Technocracy is no way to go

The proposal – since withdrawn – by outgoing Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou for a popular referendum on austerity policies mandated by the European Central Bank definitively underlined that the real problem regarding the rescue of the euro is far more political than economic, and that the consensus of Europe’s citizenry will be required sooner or later.

In Europe, referenda have unfortunately shown that the citizenship of individual states are often reluctant to become European citizens. Take Denmark in 1992, when the Maastricht Treaty was voted down; or France and the Netherlands in 2005, which both rejected the draft of the European Constitution. Also worth remembering was Ireland’s initial 2008 refusal of the Lisbon treaty.

The real political crisis today concerns models of indirect democracy. They give citizens only the right to vote, while delegating all decisions to elected politicians. These elected officials, wherever one turns, seem incapable of making decisions for the common good.

The State is the coldest of all monsters

Instead, they are the passive subjects of lobbyist pressure in a heavy atmosphere of corruption and defend various vested interests in such a way as to make both majority and minority unavailable to indispensable mediation.

But when citizens feel that the tone of their lives and the premises of personal freedom are being jeopardized by political shortcomings, violent reactions emerge, which unsettle the functioning of states themselves.

As a result, Nietzsche’s thinking makes its way to the forefront. In his masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he wrote: “The State is the coldest of all monsters. It lies coldly; from its mouth comes this lie: I, the State, am the people.”

Moreover, according to Kelsen, only in direct democracies is the social order actually created by the holders of political rights, who exercise their will in popular assemblies that are held, as they once were at the beginning of Athenian democracy, in the Agora.

This same principle helped inspire the Occupy Wall Street movement as well as the nonviolent “Indignadosé movement the world over, focused at the moment on Greece. In the scheme of things, this is the real revenge of the Agora.

Even more serious is that fact that the ECB (or the International Monetary Fund) are now dictating the rules and regulations of austerity policies without ever having been conferred the sovereignty to do so. This anomalous (technocratic?) control over the economies of member states can yield three possible outcomes.

The Agora vendetta

The first, and by far the most troubling, is that a number of states are forced to leave the eurozone, creating the kind of global financial chaos that is feared, as President Barack Obama noted during the G20 meetings, even by the United States, a country that for nearly identical reasons finds itself in serious trouble.

The second consists, unimaginably, of a euro cut in two, with the stronger half belonging to those states with more ordered economies, such as Germany and northern European countries; and the weaker half tied to the countries of southern Europe, at risk of default.

The third hypothesis would resolve all the current problems. It calls for working to complete Europe’s original political design, as a “free and united” entity, to paraphrase the Athens Manifesto. This in fact was the intention of Europe’s founding fathers.

Reaching this goal means that blind financial-technocratic governance, which so far has produced nothing but inequalities among the citizens of individual member states, yields the playing field to politics, which uses deliberated democracy to create a truly European citizenry to which all people belong, based on the values of parity and equality that I’ve already spoken of repeatedly.

This is the only solution that avoids “the Agora vendetta” and the only one that abolishes the disparities among the citizens of member states and that consolidates, in the context of a federal Europe, an authoritative and non-dispersive presence.

Such a Europe, along with the United States, China, and emerging nations, could sit down at a table and lay down new rules to fend off and fight the disasters and anxieties that the process of globalization has created.

Translated from the Italian by Christopher P. Winner

From London

Sarkozy and Merkel, the new Soviets

“When will the Empress of Europe and her French poodle ever learn?” asks Simon Heffer in the Daily Mail. For the veteran EU-phobic columnist, the shenanigans over last week’s abortive Greek referendum demonstrate that “There can be no doubt now about how brutally the European Union does its business, or how it treats the accepted norms of democracy as a tiresome obstacle to its rule.”

When I heard Europe’s paymaster, Chancellor Merkel of Germany, and her lickspittle, President Sarkozy of France, issue their ultimatum to Mr Papandreou — ‘do as you’re told or we’ll cut off your money!’ — it brought back memories of how the late and unlamented Leonid Brezhnev used to run his satellite states when dictator of the Soviet Union.

As for Italy, the next weakest link in the euro-chain, it is -

… a country whose debt is funded like one of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi schemes, and for which a hideously expensive reckoning is fast approaching. Admittedly, the moral tone of international politics would be raised by the removal of Silvio Berlusconi. But he should be removed only by Italian voters — not via a Führergram from Berlin.

For Heffer, the collapse of the euro is inevitable: “All that remains to be settled is the date of the funeral.”