
euro and hit the eurozone economies.
Is it any wonder that the people of Sweden, one of the most educated and
politically sophisticated in Europe, said No to jumping into the
eurozone's economic Black Hole by 56% to 42% on a turnout of 81% of voters
last September? Sweden's economy is doing very well outside the eurozone,
as is Britain's and Denmark's.
WHY THE EURO CANNOT LAST
One can confidently predict that the euro will not last. The only question
is how long will it continue. It might be gone in a couple of years, or it
might last decades. But certain it is that as long as it lasts it will
generate problems and tensions for the peoples of the eurozone.
"There is no example in history of a lasting monetary union that was not
linked to one State," said Otmar Issing, German governor of the EU Central
Bank. History is full of examples of abandoned currency unions. Where now
is the USSR rouble, the Austro-Hungarian thaler, the Czechoslovak crown or
Yugoslav dinar? Yet these currencies belonged to real, long-established
States, multinational political unions that were also monetary unions and,
more importantly, that were fiscal unions, bound together by common taxes
and services, which is something the EU is not and never can be.
All sovereign States are fiscal as well as monetary unions. They have
common taxes and public services throughout their territories. This means
that their poorer regions and social classes pay on average lower taxes and
receive more public services than their richer areas and classes. These
expressions of national solidarity mean that there exist automatic resource
transfers from richer regions within a country to compensate poorer
regions to some extent for the drawback of their not having their own
currency, interest rate and exchange rate, with which to balance their
payments with the rest of their national economy. Despite this, poorer
areas suffer from migration of capital and workers to richer areas within
national economies, but less than what would happen in the absence of these
fiscal transfers.
There is no such soldiarity in the EU monetary union, however, to induce
the rich EU countries to compensate the poorer ones for loss of key
economic powers. Of course some international solidarities exist between
EU members, but nothing that compares to the solidarity that binds national
States together and makes their citizens willing to pay taxes to a common
government because it is THEIR government, which they willingly obey, with
all the authority and legitimacy that derive from that.
EU monetary union is not a fiscal union. Taxes and public spending are
overwhelmingly national in the EU, and likely to remain so. Brussels
funds amount to a mere 1.3% of the EU's annual gross product, whereas
national taxes and spending typically amount to 35% or more of national
products. There is thus no realistic likelihood of the richer EU countries
being willing to pay the vastly greater sums to Brussels in the name of a
common "Europeanism" that would compensate the poorer EU countries for
surrendering their ability to use a national exchange rate and interest
policy to balance their national payments. The only thing countries
threatened with such imbalance inside the eurozone can do about it, is to
accept lower wages and profit rates compared to their competitors, or, if
people are not willing to do that, to remain jobless at home or emigrate
abroad. Neither the eurozone nor the wider EU has the solidarity that
marks a nation or people. There is no EU "demos", no EU national
community, no EU political "We, " with which citizens can identify and
accept the authority of, and for which is some circumstances they are
willing to die. Rather there are the EU's many nations and peoples.
The exchange rates of currencies are always fixed for political reasons
and there is nothing more rigid than a monetary union. This is the
fundamental reason why the euro is bound to generate tensions and
antagonisms between the different members of the eurozone as long as it
endures. The common interest rate and exchange rate that suit some some
countries will not suit others, and people will gradually realise that
their governments have surrendered key policies for advancing the national
welfare because of their foolish uncritical europhilia.
For this reason most economists believe that the euro is bound to fail,
although it could last years or even decades, as the rouble and thaler did,
while generating policy conflicts and international tensions while it does
last. In fact the euro is likely to make the national question, the right
of nations and peoples to self-rule and self-determination, the principal
issue of European politics for years to come. This will happen as
countries which in the past possessed empires and which through them
suppressed the national independence of others, discover the drawbacks of
being ruled by foreigners, that is, by people they do not elect and who are
not responsible to them.
______________
NOTE: Anthony Coughlan is an economist and Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Social Policy at Trinity College, Dublin. He is secretary of The National
Platform,Ireland, a research and information group that is opposed to EU
integration on democratic and internationalist grounds. He has been
chairman of The European Alliance of EU-critical Movements(TEAM), which
links together some 55 political party and non-party organisations in 20
different European countries in an information exchange on EU matters. He
has been involved in a number of constitutional court cases in the Republic
of Ireland seeking to establish fair referendum practices. He has written
widely on EU affairs.
Weitere Texte zum Themenbereich:
|
