With an unelected European Commission at its center acting as an authoritarian overseer, a toothless Euro-parliament on the sidelines, and a vast bureaucracy influenced primarily by Europe’s “central powers,” the whole “union” experiment possessed the true seeds of perennial dissension and disagreement from the outset. In short, there was very little true democracy involved in this greatest of all multilateral experiments in European history.
Without truly common -- or ‘federal,’ as some would prefer it -- powers of decision-making at its disposal, the “union” was blindsided by the global financial crisis that erupted in 2008, which made European political fissures apparent instantly.
During a meeting of EU finance ministers in early November 2008, a hastily drawn up concluding document appeared to produce a check-list on how to rebuild the global financial system, but also gave the opportunity to Germany to stress that EU member states did not need “a European economic government.”
What the Germans, but also the rest of the members of the Euro zone, failed to explain was how they proposed to handle the mounting crisis with the euro common currency in place, but without a “federal” treasury department (the European Central Bank is far from such an institution and was never meant to be one, not to mention that it has proved its critical incapacities beyond any doubt in the two years since Lehman Brothers).
Two years down the road from the November 2008 Eurogroup meeting, the same questions persist.
As we speak, the “union” has written off Greece, which is deemed universally as unsalvageable, but the “union” won’t stop sending bailout monies in the direction of Athens before a huge, confusing free-for-all to save shaky European banks, exposed to PIIGS debt, is completed.
Those who continue to believe that the persistence of the European “central powers” in killing Greece by means of an ideologically induced scheme of deliberate economic mass murder (accompanied by the perceived prospect of profits from buying a whole country up at bargain basement prices and turning her people into serfs in their own motherland,) are making a terrible mistake if they think that this genocidal mindset has a limited Greek focus and “contagion” can be somehow contained into a partition.
Greece is only one out of the five PIIGS.
The Troika’s cat-and-mouse game with the discredited and disarrayed Papandreou regime over the release of tranches of bailout monies is pregnant with high risks of a disorderly Greek default -- which is the one “event” that the Troika’s murderous austerity demands are supposedly designed to avert. But with the Troika having failed in every projection of how the Greek crisis was supposed to evolve, it would be a pathological fool he who would put his faith and trust in the convoluted and amateurish, but people-killing, “bailout plans” concocted by primarily Germany and France, with the aid of the IMF, purportedly to stem the cataclysm.
The European wrangling and haggling exposes the precarious state of the whole European banking system, with the ubiquitous international rating houses warning only too recently that “…globally interconnected banks in France and elsewhere faced rising risks.” In plain English, this warning suggests that even the colossi of the European banking system tread on thin ice. And if the banks fail, Europe fails.
For the moment, with the Troika Procrusteses busy chopping off Greece’s limbs and a media chorus continuing to ravage and vilify the profligate Greek frauds, there is the illusion of “tackling” the debt crisis effectively because targeted abuse, repeated over and over again, offers uneasy public opinion its fix of fake “action.”
But of course the key questions remain unanswered: where would the European “union” find the hundreds of billions to recapitalize its banks? What would be the impact of a sudden Italian, and possibly Spanish, debt tremor as Greece collapses? How northern European “leaders” will convince their electorates, already fidgeting and unhappy with the idea of “union solidarity” extended to southern loafers, to agree to more of their tax monies going into a European-wide rescue fund? Who would salvage the European Central Bank, already a major repository of toxic junk generated by the PIIGS?
And, in the end, there are always the people of Greece, who could conceivably succeed in knocking down the murderous austerity dictated from the outside and implemented by a collaborator regime with little scruples and zero legitimacy. And once the knock down is completed, Greece’s exit from the “Eurozone” would be only a question of time.
If the guinea pig thus succeeds in rising from the dissection table and defeating its tormentors, the brittle foundation of the European “union,” viz. the common currency, would receive an unsustainable blow.
Let us then watch the course of the “Eurozone” in the 5 to 10 years to follow. Who would be putting his money on its longevity?