“Europe would not function any more if it changed course after every election.”
(Angela Merkel, quoted here, poo-pooing the notion that French voters might have any say over whether the next government ratifies this treaty or not.)
Words fail me, but they’re hardly necessary,
“So, we hear Ireland is recovering”, a French friend said to me last night.
(Mind you, they said something similar in the summer of 2010. Our government has an incentive to sell the Irish good news story, and “Europe” has an incentive to buy it.)
So, here are the latest employment data, reporting the largest seasonally adjusted quarterly fall in employment in two years, and which surely deserve a thread of their own.
I have a Project Syndicate column on the summit, available here.
Wolfgang Münchau asks whether the only way to save the eurozone is to destroy the EU here.
My guess is that if Europeans had to choose between the EU and the euro, most would opt for the former.
In honor of the summit, I thought I’d post a link to Colm’s last piece in the Sunday Independent, which hasn’t yet had a thread of its own.
Summiteers, please remember: just because a particular “solution” seems politically necessary, that doesn’t mean that it makes any economic sense at all. If you really want to save the euro (as opposed to enabling it to hobble along for a few more weeks, months or years), then shouldn’t reforming the mandate of the ECB be at the top of your agenda?
And do please think about what constitutionalizing the equation
“Europe = austerity + unemployment”
will mean politically for the European project going forward.