The Eurogroup Meeting of 27th June 2015 will not go down as a proud moment in Europe’s history. Ministers turned down the Greek government’s request that the Greek people should be granted a single week during which to deliver a Yes or No answer to the institutions’ proposals – proposals crucial for Greece’s future in the Eurozone. The very idea that a government would consult its people on a problematic proposal put to it by the institutions was treated with incomprehension and often with disdain bordering on contempt. I was even asked: “How do you expect common people to understand such complex issues?”. Indeed, democracy did not have a good day in yesterday’s Eurogroup meeting! But nor did European institutions. After our request was rejected, the Eurogroup President broke with the convention of unanimity (issuing a statement without my consent) and even took the dubious decision to convene a follow up meeting without the Greek minister, ostensibly to discuss the “next steps”.Neoliberalism or democracy but not both. Actually this is an instance of Rodrik's trilemma: Internationalism, national sovereignty and democracy cannot exist simultaneously. One must be sacrificed. Under neoliberalism two are sacrificed. National sovereignty and democracy are sacrificed to transnational corporatism-technocracy.
Can democracy and a monetary union coexist? Or must one give way? This is the pivotal question that the Eurogroup has decided to answer by placing democracy in the too-hard basket. So far, one hopes....
Yanis Varoufakis
As it happened – Yanis Varoufakis’ intervention during the 27th June 2015 Eurogroup Meeting
How would you have internationalism with nat sovereignty?
ReplyDeleteYou could have a clause in a treaty that national sovereignty prevails in matters of contention instead of making the only option withdrawal from the treaty. That puts a legal limitation on internationalism. But it is not possible to have full internationalization wand also full exercise national sovereignty.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting test case is the US civil war. The South believed that states had the right to exercise their sovereignty by leaving the federation. The North disagreed and went to war over it. If the war had gone the other way, the precedent would have been different.
Rodrik's trilemma is nonsense, based on word-play, as Abba Lerner showed before Rodrik was born. Lerner echoed Keynes great essay on National Self-sufficiency, and that echoed FDR's great action - which he said in 1937 he was prouder of than anything else had ever done: His USAexit message to the 1933 London Conference. I wish the Greeks & everyone else would read those things.
ReplyDeleteRandom: That "internationalism with nat sovereignty" is the current international order. It is horrifying how little it is understood. The EU is not comparable to the pre Civil War USA, as all legal authorities- and apparently no one else!- agree. And that history is wrong. The South went to war in the pro-slavery rebellion (Marx) - firing on Fort Sumter - not the North.