Demotix/Elias Theodoropoulos. All rights reserved.In openDemocracy of October 9, Thomas Fazi critiqued my paper on The German Question and the European Question. Monetary Union and European Democracy after the Greek Crisis (DEM WP Series 105, University of Pavia). He maintains that while European democratic federalism is “possible and desirable”, this “does not make it more likely”. Here I put forward the thesis that a monetary union without a fiscal union and a democratic government cannot survive in a global economy, where the liberalisation of the financial markets is already a reality and the old political order built after WWII is crumbling.
In my answer I also try to consider the arguments of Arestis, Sawyer and Legrain, which Fazi quotes in support of his point of view. In general, we disagree on the nature of the European Federation and the strategy for building it: Fazi and some economists of the left support the point of view that “Less Europe, more Nationalism” is the answer to the European Union's present crisis. As I see it, this is a conservative stance, and a dangerous one: to take a progressive view we need a policy that is viable for Europe and the rest of the world.
The history of European integration has had its critical points, but it is also a success story. The European Union is a new institution in the history of mankind: a supranational federation in progress. The model of the federal state was unequivocally recalled in the Schuman Declaration of 1950, but the Coal and Steel Community only represented a partial form of supranational government, with various areas left undefined. We should therefore be careful to draw lessons from existing federations – such as the USA, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, India, Germany, etc. – because they are all nation-states.
