Greece, Ireland and the EU bailouts: the end of democracy in Europe
Here is an edited version of my column in today's Irish Daily Mail:
What a delight the Greeks are. All that noise, all that passion. All that debt, all that ignorance: I mean they still don’t seem to grasp exactly what it was their Government agreed to when it accepted the €110bn international bailout. They have been squealing that nobody can be allowed to run Greek affairs except the Greeks, that the EU and the IMF should butt-out. All I can say to that is: Zorba, it’s time to read the fine print on the contract.
It is also time for the Irish to look up from the election and pay attention to exactly what the EU and IMF are doing to the crippled Club Med country. It’s the Greeks now, but the Irish later.
Last week in Athens the Greeks went another round with the EU and IMF inspectors, the German-types – there is always at least one named ‘Klaus’ in the group -- who turn up every quarter to see whether the government is sticking to the bailout deal. Ireland gets the same sort of inspectors, of course, but the inspectors arriving in Athens get a much rougher time than the inspectors who come to Dublin. As I said, the Greeks are a delight.
What set off the Athens anger last week was that the inspectors made it clear Greece would have to get on with selling €50bn of state-owned assets over the next four years to pay down debt. The problem is the Athens government wants to sell just €7bn worth. The Greek people, already suffering with spending cuts, tax rises and unemployment, are angry at being told they must also sell off great chunks of national property.
The EU and IMF inspectors have ordered the government to sell water companies and mines and almost anything else that could find a buyer. However, so sensitive is the idea that these sales might include sales of land – you can bet at least a dozen people named Oleg or Abdul would have the money and desire to buy whole Greek islands -- that the government spokesman George Petalotis had to insist land would not be sold.
Yet at the same time Mr Petalotis said: ‘We asked nobody to interfere in domestic affairs. We only take orders from the Greek people.’ So you can reckon he doesn’t have much of a grasp on just how much power his government has handed to the EU-driven bailout powers.
It is important to remember that these bailout conditions for Greece, just like the bailout conditions for Ireland, were designed by the EU and not by the IMF. The IMF technique for bailout is first to devalue the currency and oversee spending cuts, then negotiate with bondholders. The reason the EU insisted on being leader in the bailout was to stop that very sensible IMF technique being used anywhere in the EU.
Reason? It would have meant a member state becoming independent of Brussels. The IMF could have helped the member state drop out of the euro. Staying in the euro and paying off all the bondholders, as the EU insists, means recovery has to come the more slow and painful way – by the anti-growth austerity Greece and Ireland are both suffering now.
Of course, this means leaving the people of both countries burdened with loans they can never pay off, and with spending cuts and unemployment levels from which they will not recover for a generation. The bailouts are designed in this way for just one reason, to forge the final link in the chain that will shackle Greece and Ireland, and in turn other eurozone countries, to a centralised European government.
That is why the Greek spokesman’s cry that ‘We only take orders from the Greek people!’ is both absurd and heartbreaking. The fact is that the euro-elite are now speaking with satisfaction of Europe entering ‘the post-democratic age.’ The dismissal of Ireland's first Lisbon Referendum result by Brussels was only the most brazen example the EU policy of ‘post-democratic’ government.
The unelected technocratic elite of Brussels see government as being too important, too complicated for the little people to control. Sending in inspectors named Klaus to direct the fiscal and economic movements of the government of a member state is more what the euro-elite have in mind -- what they have in mind now, and have always had in mind.
Certainly during this election many Irish people are beginning to question the power that the EU has over this State, and the power that the EU may allow the German government to take over this State and the rest of the eurozone. The extent of that may be decided at the European Council meeting next month, at which the new Taoiseach will have no more influence than a member of the catering staff.
But these powers have been growing since the moment the Irish greedily signed on to join the Common Market because they thought it meant free money. The gush of cash drowned out the sound of what the euro-elite were really saying.
In ‘The Great European Rip-Off,’ a book by David Craig and Matthew Elliott published in 2009, the authors list many of the statements of intention made by the bosses of the EU over the decades. It’s worth recalling what the euro-elite said during all those years so many of the Irish were sucking up what they thought was a free lunch.
It is hard to sympathise with the Irish whimpering now that ‘We have lost our sovereignty’ when the loss of our sovereignty was always the point, and the Brussels elite made no secret of it.
Here is commission president Romano Prodi in 1999: ‘The single market was the theme of the eighties; the single currency was the theme of the nineties; we must now face the difficult task of moving towards a single economy, a single political unity.’
As long ago as 1991, Hans Tietmeyer, then head of the Bundesbank and the most powerful central banker in Europe, said: ‘A European currency will lead to member nations transferring their sovereignty over financial and wage policy as well as monetary affairs. It is an illusion to think that states can hold on to their autonomy.’
Here is the present head of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, in 1998: ‘The Council of Ministers will have far more power over the budgets of member states than the federal government in the United States has over the budget of Texas.’
Here is Roman Herzog, then the German president, speaking in 1996: ‘The day of the nation state is over.’
I will add that the day of national legislatures is over, too, unless the Greeks, and the Irish, and others, find the will to get out of the EU. What the Irish will vote for later this month is not in fact a parliament. We will vote to put highly-paid politicians into the shell of a parliament, a chamber that has given up almost all the sovereign powers held by a genuine parliament. Losing the power to control the budget is just the latest and most shameful surrender of parliamentary sovereignty.
Listen to the then-president of the commission, Jacques Delors, talking in 1988. He said that within ten years ‘80 percent of our economic legislation, perhaps even fiscal and social as well’ would come from the EU and not from national parliaments.
As the authors Craig and Elliott point out: ‘This was actually quite an accurate prediction – in 2007 the German president calculated that about 84 percent of all legislation passed by the German parliament came from the EU.’
There is no reason to imagine the amount of legislation passed by the Irish parliament but originating in the EU is much less than the same 84 percent. So what the Irish are voting for is a group of politicians who will be able to control 16 percent of our laws: not control the country's budget, of course, not the monetary policy, nor the tax policy – the Irish can't really imagine they are going to be allowed to hang onto that, surely? – not the currency nor the debt nor the foreign policy.
In fact, the complaints being made in this election that parliamentary Deputies must stop acting like local politicians are rather too late: planning permission, town drains and going to constituency funerals are probably the only things left over which the Deputies have any sovereign power. Though I wouldn’t be too sure about the planning. Or the drains.
