• they went beyond an absolute limit that Europe is culturally incapable of crossing?

• they were, as such, ill-conceived?

• they were accompanied by (and were too weak to check) a neolib wave that made for a Union that was essentially as large a free-trade zone as possible?

• the disappearance of the Communist bloc has had, as one consequence, a decrease in the willingness of previous member states of the EEC to forgo national interests?

• that disappearance, twenty years ago, marks a line that further European integration will not be able to go beyond in the foreseeable future? (not quite the same as the first question)

SOCIAL PROTOCOL

Thanks to the social protocol annexed to the Treaty, Community powers are broadened in the social domain. The United Kingdom is not a signatory of this protocol. Its objectives are:

• promotion of employment;
• improvement of living and working conditions;
• adequate social protection;
• social dialogue;
• the development of human resources to ensure a high and sustainable level of employment;
• the integration of persons excluded from the labour market.

Though everyone else appears to have forgotten, not least the troika wreaking havoc in periphery.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

In the UK, we have daily anti-Europe propaganda from the headbanger red-tops. Europe is just too easy a target.

There's very little positive PR happening, from any source.

And now that the EU is being run by banks, for bankers, where would a radical treaty come from?

Something like that has always been my hope.  A truly united Europe, acting as a single economic and political entity would be an effective counterbalance to my country, which sorely needs it, and perhaps to China as well.  I think we would all be better off for it.

We all bleed the same color.

Daniel Gros did a study last year that showed that many European countries were in bad debt situation shortly before and after 1990, a lot of them at the 100% debt to GDP range, and that there were fundamentally different strategies for exiting the debt dilemma. Countries on the periphery and Med (including France) grew out of debt by currency deflation and stimulus, while others in the center chose the means of austerity and slashed spending.

It would seem to me that this is a battle of economic ideology that's being waged.

I would like to know what they say about my humble proposal of monetizing all Spanish and Italian debt in the short-term until inflation expectation grow.

http://avionesdecercanias.blogspot.com/

http://avionesdecercanias.blogspot.com/2011/09/reputationally-bankrupt-zombies.html

I commented on Munchau blog yesterday, that the ECB purchases would allow them to demand fiscal austerity when it is really needed, that is, when the economy is growing fast again and the financial markets are again pushing for bubbles.

I still did not find the naswer int he reports. I am still reading though.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

A way may even be a found to interpret existing Treaty clauses creatively to allow a member state to leave the EA while remaining in the EU, without amending the Treaty. Is it really too farfetched to entertain the possibility that just the clear and definitive wish of a member country to leave the euro area might be enough to convince the other member states to go along with it exiting the euro area while remaining a member of the EU?  

Finally, should one member state be determined to leave the eurozone and the EU, but find itself unable to garner sufficient support or even just acquiescence by the other members of the euro area, it could simply decide to renege on its commitments as member of the EA and EU unilaterally, perhaps not even waiting for the EU exit negotiations to run their course. Although following such provocative behaviour, the other member states would be highly likely to wish to hold the departing member state to account, the scope for retaliation and punishment would seem to be limited. It is not conceivable that force would be used to prevent or undo an unlawful defection. After all, the most important original force behind European integration was the memory of two recent World Wars and the belief that economic and political integration would make armed conflict in the future less likely than it was in the past. It does seem inevitable, however, that a confrontational unilateral EA exit would imply an EU exit at the same time.  

Whatever the details of the modalities of an EA exit, it would likely be a drawn-out and messy affair. The scenario of a Euro area member state taking a vacation from the euro for, say, a couple of years, temporarily adopting its own currency, achieving a sharp depreciation in the value of its currency and then rejoining the Euro area at this much more competitive exchange rate, is most unlikely to be on the menu. The country in question would have to re-apply for EU membership again and, if this application were to be successful, would have to meet the Maastricht Criteria for Euro area membership again, as noted under point (5) of Article 50. It would be very unlikely to be able to count on much goodwill towards it on the part of the countries that remained in the EA. And the members of the `core' would quite likely try to apply even stronger EA membership criteria than the original Maastricht criteria and be more alert to potential fudges that have permitted EA entry in the past.

Now I think if a country acts to leave the eurozone (EA in the paper) but not the EU, as I understand it the only thing that can happen is the Commission taking them to the Court. From that fines and loss of voting rights could stem. So would the Commission do that?

I would note that Sweden is formally bound to enter the eurozone and intentionally keeps out by failing to reach the currency stability requirement, in order to satisfy a domestic public opinion. Nothing has been done about that.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

"...we believe that the improvement in Greek competitiveness that would result from the introduction of the ND and its sharp depreciation vis-à-vis the euro would be short-lived in the absence of meaningful further structural reform of labour markets, product markets and the public sector. Higher domestic Greek ND-denominated wage inflation and other domestic cost inflation would swiftly restore the old uncompetitive real equilibrium or a worse one, given the diminution of pressures for structural reform resulting from euro area exit.
In our view, the bottom line for Greece from an exit is therefore a financial collapse and an even deeper recession than the country is already experiencing - probably a depression..."

I'm deeply suspicious of that "structural reform of labour markets" rhetoric, because what it boils down to is "Chinese labor practices - good. Worker rights and living wages - bad".

By most standards Greece is already in depression. The rate of pauperization is unprecedented already. And the immense amount of indiscriminate and heavy taxes imposed are going to have a large effect on savings. What's more important, leaving the Euro and planning for a non-feudal future might actually motivate people and have them make willing sacrifices.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

Forget about what Europe we want.

That is simply a way of saying "we don't want Europe".

Economically Englightenment values don't work because economics carried corrosive notions such as self-evident rationality, and 'enlightened' self interest, as a rhetorical virus.

In science, the feedbaqck mechanisms - independent review, and aggressive questioning - promote independent insight. Science may not be perfect, but it works fairly well as a mode of enquiry.

But economics took medieval religious notions of personal morality and smushed them up with some cod rationalisations about heroic emancipated individualism.

Unfortunately, that was just PR. Because it fundamentally didn't change from the existing medieval (late Roman?) political models, which are based on might-is-right.

So social darwinism - individual profit at any moral and social cost to others - is the political default.

Social democracy has opposed that default with occasional success, most obviously when backed up with the threat of direct action.

But it has never been in a position to remove it as a viable political influence.

The one - remote - possible positive outcome of the current neoliberal counter-reformation is that once the bodies are counted and the mess is cleared up, neo-liberalism may be left with the same positive social reputation as Nazism and the Inquisition.

Like the long term is green and the short term is blue, the medium term may well be brown:

In should be first stated that, although most economists are now agreed that full employment may be achieved by government spending, this was by no means the case even in the recent past.  Among the opposers of this doctrine there were (and still are) prominent so-called 'economic experts' closely connected with banking and industry.  This suggests that there is a political background in the opposition to the full employment doctrine, even though the arguments advanced are economic.  That is not to say that people who advance them do not believe in their economics, poor though this is.  But obstinate ignorance is usually a manifestation of underlying political motives.

There are, however, even more direct indications that a first-class political issue is at stake here.  In the great depression in the 1930s, big business consistently opposed experiments for increasing employment by government spending in all countries, except Nazi Germany.  This was to be clearly seen in the USA (opposition to the New Deal), in France (the Blum experiment), and in Germany before Hitler.  The attitude is not easy to explain.  Clearly, higher output and employment benefit not only workers but entrepreneurs as well, because the latter's profits rise.  And the policy of full employment outlined above does not encroach upon profits because it does not involve any additional taxation.  The entrepreneurs in the slump are longing for a boom; why do they not gladly accept the synthetic boom which the government is able to offer them?  It is this difficult and fascinating question with which we intend to deal in this article.

...

The dislike of government spending policy as such is overcome under fascism by the fact that the state machinery is under the direct control of a partnership of big business with fascism.  The necessity for the myth of 'sound finance', which served to prevent the government from offsetting a confidence crisis by spending, is removed.  In a democracy, one does not know what the next government will be like.  Under fascism there is no next government.

If I start I do not think the EU will unravel even if the euro does. Neither do I think members abandoning the euro will be forced out. I see no new treaty in my crystal ball, european integration will unravel a bit but hold in general.

Schengen will probably last in principle, but with increasing exceptions. I note that there is already a pre-crisis history of limiting the movement of leftish elements in the run-up to big summits.

Common Foreign and Security Policy will not go much further, be neither will the structures EU inherited from WEU be lost.

Cooperation in Criminal Justice might unravel if there is a serious challenge to the European arrest warrant. That would for example be if there is a case where the government and/or justice system of one member state refuses to extradite a citizen (which will not happen in the Assange case).

CAP, the common market, the EU lawmaking structure and other basic structures I think will keep going.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

The problem is that the economic vision treated land, labor and capital as pure factors of production and made unrelenting demands that they be treated as such, while such treatment was incompatible with the long term survival of society and the environment. The only reason society, and now the environment, survived as well as it did was due to the effective opposition of that utopian project, which is now failing.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Considering the manipulation of the media, including the internet, self-evidence may not ever occur to any majority.

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!

In the worst case scenario, all cash in the EU might end up in German banks while both the banks and the governments of deficit countries go bankrupt as a result of a generalised deposit run, while the banking supervisors and central banks at both the national and European level wash their hands of the whole thing because of "free movement of capital".

And, of course, a "banking" crisis is both a "real economy" and a "financial" crisis.

Economics is politics by other means

A real economy crisis or financial crisis?

if regulation had been effective they wouldn't be so linked.

that's the idea of reinstalling glass-steigel or ringfencing as the brits call it.

problem is they are talking about it, not doing it, and the date it's enacted is so freaking far in the future they may as well not bother at all.

with the usual delusions of megalomnania and hubris they fondly imagine the people are too stupid to ever believe their friendly local bank where they keep their savings are lying conniving thieves, for ever and ever amen.

wonder of wonders, people start getting a clue when their savings go down the crapper and bonuses for the lords of the universe keep rising.

pass the port charlie, what's that commotion below deck?

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty