The Euro, Democracy: Choose One

By Andrew Stuttaford

Sunday, August 23, 2015

The idea that the euro was by definition an assault on national democracy is not a particularly new one, but what that means in practice becomes ever more evident.

Earlier this week, Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, broke a 2012 election promise that he would not support a third Greek bailout. Politicians break election promises the whole time, of course, but as Open Europe’s Vincenzo Scarpetta was quick to point out, the reasons that Mark Harbers, the economic spokesman for Rutte’s party, gave for the change in direction were worth noting.

Here’s what Harbers said:

    We have many doubts as to whether this package will work, but putting everything on the balance, the VVD faction has decided to vote in favour. When one country would vote against, I know Europe enough by now: the money goes to Greece one way or another. The rest of Europe has already decided that…It wouldn’t make much sense if the Netherlands would be isolated

Scarpetta:

    This is pretty big stuff. A senior member of the Dutch governing party is essentially saying that they do not necessarily think another multi-billion loan is the right way forward for Greece, but his country’s opposition to the bailout would be ignored by the rest of the Eurozone – and would even leave the Netherlands “isolated”. Not a far-fetched statement. The ESM  [the bailout mechanism] can be activated by a super-majority of 85% under a special emergency procedure that the Netherlands would not be able to veto on its own. Taxation without representation anyone?

Quite. Scarpetta cites other examples, from Finland and Greece and, interestingly, Germany:

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel…witnessed the biggest party rebellion of her ten years in office when the Bundestag voted on the third Greek bailout. This despite the fact that the deal she secured was already very ‘German’, with its heavy focus on spending cuts, tax hikes and structural reforms. Anything less would most likely have triggered an even bigger rebellion.

    Ahead of the vote, the CDU’s chief whip Volker Kauder faced a huge backlash for the pressure he applied to rebel MPs, one of whom accused him of “trampling over the freedom of opinion for MPs which is guaranteed by the [German] Constitution.”

That ‘rebel MP’ was being disingenuous. As he must have known for years, Angela Merkel, whose authoritarian approach (but not, I’d emphasize, her politics) shows clear signs of her East German past, doesn’t do freedom.

Scarpetta asks “whether this underlying tension between Eurozone membership and national democracy is sustainable in the long run” and wonders  “whether the tipping point hasn’t just come one step closer.” I suspect that that happy tipping point remains far away.  The EU’s elites have invested too much political capital into the project to walk away now, even if they felt they could.

Meanwhile, writing for Politics and Strategy, the blog of the International Institute for Strategic Studies Survival magazine, Johns Hopkins Professor Erik Jones is one of those who appear to see the EU’s post-democratic nature as feature not bug. In an intriguing piece, he argues (wrongly, in my view) that the EU’s centrist coalitions are set to splinter, but that this is no reason for “Europeans to give up hope”, a revealing choice of words to say the least. Instead “this is a strong argument for the importance of European institutions”:

    [T]he European Commission, the European Central Bank and the European Stability Mechanism were created precisely to sustain policy action across changes in member state governments. Politicians should offer voters a choice and the outcomes of those choices should be respected. But that is not the same as saying that every European policy should be held hostage to every change in member-state government, and neither should it mean that historic agreements like those reached over the past several weeks should be held hostage to the fates of an unending succession of national electoral contests.

    The European Union exists because there are problems bigger than any member-state government can address on its own. The EU also exists because there are issues that can only be tackled over time periods longer than the gaps between European parliamentary elections. Europe’s political centre cannot hold, but we have always known that. European integration is the answer.

And there you have post-democracy laid bare. European “policy action” should be sustained “across changes in member state governments”, changes brought by that inconvenient tradition known as elections. There’s a nod to democracy (“Politicians should offer voters a choice and the outcomes of those choices should be respected”), but it comes with the qualification that not “every” European policy “should be held hostage” to the whims of those pesky voters, especially, it seems when “historic” agreements are involved.

To repeat, democracy is not a #EuropeanValue.