The collapse in trust in the EU and its institutions

There does not appear to be a latest figure for trust in the ECB. Would love to see that by country. They are improving under Draghi but I don’t trust them in any respect.

@ All

The relevant section of the report reads as follows;

“Trust in the European Union has fallen since autumn 2011 and now stands at its lowest ever level (31%, -3 percentage points). At the same time, levels of trust in national governments and parliaments have recovered slightly (28%, +4 and 28%, +1 respectively). As a result, the gap between trust in national political institutions and the European Union is now very narrow.”

Maybe if Europeans felt the people in charge knew what they were doing there could be some trust. The story of this economic meltdown is one of elite arrogance and incompetence, not to mention making out like bandits.

@ All

I repeat a post on another thread below as the links clarify – for me, at least, as a layman – the struggle between the two opposing economic approaches probably giving rise to the change in public mood in Europe. (Incidentally, I cannot see how Feldstein can be wrong when he says that it is daft for the ECB to buy only the bonds of governments having difficulties selling them).

@ All

FYI a link to the article by Martin Feldstein that (hopefully) works.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/30/european-central-bank?INTCMP=SRCH

and the opposing view from Paul Krugman courtesy of today’s IT.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2012/0731/1224321154817.html

The truth lies, one would imagine, somewhere beteen the two. Feldstein’s approach, however, seems more rooted in the real world and a better indicator for likely future developments.

@ All

Off topic (but not by that much).

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0731/breaking24.html

Talk about a judicial passing of the buck!

This, however, has to be the best bit.

“Independent TD Thomas Pringle contends the Treaty unconstitutionally irreversibly commits Ireland to a policy into the future of diverting our financial resources to save the Euro.”

@Seafoid

The ‘elite incompetence’ is a very plausible cover for the banditry.
Banditry in the form of wealth not accepting its losses and being supported all the way by EU institutions and creditor country bandits in is what has been going on from the start. Very successfully going on. Lets hope a tipping point is reached soon.

Move one. Move on. Nothing to see here. … Oh look, they don’t like their national governments either. … and sure aren’t the poor dears in the EU’s institutions having a tough time of it with two opposing economic approaches … and how about that Irish Supreme Court …

Five posts that say KO’R has hit a nerve at DOCM’s client.

Good man, Kevin. Someone’s listening. They may not like what you have to say, but they are listening.

@ Mrs PR Guy

How is the book coming on?

And have you come across Minervois Les Carretals since you arrived ?

I wish I was a member of the 92% who can easily understand the colour coding but unfortunately I’m not and therefore will never benefit from this post. My loss.

@DOCM

This issue of access to the European Courts is not nearly as simply as your link implies. In fact it is on the schedule of the UNECE Compliance Committee for their meeting in September. Others have been trying to ensure that the proper Rights due are provided, but there is still quite a long way to go. You can follow the on-going legal arguements at the end of the webpage below:

http://www.unece.org/env/pp/compliance/Compliancecommittee/32TableEC.html

@Tullmcadoo

I think Draghi will deliver. He has done as well as can be expected to date given the formidable opposition he faces.
He will finally have to decide whether to put the broader interests of Europe above those of a domineering and myopic Germany. Merkel is led by the opinion polls with her only objective being re-election.
Schaeuble, on the other hand, seems more and more like Europe’s answer to Iran’s Achmadinejad.
His interpretation and complete misrepresentation of the June summit communique signed by the Chancellor on behalf of Germany would have done credit to Achmadinejad any day.

@DOCM @6.17

May as well repeat my response here as well – for the benefit of a ‘layman’ non-economist such as yourself …

@DOCM

The ontologically challenged market fundamentalist and financial system skewed Professor Feldstein has been anti-Euro ab initio and his assertion that:

‘The peripheral eurozone countries became over-indebted in the last decade because the bond market failed to provide a signal that debts were too high. ‘

might well have been written by Dear Lorenzo as both strolled the corridors of philistine power in Harvard. He is simply spinning the ‘feckless peripheral’ thesis which leads to the idiocy of the ‘conflationist fallacy’ while ignoring the role of unregulated capital flows at the root of the crisis.

@Kevin O’Rourke

Walter Hallstein (prof, german, wehrmacht, CDU member), first president of the Commission, warned against the continuing power of Franco_German Gaulism in arguing that the Commission needed to take control.

What we witnessed during the crisis was the reemergence of full-blooded Franco-Geman Gaulism and its UDID [unilateral delaration of its independent dictatorship] completely sidelined the Commission as well as all other member states to say nothing of their democratic citizenries. The pernicious nationalist influence of the Bundesbanke on the ECB may also be viewed as Guallist. 50 years after Hallstein’s warning he is ignored by both the CDU and the ECB.

Separate the Banks from the Sovereigns (conflationist fallacy – not there yet)
Commission to take power over Franco-German Gaullism (not there yet)
Sever the link between the Bundesbanke and the ECB (not there yet ..

@All

Interesting to listen to Morning Ireland regarding the non impact Tourism Irelands efforts have had in delivering thousands of Londoners to this Isle during the Olympics. Some tourists (non UK it must be noted) were interviewed and the response which was most notable was that despite the recession tourists were shocked by the prices still being charged in this country for virtually everything it seems. Whether we like it not we still have a serious problem with pricing be it property, VAT, airports, tolls, GPs, Professional charges,rates, education, insurance, food, petrol & diesel, gas, electricity etc etc. . Most if not all the cost probelms lie somehere between Brussels and Kildare Street.

It seems fairly obvious that until the impact of Govt is removed to its most negligible amount throughout our economy I’m afraid our competitative cost disadvantage will remain a painful reminder that the Celtic Tiger excess is alive and kicking.

@Yield or Bust

“Celtic Tiger excess is alive and kicking..”

Yes it is in certain areas but our tourist industry is also being devastated by official policy towards cultural tourism. Recent commentary by Robert Ballagh (Ir Times) and and Joseph O’Connor (radio) have pointed out that despite over 30% of tourist coming to Ireland in part because if its cultural heritage, many of these places now have restricted opening hours etc. Gavin Kostick has made the same point several times.
The official policy seems to be driven by the Moore McDowell’s myopic view of a tourist venue as a direct cash source, ignoring the tourist spend in non heritage sites.

On a trip to Wexford last spring on a long holiday weekend, the Tourist office in Enniscorthy, closest to 1798 rebellion area, was closed for the weekend.

So where do people go in the rain? To the pubs perhaps!

The Dept of Arts Heritage , which includes the National Library / Museum suffered (from memory) a cut of approx 27% in its budget this year, the largest of any department.

It is not just prices that are killing tourism. To link in to the theme of the thread, our own government ‘institution’ is doing a fine job in killing tourism.
There is no bigger insult to a tourist than a door closed in their face.
They cannot complain to the door. They just don’t come back.

If the moderator allows the it, The Robert Ballagh letter is worth reading in full:

“Sir, – A few years ago I found myself, against my better instincts, greatly encouraged by remarks made by the great and the good at the Farmleigh Forum, organised by the previous government.

We were told how important the arts are in our society and how the arts must play a central role in our recovery. More recently we hear a lot about the value of cultural tourism, particularly in the context of the initiative “The Gathering”.

Well, how foolish was I to believe that such aspirations might translate into positive action.

Last week, when travelling back to Dublin from Galway by train I had a truly revealing experience. On the journey I struck up a conversation with some people from the US who were without question cultural tourists. Now even though this was their first trip to Ireland, they came well informed. I listened with interest as they outlined their various encounters with Irish cultural life. They first travelled to Sandycove to visit the Martello Tower, made famous by James Joyce, only to discover that it was closed. After this disappointment, they returned to Dublin and went to Synge Street to see the home of George Bernard Shaw to discover that it too was closed.

They then decided to change tack and check out the visual arts scene.

Sadly, no luck there! They found that most of the National Gallery was closed and that several rooms in the Hugh Lane Gallery were also closed due to staff shortages. Luckily they didn’t venture out to Kilmainham because there they would have discovered that the Irish Museum of Modern Art is also closed.

After Dublin they travelled west to find that the Nora Barnacle Museum in Galway was not open to the public and that the tower in Sligo, once occupied by WB Yeats, was closed due to flood damage.

So, having listened to this disappointing litany, the only emotion I can admit to in relation to our present cultural infrastructure is one of shame. – Yours, etc,”

On the subject of poor performance, the misappropriation of public funds in Member States to meet the mandates of the ECB, and the consequences of this misappropriation for sovereign borrowing costs are certainly an element in the increased disenchantment of the electorates of Member States with the institutions of the EU.

Quite consistent with evidence from other countries:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w16891

plus an error term for the huge, huge errors

DOCM,

Perhaps I did not express myself clearly enough, but I think my point may have escaped your argument.

There is an ambiguity about the political status of the EU institutions which may, indeed, have a great deal to do with the ‘incremental’ model of political development since its foundation, particularly the principle of showing respect for cultural diversity among member states and so on. National political institutions, good , bad or indifferent, command allegience of citizens because there is an implicit sense of political and cultural engagement with them. They are, intrinsically, ‘of us’ even when it seems they are not governing ‘for us’. Even though what the EU institutions do may affect the daily lives and activities of citizens in more profound ways than some of the actions of national government, that same sense of engagement doesn’t hold for a host of reasons; not least of which is that the EU is represented to citizens both by politicians and the media as primarily a regulatory agency, or a supranational coercive power, rather than as part of the ‘natural’ democratic order.

In our own case, it’s reasonable to argue that it is a mixture of fear and greed that motivates our EU engagement – fear that we might lose out ( as in the Fiscal Treaty referendum) or naked self interest (as was the case with EU structural and cohersion funds’ and CAP access in the past), rahter than any allegiance to the concept of ‘Europe’ per se.

It seems to me that loyalty to a concept of ‘Europe’ is rather confined anyway. As expressed in Kevin’s paper (p17), in class terms: “the unskilled in rich countries, and the less mobile everywhere, may have less to gain from international economic integration than the skilled or mobile.” Philosophical engagement with a concept of ‘Europe’ thus may be even further limited to specific elite groups – senior civil servants, MEPs, other political groupings and business and civil society lobbyist/NGOs. The broader civil society has not hitched up to European ideals. As things stand they can’t; because the European institutions are too shallow, and too politically weak, to permit such identification. Hence the ‘push’ from the EU is always less tractible than the ‘pull’ of national institutions.

My counterargument is that the political allegiance to Europe doesn’t ‘wax and wane’ in the same way as allegiance to national political institutions; it simply doesn’t exist in the same way. Nor can one envisage the circumstances in which it could be made to exist: there are too many barriers to it at this stage. I noted the media representation barrier in my previous post. Kevin’s paper references some economic ones. Then there are linguistic, racial tensions and cultural barriers that also lie dormant, but readily flare up in times of tension.

Please don’t get me wrong: I’m an old europhile! I think, though, that we need to have a debate about what Europe means and what is being created, whether through small incremental steps or big bold initiatives, and how the present chasm between national political arenas of power and a European polity may be bridged.

Apologies for the length of this response to your interesting reply to my first one, which has inspired these meandering further thoughts on this topic.

@ Veronica

Just to hand.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0802/breaking3.html

Notably;

“The Bundesbank was “not just one of 17 central banks” in the euro zone, Mr Weidmann said, hinting it would not look on indefinitely as the ECB pursues a strategy German economists see as outside its mandate.

“We are the biggest and most important bank in the euro system and continue to have entitlements and demands that go further than some other central banks. Whether it’s interest rates or special measures, it always ends the same way: with the central bank expected to follow goals of fiscal policy,” he said.”

This is unbelievable stuff!

Well done Draghi. He has flushed out Weidman. The BUBU has blown its cover and Weidman has made an donkey of himself.
Weidman has put it up to all the other ECB council members. By his version they only travel to Frankfurt to make up the numbers and get a nice lunch. His is the only vote on the ECB council.

Later in the article he threatens to thrown his rattler out of the pram, in not backing the communique agreed banking union, if he does not get his way.

No wonder European institutions have lost the confidence of European citizens. Is there a simple reason.
They have not been acting in the interests of European citizens.
They have to ask for Weidman’s permission to do anything.

“This is unbelievable stuff!”

@Joseph Ryan

No wonder European institutions have lost the confidence of European citizens. Is there a simple reason.
They have not been acting in the interests of European citizens.
They have to ask for Weidman’s permission to do anything.

+1

To “anti-democratic” and “oligarchical” we should add “useless”.

In a wonderful current example ECB figurehead Draghi appears to have blown it. As American economist J W Mason noted in his excellent post Pain Is the Agenda: The Method in the ECB’s Madness “It’s hard to suppress a lingering suppression that central bankers are, after all, bankers.” and here we again see the tensions between between financial sector interests, European neoliberalism and Germany’s gold bug infestation have once again prevented any effective action from being taken.

Contra Draghi, we need some way to make EMU reversible.

The European Social Survey asks a bunch of questions about people’s trust (in police,legal system, politicians etc). The only European institution it looks at is the European Parliament. It shows a fall in trust for Ireland in 2010 (on a scale of 0 to 10) but I wouldn’t call it a collapse.
Bear in mind that towards the end of the period people are showing less trust in most things:

2002 5.1
2004 5.4
2006 5.3
2008 4.7
2010 4.1

For a look at our trust in politicians, see my
http://kevindenny.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/has-trust-in-politicians-collapsed/

Indeed. The 2012 data will be available next year so we can compare further. The parliament may not generate as strong a reaction as ECB or the Commision anyway.

What is depressing is to see the same parochialism, gombeenism and pork-barrel coming out of Brussels (and the ECB) as out of the Dail and Seanad.

I don’t think you can simply characterise it as distrust of “destructive economic policies” because I don’t really see any economic policies. I see a continuation at the European level of the Irish government’s long held strategy of “sit on our hands, hope for the best and win the next election”.

The feeble-minded response to the deficit/banking crisis is as much at the EU/ECB as it is at home.