December 2010

The Political Economy of the Euro-Zone Crisis

In this week’s Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell of the WS and FT has an essay specifically on the political economy of the euro-zone crisis, Euro Trashed: Europe’s Rendezvous with Monetary Destiny.  He notes that the European Union is built on a theory of successive crises, and that the euro was foreseen, perhaps intended, to provoke a crisis that would lead toward greater union; he quotes some of its founding fathers to that end.  (I think he might have added the dialectical ideology that underlay that sentiment, but does not.):

As we contemplate the macroeconomic storm that is now passing through Europe, we must bear in mind that this is a storm that the EU’s promoters knew would come. The euro’s designers understood Rahm Emanuel’s philosophy about not letting a crisis go to waste. “Europe will be forged in crises,” the European Community’s founding father Jean Monnet wrote in his memoirs, “and it will be the sum of the solutions brought to these crises.” When the French statesman Jacques Delors laid out his plan for the euro in the late 1980s, he drew a clear trajectory: A common market had made possible a common currency. A common currency would make possible a common government. But how would that happen? After all, if a currency worked well within the existing political arrangements, there would be no reason for those arrangements ever to change. New institutions could result only from the currency’s blowing up. Economic crisis would be the accidentally-on-purpose pretext for replacing a system based on parliamentary accountability with a system based on the whims of a handful of experts in Brussels. Europe’s countries now face the choice of giving up either their newfangled money or their ancient national sovereignties. It is unclear which they will choose.

Toward the end, the essay points out that although Greece is every bit as corrupt and profligate as the newspapers suggest, that was not the case with Spain, nor with Ireland, certainly not in the sense of Greece.  That is, Spain had quite good fiscal management and undertook measures that were thought quite strict at the time to protect its banks from the subprime crisis in the US, while many other European banks were as much a part of it as the US ones.  True, Spain's economy has many structural problems - a sclerotic labor market for those in the protected sectors and, today, unemployment for everyone else. But the adjustment mechanisms by which democratic market societies overcome interest group recalcitrance - monetize the debt and let devaluation lower wages (behind the veil of money, as we Marxists like to say) - were not available to it, having joined the euro.  Spain was overcome by a one-size fits all monetary policy, which to overcome in a democratic society through internal fiscal and regulatory means alone would require superhuman willpower (and perhaps, in the regulatory arrangement of the EU and eurozone at this moment, could not be achieved in any case, on account of too many arbitrage avenues around internal controls, of the kind designed for the purpose of one-size fits all):