Author: Kevin O’Rourke

Timothy Garton Ash may be on to something. 2010 was clearly a turning point, when the Eurozone decided to engage in generalized pro-cyclical austerity — whether they did this because of the dodgy ideas that were floating around at the time, or simply because conservative politicians were more adept at using the crisis to further their long term goals (in their case, to shrink the state) than Europe’s useless left is something historians can debate in the future.

Garton Ash suggests that 2012 may also have been a turning point, or rather a turning point that never was: with Hollande and Monti newly installed, there was a clear demand for a more symmetric adjustment policy from pro-European Southern leaders, and an opportunity for Germany to respond favourably– after all, Monti was their man. That response never came. All we got was a June summit declaration on banking union on which there has subsequently been much backtracking. There was nothing on making short run macroeconomic adjustment less asymmetric. And now the German government is busily making matters even worse on the fiscal front.

I don’t see any way that the Eurozone can avoid a major political crisis. If the current policy mix continues unabated for the foreseeable future, then the real economy in the southern periphery will continue to worsen — unless of course something miraculously turns up, which is a possibility which we can however safely discount. Since this situation will ultimately prove politically unsustainable, the ‘steady as she goes’ scenario implies an eventual political crisis that could be quite nasty, at some unknowable date in the future — a year, or two years, or even — God help us — five or ten years from now.

But can we envisage a shift in the short run macroeconomic policy mix — looser monetary policy, more debt restructuring, a countervailing core fiscal stimulus channelled either through Germany or some EU body like the EIB — and moves towards an appropriate Eurozone architecture — a real banking union, which will require at least some element of fiscal union, and ideally some other elements of fiscal union as well — which is brought about in the absence of crisis? We have all seen how OMT has bred complacency and allowed German politicians to wriggle off the hooks on which they had been impaled last June. 2012 was a pretty good year to force change from that point of view as well; another way in which the year was a turning point that never was.

The problem of course is that a political crisis serious enough to force major reform may also lead to the collapse of the Eurozone: otherwise it won’t succeed in forcing major reform. Germany’s leaders can prove me wrong, by heeding Garton Ash’s advice and seizing their second chance. But I am afraid that they will not do so.

It isn’t Paul Krugman’s fault that the European Commission has been busily defending a macroeconomic policy mix that is doing tremendous damage to the European periphery: the EC only has itself to blame on this one. And so the latest outraged tweets emerging from the Brussels bubble are a little hard to take.

One of the tragedies of the interwar period is that the good guys — liberal internationalists — tended to support a macroeconomic policy mix that was destructive, as a result of their support for the gold standard. In so doing they helped undermine the case for liberal internationalism. It would be helpful if the cocooned elites in Brussels remembered that they are, de facto, the public face of the European project, and that when they defend the indefensible they are in their turn undermining that project.

Terrific article by Mark Mazower here.

Mario Monti has done Europe’s voters a huge service. It would have been easy for him to remain aloof during this election; by standing for election he allowed Italians to directly express their opinion on the EU’s current macroeconomic policy mix. The results are pretty conclusive: current policies have no democratic legitimacy, at least in Italy.

We all remember Jean-Claude Juncker’s statement that “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it”. He got it half right: they certainly don’t know how to get re-elected. But it is also clear that they really don’t know what to do about the economy either. And this represents a huge problem for the European project, since by pinning their colours so firmly to the mast of an incoherent and destructive macroeconomic policy mix, Europe’s leaders risk doing huge damage to that project. Indeed, the damage is already occurring.

It would be nice to think that these leaders would take seriously pleas by people like Karl for a saner approach to macroeconomic policy. The evidence since September, however, is that they will sit on their hands unless forced to do otherwise by the markets: the risk of financial crisis, not the reality of peripheral unemployment crises, is what grabs their attention. Another reason to welcome the Italian vote, perhaps.

Update: Paul Krugman has a very similar reaction here.