Adults in the Room, economist-turned-politician Yanis Varoufakis's account of his attempts while Greek finance minister to get the country's creditors to agree to write off some of its debts in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, opens like a thriller. Although it then goes on to become a slightly overlong blow-by-blow account, it always maintains its grip on your interests, even though you know how things turned out.
You can understand why Varoufakis would have wanted to set the record straight with a microscopic account of the events given how he was maltreated by the media through the machinations of his political opponents, but the middle part of the book does drag slightly with the succession of meetings and papers.
On the other hand, how often do you get the chance to take a ringside seat at the eurogroup? Not very.
Among the major players, only Varoufakis and Emmanuel Macron emerge from the book with their reputations essentially intact. The Eurogroup itself, most of its member ministers, the media, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, Sigmar Gabriel, Wolfgang Schauble and even Angela Merkel all display varying degrees of incompetence, ineffectiveness, illogicality, callousness and foolishness, even allowing for some bias on the part of the author.
This is a sometimes-thrilling, ultimately depressing account of how governments and institutions can allow themselves to become trapped by circumstances, group-think, myopia and stubbornness. There are glimmers of hope for a better future, not least in Macron, but will those glimmers coalesce into a guiding light?
Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts
Sunday, 4 February 2018
Saturday, 4 February 2017
Book review: Europe's Last Chance, Guy Verhofstadt, 2017
Guy Verhofstadt is probably best known to most non-Belgians (he was that country's prime minister from 1999 to 2008) as the anti-Nigel Farage, the man at whom Farage's anti-EU tirades are perhaps most often directed, given that Verhofstadt and Farage face off in the European Parliament, whereas Jean-Claude Juncker, Farage's other bete noire, presides over the European Commission. Verhofstadt's designation as the Parliament's Brexit representative has thrust him further into the limelight recently, a position he certainly enjoys.
He's a pro-European, but also a reformist, and Europe's Last Chance is his diagnosis of and prescription for the EU's ills. As such it's wide-ranging, covering EU governance, financial union, an EU army, the rise of populism, the migrant crisis and Russia. I expect it's therefore an almost perfect book for someone looking for a middle-distance contemporary guide to the EU. As someone who reports on the EU for a living, I'd have preferred a more warts-and-all, microscopic examination of everything from which Commissioners take sugar with their coffee to what national heads of state spit when they talk, but probably that's just me.
The book starts weakly, with a subjective and unconvincing attempt to solve the problems of nationalism and European identity. That the EU Verhofstadt envisions - as he later reveals - is essentially just a nation writ large undermines his attempt to dispel nationalist sentiment as wrong-headed. "That Europe is suffused with social bases and values so different as to be incompatible is nonsense", we're told, rightly, but then Verhofstadt declares that: "The entrepreneurial spirit is not northern European, it is European [his emphasis], as are solidarity with the vulnerable, the pursuit of justice...", as if North Americans or Africans were not entrepreneurial, Central Americans not empathetic, Middle Easterners not concerned with fairness. This crude if well-intentioned assertion is then undermined later by Verhofstadt himself, when he notes that "many French people still hold monarchist, rightist, and downright anti-semitic opinions".
It's not so much that Verhofstadt is wrong - later he says that "everyone should be able to become European" - it's just that he's better at handling the technical details than the emotional reasoning, and unfortunately the emotional part of the book comes first.
Later chapters are more convincing. The problems with the currency union lacking a fiscal union are well-known but quite clearly presented here, and the problems with the Greek debt crisis and the fractured and sclerotic EU governance even more so. Likewise, Verhofstadt's plans for dealing with these problems and others are clearly presented: he wants the Eurozone to be a genuine union; Greece's politicians to institute sweeping reforms; and the EU government to be shrunk and elected on a continent-wide basis and executive powers to be transferred to the Parliament and Commission, with a nationally selected senate acting only as a legislative check.
For those not already well versed in EU politics, this will all be informative and interesting stuff. For me, the most interesting parts were those that were less familiar and more personal: Verhoftstadt's take on the rise and (moral) fall of Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orban, the difficulties his cleaner had securing asylum in the EU, the wall he himself ran into when trying to secure a loan in Italy to set up a vineyard.
The book isn't perfect: in places it feels a touch shallow (minus the index it comes in under 300 pages), it could've done with more raw data and insider examples, some idea of how broad Verhofstadt thinks the EU should ultimately be would have been interesting (should Turkey be a member?), as would some indication of how he thinks the EU should deal with Brexit outside of his ideal scenario of a two-tier EU with an inner Eurozone and an outer associate layer in which the UK might find a home, plus there are too many typos, but over its course it slowly gains authority as it covers more ground, and by the end it's hard to imagine any but the most fixedly anti-EU readers not agreeing that the EU needs to succeed if Europe is to compete on the world stage, and that the only way it can do so in the long-term is through reform and closer unity.
A final thought: as a Brit, it's depressing to read a plan for European success in which Britain realistically will play no part. If a close-knit market of half a billion people and a European army are needed to compete with the US and China, repel the threat of a rampaging Putin and bring stability to north Africa, where does that leave the UK? A lone outsider, desperately trying to keep upper lip stiff while the realisation of increasing irrelevance and backwardness slowly dawns...
He's a pro-European, but also a reformist, and Europe's Last Chance is his diagnosis of and prescription for the EU's ills. As such it's wide-ranging, covering EU governance, financial union, an EU army, the rise of populism, the migrant crisis and Russia. I expect it's therefore an almost perfect book for someone looking for a middle-distance contemporary guide to the EU. As someone who reports on the EU for a living, I'd have preferred a more warts-and-all, microscopic examination of everything from which Commissioners take sugar with their coffee to what national heads of state spit when they talk, but probably that's just me.
The book starts weakly, with a subjective and unconvincing attempt to solve the problems of nationalism and European identity. That the EU Verhofstadt envisions - as he later reveals - is essentially just a nation writ large undermines his attempt to dispel nationalist sentiment as wrong-headed. "That Europe is suffused with social bases and values so different as to be incompatible is nonsense", we're told, rightly, but then Verhofstadt declares that: "The entrepreneurial spirit is not northern European, it is European [his emphasis], as are solidarity with the vulnerable, the pursuit of justice...", as if North Americans or Africans were not entrepreneurial, Central Americans not empathetic, Middle Easterners not concerned with fairness. This crude if well-intentioned assertion is then undermined later by Verhofstadt himself, when he notes that "many French people still hold monarchist, rightist, and downright anti-semitic opinions".
It's not so much that Verhofstadt is wrong - later he says that "everyone should be able to become European" - it's just that he's better at handling the technical details than the emotional reasoning, and unfortunately the emotional part of the book comes first.
Later chapters are more convincing. The problems with the currency union lacking a fiscal union are well-known but quite clearly presented here, and the problems with the Greek debt crisis and the fractured and sclerotic EU governance even more so. Likewise, Verhofstadt's plans for dealing with these problems and others are clearly presented: he wants the Eurozone to be a genuine union; Greece's politicians to institute sweeping reforms; and the EU government to be shrunk and elected on a continent-wide basis and executive powers to be transferred to the Parliament and Commission, with a nationally selected senate acting only as a legislative check.
For those not already well versed in EU politics, this will all be informative and interesting stuff. For me, the most interesting parts were those that were less familiar and more personal: Verhoftstadt's take on the rise and (moral) fall of Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orban, the difficulties his cleaner had securing asylum in the EU, the wall he himself ran into when trying to secure a loan in Italy to set up a vineyard.
The book isn't perfect: in places it feels a touch shallow (minus the index it comes in under 300 pages), it could've done with more raw data and insider examples, some idea of how broad Verhofstadt thinks the EU should ultimately be would have been interesting (should Turkey be a member?), as would some indication of how he thinks the EU should deal with Brexit outside of his ideal scenario of a two-tier EU with an inner Eurozone and an outer associate layer in which the UK might find a home, plus there are too many typos, but over its course it slowly gains authority as it covers more ground, and by the end it's hard to imagine any but the most fixedly anti-EU readers not agreeing that the EU needs to succeed if Europe is to compete on the world stage, and that the only way it can do so in the long-term is through reform and closer unity.
A final thought: as a Brit, it's depressing to read a plan for European success in which Britain realistically will play no part. If a close-knit market of half a billion people and a European army are needed to compete with the US and China, repel the threat of a rampaging Putin and bring stability to north Africa, where does that leave the UK? A lone outsider, desperately trying to keep upper lip stiff while the realisation of increasing irrelevance and backwardness slowly dawns...
Friday, 3 June 2016
Brexit #2: what is and what might be
Vote Leave figurehead Boris Johnson has been taking flipflopping to new lows in his hijacking of the EU referendum, but even the most decided of the rest of us would probably admit to thinking there are pros and cons to being in the EU (although for us those pros and the cons will be different things).
I wonder though how many of us would admit that at least part of our inclination to vote one way or the other is due not to some fixed aspect of the EU's setup, but to our desire to either keep or change some temporary political circumstance that just happens to be the way we do or don't want it to be for the time being?
For example, I'm more in agreement overall politically with the current inhabitants of the EU institutions than I am with the current Tory UK government, due to our stances on issues like the refugee crisis, climate change, workers' rights, etc, and I can't deny that that's one of the attractive prospects about voting to remain. Of course if we were to vote to leave the EU then the UK government could theoretically reinstate many of the things I like that the EU currently gives us, like the maximum 48-hour working week, but would it?
In this FT article Joshua Chaffin wrote about how "Cornwall took in more than €654m from Brussels during the EU’s 2007 to 2013 budget cycle" (as part of the EU's scheme for taking money from wealthier areas and giving it to more deprived ones), and whether that's having an impact on Cornish residents' voting intentions. Boris has said the UK could redistribute money like this on its own without cycling it through Brussels first if we vote to leave, but one resident told Chaffin that "The EU’s been a much better mechanism for getting money from the wealthier parts of Britain to the poorer parts than our own government’s ever been”.
Likewise, when I spoke to an academic for a Brexit piece I contributed to for work, and put it to her that the UK government could, if we vote to leave, choose to more-than replace the research funding we currently receive from the EU with the money leavers claim we'd save, she said: "Nobody can convince me that if we weren’t part of the EU then the amount of research funding that’s available for the humanities around minorities or marginal groups would be increased under the present government. That’s absolutely inconceivable.”
In both of these examples, short-term thinking brushes up against long-term, and pragmatism up against wishful thinking. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about these situations.
In his book And The Weak Suffer What They Must?, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis writes about how "Greek and Italian politicians [...] extended an intriguing offer to voters fed up with them" when their countries were considering joining the EU's single currency: "Keep voting for us and we shall soon rid you of ... our rule! Once monetary union is complete, our country will be administered de facto by Northern Europeans [...] Most Greeks I know secretly welcomed that offer [...]"
And look where that got them...
Maybe it isn't wise to make long-term decisions on the basis of short-term circumstances.
Right now I dislike Tory austerity (with the UK not in the Eurozone, we don't have to worry about Eurogroup austerity) and like EU's stance towards online privacy protection, for example, but in the future might I lament a more left-wing UK government being unable to introduce a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions because a more right-wing EU doesn't want one?
I think the best thing on June 23 will be to vote in line with whether you think the fixed aspects of EU membership or non-membership are good or bad: having a continent-wide system of governance, being able to influence that governance, being in some respects controlled by that governance; free movement; free trade.
But I suspect transient concerns will end up playing as big a role, if not bigger.
I wonder though how many of us would admit that at least part of our inclination to vote one way or the other is due not to some fixed aspect of the EU's setup, but to our desire to either keep or change some temporary political circumstance that just happens to be the way we do or don't want it to be for the time being?
For example, I'm more in agreement overall politically with the current inhabitants of the EU institutions than I am with the current Tory UK government, due to our stances on issues like the refugee crisis, climate change, workers' rights, etc, and I can't deny that that's one of the attractive prospects about voting to remain. Of course if we were to vote to leave the EU then the UK government could theoretically reinstate many of the things I like that the EU currently gives us, like the maximum 48-hour working week, but would it?
In this FT article Joshua Chaffin wrote about how "Cornwall took in more than €654m from Brussels during the EU’s 2007 to 2013 budget cycle" (as part of the EU's scheme for taking money from wealthier areas and giving it to more deprived ones), and whether that's having an impact on Cornish residents' voting intentions. Boris has said the UK could redistribute money like this on its own without cycling it through Brussels first if we vote to leave, but one resident told Chaffin that "The EU’s been a much better mechanism for getting money from the wealthier parts of Britain to the poorer parts than our own government’s ever been”.
Likewise, when I spoke to an academic for a Brexit piece I contributed to for work, and put it to her that the UK government could, if we vote to leave, choose to more-than replace the research funding we currently receive from the EU with the money leavers claim we'd save, she said: "Nobody can convince me that if we weren’t part of the EU then the amount of research funding that’s available for the humanities around minorities or marginal groups would be increased under the present government. That’s absolutely inconceivable.”
In both of these examples, short-term thinking brushes up against long-term, and pragmatism up against wishful thinking. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about these situations.
In his book And The Weak Suffer What They Must?, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis writes about how "Greek and Italian politicians [...] extended an intriguing offer to voters fed up with them" when their countries were considering joining the EU's single currency: "Keep voting for us and we shall soon rid you of ... our rule! Once monetary union is complete, our country will be administered de facto by Northern Europeans [...] Most Greeks I know secretly welcomed that offer [...]"
And look where that got them...
Maybe it isn't wise to make long-term decisions on the basis of short-term circumstances.
Right now I dislike Tory austerity (with the UK not in the Eurozone, we don't have to worry about Eurogroup austerity) and like EU's stance towards online privacy protection, for example, but in the future might I lament a more left-wing UK government being unable to introduce a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions because a more right-wing EU doesn't want one?
I think the best thing on June 23 will be to vote in line with whether you think the fixed aspects of EU membership or non-membership are good or bad: having a continent-wide system of governance, being able to influence that governance, being in some respects controlled by that governance; free movement; free trade.
But I suspect transient concerns will end up playing as big a role, if not bigger.
Sunday, 29 May 2016
Book review: Democracy Without Nations? Pierre Manent, 2006
In Democracy Without Nations? Pierre Manent poses an interesting and important question, fails to answer it convincingly, but in tackling it leaves it all the more interesting.
The question, more fully articulated than in the book's title, is essentially: can Europe survive without its nations?
Manent's answer is no. Manent loves nations, and admits as much: "my own national passion, which is undoubtedly quite real". But why does he think Europe can't do without them?
He gives three reasons.
The least convincing is that "After more than half a century of trying, the European enterprise, the effort "to construct Europe", has not succeeded in overcoming our old nations."
The easiest demonstration that this is unconvincing is that Manent has felt the need to write his book: he feels the nation needs to be defended. Nations can't be both weak enough to be in existential crisis and strong enough to necessitate their continued existence. Manent is trying to have his cake and eat it.
Second, he likes the size of nations - they're "at once quite ample and neatly circumscribed". They're "the middle ground between the puny and the immense, the petty and the limitless".
That's a more reasonable point, but it overlooks the fact that China is a nation of about 10 million square kilometers and 1.3 billion people, whereas Luxembourg is a nation of 2.5 thousand square kilometers and half a million people.
Perhaps these nations are absurd outliers - the federal nature of the USA and India points to that - but the fact remains that China, Luxembourg, the USA and India are all reasonably well-functioning nations. There's nothing necessary about the size of the UK, France and Germany.
Manent does ask whether Europe can become the new nation that subsumes existing European nations, as I'm implying is a viable course, but he seems to reject the viability of this possibility simply because it hasn't happened yet, as in point 1. He criticizes Europe's "refusal to define itself politically", or in terms of either a territory or a population.
Although I find this unconvincing in terms of the answer to the overarching question, I think Manent has a point, and this is one of the most interesting parts of the book. He says "Europe cannot construct itself meaningfully unless Europeans in the various nations identify themselves with a common European political action", and I agree with him; but he ends the sentence with "and for the foreseeable future that means with the common action of European nations", and there I disagree.
Firstly: has Britain defined itself any better than Europe? Has France? Second, take the Pirate Parties, which are uniting people worldwide around a single thread of causes.
Manent touches on this - on how globalisation is allowing or causing people to identify with each other across the world based on shared interests and experiences - but he says that "Communication by itself does not create a true bond among people [...]", and here again we diverge.
Although I agree that "Today's popular term identity is a terribly impoverished substitute for the older term community", I think he's mistaken that nations can any longer be the site of community, if they ever were. Do I really identify more with a British criminal in Newcastle or a British Baron in Cornwall than I do with someone from another country who lives alongside me in London and shares my work ethic and lifestyle? Non, nein.
The scale of community is dozens or hundreds, or a few miles, or dozens of conversations; the scale of politics ...? For me, as is enshrined in the EU's subsidiarity, it depends on the scale of the problem.
Finally, and perhaps most convincingly, Manent criticizes the effectiveness of the EU's instruments, which he says "prevent any individual or collective action that is not the simple application of a rule or regulation authorising rights". Unfortunately he provides no examples and barely elaborates; the argument is the most convincing of the three because of what has happened in Europe to countries like Greece since the financial crisis, but DWN? was written before the crash, and I don't know enough about institutions like the European Central Bank to be able to judge whether their weaknesses are terminal or skin-deep. That's covered by the next book I'll read; for the time being all I can say is that Manent is too brief on this point.
So DWN? failed to convince me that the nation must remain the primary site of politics, although I'm happy to concede it could well remain a secondary or tertiary one. Questions about the level at which democracy works best and about how people will associate in this globalised age are fascinating ones, and DWN? is a fairly though-provoking read even if far short of being the definitive text. Probably no such text exists yet...
The question, more fully articulated than in the book's title, is essentially: can Europe survive without its nations?
Manent's answer is no. Manent loves nations, and admits as much: "my own national passion, which is undoubtedly quite real". But why does he think Europe can't do without them?
He gives three reasons.
The least convincing is that "After more than half a century of trying, the European enterprise, the effort "to construct Europe", has not succeeded in overcoming our old nations."
The easiest demonstration that this is unconvincing is that Manent has felt the need to write his book: he feels the nation needs to be defended. Nations can't be both weak enough to be in existential crisis and strong enough to necessitate their continued existence. Manent is trying to have his cake and eat it.
Second, he likes the size of nations - they're "at once quite ample and neatly circumscribed". They're "the middle ground between the puny and the immense, the petty and the limitless".
That's a more reasonable point, but it overlooks the fact that China is a nation of about 10 million square kilometers and 1.3 billion people, whereas Luxembourg is a nation of 2.5 thousand square kilometers and half a million people.
Perhaps these nations are absurd outliers - the federal nature of the USA and India points to that - but the fact remains that China, Luxembourg, the USA and India are all reasonably well-functioning nations. There's nothing necessary about the size of the UK, France and Germany.
Manent does ask whether Europe can become the new nation that subsumes existing European nations, as I'm implying is a viable course, but he seems to reject the viability of this possibility simply because it hasn't happened yet, as in point 1. He criticizes Europe's "refusal to define itself politically", or in terms of either a territory or a population.
Although I find this unconvincing in terms of the answer to the overarching question, I think Manent has a point, and this is one of the most interesting parts of the book. He says "Europe cannot construct itself meaningfully unless Europeans in the various nations identify themselves with a common European political action", and I agree with him; but he ends the sentence with "and for the foreseeable future that means with the common action of European nations", and there I disagree.
Firstly: has Britain defined itself any better than Europe? Has France? Second, take the Pirate Parties, which are uniting people worldwide around a single thread of causes.
Manent touches on this - on how globalisation is allowing or causing people to identify with each other across the world based on shared interests and experiences - but he says that "Communication by itself does not create a true bond among people [...]", and here again we diverge.
Although I agree that "Today's popular term identity is a terribly impoverished substitute for the older term community", I think he's mistaken that nations can any longer be the site of community, if they ever were. Do I really identify more with a British criminal in Newcastle or a British Baron in Cornwall than I do with someone from another country who lives alongside me in London and shares my work ethic and lifestyle? Non, nein.
The scale of community is dozens or hundreds, or a few miles, or dozens of conversations; the scale of politics ...? For me, as is enshrined in the EU's subsidiarity, it depends on the scale of the problem.
Finally, and perhaps most convincingly, Manent criticizes the effectiveness of the EU's instruments, which he says "prevent any individual or collective action that is not the simple application of a rule or regulation authorising rights". Unfortunately he provides no examples and barely elaborates; the argument is the most convincing of the three because of what has happened in Europe to countries like Greece since the financial crisis, but DWN? was written before the crash, and I don't know enough about institutions like the European Central Bank to be able to judge whether their weaknesses are terminal or skin-deep. That's covered by the next book I'll read; for the time being all I can say is that Manent is too brief on this point.
So DWN? failed to convince me that the nation must remain the primary site of politics, although I'm happy to concede it could well remain a secondary or tertiary one. Questions about the level at which democracy works best and about how people will associate in this globalised age are fascinating ones, and DWN? is a fairly though-provoking read even if far short of being the definitive text. Probably no such text exists yet...
Sunday, 28 February 2016
Pity the poor arseholes
There are lots of talking points around whether the UK should remain in the EU. I want to get to the seat of one burning issue.
On The Andrew Marr Show today, discussing the referendum, Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said he was worried about British plumbers and electricians being "undercut" by workers from elsewhere in the EU.
But plumbing and electricity services can only be delivered in person, meaning everyone competing to provide those services faces the same living costs (unlike for telecoms services) - with the exception of the cost of supporting dependents. It costs less to support children living in Bulgaria than children living in London.
There are at least two solutions to this problem: stop British people having to compete on costs, as IDS wants, or support them to compete with a benefits system, specifically child tax credits.
Why might the second option be better? Because it's more progressive.
If you want to renovate your bathroom along the theme of a Roman thermae, filling your bath from the teats of a golden Venus, then you probably want the very best quality workmanship - no chipped nipples or asymmetrical streams of hot and cold to tarnish the effect. And you can get that, by paying through the nose for the plumber best able to handle lovely Venus, helping that plumber to build an empire and thermae of their own.
But if all you want is your bog repaired, cost is your main concern.
Under a protectionist policy like IDS advocates, everyone who wants their bog repaired has to support the plumber's kids to the same extent, regardless of whether they wipe their arse with Morrison's own-brand paper or quadruple-quilted Andrex.
Whereas, under a system of tax-based support, those who buff their anuses to a high sheen with the under-feathers of fattened geese contribute more to little Jim and Jane's alphabetti spaghetti than those who have to wait for the burn to subside before they can sit down after taking a squat.
IDS would prefer to see the goose baskets of the wealthy brim-full with goslings, whereas I'd like everyone to be able to take the weight off immediately after a strainer.
Where do you sit?
On The Andrew Marr Show today, discussing the referendum, Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said he was worried about British plumbers and electricians being "undercut" by workers from elsewhere in the EU.
But plumbing and electricity services can only be delivered in person, meaning everyone competing to provide those services faces the same living costs (unlike for telecoms services) - with the exception of the cost of supporting dependents. It costs less to support children living in Bulgaria than children living in London.
There are at least two solutions to this problem: stop British people having to compete on costs, as IDS wants, or support them to compete with a benefits system, specifically child tax credits.
Why might the second option be better? Because it's more progressive.
If you want to renovate your bathroom along the theme of a Roman thermae, filling your bath from the teats of a golden Venus, then you probably want the very best quality workmanship - no chipped nipples or asymmetrical streams of hot and cold to tarnish the effect. And you can get that, by paying through the nose for the plumber best able to handle lovely Venus, helping that plumber to build an empire and thermae of their own.
But if all you want is your bog repaired, cost is your main concern.
Under a protectionist policy like IDS advocates, everyone who wants their bog repaired has to support the plumber's kids to the same extent, regardless of whether they wipe their arse with Morrison's own-brand paper or quadruple-quilted Andrex.
Whereas, under a system of tax-based support, those who buff their anuses to a high sheen with the under-feathers of fattened geese contribute more to little Jim and Jane's alphabetti spaghetti than those who have to wait for the burn to subside before they can sit down after taking a squat.
IDS would prefer to see the goose baskets of the wealthy brim-full with goslings, whereas I'd like everyone to be able to take the weight off immediately after a strainer.
Where do you sit?
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