Let us take as our starting point two short quotations. The first is from a speech delivered by Jean Monnet in Washington on 30 April 1952: “We are not uniting states, we are uniting people”. The second is drawn from an interview that Jean-Claude Juncker has just granted to the newspaper Le Monde. Uncertain as to the practical usefulness of urgently reducing Greek debt, the president of the European Commission immediately adds, almost mezza-voce, that to do so nonetheless “would be to recognise the collective effort made by the Greeks”, punctuating his comments with a kind of act of contrition: “We have taken a lot from them and given them little. We must at least give them back their dignity”. There is no need to be gifted in reading signs to be able to discern the gaping chasm between these two statements, or the enormity of the act of treason against the original extraordinary humanist purpose.
What has happened that the dream, for some, has turned into a daily nightmare? For it to have become, for far too many European citizens today, no more than a pathetic illusion they no longer fall for - preferring to be warmed in the false sense of security of the populists, nationalists and other extremists of all kinds. The causes of the “multicrisis” that we are experiencing are no doubt many but, as political analyst Bastien Nivet pointed out in the academic magazine The Conversation, they all, from the euro zone crisis to the upheavals in the Schengen area, coalesce in one single certainty: “These symbolic jewels of European construction are dysfunctional because the member states have failed to take account of their consequences and implications. They have not put in place the political dimensions to go with them”. But is this just an “ivory-tower” analysis, detached from political reality? No doubt some in the corridors of power will say so, arguing that, as Gambetta put it so well in the 19th century, politics is, after all, the art of the possible. Agreed, but there is no getting away from the facts, leading another academic, Jean Tirole, Nobel Economics Prize winner, to hammer home the point in an interview with Belgian daily Le Soir: “The people who made the Maastricht Treaty understood perfectly well that debt and budgets could cause problems in Europe but they did not set up the institutions to deal with them”. Who is right and who is wrong?
Clearly, the two academics have allies, including two well-known figures who have practised the art of the possible in their political and governmental duties - with varying fortunes. In a remake of Sergio Leone's classic film The, Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the role of the Good would go to Jacques Delors. What does the former Commission president say, for instance, in the latest work in which he speaks (see European Library, no 1140 of 24 May)? He argues that the economic and monetary union has to be “rebuilt” as a matter of urgency because as he has “always said, there was a design fault from the very beginning”. One up for the academics, then! Some may perhaps be tempted to say that Mr Delors is a “has been”, giving in to nostalgia, a man whose regrets no longer resonate with the concrete political realities of the present day. To suggest this would be both graceless and foolish. While the future cannot, indeed, be built with eyes locked on the rear-view mirror, one has to know where one comes from to know where one is going - and, more to the point, where one wants to go! Errors made right at the start of the single currency explain the current turmoil undermining the euro zone, of that there is no doubt.
What, then, was the design fault from the outset? Agence Europe readers, followers of Ferdinando Riccardi's Look Behind the News, are well aware that Mr Delors has always regretted that, in economic and monetary union, the economic strand was less robust than the monetary strand, embodied by the European Central Bank. In his book of interviews with Cécile Amar, Jacques Delors is clearer. In substance, his “greatest regret” is that his report which is the act upon which the single currency was founded “was not acted upon in its entirety” and parts of “the White Paper on growth, competitiveness and solidarity”, which he put to the Council in 1994 before it was sent to finance ministers, were deleted, removing, for example, his idea of a “European loan”, ultimately proving to be the first indicator of the problems European economic and monetary union would bring. When, in 2001, it was agreed that Greece should be one of the founding members of the euro zone (something he would not have accepted if he had had anything to do with it), Mr Delors warned the then French prime minister, Lionel Jospin, that a pact coordinating economic policies was needed alongside the budgetary and monetary sides. He argued in vain, however. Because, in his words, no one stood up to “the pressure brought to bear by the German and Dutch fundamentalists”. And this is the very moment that “the Ugly” appears on the screen.
Michel Theys