'Social' Europe - or Anti-Social Europe?

Always fascinating to see self-styled progressives retreating in confusion, trying to cover their errors by (of course) blaming someone or something else. Preferably the Tea Party tendency in the USA.

Take John Weeks (economist and Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London). Here he is over at Social Europe Journal lamenting the state of the Eurozone:

Few outside of Europe (and not all within) understand the profoundly undemocratic nature of the European Union that created the current disaster. In retrospect it is clear that the long-term effect of the Maastricht Treaty and its infamous “criteria” were to remove economic policy from democratic oversight. The design of the European Central Bank completed the task.

The anti-democratic removal is not an accident of the law of unintended consequences. It is the conscious fulfilment of the central political principle of neo-liberalism, that economic policy is the preserve of experts, and should not be subject to the “populism” of democratic politics.

It is an irony that the European Union is frequently assailed by right wing politicians in the United States as a haven of socialism. The reality is that the European Union represents exactly the end of democratic oversight that the Tea Party Republicans crave.

HAHAHA *pauseswhilescrapesselfofffloor*

Yes, folks. The problem is that the EU is too RIGHT-WING!

Wait. There’s more?

Similarly, today in Europe a pact among the governments of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain to coordinate a simultaneous withdrawal from the euro zone would offer a viable alternative to the imposed austerity programs. Together the output of these five countries is almost forty percent larger than Germany’s. The probability of this radical but feasible alternative may be as high as one in a million…

How far we have fallen! The vision of a cooperative Europe, that began in 1950 with the Iron and Steel Community, is now realized as a collection of weak and strong countries caught in a spiral of beggar-thy-neighbor trade and austerity policies, in which the 99% are the losers (even in Germany).

The authoritarian governance of the EU has reached its fullest expression in the debt disasters of the 21^st Century, bringing on a continental depression. The ideology that justified this consciously-created and unnecessary depression was and is pure neo-liberal economics.

Of all the bitter ironies of European unity gone viral, one stands out from all the others: a political project designed consciously to ensure that no country would again dominate the continent changed into the mechanism to achieve that domination.

And, yes, it’s all GERMANY’S FAULT that the EU is ‘authoritarian’. Arbeit macht frei!

Read the whole thing, but first take out life insurance against dying of extreme mirth.

Yet let’s be fair. His idea that a group of countries leave the EU to set up some sort of more manageable formation is not a bad one.

Maybe this is getting to the nub of the whole business. The EU is just too big.

Given that there is no willingness across Europe to set up a single big country and have all the wealth transfers between richer and poorer areas run centrally and supposedly democratically as might happen (or not) in a normal country, the alternative is to have all sorts of ad hoc rules which are in substance capable of being untransparent or oppressive. Why not have a number of national groupings in Europe which share some common light-touch overall trading and strategic framework, rather than the one-size-doesn’t-fit-all rigidity as we have now?

It can’t be said enough. It’s all about Trust.

As of this morning, the German elite have concluded that the Greek elite and Greek masses alike can not be trusted to keep their promises, and so insist on highly intrusive measures and controls to keep them up to the mark (so to speak). There is even talk of leaning on Greece to postpone elections.

The Greeks think that all this is arrogant and intrusive and object strenuously. Distrust in Germany (the main source of European money to help Greece!) soars. Loony Greeks (Left and Right) start railing against foreign oppression. And down we do spiral.

The latest news is that all is in place to give Greece yet another bail-out. But we all know that it won’t work. Greece can not pay back the debts it now owes even under the most optimistic scenarios of the next bail-out working. Plus the capacity of the Greek system to deliver the measures promised even with cruel Germans manning the towering heights of Greek bureaucracy is inadequate. It won’t happen.

If you want a more nuanced look at Greece/EU from a demoralised progessive point of view, try Nick Cohen in the Guardian, who points to a strange fanaticism within the Eurocracy which can not accept that its most cherished beliefs were attached to utterly wrong-headed policies:

Raised in a Eurosceptic country, we do not understand how an absolute commitment to the European project was a mark of respectability on the continent. Like going to church and saying your prayers for previous generations, a public demonstration of commitment to the EU ensured that the world saw you as a worthy citizen. If you wanted to advance in Europe’s governing parties, judiciaries, bureaucracies and culture industries, you had to subscribe to the belief that ever-greater union was self-evidently worthwhile…

When historians write about the end of its postmodern utopia, they will note that it was not destroyed by invading armies anxious to plunder Europe’s wealth or totalitarian ideologues determined to install a dictatorship, but by politicians and bureaucrats, who appeared to be pillars of respectability, but turned out to be fanatics after all.

The point, dear Professor, is that the EU crisis has nothing much to do with ‘neo-liberalism’. The EU is a convoluted sui generis ideological potage (because nothing else could be cooked up in the kitchen) which messily combines bits of almost anything you can think of. Tedious ‘social’ policies, endless formalism, and ‘single market’ rules which do indeed rely upon some simple ideas, namely that debts should be repaid and that generous ‘solidarity’ transfers from one country to another require respect for honest process in return.

As a gesture of goodwill towards Scotland, let’s go to Macbeth to sum up where the Eurocrats now stand: