The Greek vote — No No No

30 Jun, 2015 at 18:27 | Posted in Economics | 2 Comments

The euro has taken away the possibility for national governments to manage their economies in a meaningful way — and in Greece the people has had to pay the true costs of its concomitant misguided austerity policies.

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The unfolding of the Greek tragedy during the last couple of months has shown beyond any doubts that the euro is not only an economic project, but just as much a political one. What the neoliberal revolution during the 1980s and 1990s didn’t manage to accomplish, the euro shall now force on us.

But do the peoples of Europe really want to deprive themselves of economic autonomy, enforce lower wages and slash social welfare at the slightest sign of economic distress? Is inreasing income inequality and a federal überstate really the stuff that our dreams are made of? I doubt it.

History ought to act as a deterrent. During the 1930s our economies didn’t come out of the depression until the folly of that time — the gold standard — was thrown on the dustbin of history. The euro will hopefully soon join it.

2 Comments

  1. However in Uk there still appears to be a majority in favour of staying in Eu ! Various Europhobic right wingers (Tory/ Ukip) still consider Eu to be a “leftist” construct despite ample evidence to the contrary i.e. Greece.

    Comment by JdeV— 1 Jul, 2015 #

  2. I agree with some of your sentiments re uberstate. I guess one hope in a Federal Europe process was that it would balance out neo-liberalism which is heavily connected to the rise of the US as the economic, cultural and political hegemon. But as you have pointed out, that is not how things have turned out. A big game-changer was British efforts to rapidly expand the EU to undermine a socialist agenda being led by France and Germany in the late 1990s. This derailed the Delor/Kohl/Mitterand agenda for closer union. What was left for the Eurozone was the unintended consequence of monetary without political and fiscal union.

    With the Greek crisis, large flows of cheap labour in the midst of a recession that has affected lower wage and unskilled labour in Old Europe, the EU project is now much less popular than it used to be.

    Comment by Nanikore— 1 Jul, 2015 #


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