Fritz Scharpf on the Eurozone mess

It’s not really the last war to people who are living through it.

What’s the EFSF/M?

It hands out loans, not subsidies. Officially at least.

official EU policy is to include restructuring clauses in sovereign debt from 2013 onwards, presumably with the intention that they be used if necessary.

By 2013 it will be over, one way or the other.

if Ireland can get back to its 2004 output, it has no structural problem at all

Isn’t Ireland’s 2004 output based on (a) measuring at the height of a bubble and (b) being a haven for cross-border tax avoidance w.r.t. the rest of the EU, not to mention the US? Or is that too harsh?

I don’t understand the comment that Ireland doesn’t need any additional help because they just need to get back to 2004 output levels. Doesn’t this just skip the entire point that if you take away a federal government’s monetary control and restrict their deficit spending, they cannot successfully recover from a recession?

This gets to another issue, though, I think: if Ireland is somehow not allowed to default, but the market price for Irish government bonds is higher than for German bonds, isn’t this a transfer payment from Ireland to Germany? My feeling is that under the ECB has the option of loaning the Irish government money at a significant markup or insisting that Ireland cannot default, but not both. A low interest rate loan is not a wealth transfer if you are guaranteed repayment.

Or more succinctly:

When the Germans are unhappy that their euros are going to bail out the profligates, and the Irish and Greeks are unhappy that their countries are being run by a troika of the Commission, IMF and more powerful member states on the Council, there are obviously going to be political problems

is true, but the Germans wouldn’t be unhappy if they thought they were continuing to be the China of Europe (using their excess savings to finance the customer base that underpins their growing industrial dominance), and the Irish and Greeks would be a lot less unhappy about the troika of […] if they were all getting back into work. If (and therefore, with decent chance, when, if the technocrats get their act together) European Fiscal and Monetary Union was working well and delivering growth, the Irish Independent would be full of Thomas O’Friedman types explaining why it didn’t make sense for a country like Ireland to have an independent fiscal policy and that structural factors were what mattered etc etc.

Internet educates and informs shocker.

Thank you for the pointer Henry, Scharpf’s lecture is worth printing, reading closely and taking the time to absorb (while underlining enthusiastically). At only 36 pages , double spaced, excluding the graphs and bibliography, it is the perfect way to spend an evening. Almost.

I really can not recommend it enough.

It seems to me like the best layperson’s guide so far as to how the collision of the GFC, the ECB’s “independence” from a moral purpose and the EU commission’s commitment to market liberalism threaten to destroy the legitimacy of the EU project. They will get their industrialists/financiers paradise (depending on whether you are Merkel or Trichet) and inequality and democratic accountability be damned.

As an Irish person I am particularly fond of how he found the time to relabel us as GIPS rather than PIGS. One in eye for LBS and his ilk.

In short, I think a lot of the supply side stuff is essentially for show

For show, and for German domestic political consumption which matters too.

“In Ireland, it genuinely is an adjustment problem – if Ireland can get back to its 2004 output, it has no structural problem at all. Therefore, debt relief for Greece makes sense – it has a long term solvency problem – but for Ireland there’s a lot less of a case for providing a permanent large transfer payment to one of the world’s richest economies.”

I’m not following the logic here. If Ireland has an output gap, than some official structure should step in to fill it through expansionary fiscal or monetary policy.

I can’t make any sense out of “there’s a lot less of a case for providing a permanent large transfer payment to one of the world’s richest economies.” There isn’t a fixed lump sum of euros available to the world, so I don’t understand what is being transferred permanently.

“supranational authorities – which are not themselves democratically accountable and have no reason to be politically responsive to the citizens affected by their policies.”

First of all, I admit that I didn’t read the whole PDF, but only the excerpts presented here and the comments.
However, I have some problem with this idea of “undemocratic EU” that seems very fashonable those days:
1) The EU commission is composed by members of the governments of member states, who are themselves democratically elected. Smaller states are, if anything, overrepresented.
2) The ECB is a non democratic bureocracy, but so are all central banks today: the central banks of Italy, Germany or Ireland are in no way more democratic than the ECB.
3) If the EU was more democratic by making every EU citizien vote any policy choice, the population of Ireland (4M), Spain (47M), Greece (11M) and Portugal (15M) would still be outnumbered by the germans alone (81M). Thus, in a “more democratic” EU, we would still see the Germans prevailing on the “PIGS”, in a perfectly democratic way.
4) If, on the other hand, there was no EU at all, every european state would try to exit the crisis with “beggar thy neighbour” policies. But European states are very tightly coupled, so that this would result in an even less democratic economy: for example, the Irish low tax rate are an exmple of beggar thy neighbour policy, and in fact has effects on the french economy (draining taxes away from the french state), though the French never voted for the Irish parliament. This is much less democratic than the French asking to dictate policy to the Irish in exchange for cheaper loans.

On the whole, I think that there are big problems in the EU today, but those problems are not caused by a supposed “lack of democracy”. Instead:
1) The chosen economic policies are very stupid because are based on a “neolib” understanding of world economy. This, however, is a problem generalized throughout Europe, including the “democratically elected” governments of member states.
2) Because of, mostly, linguistic barrier, popular political discourse in EU is still based mostly on national level. If what I see here in Italy is a guide for the whole EU, national politicians have all incentives to blame the EU for unpopular policies (that maybe they would implement anyway), thus undermining the EU legitimacy. This is, however, a “cultural” problemof EU citiziens, not a problem caused by EU “evil elites”.

Random lurker@21

It is worth reading the entire paper, I think he addresses most of your points.

1) The EU commission is composed by members of the governments of member states, who are themselves democratically elected. Smaller states are, if anything, overrepresented.

The commission famously represents only itself and makes no claims to being in any way a democratic entity with the almost toothless parliament and the terrifically opaque council of ministers fulfilling this role. Sharpf argues that market liberalism has infected the commission to such an extent that it makes political decisions with neoliberal economic goals without a popular mandate.

2) The ECB is a non democratic bureocracy, but so are all central banks today: the central banks of Italy, Germany or Ireland are in no way more democratic than the ECB.

This is dealt with in the paper at some length, to oversimplify the arguments the problem with the ECB is that it is as least as undemocratic as the most undemocratic national CBs but substantially less accountable to the countries that its policies most adversely affect.

3) If the EU was more democratic by making every EU citizien vote any policy choice, the population of Ireland (4M), Spain (47M), Greece (11M) and Portugal (15M) would still be outnumbered by the germans alone (81M). Thus, in a “more democratic” EU, we would still see the Germans prevailing on the “PIGS”, in a perfectly democratic way.

Indeed, but in a pan European polity national interests might not be the main way by which constituencies are divided. A more traditional left/right divide might emerge. At any rate all democracies are faced with the problems of the dictatorship of the majority (which in Europe has turned into the dictatorship of the plurality),

4) If, on the other hand, there was no EU at all, every European state would try to exit the crisis with “beggar thy neighbour” policies. But European states are very tightly coupled, so that this would result in an even less democratic economy: for example, the Irish low tax rate are an exmple of beggar thy neighbour policy, and in fact has effects on the french economy (draining taxes away from the french state), though the French never voted for the Irish parliament. This is much less democratic than the French asking to dictate policy to the Irish in exchange for cheaper loans.

Perhaps you should read the lecture.

I see the French are now saying they’ll veto any renegotiation unless the corporate tax rate issue is sorted.

Makes one glad Great Britain isn’t in the euro, and can thus solve part of its problem by just printing money, doesn’t it? I can’t even begin to imagine how many pounds of flesh France and Germany will extract from London before they’re done. (At this point, it’s probably cheaper for Ireland to try to cobble together a Russian-Chinese-Saudi loan.)

Well done Gordo. Might not have been a great PM, but at the key moment made the right call.

Just finished this, many thanks for the link. Admirably clear, and free of axe-grinding.

That said, the citation at footnote 27 of a blogpost in the Telegraph by Dan Hannan should carry a massive health warning. In fact I believe there are European regulations to this effect. You can argue about the procedural legalities, and the Hannan type enjoys nothing better. You can also argue about whether fines should be levied at all. As a practical matter, though, a fines mechanism with a unanimity requirement would be in the chocolate teapot category of usefulness.

Scharpf dates the development of a distinct EU-level neoclassical agenda to the early 1980s. Since that time, a series of European countries have joined the EU, in a process that requires the complete adoption of the acquis communautaire into domestic law. Teams of Commission officials typically install themselves in national capitals to assist this process. I’d be interested in Scharpf’s view on the legitimacy or otherwise of this. Once you start pulling on the thread of democratic deficit, there’s a lot to unravel.

At some point, there has to be a ‘damn the investors, damn the banks, damn the other members…’ mentality if it necessarily means extended penury (which I believe it will for Greece and Portugal, at least) for my citizens.

Greece’s problems fundamentally do not have much to do with monetary policy, and they are not really “austerity” in the sense of bad countercyclical policy. They stem from the fact that about fifteen years ago, Greece had to choose “are we going to be the kind of country that pays very generous benefits and public sector salaries, or are we going to be the kind of country that doesn’t collect taxes on the middle class?” and decided “why not do both?”

The unprecedented scale and swiftness of the economic crisis deserves more weight when discussing the current state of the union, so does the hypocrisy of both politicians (carefree) and the people (responsible for accountability) for only complaining and wanting to act when it rains, rather than taking pre-cautionary measures.
Where was the scepticism when everyone had their place in the sun? Questions of EMU’s democratic legitimacy or the broadness of German shoulders or the concept of saving on a national level completely ignored.
Hindsight is a beautiful. But I suspect once economic recovery is underway, questions of accountability and legitimacy will not surface again with the exception of academic circles until the next recession.

Excellent paper, taken in conjunction with the previously posted paper by Kevin O’Rourke on the twin structural trilemmas of monetary union and political institutions of the EU caught as they are in an evolutionary moment, one could foresee a deep antipathy popping up in different communities split across certain cleavages in the EU. Worth printing the paper and sitting down with a highlighter. (I notice my A4 paper is Finnish, highlighter German, printer Taiwanese, electricity likely Saudi oil derived, while my dread is 100% Irish) Also it poses an interesting question on status of unions in various economies and their utility as a proxy for economic management. Wonder will the Commission start “scoreboarding” countries in that area.

There’s more wonkish angst over here (http://www.iiea.com/blogosphere/professor-sinn-misses-the-target) on German angst at Target 2 payments imbalances and whether or not it constitutes a “shadow” bailout with Karl Whelan taking on Hans-Werner Sinn.

But secondly, Greece is a surprisingly closed economy, and economic and political chaos are not usually all that great for the tourist sector, particularly since a lot of Greece’s tourist infrastructure is owned by German hotel chains who would be taking a pretty severe economic blow in having to write down the value of their real estate.

And firstly I don’t think this works because the structural fiscal balance isn’t in primary surplus. You can cover a deficit by printing in the short term if you’re sure that it’s cyclical and you’re expecting growth to recover, but if the reason that you have a structural deficit is that you fail to collect taxes, then it’s pretty straightforward to show that printing money to cover that is going to be hyperinflationary.

In terms of input legitimacy vs. output legitimacy, has there been any consideration given to the notion that the latter should be discounted for uncertainty? There seems to have been great overconfidence among pro-EU leftists that they knew how this would turn out and that, despite the democracy deficit and institutional factors deliberately favoring right-wing policies, that they could domesticate this beast and make it a welcome pet of the Social Democratic household. If you hold a fair election and do what the voters tell you, you can be reasonably sure you got the input legitimacy right. If you are going to defy their will because you know they will approve the results more than the contrary, even though they don’t know it, you’d better be damned sure of those results, and I don’t see how the European Left could have been so unafflicted by self-doubt.

Does anyone doubt that Scharpf’s digression into conspiracy theory is the truth? That there is an elite and half-hidden class in Europe that was always interested primarily in pushing Europe in a supply-side direction, sculpted European unification to inevitably further this end, and is sculpting the response to the crisis in a similar agenda-laden fashion? If the left intelligentsia realized this, why did they support unification under these circumstances, and, if they did not, why not? Is this not pretty much the end of Social Democracy in Europe? Perhaps the left has been too intellectually trained to discount conspiracy as an important vector in history? Perhaps elites tend naturally to have too much confidence in other elites? What led to this blindness? Wishful thinking perhaps? 4 years ago, Henry wrote this:

“But it’s a little odd to see a respected political scientist like Bogdanor making these arguments [that Social Democracy is being crushed by global economic forces], given the thriving academic literature ranging from Carles Boix’s work on how social democrats have regeared their economic policy by tackling the supply side of the economy to Geoffrey Garrett’s demonstration that openness to international markets appears to have positive rather than negative effects on welfare state size, which points to the opposite set of conclusions. There’s more of a case to be made that the EU is an inhospitable environment for social democracy – but even this is less true than it might have seemed a couple of years ago (the high tides of European market liberalization seem to be receding rather rapidly).”

Really? Looks to me like said high tides were receding in advance of a tsunami. I’m not just trying to pick on Henry here. It’s that he’s not just asserting that belief in the decay of social democracy from the operation of international capital is, in his opinion, incorrect. He’s stating that it is not even intellectually respectable. It is worth asking why not. I’m not familiar with Biox’s or Garrett’s work, but really, how solid do their conclusions look a mere 4 years later? Openness to international markets was a necessary condition of the US financial crisis becoming global. Sure doesn’t look like the welfare state will be growing now. While it’s easy to say “20/20 hindsight”, many of us were Euroskeptics for precisely these reasons. I expressed skepticism of these ideas when Henry cited them, in fact. Many in the anti-globalization left saw through this.

At this point, should the EU be saved? The prevailing thinking seems expressed in the end of this article:

“In the worst case, therefore, the attempts to save the Euro through the policies presently enacted may either fail on their own terms, or they may not only undermine democracy in EU member states but endanger European integration itself.”

This suggests, though it does not strictly state, that endangering integration is worse than undermining democracy. Why? Should not the commitment of someone of the Left be to something like Social Democracy with European integration only to be supported if it is a means to that end?

At this point, I see only two positions someone on the left can support:

1) Radically transform the EU. No democracy deficit. Drastically reduced independence for the ECB. Employment targets as well as inflation targets. Counter-cyclical deficits accepted. Europe-wide social welfare, labor, and taxation policies. The problem with this is that it is not at all clear how to achieve it when the democratic mechanisms of the EU are so weak. Can the parliament weaken the ECB? Can a group of nations collude to set some different set of rules than the EU as a whole to try to pressure the larger body? The bargain here is greater integration in exchange for a shift to the left. I don’t see the oligarchs going for this; they already have most of what they want from integration, so it is hard for me to see how this works, unless it is achieved under great pressure from option 2.
2) To hell with it. Break it up. Let some leave, though once the dam is punctured, it may all unravel. Yes, it will be very costly, and will have been a very expensive lesson. Social Democracy may well end up strengthened because people will fight for it and remember why they want it.

We must protect the EU at all costs cannot be an acceptable position.

Some may feel that the cosmopolitanism of the EU is worth the sacrifice of Social Democracy. Ah, to visit Italy without a passport! The greater fools, for they will get neither. Has animosity between European nations (other than Cold War belligerents) been greater at any time since WW2 that it is now? Is it not going to get worse? Integration does not necessarily produce community.

Daniel has strong views on the rights of creditors, and the perils of fucking with them. In his wake you’ll find a trail of Irish puppies and Icelandic sealcubs, impaled on spikes. That’s not a criticism, understand. He has clear premises, and follows them to clear conclusions. And he concedes a case for restructuring Greek debt. On restructuring, Barry Eichengreen on the Brady Plan is worth a read. It includes a good catch: the head of the Paris Club at the time was Jean-Claude Trichet.

Take a moment to think about the first half of the twentieth century.
Then ask yourself if someone might reasonably consider your post at #38 careless and self-indulgent.
I’ve not picked a fight with you before. You take a leftist line and that’s fine by me.
But in this case you’ve indulged in the tantrum of a wrecker and a hysteric.
My strong advice is to put a sock in it.

Can I ask where you’re from?
I think it might be relevant.
I’m British, by the way.

Turns out it’s not.
The reason I asked is I’m surprised that when I mentioned the first half of the twentieth century, you zeroed in so enthusiastically on the Nazis. There was also the small matter of the First World War – a nationalist cockfight – and the Great Depression – exacerbated by a competitive retreat behind protective barriers.
Listen, guests have just arrived, but you deserve a proper response.
I’ll get back to you before long I promise.

Why did the assassination of an archduke in Serbia launch a world war? Because of trans-national alliances. The European elite believed that creating explicit military and economic links among countries would prevent conflict among them, a line of thinking not unlike that underlying European unification today. In fact, it meant what should have been a regional conflict at most became a conflagration involving all. The level of economic integration and trade as a share of GDP that existed prior to the First World War was not regained until the 90s. And democracy was more limited before WW1, so that the countries were governed more by elite consensus, a circumstance the EU restores. In a Europe that was more institutionally nationalist, that is, one where countries had fewer enforceable obligations to one another, it is hard to see how WW1 would even get off the ground. So why is WW1 associated with nationalism? Well, the elites had to get people to volunteer as cannon fodder, an unpleasant occupation. Since it was a war mostly of white Christians against white Christians, race and religion were out. So that left nationalism as the drum that could be beaten. But that doesn’t mean that only nationalism can inspire such things. The Cold War was fought between two mostly white, but multi-racial, secular superpowers, it justified enormous carnage and was ideological. Pol Pot’s slaughter was ideological.

Now, one might argue that the deeper causes of the trans-national alliances were nationalist, but this also has problems. If a trans-national alliance formed by nations in their own interest as perceived by the elite is nationalist, then the EU is nationalist too. Is it that the nations in question, the major ones, were imperialist? Well, there is not much old school imperialism from Europe anymore, either before or after unification. Militarist? Before unification, Europe was almost religiously anti-militarist, save for tolerating American militarism for Cold War purposes. Militarism was, however, explicitly pushed as a means of unifying Europe during the Kosovo conflict, which was referred to as a “military Euro”. One could agree or disagree with the merits of Kosovo, but it made the linkage between militarism and European unification explicit. In the same period, and by largely the same actors, NATO was enthusiastically expanded, which had a lot to do with pulling Eastern European members into the EU (at a minimum, it made it impossible for Russia and allies to prevent it).

As for the Great Depression, forget exacerbated, it was caused by much of the same sort of financial industry games that have caused this financial crisis. And the EU has greatly enabled such games. In the US, it was also exacerbated by a return to what we would now call supply-side solutions, including deficit hawkery of the type Europe enforces by law, by the second Roosevelt administration (and thankfully abandoned after a couple of years).

Shay, I basically agree with you, except that I don’t see how the first group is “post-political” and don’t see them as all that broad – it’s the economic elite, the military, and the (meta)state bureaucracy, three groups that are not always, but are often, aligned. And power is the whole game, so I don’t know what you mean by post-political. As for the second group, I would count myself in that, but to me you are only in that group if there are circumstances under which you would consider the EU not worth it.

I should say that there is a lot I do like about the EU. The privacy directives, the development aid, the concessions the left has been able to get. I don’t know how much of that will last though. A pan-European movement to restore Social Democracy if it can force change could be a good thing. It will have to be willing to seriously disrupt operations, though. I suggest calling it that – The Movement to Restore Social Democracy – by invoking a previous state, it almost sounds small-c conservative. Many progressives will have a knee-jerk aversion for that very reason, but I think that wrong-headed, though that is a different discussion, But the essence of the movement could be: restoration of the welfare state, reduction of financial industry power, increase of economic and political equality, etc. It would be a movement for democracy and relative socialism: it is good to see those two expressly wedded, rather than having putatively socialistic elites disdainful of the popular will.

Shay, agreed, and of course this was one of the demons that drove the European powers into WW1: grandiosity.

I put in a does not equal sign that got stripped. In the second to last sentence, I meant “nationalism” does not equal “nationalism”, i.e., the word is being used in two different senses.

#47:

… a rag tag army of idealists and nationalists …

How romantic. Are ewoks involved?

Shay, you stepped in after I left.
I know you had a run-in with dsquared, and if you’re still smarting I sympathise. Console yourself with the fact that you have company.
As far as your argument with me is concerned, you’ll really have to do better than this. Your attempted division of the world is comic. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but posing for admiring glances as you bravely set about an imagined opponent only invites ridicule.
There is a division of the world. Unfortunately, right now, it involves you sitting at the kiddies table.

> I should say that there is a lot I do like about the
> EU. The privacy directives, […]

Realistically, the privacy directives are always bargained away in the end for something the EU bureaucracy wants from the US (or just threatened away by the US). They sound good on paper, but I wouldn’t count on them to protect me in any significant dispute.

Cranky

Bert,

Since you say you are confused, let me lay it out more schematically for you:

1)What I advocate for Europe is a system where popular control of government, industry, and the financial sector, including central banks, is at least as great as it was prior to Maastricht. If this can be done while maintaining unification, great. However, I will not hold unification to be a value that trumps all other values.
2)Returning to that prior level of control, which I would call “Social Democracy” in a broad sense, is a substantive commitment I am willing to sacrifice for small-d democracy. If the people vote to move to a more liberal (in the European sense) system, fine, but they must clearly vote for it, and voting for a party that does this without making their intentions clear beforehand does not count. And they must be able to vote to restore the system as well. If they can vote out Social Democracy for Liberalism, they must be able as well to do the reverse.
3)Since the legitimacy of European institutions is very much and increasingly in doubt according to Scharpf, whom you seem to endorse, the legitimacy of their failure to embrace the policies I favor is also in such doubt. They have never had a popular mandate for what they are now doing, and the whole project was largely shoved down Europe’s throat. I would be happy to put my policies against the current EU policies in an election. Let the legitimate democratic result prevail.
4)Nationalism can only justify the EU as constituted to the extent that it was a realistic problem in the member nations before Maastricht. Otherwise, you are just using the word “nationalism” the way people use the word “boo!” Saying we must have an EU to forestall a WW1 or a Yugoslavia situation only is valid if a) such things were in prospect among these countries before Maastricht, and b) the EU has clearly made such dangers (war between members or major ethnic or racial conflict) significantly less likely. The first is clearly untrue, and the second is unlikely. There is now, for example, serious animosity between Greeks and Germans that did not exist before and looks likely to worsen over time.
5)The EU was achieved in stages, and one can endorse some stages without endorsing others. ISTM, that if you looked at what the EU had achieved prior to Maastricht, and what it was capable of within the framework then in place, which included aid to Spain and Ireland, the balance sheet looks pretty good. Since then, not so much. One could call that opposition to Maastricht rather than the EU, but Maastricht is designed to be irreversible. Opposition to Maastricht means opposition to the specific institutional form of the EU as of today, though not necessarily to the project of unification. However, it can, and does for me, mean opposition to unification if unification necessarily means Maastricht unmodified.

If you google Slovenia yourself, you will see that it seceded in 1991, not 1990. Things were moving very fast back then, so a year made a real difference. I know. I was, in fact, living in the area at the time. I was in Yugoslavia in 91 and in 92 as the country was starting to break up. I didn’t go where the fighting was, but I saw the columns of tanks and troops headed towards war, I talked with people in the bars. The lesson of Yugoslavia is that if you really do have serious ethnic or religious conflict, you are not going to be able to fix it by imposing a unified polity. There have been times in European history when this has worked, more or less, but not for a very long time; it is not something that works in our era, which has instead seen many of the old “cobblings together” unravel or come under serious strain. Yugoslavia spent half a century promoting a “Serbo-croatian” identity without taming the conflict between Serbs and Croats. It suppressed the conflict by force (and prosperity by Communist standards) for a good, long time, but the long-term effect was just freezing that conflict and their other internal conflicts in amber. And, yes, Slovenia has benefitted from the EU and is a very nice place. This doesn’t change the overall point.

Marton Bento@61

The more I think of it the more I really like the idea of a pan-European movement to restore Social Democracy.

An excellent idea, though there would be many forces to work against, one prominent example being the majority of the current EU financial and political elite.

There might also be a problem with attracting much of the social democratic political talent, given how thoroughly subverted by the the institutions of the EU the current body politic is. Who wants to spoil their chance of a shot at a tasty DG post after all?

On the positive side the Christian Democrat Hegemony is currently looking vulnerable (at last), the contradictions inherent in protecting both the rentier classes and some degree of economic and social justice are glaringly apparent, notwithstanding the attempts to blame the whole problem on lazy southerners, burkhas and the Irish corporation tax rate.

No serious person.

Shay, yes, I recognize that I am talking about something very “anti-establishment”, as they said in the old days. One thing such a movement could do is create a genuine pan-European identity. I’m skeptical that deep political identities can be created top down anymore. I don’t see a way to get there within current institutions, so the pressure must come from outside the institutions.That’s why I say it’s anti-EU. It would be better, to me, if it were not anti-unification per se, as a less oligopolic unification could be a very good thing, and disintegration would be very painful. But disintegration would be one of the few credible threats such a movement could make, so it belongs on the table.

You’re going to whine about “cheap points”? You changed your tone with this last comment, but you do realize you’ve been inordinately rude throughout this discussion, right? And that I have refrained from responding in kind to try to elevate the tone? That the 1991 comment was specifically a response to your presumptuous cheap shot that I should google Slovenia? And you made remarks like this:

“careless and self-indulgent…
you’ve indulged in the tantrum of a wrecker and a hysteric.
My strong advice is to put a sock in it.
Fisking all this would be too tedious to contemplate”

This is intended to convince me? And how nicely am I really obligated to talk to you after that? And why? To convince you? You’re spraying vitriol like spit all over the room. You’re not going to be convinced of anything. And you’re complaining about a remark that’s not even rude. I suppose it could be considered pedantic.

“Would it be a problem if we disagreed less?”

WTF? Go reread the thread, and you tell me who’s picking a fight here. In fact, you even said you were picking a fight.

As for the substance, I’ll try to get back to it later. It’s late now.

Martin Bento@66

This being the Internet it is worth remembering that not everyone posting is necessarily in their full health.

Your memory is serving you poorly. What I said in #38 is that people on the left should support either reforming the EU or abolishing it. I later said that I preferred reforming. And, no, I’m not upset at your hostile tone. It just seemed that your “Is it a problem if we disagree less?” and “you won’t convince me by scoring cheap points” comments were extremely bizarre in the context of it. As though I were the one being combative, as though I must stick to the strictest and most generous standards of debate while you lodge stink boms, and as though you were open to persuasion, when you were obviously strongly emotionally invested in your position. If I did convince you, you would have to eat major crow to admit it, given your rhetoric, and no one likes the taste of crow.

If the purpose of European integration was to keep national egos from tipping into war, this was achieved by the early 80’s at the very latest and the further integration was unnecessary. If its purpose was to stop bigotry generally, it is doing very poorly, as there is now more of this within Europe now than in recent decades, it is directed primarily at Muslims and gypsies, so that erasing national boundaries does not help, and the EU has done little to counter it. Meanwhile, tensions among the members are higher than they have been for decades and look likely to go higher still. And the EU made this possible. Without the EU, Greece’s problems would not be everyone’s problems, for example.

I wasn’t retreating. It was just 3 AM where I was. But I do see your viewpoint, and I’m glad we have settled down to a more reasonable discussion. I expect this thread to close soon though, so I don’t think this is the place to continue.