An interview which has moved on. The European Central Bank has in practice come out of its political reserve, by taking position on the significance and repercussions of monetary union and clarifying its role. It did so in a way which may at first sight appear strange: what started off as an interview with a member of its board of directors became a political stance by the ECB itself. Allow me to explain.
Since the start of this year, Mr Benoit Cœuré has been the French representative on the board of the ECB, following the departure of former President Jean-Claude Trichet. Mr Cœuré gave his first interview to Jean Quatremer for his blog, Coulisses de Bruxelles (Behind the scenes at Brussels). However, given the candour and interest of his replies, the presidency of the ECB wanted to have sight of the text prior to publication and revised some aspects of it. For this reason, the interview was published with the following words: “This interview has been proofread and amended by the ECB”. It should therefore be considered as expressing the position of the ECB itself. This, incidentally, is how it was taken on board in the debate which traditionally follows Mr Quatremer's pieces (see below).
Political union unavoidable. The text for which the ECB assumed responsibility reads (our translation): “We believed that monetary union would be the crowning moment of the single market; today, we realise that it is in fact just the start of political union. If Europe wants to exist in the context of globalisation, it must work towards more integration, without prejudice to the form this may take, which must be decided on by the people of Europe.” But does the ECB not play a direct and autonomous role in this framework? “The ECB, which is the only fully federal institution of the EU, has played a very important role in ensuring the continuity of the functioning of the European financial system. But this role can only be a temporary one (…). The euro is fundamentally a political project. A proportion of the market has failed to understand this political nature and has underestimated the fact that Europe has no choice but to organise itself around the euro in order to exist within globalisation.”
The tasks, however, must be clearly separated, without forgetting the “division of roles between monetary policy, which is responsibility of the ECB, and the budgetary policy, which is up to the member states. This does not prevent the ECB from taking its responsibilities with regard to the financial crisis. Last December, we carried out a financing operation at a rate of 1%, which made it possible to inject €489 billion into the financial system, an operation we are due to repeat on 28 February.” But these operations must serve to reinforce the capital base of the banks: if the banks use profits “to distribute excessive pay or dividends, there will be a real problem. It is up to the regulators and the states to ensure that this does not happen”, the objective being to “improve the funding of the real economy”.
The division of the roles is untouchable. The ECB is prohibited from granting loans directly to a member state, and rightly so. If it could, it would “become an instrument of the budgetary policy of that state, which would bring it on to the political terrain which it does not possess (…). It would be entitled to an opinion on tax policy, budgetary policy, on expenditure. However, it has no political mandate.” At present, the EU has the “foundations of an economic pole opposite the ECB, which needed an interlocutor to give it visibility on the budgetary policy and allow it to make appropriate monetary policy decisions”. This is the first step towards budgetary union, the start of the future political union.
Two opposite tendencies. In Coulisses de Bruxelles, the interview is followed by a debate which continued for several days, featuring several people with high-level responsibilities within the European institutions, but who used pseudonyms. Two opposite tendencies clearly emerged: the first shares the position of the ECB on monetary union, which is necessarily evolving towards the political union of Europe; the other is totally sceptical, in some cases even to the point of irony, about the possibility of monetary union becoming political, between populations with radically different traditions, mindsets, economic capacities and lifestyles.
Many figures involved with Community administration believe that if actual political union was to exist one day, it would cover only some of the member states. (FR/transl.fl)