How European Euroskeptics view the Euro crisis

I attended this week a gathering of conservative, and mostly Euroskeptic, members of the European Parliament (EP). They are members of a smallish parliamentary bloc ocalled the European Conservatives and Reformists, which includes members of the EP from the British conservative party, a Belgian libertarian party and parties from the Czech Republic, Poland, Iceland and Hungary. In all, the group comprises 53 members from nine countries (there are, at the moment, no French or German members). The most prominent figure in the visiting delegation was probably Daniel Hannan, whose excoriation of Gordon Brown in the EP became a Youtube sensation.

From Brussels (and with EU funds apportioned to European political parties), this group essentially wages an insurgency against the expansion of the EU’s powers. The group is not, at least not formally, dedicated to the abolition of the European Union. Instead, its members seek a marked reduction in the EU’s powers and a dramatic slimming of the hulking EU bureaucracy. As one would expect, the evening featured plenty of witty salvos against the madness of the EU regulatory apparatus and the incoherence of EU officials. Jose Manuel Barroso was on more than one occasion likened to Leonid Brezhnev.

Some of the MEPs did acknowledge that within what they view as the vast awfulness of the European integration project there are liberalizing nuggets that should be salvaged, notably the breaking down of European trade barriers and the free movement of labor. But the vision of what an ideal EU would look like was fuzzy, and one had the sense that at least a few of the members wouldn’t shed a tear if the whole project collapsed.

The Eurozone crisis places these insurgents in a curious position. On the one hand, they see the Euro’s plight as a fundamental vindication of their worldview. The Euro, they insist, was always a political currency that had as its goal the creation of a European superstate and a sense of European nationality. It had nothing to do with economic fundamentals and was doomed to fail. More broadly, they argue that the European debt crisis was the logical consequence of the European welfare state model propagated by the EU and of the greedy expansionism of the Brussels bureaucracy.

If there was an element of glee at the EU’s travails, however, it mixed with genuine alarm at the scale of the crisis  and with a realization that events might soon spin out of control.  "It’s a matter of months," one member said. One concern was particularly salient: that the stifling political consensus within Germany and France, in particular, regarding further EU integration could have dangerous political consequences. "The European elite has only one response to the crisis," said Dirk Jan Eppink, "more Europe, more Europe, and more Europe."  Popular anger is growing, but because the major parties are lockstep in support of greater European integration, it really has nowhere to go. And with no mainstream outlet, these European conservatives worry that it could erupt in very nasty ways.