Experts: Europe needs more perfect union
Finance officials and experts gathered in Italy mostly agreed Saturday that Europe needs deeper political union to preserve the troubled euro — even though persistent national identities made the prospect politically unlikely in the near future.
Speakers at the annual Ambrosetti forum labored to articulate the emerging existential dilemma: Monetary union struggles without central budget control, but member nations want independence; and the imbalances that result could lead to a calamitous breakup of the euro — which no one wants either, especially since it could send the world economy into a tailspin.
Unless Europeans agree “to complete economic and monetary union … with a fiscal union, with a strong governance, with a feeling that some political decision should be adopted in common by those who are sharing the single currency, we will not succeed,” said Joaquin Almunia, a vice president of the EU commission, the closest thing to a central government in the union.
While most governments bristle at this, Spanish Finance Minister Elena Salgado bravely concurred, saying she supported “more fiscal integration” and noting that her country was in any case deeply dependent on trade with the rest of the EU.
The current structure depends on national governments acting in concert when needed. But instead, said Italian economist Mario Monti, governments are becoming increasingly “short-termist” — preferring to pander to voters even if the result is dysfunction on the European level.
The most acute example of this has been repeated dithering over rescue packages for Greece and other economies on the brink of insolvency in the past two years. The emerging pattern has been rescue packages agreed upon at the last possible moment, after prolonged hesitation and public acrimony sent European and global markets careening.