DEMAND driven ECONOMICS

DEMAND driven ECONOMICS

Posts 1-1 of 1
  • Amarendra Dhiraj
    Amarendra Dhiraj    Group moderator
    The company name is only visible to registered members.
    European union: too old, too bad, too deaf, too late....hopeless....
    When you turn 50 you no longer have to worry about acceptance by the young and hip (hopeless); having children (too late); listening to what people say (too deaf); or getting up unassisted (too bad). Well, obviously such a card couldn't be right for the European Union.

    This week, on March 25th 1957, of the Treaty of Rome, the founding text of what became the European Union. Agreement has been hard.

    The French wanted something on minimum welfare standards....
    The Poles wanted a reference to God but not to a constitution.....
    The Germans wanted the constitution but not God......
    There was even talk of two declarations—one by the original six, a second by the others.

    For behind the wrangling lies a growing divergence between two concepts of what the EU is for.

    One holds that Europe is a good thing merely for existing, and that the more Europe, the better.
    The other says that Europe is only good for what it can do; the EU is an instrument for specific policies and whether it is a net plus depends on whether the policies work.

    And it informs the views of at least two countries still. The Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, wrote a booklet in 2005 called “The United States of Europe”; Luxembourg's prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, thinks almost all EU projects should be seen as preparations for political union.

    The president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, has started talking of “a Europe of results”—meaning a series of policies designed to win back popularity on issues people care about: climate change, energy security, cross-border crime, immigration.

    All these are global in character. Small countries cannot deal with them alone. The EU justifies itself as the organisation that gives Europeans a voice on the world stage.

    Grand existential projects—the constitution, a European army, the Europeanisation of national legal systems.

    But it is no less true that many existentialists do not support the policies that animate the instrumentalists—or at any rate not enough to make them work.

    In the long run, the bigger question is whether the these approaches can somehow be made compatible. The risk is that undermining the instrumentalists' policies will stop the EU earning legitimacy through results. But without results, the focus of democratic hopes and support will always remain the nation-state, however many Berlin declarations are intoned.
    • 29 Mar 2007, 11:02 am