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Depressingly wrong: I had no idea, before the financial crisis, of what a destructive device the single currency could be, and of what a horror France and Germany had created by binding everyone together by the currency supposedly in the interests of ever-closer union. Now I know.
It's probably no more than an expression of "leaning", or an emotional stance, but I'm still a federalist. That is, I think we're better together than each one to his own. However, what I once considered as something that would by and large end up as some form of federation, I now see as in all likelihood doomed. I could say, "I won't see it, but some day it will happen because it must". But there's no inevitability in history, or at least, it's an overrated notion.
I'm sad about this, because I feel more European than (insert whatever nationality). But I'd better get used to it. After all, I feel more human than (insert whatever nationality), and look what a fuck-up the whole world is.
It's a neo-liberal Trojan Horse - the exact opposite of the expression of pan-European popular solidarity it could have been, and some us (naively) hoped it would become.
The problem isn't the concept of a single currency, but the fact that its implementation was left to a nomenklatura of Wall St-inspired rapists and headbangers.
The latter are the problem, and progress will be impossible until they're swept from power.
As for "the concept of a single currency", the fact is more that the area concerned didn't (doesn't) correspond to requirements, and it's rather difficult to conceive of a large area that does, absent a couple of centuries and a civil war to settle things down.
I certainly agree that, now the failure of the experiment is patent, the big money-financed noise machine (in and out of public view) keeps up the beat in favour of destruction aka "reform". All we are doing here is registering the increasing number of those who speak out in the opposite direction, but the Serious™ people aren't listening.
I don't think people like Jacques Delors were motivated by neoliberal conspiracies to force competition and "reform" on nation states (which is not to deny the existence of would-be such conspirators, or that economic liberals were not in favour of the single currency).
Which reminds me of the Shock Doctrine and how the economic structure of South Africa after apartheid was written by a select few while the great number of people (including most of ANCs leadership) were busy with what seamed as the great questions of democracy. Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
I see a general pattern where you have politicians stuck in a business-as-usual frame, who produce complicated systems of economic regulations that just happens to be neoliberal dogma. The politicians may not mean to legislate neoliberal dogma into law, the politicians may be stuck in some other frame. But then as the pieces fall into place the system gets set into neoliberalism.
So if Delors et al did not mean for it to be neoliberal trap, then who wrote the damn thing? If it is similar to the examples in South Africa, Latin America and East Europe that the Shock Doctrine covers some economists with ties to the Chicago school are likely to have delivered it in some form. "You need a currency union? Here we have one, made just for you! Lots of boring details here that you don't need to know, what you need to decide is what to call it and what symbols to use." Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
Joseph Stiglitz in Globalization and its Discontents has an interesting description of how the IMF and World Bank gor gradually purged of their old Keynesian staff and replaced it with the "Washington Consensus" we know and love. A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman
And I'm far from agreeing with you that "its implementation was left to a nomenklatura of Wall St-inspired rapists and headbangers". That description doesn't correspond to what I see of delusory French and pig-headed German elites, in 1992 or now.
The social chapter, such as it is, seems to have been added as a CYA afterthought, and has played a relatively minor role in policy since 1992.
As for Delors - surely one of the earliest faux-Socialists who was more interested in financialisation than in political and social progress?
And then a coterie of know-nothing politicians who embody the worse of the "common sense" of their voters. A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman
At best there's a certain reluctant acceptance that social welfare matters somewhat, and it's not always a bad idea to throw some cash at backward areas.
But all the important decisions have always been made on the basis of neoliberal monetarism by bankers, economists, and those with similar backgrounds.
The clues were always there, right back to when the EU's ancestor was called the 'Common Market' in the UK.
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