Post by RedFlag32 on Feb 11, 2006 15:12:24 GMT
THE CRISIS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION
INTRODUCTION
The perspective from which this criticism of the European Union is made is that of socialist internationalism. It seeks to set out the position of classical socialist thought on the national and democratic questions as these are affected in the West and Central European area by the European Union.
We are internationalists on the basis of our solidarity as members of the human race. As internationalists we seek the emancipation of mankind. The human race is divided into nations.
Therefore we seek the self-determination of nations. The right of nations to self-determination inspired the 18th century American Revolution and was formally proclaimed as a democratic principle in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French Revolution, 1789. It is now a basic principle of international law, enshrined in the United Nations Charter. As democrats and internationalists we assert the right of those nations that wish it to have their independence, sovereignty and a nation state of their own, so that they may relate to one another internationally on the basis of equal rights with other nations. The European Union seeks to negate this principle fundamentally.
The historical origins of the European integration project are in the 1920s and 1930s, with Jean Monnet and others who conceived and pushed the project for decades. Three factors gave it impetus after World War 2: a State power factor, an economic factor and a bureaucratic/personal power factor.*
THE STATE POWER FACTOR
One basic formula for understanding the EU project on the political side is this, to quote Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung: “Take five broken empires, add a sixth one later, and try to make one big neo-colonial empire out of it all.” This is not the whole story, but it is perhaps the most essential part of the story.
The five broken empires were France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Holland, whose hearttlands were defeated, occupied and shattered in World War 2. After the war they found themselves in a world dominated by America and Russia. Their ruling elites, their Foreign Ministries especially, who had been used to running empires, concluded that if they could no longer be big powers in the world on their own, they should aim to be a big power collectively.
The sixth former empire that joined them later was Great Britain. Britain applied to join the then EEC at the behest of the USA in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez crisis. Her ambition was to divide France from Germany and prevent these two States together dominating Western Europe, or else to be included by them in a triumvirate to “run Europe” together. Britain has failed in either aspiration. This is probably the deepest root of popular British “euro-scepticism”.
The foundation myth of the EU is that it has its origins as a peace project to prevent wars between France and Germany. In fact war was impossible between individual members of either of the two blocs during the Cold War. Washington and Moscow would just not have permitted it. The atomic bomb makes inter-State wars in Europe impractical anyway. Most wars are civil wars. The end of the Cold War in 1989 brought war back to Europe after 45 years of armed peace, in Yugoslavia and Chechnya.
Historically the first step towards economic integration in post-war Europe was the 1951 European Coal and Steel Community. This was pushed by the USA at the time as a means of reconciling France to German rearmament at the commencement of the Cold War, just a few short years after the end of World War 2. The USA has been an ardent champion of European integration and enlargement from the early 1950s until the current Bush administration.
The real historical model for the EU is the unification of Germany in the 19th century. This began with a customs union, then became a confederation of formally equal states, then a monetary union and then a unified Federal State with one constitution, army and government representing it internationally vis-a-vis other States. Of course the people of Germany constituted one people who spoke the same language. The EU on the other hand consists of many peoples.
THE ECONOMIC FACTOR
The rules of the European Union are set down in its various treaties and given formal constitutional status in the “Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe”, whose ratification process is currrently suspended following its rejection by French and Dutch voters in referendums in summer 2005. These EU rules make it illegal under European law for Member State Governments to adopt any measure that would interfere with the free movement of good, services, capital and labour across the 25-member Union, or pursue policies that would discriminate in favour of one country’s economic actors as against those of the others. The European treaties turn classical laissez-faire competitive capitalism into supranational constitutional principles.
These rules provide an optimal profit-maximising environment for the EU-based transnational firms that have been the principal financial supporters of European integration since the 1950s. They substantially free private capital from national State interference and from democratic control by national parliaments and governments in response to their citizens’ concerns. They are naturally congenial to the EU-based transnational firms that are organised in such bodies as the EU Employers Confederation(UNICE) and the European Round-Table of Industrialists.
These business interests have been the principal economic advocates of the EU single market, the euro-currency and EU enlargement to include the East European countries. EU rules on free movement of labour put downward pressure on wage rates in the richer West European countries, while its rules on free movement of capital and land acquisition facilitate West European firms moving to Eastern Europe where wages are lower, working conditions poorer and pollution controls weaker. The EU-based Transational Corporations have traditionally been the principal financial backers of the international European Movement, which is a powerful cross-national lobby continually pushing further integration.
THE BUREAUCRATIC/PERSONAL POWER FACTOR
The process of EU integration transfers power from elected national parliaments and governments to a small number of politicians and bureaucrats at supranational level, who obtain a huge accretion of personal power thereby. In the EU the non-elected Commission has the monopoly of making proposals for new EU laws. Those laws are then made by the Council of Ministers, representing national governments, on the basis of a weighted or qualified majority of votes - 258 out of 345 in a 27-State EU - with each State having a different number of votes, ranging from 29 each for the biggest ones to 3 each for the smallest. The European Parliament cannot initiate any law, but may propose amendments to laws that are agreed by the Commission and Council of Ministers. It can also veto an EU law by an absolute majority of its members if such agreement cannot be reached, but this seldom happens. The EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg adjudicates on all disputes under the treaties and its judgements are binding on Member States, their Governments and their citizens.
At national level Ministers are part of the executive arm of government, responsible to their elected national parliaments and citizens. When a particular policy area is transferred to the supranational level of the EU, the relevant national Ministers are substantially freed from national political control and are transformed into supranational EU legislators. They are made members of what is literally an oligarchy, a legislative committee, of 25 persons on the Council of Ministers who make laws for 450 million people. The EU Council of Ministers is irremoveable as a body. Over time its individual members become ever more distanced from their national electorates, their willingly accepted personal task vis-à-vis their fellow Ministers from other countries, with whom they interact on first-name terms, being to deliver their peoples in support of further integration. National parliamentarians who aspire to become Ministers, whether they are in government or opposition, tend to share this outlook.
This process represents a slow coup against political democracy at the level of Nation States. It means that at national level those running the State itself become party to depriving their fellow citizens of the power to make their own laws and decide their own government. The State itself thereby turns into an enemy of its own citizens. Long-established national institutions of government such as parliaments,executives and courts remain formally in being, so that citizens continue to believe that nothing much has changed; but these institutions have been hollowed out and their reality transformed as power has been gradually shifted from the national to the supranational level. Simultaneously at civil service level senior national bureaucrats are substantially freed from democratic public scrutiny as powers are transferred to the bureaucracy in Brussels with which they regularly interact. There EU laws are prepared for enactment by the Council of Ministers outside the ken of national parliaments or even the European Parliament, which can propose amendments to EU laws but cannot have those amendments adopted without the agreement of the EU Council and Commission.
Democracy, public accountability, wilt or disappear. This process, which would be accelerated under the proposed EU Constitution, is building inevitably to a major crisis of democracy across the European continent.
The “Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe” proposed to repeal the existing EC/EU treaties and establish a new European Union based on its own Constitution rather than on treaties between sovereign states as hitherto.
The proposed Constitution sought to give the constitutional form of a supranational Federal State to the 25, soon to be 27, Nation States of the EU. It would have given this new Union a political President, a Foreign Minister and diplomatic corps, and a Public Prosecutor. It would have given it power to sign treaties with other States in its many areas of competence. It would have imposed a constitutional obligation on all the EU States to increase their military budgets. The proposed Constitution would have made the citizens of the Member States of the EU into real citizens, not just nominal or honorary ones, of this new supranational entity, to which they would owe the normal citizens’ duty of loyalty and obedience to its laws, and obtain rights in relation to it. The only two powers of a State the EU would lack if the proposed Constitution were to come into force would be the power to impose taxes and to force its constituent Member States to go to war against their will, although as it is, some may go to war on behalf of the EU as long as the others consent. The advocates of EU integration have made no secret of their desire for the EU to obtain these remaining State powers in time. It is normal for “bottom-up” Federal States to develop in the gradual way the EU has - the USA, Canada Australia and 19th Century Gemany being the best examples. These Federal States contrast with “top-down” Federations,where originally unitary centralised States adopt a federal form - e.g. post-1945 Germany, Austria, Russia,India, Pakistan, Nigeria etc.
THE EU’S FUNDAMENTAL DEMOCRATIC PROBLEM
It is possible to turn the EU into a State, but it is not possible for that State to have a democratic basis and legitimacy. The reason is that democracy means rule by the “demos”, the people, through the representatives they elect and on whom they confer authority.
A European people does not exist except in the statistical sense, and one cannot be artificially created from above in the way the EU is attempting. The 450 million inhabitants of the EU are divided into many peoples, real national communities speaking their own languages, who desire to make their own laws, decide their own government and self-determine themselves as they have done for generations through representatives they elect and who are responsible to them.
It is impossible to democratise the EU by giving the European Parliament power to make laws instead of the 25-person Council of Ministers, as some suggest. The democracy that is needed to underpin a stable State is not just majority rule, but majority rule on the basis of a people, a collective “We”, a community - normally a national community - where there is sufficient mutual identification and solidarity among its members as to induce minorities willingly to obey the majority, thereby giving majority rule its democratic authority.
The existence of such a real, self-aware community is crucial for underpinning the legitimacy and stability of a State with its own tax and public service system, from which some citizens are net gainers and others net losers - if that State is to be stable and endure. It is the absence of such a community at European level, and the impossibility of creating it artificially, that is the root cause of the EU’s crisis of authority and legitimacy.
The EU’s “democratic deficit” problem is inherently insoluble without repatriating major powers from the supranational to the national level. The proposed EU Constitution would have done the opposite of this.
THE CURRENT CRISIS OF EU INTEGRATION
Officially the EU Member States are at present engaged in a “period of reflection” following the French and Dutch No votes to the Constitution. It is unlikely that there will be any further plans for revising the European treaties until after the French presidential election in summer 2007.
Meanwhile there are deep divisions between the Member States over the EU budget for the upcoming 2007-2013 period. The ten relatively poor new Member countries want maximum subsidies from Brussels, whereas the net contributing countries, in particular Britain, Germany and Holland, are reluctant to pay up.
There is tension between those countries that want to enlarge the EU further by including Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria etc., and those that see such EU “widening” as inhibiting further “deepening”, that is, further integration. Some see the solution to this problem as being the formation of an inner group around France and Germany that would integrate further, perhaps in such areas as harmonized taxation, using the EU institutions for that purpose, while leaving the others to move at their own pace. But such a two-tier or three-tier EU would almost certainly generate new political tensions between Member States and deepen popular hostility to the whole project.
The future of the EU is intimately linked to the fate of the euro. A central aim of the supranational Federation envisaged by the proposed EU Constitution was to provide a political counterpart for a single European currency. What exists at present is 12 countries, 12 States, 12 Governments, 12 budgets and 12 tax and public spending policies - all using the same euro-currency. Yet without one State behind it, the euro cannot survive in the long run. A State is always needed to guarantee a currency’s value. All States have their own currencies and all currencies belong to States.
Countries need maximum flexibility, not rigidity, in the modern world. The euro-currency has been a political project from the beginning, aimed at reconciling France to Germany’s reunification after 1989, but using economic means that are quite inappropriate for this purpose. Germany and France’s high unemployment rate is significantly due to the euro. The euro-currency imposes a one-size-fits-all interest rate policy on quite different economies, and an inflexible exchange rate that makes it impossible for States to restore their economic competitiveness by changing their currency’s value.
There have been suggestions recently that Italy might leave the euro-zone in order to restore its competitiveness by devaluing the lira. Otherwise it faces years of rising unemployment as its industries cannot compete at the implicitly high exchange rate entailed by eurozone membership. The fall in the dollar and the rise in the euro as a consequence of America’s balance of payments deficit hits the competitiveness of the eurozone as a whole. Even though all 25 EU States are supposed to abolish their national currencies and adopt the euro, this is very unlikely to happen.
In time the euro is likely to join history’s many abandoned currencies. The growing problems associated with it illustrate the fundamental lack of political realism of the European integration project as a whole. EU integration is dogged by problems that look like getting worse. Its popular legitimacy and acceptability decline with every year that passes. The EU’s emergence was the result of a particular international conjuncture after World War 2 and during the Cold War. It has no obvious purpose now apart from maintaining the power and perquisites of some powerful political, economic and bueaucratic elites whose careers and mental mind-sets are bound up with it. Its long-term historical prospects are bleak.
· Probably the best account in English of the development of the European Union and its historical origins, which go back to the 1920s and 1930s, is the book by Christopher Booker and Richard North, “The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive?”; revised paperback edition, 2005; Continuum Publishers, London and New York; ISBN: 0-8264-8014-4; E14 or £10 sterling.
Anthony Coughlan is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Social Policy at Trinity
College, Dublin, and Secretary of the National Platform EU Research and
Information Centre,Ireland. He may be contacted at 00-353-1-8305792 or
6081898. His e-mail address is <jcoughln@tcd.ie>
INTRODUCTION
The perspective from which this criticism of the European Union is made is that of socialist internationalism. It seeks to set out the position of classical socialist thought on the national and democratic questions as these are affected in the West and Central European area by the European Union.
We are internationalists on the basis of our solidarity as members of the human race. As internationalists we seek the emancipation of mankind. The human race is divided into nations.
Therefore we seek the self-determination of nations. The right of nations to self-determination inspired the 18th century American Revolution and was formally proclaimed as a democratic principle in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French Revolution, 1789. It is now a basic principle of international law, enshrined in the United Nations Charter. As democrats and internationalists we assert the right of those nations that wish it to have their independence, sovereignty and a nation state of their own, so that they may relate to one another internationally on the basis of equal rights with other nations. The European Union seeks to negate this principle fundamentally.
The historical origins of the European integration project are in the 1920s and 1930s, with Jean Monnet and others who conceived and pushed the project for decades. Three factors gave it impetus after World War 2: a State power factor, an economic factor and a bureaucratic/personal power factor.*
THE STATE POWER FACTOR
One basic formula for understanding the EU project on the political side is this, to quote Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung: “Take five broken empires, add a sixth one later, and try to make one big neo-colonial empire out of it all.” This is not the whole story, but it is perhaps the most essential part of the story.
The five broken empires were France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Holland, whose hearttlands were defeated, occupied and shattered in World War 2. After the war they found themselves in a world dominated by America and Russia. Their ruling elites, their Foreign Ministries especially, who had been used to running empires, concluded that if they could no longer be big powers in the world on their own, they should aim to be a big power collectively.
The sixth former empire that joined them later was Great Britain. Britain applied to join the then EEC at the behest of the USA in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez crisis. Her ambition was to divide France from Germany and prevent these two States together dominating Western Europe, or else to be included by them in a triumvirate to “run Europe” together. Britain has failed in either aspiration. This is probably the deepest root of popular British “euro-scepticism”.
The foundation myth of the EU is that it has its origins as a peace project to prevent wars between France and Germany. In fact war was impossible between individual members of either of the two blocs during the Cold War. Washington and Moscow would just not have permitted it. The atomic bomb makes inter-State wars in Europe impractical anyway. Most wars are civil wars. The end of the Cold War in 1989 brought war back to Europe after 45 years of armed peace, in Yugoslavia and Chechnya.
Historically the first step towards economic integration in post-war Europe was the 1951 European Coal and Steel Community. This was pushed by the USA at the time as a means of reconciling France to German rearmament at the commencement of the Cold War, just a few short years after the end of World War 2. The USA has been an ardent champion of European integration and enlargement from the early 1950s until the current Bush administration.
The real historical model for the EU is the unification of Germany in the 19th century. This began with a customs union, then became a confederation of formally equal states, then a monetary union and then a unified Federal State with one constitution, army and government representing it internationally vis-a-vis other States. Of course the people of Germany constituted one people who spoke the same language. The EU on the other hand consists of many peoples.
THE ECONOMIC FACTOR
The rules of the European Union are set down in its various treaties and given formal constitutional status in the “Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe”, whose ratification process is currrently suspended following its rejection by French and Dutch voters in referendums in summer 2005. These EU rules make it illegal under European law for Member State Governments to adopt any measure that would interfere with the free movement of good, services, capital and labour across the 25-member Union, or pursue policies that would discriminate in favour of one country’s economic actors as against those of the others. The European treaties turn classical laissez-faire competitive capitalism into supranational constitutional principles.
These rules provide an optimal profit-maximising environment for the EU-based transnational firms that have been the principal financial supporters of European integration since the 1950s. They substantially free private capital from national State interference and from democratic control by national parliaments and governments in response to their citizens’ concerns. They are naturally congenial to the EU-based transnational firms that are organised in such bodies as the EU Employers Confederation(UNICE) and the European Round-Table of Industrialists.
These business interests have been the principal economic advocates of the EU single market, the euro-currency and EU enlargement to include the East European countries. EU rules on free movement of labour put downward pressure on wage rates in the richer West European countries, while its rules on free movement of capital and land acquisition facilitate West European firms moving to Eastern Europe where wages are lower, working conditions poorer and pollution controls weaker. The EU-based Transational Corporations have traditionally been the principal financial backers of the international European Movement, which is a powerful cross-national lobby continually pushing further integration.
THE BUREAUCRATIC/PERSONAL POWER FACTOR
The process of EU integration transfers power from elected national parliaments and governments to a small number of politicians and bureaucrats at supranational level, who obtain a huge accretion of personal power thereby. In the EU the non-elected Commission has the monopoly of making proposals for new EU laws. Those laws are then made by the Council of Ministers, representing national governments, on the basis of a weighted or qualified majority of votes - 258 out of 345 in a 27-State EU - with each State having a different number of votes, ranging from 29 each for the biggest ones to 3 each for the smallest. The European Parliament cannot initiate any law, but may propose amendments to laws that are agreed by the Commission and Council of Ministers. It can also veto an EU law by an absolute majority of its members if such agreement cannot be reached, but this seldom happens. The EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg adjudicates on all disputes under the treaties and its judgements are binding on Member States, their Governments and their citizens.
At national level Ministers are part of the executive arm of government, responsible to their elected national parliaments and citizens. When a particular policy area is transferred to the supranational level of the EU, the relevant national Ministers are substantially freed from national political control and are transformed into supranational EU legislators. They are made members of what is literally an oligarchy, a legislative committee, of 25 persons on the Council of Ministers who make laws for 450 million people. The EU Council of Ministers is irremoveable as a body. Over time its individual members become ever more distanced from their national electorates, their willingly accepted personal task vis-à-vis their fellow Ministers from other countries, with whom they interact on first-name terms, being to deliver their peoples in support of further integration. National parliamentarians who aspire to become Ministers, whether they are in government or opposition, tend to share this outlook.
This process represents a slow coup against political democracy at the level of Nation States. It means that at national level those running the State itself become party to depriving their fellow citizens of the power to make their own laws and decide their own government. The State itself thereby turns into an enemy of its own citizens. Long-established national institutions of government such as parliaments,executives and courts remain formally in being, so that citizens continue to believe that nothing much has changed; but these institutions have been hollowed out and their reality transformed as power has been gradually shifted from the national to the supranational level. Simultaneously at civil service level senior national bureaucrats are substantially freed from democratic public scrutiny as powers are transferred to the bureaucracy in Brussels with which they regularly interact. There EU laws are prepared for enactment by the Council of Ministers outside the ken of national parliaments or even the European Parliament, which can propose amendments to EU laws but cannot have those amendments adopted without the agreement of the EU Council and Commission.
Democracy, public accountability, wilt or disappear. This process, which would be accelerated under the proposed EU Constitution, is building inevitably to a major crisis of democracy across the European continent.
The “Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe” proposed to repeal the existing EC/EU treaties and establish a new European Union based on its own Constitution rather than on treaties between sovereign states as hitherto.
The proposed Constitution sought to give the constitutional form of a supranational Federal State to the 25, soon to be 27, Nation States of the EU. It would have given this new Union a political President, a Foreign Minister and diplomatic corps, and a Public Prosecutor. It would have given it power to sign treaties with other States in its many areas of competence. It would have imposed a constitutional obligation on all the EU States to increase their military budgets. The proposed Constitution would have made the citizens of the Member States of the EU into real citizens, not just nominal or honorary ones, of this new supranational entity, to which they would owe the normal citizens’ duty of loyalty and obedience to its laws, and obtain rights in relation to it. The only two powers of a State the EU would lack if the proposed Constitution were to come into force would be the power to impose taxes and to force its constituent Member States to go to war against their will, although as it is, some may go to war on behalf of the EU as long as the others consent. The advocates of EU integration have made no secret of their desire for the EU to obtain these remaining State powers in time. It is normal for “bottom-up” Federal States to develop in the gradual way the EU has - the USA, Canada Australia and 19th Century Gemany being the best examples. These Federal States contrast with “top-down” Federations,where originally unitary centralised States adopt a federal form - e.g. post-1945 Germany, Austria, Russia,India, Pakistan, Nigeria etc.
THE EU’S FUNDAMENTAL DEMOCRATIC PROBLEM
It is possible to turn the EU into a State, but it is not possible for that State to have a democratic basis and legitimacy. The reason is that democracy means rule by the “demos”, the people, through the representatives they elect and on whom they confer authority.
A European people does not exist except in the statistical sense, and one cannot be artificially created from above in the way the EU is attempting. The 450 million inhabitants of the EU are divided into many peoples, real national communities speaking their own languages, who desire to make their own laws, decide their own government and self-determine themselves as they have done for generations through representatives they elect and who are responsible to them.
It is impossible to democratise the EU by giving the European Parliament power to make laws instead of the 25-person Council of Ministers, as some suggest. The democracy that is needed to underpin a stable State is not just majority rule, but majority rule on the basis of a people, a collective “We”, a community - normally a national community - where there is sufficient mutual identification and solidarity among its members as to induce minorities willingly to obey the majority, thereby giving majority rule its democratic authority.
The existence of such a real, self-aware community is crucial for underpinning the legitimacy and stability of a State with its own tax and public service system, from which some citizens are net gainers and others net losers - if that State is to be stable and endure. It is the absence of such a community at European level, and the impossibility of creating it artificially, that is the root cause of the EU’s crisis of authority and legitimacy.
The EU’s “democratic deficit” problem is inherently insoluble without repatriating major powers from the supranational to the national level. The proposed EU Constitution would have done the opposite of this.
THE CURRENT CRISIS OF EU INTEGRATION
Officially the EU Member States are at present engaged in a “period of reflection” following the French and Dutch No votes to the Constitution. It is unlikely that there will be any further plans for revising the European treaties until after the French presidential election in summer 2007.
Meanwhile there are deep divisions between the Member States over the EU budget for the upcoming 2007-2013 period. The ten relatively poor new Member countries want maximum subsidies from Brussels, whereas the net contributing countries, in particular Britain, Germany and Holland, are reluctant to pay up.
There is tension between those countries that want to enlarge the EU further by including Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria etc., and those that see such EU “widening” as inhibiting further “deepening”, that is, further integration. Some see the solution to this problem as being the formation of an inner group around France and Germany that would integrate further, perhaps in such areas as harmonized taxation, using the EU institutions for that purpose, while leaving the others to move at their own pace. But such a two-tier or three-tier EU would almost certainly generate new political tensions between Member States and deepen popular hostility to the whole project.
The future of the EU is intimately linked to the fate of the euro. A central aim of the supranational Federation envisaged by the proposed EU Constitution was to provide a political counterpart for a single European currency. What exists at present is 12 countries, 12 States, 12 Governments, 12 budgets and 12 tax and public spending policies - all using the same euro-currency. Yet without one State behind it, the euro cannot survive in the long run. A State is always needed to guarantee a currency’s value. All States have their own currencies and all currencies belong to States.
Countries need maximum flexibility, not rigidity, in the modern world. The euro-currency has been a political project from the beginning, aimed at reconciling France to Germany’s reunification after 1989, but using economic means that are quite inappropriate for this purpose. Germany and France’s high unemployment rate is significantly due to the euro. The euro-currency imposes a one-size-fits-all interest rate policy on quite different economies, and an inflexible exchange rate that makes it impossible for States to restore their economic competitiveness by changing their currency’s value.
There have been suggestions recently that Italy might leave the euro-zone in order to restore its competitiveness by devaluing the lira. Otherwise it faces years of rising unemployment as its industries cannot compete at the implicitly high exchange rate entailed by eurozone membership. The fall in the dollar and the rise in the euro as a consequence of America’s balance of payments deficit hits the competitiveness of the eurozone as a whole. Even though all 25 EU States are supposed to abolish their national currencies and adopt the euro, this is very unlikely to happen.
In time the euro is likely to join history’s many abandoned currencies. The growing problems associated with it illustrate the fundamental lack of political realism of the European integration project as a whole. EU integration is dogged by problems that look like getting worse. Its popular legitimacy and acceptability decline with every year that passes. The EU’s emergence was the result of a particular international conjuncture after World War 2 and during the Cold War. It has no obvious purpose now apart from maintaining the power and perquisites of some powerful political, economic and bueaucratic elites whose careers and mental mind-sets are bound up with it. Its long-term historical prospects are bleak.
· Probably the best account in English of the development of the European Union and its historical origins, which go back to the 1920s and 1930s, is the book by Christopher Booker and Richard North, “The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive?”; revised paperback edition, 2005; Continuum Publishers, London and New York; ISBN: 0-8264-8014-4; E14 or £10 sterling.
Anthony Coughlan is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Social Policy at Trinity
College, Dublin, and Secretary of the National Platform EU Research and
Information Centre,Ireland. He may be contacted at 00-353-1-8305792 or
6081898. His e-mail address is <jcoughln@tcd.ie>