Elites have failed us. It is time to create a European republic
And how are you going to pass power to the one group that rules 500 million people without their being the elite?
Elites have failed us. It is time to create a European republic
And how are you going to pass power to the one group that rules 500 million people without their being the elite?
Erm, didn’t a Mr. Hitler try that one already (directly rather than via the ballot box). From memory it didn’t go too well. Hmnn, perhaps Mr. Hitler was the wrong kind of elite? I’m sure the new elite will be better……
I’m afraid Germany will refuse to pay for it.
Napoléon also had a shot. The Germans took against it, as I recall
Maybe get it tattooed on your arm?
Besides, it’ll obviously be them in charge. They always think it will be, cos reasons.
It took two people to write this piece for the guardian:
One can expect tremendous sparks of original thought when two pioneers of European research combine and, naturally enough, each of the principals is supported by a team of dedicated professionals.
At European Alternatives the Communications Officer is one Marta Cillero:
Meanwhile, at the European Democracy Lab, Verena Humer:
The future of Europe is in safe hands.
@Jimmers – superb 🙂
Funny how such views about uniting Europe as a single superstate can get an airing in a British national newspaper when they’re also made-up and fictitious and the product of barmy paranoid low-information uneducated Brexit voters’ overactive imaginations, often according to the same newspapers. Heck, Brexit voters get ridiculed for raising the spectre of Eurofederalism, let alone a unitary European Republic…
Weird synchronicity. I was thinking earlier that the EU had got about as far as it was going to get and some fuckwit somewhere was going to propose replacing it with something more “rigorous” and apparently I was channeling the groan. The Democratic People’s Republic of Europe. Has ring to it.
It would be marvellous to see euro-scum –esp garbage like Facepainter –trying to take “Direct Action” to establish their Eurocommie Empire.
The most danger is that we would die laughing like that Scotsman watching The “Goodies” battling bagpipes.
The German court ruling probably signals the death knell of absolute federalism in the EU. The boxheads seem strangely unwilling pay for everything. Where that leaves the Euro is probably ‘not in a good place’. The Euro demands fiscal / budgetary / transfer union – it’s why the likes of Jacques Delors designed it way in the first place, to force the endpoint they wanted. A proper financial crisis is going to test this to destruction – and now we’ve got one. Italy can’t survive unless something fundamental changes. Yay popcorn!
I quite fancy Prof Guerot, I think it’s her lisp that does it for me. She was on telly a lot during Brexit and is at a Uni where a friend teaches.
Her criticisms of the EU are pretty good, until she gets onto the European Republic schtick, which is just complete arse.
Far from resulting in moves towards pan-Europeanism, ISTM that the reactions of peoples and national governments has been to rush headlong in the opposite direction. And surely, just about every rule in the EU book is being broken by such actions, not least economic ones. Weren’t we told that we couldn’t possibly have any variation to those laid down? And now look at them!
Rhoda’s restatement of the problem:
Elites have failed. Fuck ’em forever.
Ulrike Guérot –you must be fucking joking Ottokring–or be taking too much Viagra.
A classic middle aged bag. Thin rather than obese but that is it.
European Balcony Project?
I don’t really want to but I am afraid I will have to Google it
I wish I hadn’t done that
And she is not the most demented of the team
Calls for European democracy all seem to involve moving decision making and power further and further away from the electorate. Of course a european republic would have to have it’s own tax raising powers, it’s own army , it’s own police . I’m sure the potato would be hawking his wares to them faster than a speeding bullet.
I second what Mr Ecks says about Guerot. Definitely NOT a MILF.
@Patrick
I suspect popcorn but no fireworks. German-watchers can confirm better than me but my limited understanding of the result was that it would have little practical economic effect – so long as the bank sages cross the Ts carefully on whatever documentation is required to demonstrate compatibility, that side of things can be bodged as required. The deeper chasm is on the more abstract issue, that the German constitutional court has confirmed that it won’t roll over and accept EU law as forming a kind of “super-law” that overrides all national laws, even constitutional ones – something that other countries’ legal systems have pretty much conceded. At some point that might come to a head on an issue which cannot be bodged, and then we might find ourselves looking at a European version of the nullification crisis:
The nullification crisis was a United States sectional political crisis in 1832–33, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, which involved a confrontation between the state of South Carolina and the federal government. It ensued after South Carolina declared that the federal Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and therefore null and void within the sovereign boundaries of the state.
Now the EU won’t be able to reach for the US solution of a Force Bill to threaten any non-compliant state with military action. But still something would have to be done. My guess would be that if the miscreant is Germany then a high-level political solution would be pulled out of the bag, and if the miscreant were a more disposable state like Hungary then suspension or expulsion might be reached for instead. Like RLJ it’s often felt to me that the internal contradictions of the EU are building to a head, and as you point out, the necessary economic logic of the single currency is coming unstuck on the unwillingness of states to accept fiscal union, but the capacity for eurobodge never ceases to amaze either, so perhaps this crisis too shall pass. For now. Ultimately it took another generation from the nullification crisis for the US to resolve the issue of federalism vs states’ rights in the Civil War. May our continental friends escape such a fate…
‘Discourse to the European Nation’
What language was it in? [French]
‘urging Europeans to come together around their shared universalist values’
What is a universalist value? Communism.
‘and against the rising monsters of nationalism.’
Nationalism bad. How dare you love your country!
‘As Europe marched towards the murder of its soul and its people
Soul? Europe is a geographical feature. It has no soul. It contains many countries of diverse backgrounds. ‘The murder of its soul’ is just stupid commie talk.
‘many dared to dream the impossible.’
The Dreams of communism. That’s what fueled the Nazis, fighting the communists.
‘Elites have failed us.’
Communism fails again, because it was implemented by the wrong people. Yawn.
MBE
if the miscreant is Germany then a high-level political solution would be pulled out of the bag
Exactly. And once they get away with it once, they’ll keep doing it. Let hope the EU falls apart before then.
@MBE
I wouldn’t demur to your prediction of a high-level political fudge but it does rather look as though the Constitutional Court has placed the ECB in balk.
At root, clearly enough, is that the ECB has shifted from using money-creation as an instrument of monetary policy and has tipped over into bailing out the southern states, principally Italy for the time being, which is expressly verboten under the Treaties.
With the Bundesbank excluded from participating in underwriting these operations and given that “coronabonds” are also unacceptable to the ‘frugal’ nordic states, it’s a job to know which rabbits can be pulled from which hats. Add to this that as a magician Christine Lagarde is no substitute for Mario Draghi.
Ahhh, Andrew Jackson. I played golf in the Land of the Waxhaws a couple of weeks ago.
“Now the EU won’t be able to reach for the US solution of a Force Bill”
That wasn’t the solution. The Compromise Tariff ended the Nullification Crisis. Attempted enforcement of the Force Bill “would have been rather interesting” (in my best Joe Mantegna voice).
The Great Flaw in the founding of the U.S. was income – how it would be financed. At the founding, it wasn’t an issue, because the government did so little, it didn’t need much money. Up to the Civil War, tariffs were the principal source of revenue for the U.S. Creeps like Lincoln wanted the government to do so much more, tariffs would need to be tripled to finance. Hence the Morrill Tariff. The rub was tariffs were paid by the South. How money would be spent was determined by Congress, controlled by Yankees and Westerners. Another one of them “taxation without representation” deals. As I have said before, the Civil War was about light houses. The South paid for them while the North got most of them.
@TMB
Although as you say it is “clear enough” I’m not sure the court expressly ruled what was being done was actually illegal/unconstitutional, just that it had the potential to be if the Ts were not crossed. Feel free to correct me if that’s wrong. Am I right to think that coronabonds are likely to come to court too? Is the German legal process fast enough that such a case could reach a politically incovenient result at an inopportune time or would it likely be too late to matter?
@Gamecock
You’re quite right I should have mentioned the Compromise Tariff. Any application of the Force Bill would have been “interesting” indeed, what I meant but did not say was that it represented a kind of “ultimate solution” or backstop to the issue of federalism vs states’ rights even if back then it was more of symbolic value.
@MBE
It’s important to note that the ruling was the result of a referral by a grouping opposed to the actions of the ECB and not at the behest of the German government seeking clarification on constitutional propriety. True, the Court has couched it’s ruling in a way that requests the ECB to demonstrate that it was not using a monetary instrument as a bail-out mechanism but this is a matter of form only.
It would take more than an administrative sleight of hand dotting “i’s” and crossing “t’s” for the problem to be resolved which is not to say that an alternative and political solution could not be found but it’s hard to see what that might be.
Italy clearly needs a bail-out but the ECB is blocked from providing one and the coronabonds are not going to happen because the Germans and the Dutch have said no to any mutualising of debt.
The intractable problem of the Euro is that even if all Italian borrowing were wiped out entirely, it would only take a decade or so for the whole sorry mess to repeat itself.
@TMB
Isn’t the “official” line taken by all the bankers involved that “ceci n’est pas un bail-out”?
@MBE
To which the unspoken response from Karlsruhe might be: “Wir sind keine Bänker”
Isn’t the real problem that Italy, like a Greece, is insolvent not illiquid? It’s hard to see how more debt is going to help.
I was also reading a piece in the New Statesman this morning that Yanis Varoufakis reckons Boris should just for a hard Brexit, the single market is as good as dead.
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2020/05/yanis-varoufakis-covid-19-has-turbocharged-eu-s-failures