For the first time Gallup finds a statistical tie for leaving the Euro in both Greece and Italy.
This has been a long time coming, and a great deal of suffering has happened because people are so slow to adjust to reality. The Euro was never a good idea for either Greece or Italy, and staying in it has cost them a great number of lives, ruined lives, and unhappiness.
It is unclear to me that the Euro is a good idea for any nation in Europe except the Germans. It is too tedious to go into the details; if you’ve been paying attention at all, you know that nations need the ability to use their currency to devalue, and that the Euro is lower than the German Mark would be, giving Germany a large export advantage.
The Euro would only make sense if Europe were going to genuinely amalgamate. If Paris, and Berlin, and so on were reduced to the status of American states.
Meanwhile we are watching the end of the Schengen system. White women have been raped in Germany, and that’s going to be the end of Merkel’s strong support for letting refugees in. Internal borders have been going up all over Europe, and that’s going to continue. This, one notes, fucks the southern European nations of, oh, Greece and Italy. When the borders are closed they’re going to be stuck with almost all the refugees without the capacity to deal with them.
Why are they still in the Euro? Why are they still in the EU?
Polls still show very strong support for staying in the EU, but I wonder if the benefits still outweigh the advantages. If Europe can’t even fairly divide up refugees according to each member’s ability to handle them, what serious crisis could Europe handle? And remember, the refugee crisis in Europe is nothing compared to what Lebanon or Turkey have had to handle.
The EU was created so there wouldn’t be another general European war. Maybe it should have stuck to that mandate rather than charging ahead with a level of integration it could not support, with a design that ensured that most countries could not hold referendums if support existed.
The EU did a great deal of good, I won’t deny it. It is understandable that it still has a high level of support in certain nations (like Poland). But it has become an anti-democratic stronghold whose policies are clearly damaging the economies of many of its members. I’m not even sure one can make the case that France wouldn’t be better off out of the Euro.
A world of little states is problematic. So many of our problems can only be solved trans-nationally. But the trans-national bodies we have created have been disasters. The WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF have all done more harm than good–in essence because they were designed to maintain the post-WWII status quo (over Keynes objections, I might add).
Until we understand what should be done locally, and what should be done internationally, and until we decide upon the source of our ultimate legitimacy (the EU, IMF, WTO, and World Bank all do not agree it is the “people”), then we are going to continue to have these problems.
That would be fine if we weren’t currently engaged in activities which are likely to see one or two billion people die, and which, on the outside, risk wiping out the human race.
We need to make internationalism work. The first step towards that would be understanding that internationalism must be designed to work for everyone, and that there is infrastructure is in place to genuinely care for those who lose out (there are always some).
Until then, joining projects like the WTO or Euro remains political malfeasance.
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