Greece threatens more than the euro

[pampango]

Source: UK Financial Times

As Greece's financial crisis rumbles onwards, it has become commonplace to argue that the roots of the problem stretch all the way back to the design of Europe's single currency. Actually, it is worse than that. The Greek crisis is about the very basis on which European unity has been built for the last 60 years. It threatens not just the euro but the entire edifice of the European Union.

The risk for Europe now is that if the EU does not move forward politically in response to the Greek crisis, it will move backwards - and the long process of European integration could start to unravel. The EU has always proceeded by creating economic "facts on the ground", which were intended to trigger political effects. Ever since the 1950s this has worked admirably, as a modest coal and steel community turned into a common market and finally into a Union of 27 nations, with its own parliament, supreme court and foreign policy.

Jacques Delors, the European Commission president who presided over the creation of a single market in the 1980s, said frankly: "We're not here just to make a single market - that doesn't interest me - but to make a political union." The creation of the single market involved a huge expansion of European law and therefore deep erosions of national sovereignty.

The same political thinking lay behind the design of the single European currency in the 1990s. As Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, a former member of the board of the European Central Bank, recently wrote in these pages: "The founding fathers wanted the euro primarily as a step towards political union."

But the consequences could go well beyond the single currency. The EU would have a crisis of confidence and the likely result would be that other powers it has acquired, on everything from immigration to social policy, would come into question. There is more than money at stake in the Greek crisis.

Read more: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/900dc6f8-201a-11df-81a2-00144feab49a.html

[Demeter]

1. Good Luck With That

I sincerely doubt that the populace in Europe want to be in a political union. They want the blessings of economic union without the imposition of Empire, as a counterbalance to the global Corporation. After all, Hitler, Napoleon, and the like were trying for political union, too, and were undermined from within as well as defeated from without. Guess which side had the Global Corporations working for him? (That's right--NOT the Common Man).

Corporations LOVE the dictator--marketing is so simple when there's only one person to bribe, coerce or otherwise subordinate.

[Odin2005]

2. Structures like the EU are how corporatists quash the will of the people.

[pampango]

3. On my few trips to Europe my impression was that the people likes the freedom of movement and

commerce on the continent that has come with the EU, but they still think of themselves as Germans, French, English, etc. They like what the EU has achieved but most don't have a burning desire for a political union that goes beyond what they've achieved to day.

[Diclotican]

4. pampango

pampango

And the "tribe mentality" that the different nations is a part of, wil survive for a long time after EU is dead in the water.. But EU have been doing some good to, it is far more easy today to travel from Vardø to Gibraltar. From the Scottish Isles to the border of Russia than it have been since the roman times.. Most european want that freedom, and they also want to be in peace with eatch other, as a result of trade and the posibility of movment. But a POLITICAL union, where you are just a group in a bigger union is far out in the future for most europeans.. Yes EU do have a parlament, a court and something that can be taken for a forreign policy outside the union.. But it is still far from what you would say a political union where the Parlament itself make rules and laws.. It is the different country who in the end "own" their own laws..

Maybe in the future it can be different, but today I would say that most of the members would not go farer than they have been doing allready..

And I woted NO in 1994 when Norway woted for or against EU...

Diclotican

[The2ndWheel]

5. Entropy

It takes a lot of energy to bring, and keep, that many different people together.

[blue97keet]

6. Make too big a batch of hamburger and it takes one sick cow to contaminate everthing at once.

[depakid]

7. Greece... Spain, Portugal, Ireland