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From the acclaimed author of Bernanke’s Test, “an essential title for any reader with investments or interest in financial instruments” (Library Journal). The End of the Euro begins with an overview of the birth of the euro itself. Understanding this history is essential to understand the anomalies built into the project from the beginning. These anomalies form the subject of chapter two, along with how they led to the situation that turned Greece, Portugal, and Spain into euro-destroying economic disaster areas. Chapter three shows how this was not an unforeseeable situation, as Europe’s history is filled with earlier failed attempts to build monetary unions. Chapter four is focused on Germany, by far the most important country within EMU, and why the chances of Germany leaving the union are much higher than is generally assumed. The book concludes with an analysis of what lies in wait for the remains of the monetary union—and for a deeply divided and troubled continent in general. Either the EMU transforms itself fundamentally or it disintegrates. “Johan Van Overtveldt is a consistently insightful and incisive writer and I await each of his books with real anticipation.” —Tyler Cowen, The Marginal Revolution blog “A whole generation of Europeans has found comfort in the idea that economic cooperation has overruled the pull of power politics and even some basic laws of economics. This book forcefully squashes that illusion. A must-read!” —Jonathan Holslag, research fellow at the Brussels Free University
Once the world’s bastion of liberal, democratic values, Europe is now having to confront demons it thought it had laid to rest. The old pathologies of anti-Semitism, populist nationalism, and territorial aggression are threatening to tear the European postwar consensus apart. In riveting dispatches from this unfolding tragedy, James Kirchick shows us the shallow disingenuousness of the leaders who pushed for “Brexit;” examines how a vast migrant wave is exacerbating tensions between Europeans and their Muslim minorities; explores the rising anti-Semitism that causes Jewish schools and synagogues in France and Germany to resemble armed bunkers; and describes how Russian imperial ambitions are destabilizing nations from Estonia to Ukraine. With President Trump now threatening to abandon America's traditional role as upholder of the liberal world order and guarantor of the continent's security, Europe may be alone in dealing with these unprecedented challenges. Based on extensive firsthand reporting, this book is a provocative, disturbing look at a continent in unexpected crisis.
Johan Van Overtveldt provides comprehensive documentation showing that the political dithering so apparent in the most recent euro crisis has in fact been the hallmark of the euro project from the start. --Anil Kashyap, Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics and Finance, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business From noted economic journalist Johan Van Overtveldt, an up-to-the-minute examination of the fate of the Euro. In a process that began with the Maastricht Treaty of 1991 and concluded on January 1, 1999, 11 Western European countries made the euro the European Union's single currency, and the European Central Bank (ECB) the EU's only policy-making central bank. Bringing together Germany, France, Italy, and other European countries into a monetary union with a single currency and a single monetary policy could only ever result in major imbalances between the member countries, thus threatening the EU itself. This was recognized from the start by many economists and other observers, and the political elite paid elaborate lip service to these warnings. However, no one really followed up on these risks in terms of actions and reforms. Instead, the politicians seemed to indicate, directly and indirectly, that if the EU showed unity, the conditions to turn itself into a well-functioning monetary union would simply come about automatically. Moreover, given the imperative to work together more closely, the monetary-union effort would strengthen the political union among the euro-countries. Thus, in spirit, the process of monetary union was often seen as a means to an end. With that reasoning, the political elite supervising monetary union turned a great idea--the creation of a unified currency for Europe--into a huge gamble. Implicit in their reasoning was the idea that Europe's leading politicians would always be able to come up with an adequate solution to any crisis that might occur. As the former Belgian prime minister and European Union leader Jean-Luc Dehaene repeated relentlessly: "The idea of a unified Europe grows and becomes reality through crises. We need crises to make progress." Dehaene and like-minded European politicians never seriously considered the possibility of an insoluble, catastrophic crisis that could potentially crash the entire EU effort. For ten years, from 1999 to 2008, it seemed that the politicians' claim was vindicated. Although there was little substantial progress toward real political union within the euro area, the euro and the euro countries in general prospered, despite a string of major shocks like the bursting of the dotcom bubble, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But things changed dramatically with the financial crisis of 2007-2008. In January 2009 Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics and political science at Berkeley, wrote that "what started as the Subprime Crisis in 2007 and morphed in the Global Credit Crisis in 2008 has become the Euro Crisis in 2009." After its immediate impact, the crisis caused the financial and capital markets to worry about the so-called sovereign risks, i.e. countries running the risk of becoming insolvent. Although budget deficits in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom were much larger than the aggregate data for the euro area, markets started to home in on the risks posed by countries inside the European monetary union. Markets recognized that the enormous problem facing everyone in the union was the long-term working of the monetary union itself. Eichengreen's "Euro Crisis" is all about the sustainability of EMU and the single currency. By early 2009 the structural imbalances within the euro area and especially the untenable situations building up in Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland were there for everybody to see. The first reaction of the political leadership was denial of any structural problem whatsoever. The second reaction was recognition of the crisis situation, but absolute denial of any link between that crisis and the workings of the monetary union. Eventually, a third phase set in: the search for external villains to blame. Those villains were found in the greed, speculation, and irresponsibility of the financial markets. As the French saying goes: "les excuses sont fait pour s'en server" ("excuses are made to take advantage of"). Fundamentally, however, the gigantic problems facing the EMU, and the euro as a currency, have little to do with either alleged criminal behavior in the financial markets or with the financial crisis of 2007-2009. The crisis of 2009-2010 was an accident waiting to happen. It could have happened earlier, or the clash could have been postponed for several more years; but given the the basic characteristics of the EMU-set-up, a major crisis was simply unavoidable. Untenable imbalances within the monetary union were enshrined in the different treaties, pacts, and political agreements that led to the creation of the euro in the first place, and guided its first ten years. That politicians never acted on this reality to make them the prime culprits of the long and highly painful death agony of the euro. The structure of this book is as follows: Chapter I gives an overview of the birth of the euro. Understanding this history is essential to understand the anomalies built into the project from the beginning. These anomalies form the subject of Chapter II, along with an analysis of how they led to the situation that turned Greece, Portugal, and Spain into euro-destroying economic disaster areas. Chapter III shows how this was not an unforeseeable situation, as Europe's history is filled with earlier failed attempts to build monetary unions. Chapter IV is focused on Germany, by far the most important country within EMU, and why the chances of Germany leaving the union are much higher than is generally assumed. The book concludes with an analysis of what lies in wait for the remains of the monetary union--and for a deeply divided and troubled continent in general. Either the EMU transforms itself fundamentally or it disintegrates, and the likeliest outcome is the latter.
This volume argues that the crisis of the European Union is not merely a fiscal crisis but reveals and amplifies deeper flaws in the structure of the EU itself. It is a multidimensional crisis of the economic, legal and political cornerstones of European integration and marks the end of the technocratic mode of integration which has been dominant since the 1950s. The EU has a weak political and administrative centre, relies excessively on governance by law, is challenged by increasing heterogeneity and displays increasingly interlocked levels of government. During the crisis, it has become more and more asymmetrical and has intervened massively in domestic economic and legal systems. A team of economists, lawyers, philosophers and political scientists analyse these deeper dimensions of the European crisis from a broader theoretical perspective with a view towards contributing to a better understanding and shaping the trajectory of the EU.
Has Europe's extraordinary postwar recovery limped to an end? It would seem so. The United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Italy, and former Soviet Bloc countries have experienced ethnic or religious disturbances, sometimes violent. Greece, Ireland, and Spain are menaced by financial crises. And the euro is in trouble. In The End of the West, David Marquand, a former member of the British Parliament, argues that Europe's problems stem from outdated perceptions of global power, and calls for a drastic change in European governance to halt the continent's slide into irrelevance. Taking a searching look at the continent's governing institutions, history, and current challenges, Marquand offers a disturbing diagnosis of Europe's ills to point the way toward a better future. Exploring the baffling contrast between postwar success and current failures, Marquand examines the rebirth of ethnic communities from Catalonia to Flanders, the rise of xenophobic populism, the democratic deficit that stymies EU governance, and the thorny questions of where Europe's borders end and what it means to be European. Marquand contends that as China, India, and other nations rise, Europe must abandon ancient notions of an enlightened West and a backward East. He calls for Europe's leaders and citizens to confront the painful issues of ethnicity, integration, and economic cohesion, and to build a democratic and federal structure. A wake-up call to those who cling to ideas of a triumphalist Europe, The End of the West shows that the continent must draw on all its reserves of intellectual and political creativity to thrive in an increasingly turbulent world, where the very language of "East" and "West" has been emptied of meaning.
THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER A WATERSTONES POLITICS PAPERBACK OF THE YEAR, 2018 The Strange Death of Europe is a highly personal account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Declining birth-rates, mass immigration and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive change as a society. This book is not only an analysis of demographic and political realities, but also an eyewitness account of a continent in self-destruct mode. It includes reporting from across the entire continent, from the places where migrants land to the places they end up, from the people who appear to welcome them in to the places which cannot accept them. Told from this first-hand perspective, and backed with impressive research and evidence, the book addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel's U-turn on migration, the lack of repatriation and the Western fixation on guilt. Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, Lampedusa and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away. In each chapter he also takes a step back to look at the bigger issues which lie behind a continent's death-wish, answering the question of why anyone, let alone an entire civilisation, would do this to themselves? He ends with two visions of Europe – one hopeful, one pessimistic – which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offer a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next.
Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight for reform from within. In this iconoclastic polemic, economist Costas Lapavitsas demolishes this view. He contends that the EU’s response to the Eurozone crisis represents the ultimate transformation of the union into a neoliberal citadel that institutionally embeds austerity, privatization, and wage cuts. Concurrently, the rise of German hegemony has divided the EU into an unstable core and dependent peripheries. These related developments make the EU impervious to meaningful reform. The solution is therefore a direct challenge to the EU project that stresses popular and national sovereignty as preconditions for true internationalist socialism. Lapavitsas’s powerful manifesto for a left opposition to the EU upends the wishful thinking that often characterizes the debate and will be a challenging read for all on the Left interested in the future of Europe.
Europe’s financial crisis cannot be blamed on the Euro, Harold James contends in this probing exploration of the whys, whens, whos, and what-ifs of European monetary union. The current crisis goes deeper, to a series of problems that were debated but not resolved at the time of the Euro’s invention. Since the 1960s, Europeans had been looking for a way to address two conundrums simultaneously: the dollar’s privileged position in the international monetary system, and Germany’s persistent current account surpluses in Europe. The Euro was created under a politically independent central bank to meet the primary goal of price stability. But while the monetary side of union was clearly conceived, other prerequisites of stability were beyond the reach of technocratic central bankers. Issues such as fiscal rules and Europe-wide banking supervision and regulation were thoroughly discussed during planning in the late 1980s and 1990s, but remained in the hands of member states. That omission proved to be a cause of crisis decades later. Here is an account that helps readers understand the European monetary crisis in depth, by tracing behind-the-scenes negotiations using an array of sources unavailable until now, notably from the European Community’s Committee of Central Bank Governors and the Delors Committee of 1988–89, which set out the plan for how Europe could reach its goal of monetary union. As this foundational study makes clear, it was the constant friction between politicians and technocrats that shaped the Euro. And, Euro or no Euro, this clash will continue into the future.
However, this inheritance of economic and social institutions that was the solution until around 1973--when Europe had to switch from growth based on brute-force investment and the acquisition of known technologies to growth based on increased efficiency and innovation--then became the problem.
A quiet revolution has been occurring in post-World War II Europe. A world power has emerged across the Atlantic that is recrafting the rules for how a modern society should provide economic security, environmental sustainability, and global stability. In Europe's Promise, Steven Hill explains Europe's bold new vision. For a decade Hill traveled widely to understand this uniquely European way of life. He shatters myths and shows how Europe's leadership manifests in five major areas: economic strength, with Europe now the world's wealthiest trading bloc, nearly as large as the U.S. and China combined; the best health care and other workfare supports for families and individuals; widespread use of renewable energy technologies and conservation; the world's most advanced democracies; and regional networks of trade, foreign aid, and investment that link one-third of the world to the European Union. Europe's Promise masterfully conveys how Europe has taken the lead in this make-or-break century challenged by a worldwide economic crisis and global warming.