OPINION:Shifts in Europe permit sovereignties to evolve. This beats being at the mercy of the markets
TO THE surprise of many, the former anti-Lisbon campaigner Declan Ganley and Prof Brendan Simms have recently argued for a United States of Europe (Sunday Business Post, January 8th). While their concrete proposals for a United States of Europe are well worth discussing, one might feel less inclined to share their conviction that the US and its history can and should serve as a model for any future European Union.
Their intervention is proof of one positive outcome of the current crisis – that Ireland’s relationship with the EU is moving centre stage. While who exactly is to blame demands serious attention, Ireland has produced too few constructive visions of an EU that Irish citizens would like to inhabit.
With the advent of the financial crisis, the lack of debate has partly been compensated for by the welcome addition of a higher number of foreign nationals participating.
Recently, Thomas Klau of the European Council of Foreign Relations spelled out the political options: “Our nations and their leaders . . . can take charge and assume control, initiating a bold jump forward into a federated euro zone power . . . or they can yield to the power of the markets . . .” (The Irish Times, November 12th, 2011).
This really is the nub of the issue and it relates in a particular way to Ireland. An informed public debate on a federal Europe has never actually taken place in Ireland, and the case for it has far too rarely been made.
One of the most deeply felt promises Taoiseach Enda Kenny thought he should make in his state of the nation address before Christmas was that he wanted to be remembered as the Taoiseach who “retrieves Irish sovereignty”. But it behoves the Taoiseach to tell Irish citizens another simple truth: the future of Ireland will lie in an EU in which member states pool their sovereignties even further and that “national” sovereignty will have a very different meaning than in the last century.
A federal Europe is being forged inexorably by current trends at world level: the world of the future will be governed by larger political entities and their currencies (dollar, renmimbi, an Asian currency unit?) and the current crisis can only be solved in larger entities.
The creation of a federal Europe needs to be flanked by serious attempts at challenging the supremacy of the financial markets whose only purpose is short-term profit maximisation.
Britain’s isolation in its attempts to protect the most powerful bastion of finance capitalism, the City of London, may go down in the history books as a last-ditch effort of the international finance lobby to avoid tighter control by democratically elected governments.
The euro area is not sustainable in its current form. A restructuring of the European Monetary Unit project is inevitable so as to make some form of monetary integration viable and to save and consolidate democracy. The replacements of democratically elected governments forced by the markets and executed by the French and German leaders shows the threat current conditions represent to democratic decision-making structures previously deemed unassailable.
The EU needs to become a more progressive project by establishing itself as a polity for its citizens rather than simply a facilitator for the free movement of capital, goods and services.
A progressive project must encompass: a tax on short-term capital transactions aimed to fund a job-creating EU-wide investment programme; a speedy re-regulation of the EU financial sector including the City of London with pay in line with productivity; writing off more debt allowing for the disappearance of ghost assets; the development of a eurobond market for EU residents; and the introduction of a US-style EU-wide legislation combating white-collar crime to restore confidence in the banking and political spheres. EU-wide automatic corrective fiscal mechanisms need to be urgently implemented.
In Ireland, nationalism is still regarded as a benign and progressive force. There is a widespread but unfounded perception that the Irish electorate will never agree to hand over more sovereignty to Brussels.
If the options are clearly spelled out, there can be little doubt that the majority of citizens will not take the risk of throwing the life buoys of the EU and the euro overboard to face helplessly the veritable storm unleashed by the financial markets.
Ireland has in fact less to fear from a federal Europe; after all, the main language of a federal Europe is most likely to be English, and Irish culture is appreciated and admired throughout the Continent. Britain’s inability and unwillingness to make up its mind only increases Ireland’s standing in the EU as the only fully committed Anglophone member state.
It is time for all EU citizens to engage in building a democratic federal Europe, based on the principle of a fair society. This may mean a return to and rescuing of the achievements of the pre-neoliberal era which distorted the EU’s greatest achievement, its social market economy, and to democratic political structures which saw a profound value in it.
Bernadette Andreosso-O’Callaghan is Jean Monnet professor in the department of economics at the University of Limerick. Joachim Fischer is senior lecturer in German at the University of Limerick