Euro-deja-vu
When I woke up this morning and scanned the headlines, I knew what I was going to blog about — the stories in the press about how the European Union was, after much hemming and hawing, beginning to move towards a closer fiscal union. I was then going to not-so-humblebrag about my own prediction that ...
When I woke up this morning and scanned the headlines, I knew what I was going to blog about -- the stories in the press about how the European Union was, after much hemming and hawing, beginning to move towards a closer fiscal union. I was then going to not-so-humblebrag about my own prediction that this would indeed happen. This was all going to be a great set-up to the last-minute reverse course -- i.e., this Financial Times op-ed by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble in which he declared his "unease when some politicians and economists call on the eurozone to take a sudden leap into fiscal union and joint liability."
When I woke up this morning and scanned the headlines, I knew what I was going to blog about — the stories in the press about how the European Union was, after much hemming and hawing, beginning to move towards a closer fiscal union. I was then going to not-so-humblebrag about my own prediction that this would indeed happen. This was all going to be a great set-up to the last-minute reverse course — i.e., this Financial Times op-ed by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble in which he declared his "unease when some politicians and economists call on the eurozone to take a sudden leap into fiscal union and joint liability."
Here’s the thing, however — if you read my eurozone blog post from this past February, you’ll see that almost the exact same dynamic played itself out six months ago. This time the Germans are pre-emptively balking before the peripheral countries can balk in response to German calls for austerity… but you get the general idea.
So… in the interest of avoiding IPE déjà vu for readers, I hereby promise not to blog about this again until something actually happens beyond news reports of preliminary steps-towards-fiscal-centralization-followed-by-political-pushback. I will simply observe that Ryan Avent’s basic question will be the one to ask going forward:
Europe’s leaders know what they’ll have to do to stabilise the situation. The key question now is: what is the set of euro-zone countries consistent with the political will to save the currency area? Europeans in Europe’s core will share a currency with "outsider" countries, but they won’t fight to save them. So who are the outsiders? Who has to go to convince core voters that the cost of saving the euro zone is worth bearing?….
With which countries do core voters sufficiently identify themselves as to make a large, ongoing commitment acceptable? Answer that, and you probably have a good idea how this mess will end.
Readers are requested to state which countries get the Euroboot in the comments below.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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