*** EDWIN LE HERON: A quoi sert la Banque centrale européenne? La Documentation française (Direction de l'information légale et administrative, 29 quai Voltaire, F-75344 Paris cedex 07. Tel: (33-1) 40157010 - Internet: http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr ). Réflexe Europe / Débats series. 2013, 232 pp, €9. ISBN 978-2-11-008893-2.
Like a goldsmith's business, popularisation sometimes looks like art, as is the case with this book in which an economist reliably explains, in a detailed yet user-friendly manner and simple terms the origins of the European Central Bank and the currency, the euro, of which the bank is the sole manager, the doctrinal foundations for its work, how it operates, its independence, its mission and, above all, its attitude in times of crisis, in other words that seemingly endless period from 2008 until now (that may not be over yet). Edwin Le Héron's fine tome is an excellent contribution to a series aiming to take the long view on controversies arising in the history of the European construction project in order to help readers find their way around the challenges and problems facing the European Union today. This scientific writer calls a spade a spade, even at the risk of upsetting certain quarters. The large number of explanatory boxes (on ordo-liberalism, a currency's six tasks, Eurogroup, Keynsian trends, the relevance of convergence criteria and the rationale for tackling inflation and so on) turn this book into a precious guide to every aspect of the single currency, its promises and the dangers surrounding them.
Rather than examining the European Central Bank from a technical angle, the author sheds light on it by revealing the fundamental issues it covers. In the first section on the emergence of the ECB, he starts by explaining that it incarnates the synthesis of very different monetary histories and is itself the expression of a 'historical compromise' between very different political visions of the European project, visions that are still very much 'alive and kicking.' He also shows how its strong independence by statute and the war on inflation conferred upon it above all other tasks arise from the particular ideological backdrop prevailing at the time of its gestation, which was a time of huge criticism of state interventionism and a renewal of free market economic theories more generally. In the second section, Edwin Le Héron looks at how the European Central Bank operates. The author is senior lecturer at Sciences Po Bordeaux University, and here he reviews the bank's role in European monetary organisation, its monetary policy system and various monetary policy instruments, thus enabling the author to draw up an initial balance sheet of the bank's economic action.
The most stimulating section of the book is undoubtedly the third part, which takes the form of an essay on how the European Central Bank might develop in the future along, more generally, with the future of the eurozone and the single currency. The author, who is a member of the Groupe de Recherche en Economie Théorique et Appliquée of University Montesquieu Bordeaux IV, analyses the special policies the ECB has 'very pragmatically' decided to carry out to (attempt to) muzzle the crisis in the eurozone, along with the decisions taken by the European authorities to ensure the survival of economic and monetary union. The measures proved in the end to be insufficient because of the lack of 'doctrinal foundations' for the monetary venture, despite the fact that the ECB has been able to demonstrate that it is not 'just a clone of the Bundesbank.' The problem is that the political leaders are under pressure from Merkel's Germany and opted in the Budget Pact for federalism that 'remains tinged with ordo-liberalism,' and 'suggests only respect of monetary rules monitored by independent authorities and the affirmation of liberal priority targets (price stability and budget equilibrium).' But the author explains that monetary union cannot be sustainable 'without a federal vision,' and 'without an economic federalism and solidarity': 'Without strong solidarity between' eurozone Member States, 'without fiscal integration, without a genuine common budget, without a shared social project, without an industrial strategy, a monetary policy cannot survive,' he warns. The ball is therefore in the court of the decision-makers who, in order to find the political courage they have been lacking for so long, must become fully aware of the dangers of the third scenario described by the author: that of the resistible 'temptation to carry out monetary sovereignism' that would veritably amount to suicide!
Michel Theys
*** ARNAUD LEPARMENTIER: Ces Français fossoyeurs de l'euro. Plon (76 rue Bonaparte, F-75284 Paris cedex 06. Tel: (33-1) 44413500 - Fax: 44413053 - Internet: http://www.plon.fr ). Tribune libre series. 2013, 242 pp, €18-50. ISBN 978-2-259-22008-8.
As any Frenchman will tell you, any time Europe is in trouble, it is other people who are to blame - the English, the Germans, the Dutch, the Poles or the Hungarians. Arnaud Leparmentier commits the crime of lese-majesty by writing that the reason that Europe undergoes crisis is because the French have never wanted Europe to a be a copy of France at European level. For a long time a foreign correspoindent in Brussels before becoming an editorialist for French newspaper Le Monde, Arnaud Leparmentier re-writes the lost opportunities in his own way. There have been many of them, but every attempt to create a tighter, more federal and more political Europe has clashed with the untouchability of French sovereignty. In this book on the French gravediggers of the euro, the journalist-author spares nobody. Balladur was indifferent, Jospin only wanted a socialist Europe, Chirac was wily and scornful, surfing on his 80% landslide victory, Giscard, a self-declared Hellenist, managed to win Greece's membership in the face of opposition from all the experts… The scenes are juicy and Sarkozy and Merkel come in for much stick and are descirbed as 'mediocre Europeans.' Hollande comes in for less criticism simply because he appeared on the European scene too late to be covered in the book. Arnaud Leparmentier can be criticised for lack of impartiality. He does at least have the excuse that he knows what he is talking aobut. He attended virtually all the European summits of recent years and has rubbed shoulders with and held close discussions with all and sundry. More than political analsyis, the book tells a tale. The European institutions, Commission and Parliament, get little coverage of course. The French jouranlist says it is at the Justus Lipsius builiding that Europe is constructed and deconstructed amidst sound, fury and coming to arrangements.
(RV)
*** Le Revue générale. Revue générale asbl (41 ch. de Louvain, B-1320 Hamme-Mille. Tel: (32-10) 866629 - Fax: 866691 - email: la.revue.generale@live.be - Internet: http://www.revuegenerale.be ). November / December 2012, No. 11/12, 125 pp, €16. Annual subscription: €99 (Belgium), €109 (elsewhere in the European Union), €119 (outside the European Union).
The European Union has a central location in this issue of a Belgian review founded way back in 1865. Prof. Christian Franck analyses the connections from the start between the euro and political union, pointing out that Chancellor Helmut Kohl only agreed to the single currency as long as political progress made it 'acceptable and legitimate' to abandon monetary sovereignty. However, it has acted essentially as an 'extrinsic link,' because it has never been applied to the measures of economic and monetary union itself. After pointing out how political union has become, within the European Union, a 'vague and polysemic notion' on which the twenty-seven Member States are divided, the author, who is professor emeritus at Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, notes that the various breakthroughs in eurozone governance required by the crisis have led Angela Merkel to want tighter political union in order to provide 'additional legitimacy' to the new economic union architecture, which should translate into a strengthening of the parliamentary component. The author, who is now a lecturer at the Diplomatische Akademie Wien in Austria and in the College of Europe, says that the resurgence of the political union debate will probably lead to 'political piloting' rather than the advent of a federal Europe along the lines of the German model, because Member States will not agree to being reduced to little more than German Länder. In the same spirit, this political analyst from the realist school argues that 'if an existing federal system had to be used, it would be the Swiss Confederation that should be used as inspiration,' because the Swiss Federal Council is voted in by a mixed assembly of parliamentarians from the National Council, an expression of the Swiss nation, and the Council of States, representing the cantons. In his opinion, this would be more acceptable to the EU heads of state, particularly if the president of the European Commission chairs it. In these highly pedagogical chapters by Renaud Denuit on various aspects of the ongoing eurozone crisis, the author, a former European Commission official, concludes with this feeling that would be difficult to challenge: 'Faced with the simultaneous rise in precarious living, political and economic gloom and national ideology, enlightened intellectuals feel as a matter of urgency that the Europe that our children and grandchildren will experience will actually be decided in the very short-term, probably over the next two years.'
(MT)
*** Politique. Revue de débats. ASBL Politique (9 rue du Faucon, B-1000 Brussels. Tel: (32-2) 5386996 - email: secretariat@politique.eu.org - Internet: http://politique.eu.org ). March/April 2013, No. 79, 84 pp. Annual subscription: €40.
Along with a very detailed special dossier on Impasses de la démocratie (in Belgium and elsewhere), there are two articles in particular in this issue of a review that is well-known in intellectual, progressive circles in Belgium that will attract the attention of readers of European Library. In the first, researcher Bruno Bauraind, coordinator of the Econospheres network, calls for a genuine debate on the distribution of wealth in Belgium and Europe, as only 'a mass, co-ordinated response from all civil society organisations in Europe' could contain and check the 'German model' and austerity at any cost. Professor Laurent de Briey of the social and political science department of the Economic, Social and Management Science Faculty of Notre-Dame de la Paix University in Namur, Belgium, makes an intellectually stimulating critique of the criticism by dismayed economists who, while 'not resigning themselves to the domination of neo-liberal orthodoxy,' seem to him to be 'suffering from nostalgia for the post-war boom.' In this way, he says they turn into the high priests of the regulated economy of that time, in other words of the growth that was the engine of that golden age. Hence this perfidious but powerful growth (in this time when natural resources are not what they used to be) is perhaps a solution of the past that is out-of-date, particularly because 'proof remains to be given that support for growth as a response to public debt is actually compatible with a more qualitative development model for which, by definition, quantitative growth is not longer the absolute priority.' In the same spirit, he expresses concern at the assimilation of any desire to reform the welfare state into social regression, seeing this as a form of 'social conservatism' unable to take account of the demographic challenge of the ageing of the population in Europe.
(MT)
*** Louvain. Université catholique de Louvain (Halles universitaires, 1 place de l'Université, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve. Tel: (32-10) 479175 - email: reginald.evrard@uclouvain.be - Internet: http://www.uclouvain.be/revue-louvain ). January 2013, No. 192, 35 pp, €5. Annual subscription: €25 (Belgium), €30 (elsewhere in the European Union), €35 (rest of the world).
As a sign of the times, this first 2013 issue of this bimonthly review published by the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium has a special dossier announced on the cover with the title 'Economistes, l'heure des comptes a sonné.' One economist, Frenchman Robert Boyer, who is one of the fathers of the theory of regulation, regrets in the article that in the European Union, 'intergovernmental negotiations have overtaken a Community approach to resolving crises,' with the most powerful government, that of Germany, therefore carrying responsibility for deciding on the future of the eurozone. This expert on the crises of capitalism says it is 'tragic that countries are defending their national interests tooth and nail to the detriment of cooperation that would allow the emergence of renewed European growth ex-post and finally generate citizen ownership of the European ideal.' He points out that luckily, international financiers are more powerful than Berlin and they ensure there is talk of the weapon of 'refinancing of public debt … failing any movement towards fiscal and bank federalism.' A discordant voice that tends to counter Jean Sloover's prediction that while 'we are in the tail of the neoliberal typhoon,' change is unlikely to come from economists…
(MT)
*** MICHAELA KRIEGELSTEIN: Finanzkrisen und Glaubwürdigkeit des Haftungsausschlusses im EU-Vertrag. Peter Lang (1 Moosstrasse, Postfach 350, CH-2542 Pieterlen. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3761727 - email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). Europäische Hoschschulschriften / Publications Universitaires Européennes / European University Studies, No. 3411. 2012, 357 pp, €62-80. ISBN 978-3-631-63011-2.
In this book, Michaela Kriegelstein examines the credibility of the non-liability clause for the financial crisis. She starts by describing the regulations in force and their foundations before discussing the prevention of imbalances in the treaties and the legal action framework available to the European Union. The following section is largely devoted to economic and monetary union, particularly the cost of leaving the eurozone. The author then focuses on financial crises and how they are spread in Europe itself and elsewhere in the world. Later in her study, Michaela Kriegelstein examines the credibility of the non-liability clause for public debt within EMU and describes the benefits of using the euro as an international currency, along with the financial aid available from the International Monetary Fund. She ends by looking at crisis prevention, reviewing the institutional characteristics of the European Central Bank System.
(SH)