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| St_Andrew |
| In Sweden this autumn there is going to be a referendum about joining EMU or not. So of course there is a big debate going on here about it... I'm fighting for a yes and I think that's necessary for such a small country as Sweden. What do you think about EMU/EURO? I guess there is a lot of people here that already live in a EMU country, what's your experiences? |
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| DrUg_Tit0 |
| It's ok if you're travelling, so that you don't have to change money at the rip off exchange offices each time you go to a new country. |
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| Dj_Irish |
| quote: | Originally posted by DrUg_Tit0
It's ok if you're travelling, so that you don't have to change money at the rip off exchange offices each time you go to a new country. |
True, but that's also one of the least significant issues about this subject IMO.
One of the bigger ones is the countries right to stimulate their own economy with interest rates politics. This will be handed over to the ECB when joining the EMU. For small countries like Sweden that can become a problem. We constitute a very small part of the EU and the EMU. If we get into a recession or an otherwise poor economy we can now choose to stimulate the ecomomy by changing the interest rates. In the EMU we are left to the ECB to do something like that and they are very unlikely to change the interest rates for the whole EMU area just because of one country. Maybe they'll do it to help powerhouse economies like the German one or the French but for a country with only 9 million people it's not very likely.
Also, when you think about the democratic process of the EU my doubts raise about getting more entangled in this kind of "unions". I think there was a quoute in our daily newspaper that whent something like this: "If the EU would apply its democratic demands for countries applying for membership on it self, it would not pass". |
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| TranceGiant |
I just know that us Austrians got ed :( Since one Euro equals 14 Austrian Schillings everybody stepped into the trap of seeing "little numbers"...during the first months everybody kept calculating but as time goes by you get lazy and don't care..and lose sooo much money :whip:
74 schilling for a McD menu for example...that sounded threatening...now it's 5.95 and u smilingly even give the 5 cent tip. thinking you made a bargain :stongue: |
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| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by Dj_Irish
Also, when you think about the democratic process of the EU my doubts raise about getting more entangled in this kind of "unions". I think there was a quoute in our daily newspaper that whent something like this: "If the EU would apply its democratic demands for countries applying for membership on it self, it would not pass". |
Funny you should mention that, I posted an article on this a while back. The link to the original times article is dead so I'll just repost the article:
"EU blueprint spells demise of democracy
anatole kaletsky
The European Union is arguably the most successful political entity ever created. In less than 50 years, its territorial expansion and accretion of state powers has exceeded the wildest ambitions of the Roman, British or Napoleonic Empires. It has helped to bring permanent peace to a continent which has never known anything but warfare. It has spread prosperity and democracy to impoverished and benighted regions from Iberia to the Balkans. And it has done all this without coercion, let alone bloodshed. Even the United States of America, the only remotely comparable experiment in creating a universal political civilisation, could not boast such achievements after just 46 years of existence.
Why, then, is the EU so widely despised and resented, especially by European citizens themselves? And why do the prospects for a flowering of Europe’s political and economic culture seem gloomier today than at any time in the past 50 years?
Some answers to these questions can be found in the draft constitution for a new Union of European States, published on Monday by the Convention on the Future of Europe. This is a document of monumental importance which Tony Blair has, as usual, tried to drive out of public consciousness. Initially he refused to acknowledge that the convention was even drafting a new constitution. Now, aided and abetted by the British media, ministers are trying to distract attention from the real issues by focusing on trivia. Will the EU change its name to “United States of Europe”? Will it agree to administer common powers on a “federal” basis? Who cares?
What matters is not the name of the new Europe, but its new purposes and powers. As the EU has developed, mutating from a free-trade area into a single market, then a monetary zone, then an economic government and now into a geopolitical, defence and judicial entity with all the main attributes of a nation state, it has acquired more and more power over the lives of its citizens.
The two crucial questions before the Constitution Convention in Brussels are exactly the same as the ones facing the American founding fathers in Philadelphia in 1787: how should powers be divided between the new federation and its member states? And how should these powers be democratically controlled?
Most of the debate in Brussels has focused on the first question, yet the second matters more. If we look at the US Constitution, in contrast to the European draft, the former document is devoted almost entirely to the detailed procedures for electing a President and Congress and appointing the Supreme Court. The list of federal competences and powers (Section 8 of the US Constitution) consists of only about 300 words, one fifth of the length of this article. This has not prevented the US federal Government becoming enormously powerful. But it has ensured that the steady shift of power from the State to the centre, which is inevitable in any federal system, has enjoyed political legitimacy, has been subject to judicial checks and balances and has been driven by democracy, rather than bureaucracy.
In the European constitutional debate, by contrast, the issue of legitimacy and the conflict between bureaucracy and democracy, which is really at the heart of the present political and economic malaise across Europe, has been trivialised or swept aside. European politicians ritually bewail the “democratic deficit” in EU institutions, but in practice they show absolutely no interest in political legitimacy. In fact, the institutional changes required to make European institutions more democratic have scarcely figured in the debates in Brussels, still less in the draft constitution.
The way power is shifting in Europe can be clearly seen from the outline constitution. All imply major shifts in favour of the Union. The new constitution accelerates the accretion of EU powers which have made foreign policy, defence and justice, as well as economic and social policy, matters of “Union competence”. But it then goes much further than any previous official document by suggesting that even powers remaining at the national level should be governed by a new “obligation of loyal co-operation”.
Some of the practical consequence can be imagined from recent news events. Britain’s pursuit of an independent policy on Iraq would clearly conflict with the principle of loyal co-operation. But so would the French Government’s decision to cut taxes to fulfil its electoral promises, even though this has fatally “impaired the effectiveness” of the eurozone Stability Pact, one of the pivotal policies of the EU. The import of the new constitution, therefore, is that national governments must give priority to Union objectives, even in areas of policy which have not been transferred to the EU. But what if these Union objectives conflict with national political priorities, especially if these priorities have been democratically confirmed by a strong electoral mandate, as in the case of the French tax cuts?
This leads back to the real crux of the constitutional issue in Europe — the question of democratic control. The Blair Government has a simple answer. According to Jack Straw, nation states must remain the “primary source of political legitimacy” in Europe and Britain’s main objective in the Constitutional Convention is to ensure this. France also seems sympathetic to this view. The way to deal with the democratic deficit in Europe is to make sure that EU institutions are ultimately controlled by national leaders, through their weighted votes on the European Council and their power to appoint the European Commission. Since the national leaders who sit on the Council and appoint the Commission are all elected by voters, EU institutions ultimately controlled by these two bodies are, by definition, democratically legitimate.
But these Anglo-French slogans about an “inter-governmental” Europe are incompatible with democracy. The fact is that voters have no real influence over the European Council, still less the European Commission, because neither is a government which can be voted out. The individual members of the Council can, of course, be punished by their national voters. But national leaders usually deny responsibility for European decisions, maintaining that they were outvoted by other nations. Without pan-European political parties and coalitions, national voters have no way of affecting the decisions of the Council as a whole.
The absence of democratic legitimacy in a collegiate body like the European Council will be hugely aggravated if Europe continues to grow in size and scope. Lack of legitimacy might have been tolerable while the EU’s decisions were mostly confined to technocratic issues such as trade regulation, and when there were few enough members for lines of responsibility to individual leaders to be reasonably clearly drawn. But what will happen when the EU insists on higher taxes, when soldiers are sent to their deaths and when such decisions are shared by an amorphous group of 25 or more national leaders, each of whom can dodge responsibility for what the EU has done?
This raises what I think are the really interesting and important question about the future of Europe. Is the neglect of democracy in the new European constitution merely a cynical omission by national politicians and bureaucrats whose primary aim is preserving as much of their powers as possible? Or does it reflect a much deeper problem – the fact that Europe is simply too large and diverse ever to be governable in a genuinely democratic manner?
I suspect that the failure to come up with a constitution which would improve the democratic legitimacy of Europe has much more to do with the absence of a European “demos”, than with the selfishness and cynicism of European bureaucrats and politicians. That is why the idea of transferring real power to the European Parliament has so little support anywhere in Europe, while direct election of a European president is dismissed as absurd.
But if there is really no such thing as a European political consciousness, if pan-European political parties are impossible, if an elected president is inconceivable – and if such manifestations of democracy become even more fantastical as Europe continues its eastward enlargement — can the Union’s past successes justify further transfers of sovereignty from the democratic nations of Europe to the bureaucratic centre? That is the crucial question for the Constitutional Convention to answer. So far, there has been deafening silence." |
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| Dj_Irish |
| Ah, interesting read. Thanks for re-posting it Occrider. |
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