Europe Entrapped. Does the EU have the political capacity to overcome its current crisis ? (2013)

Zusammenfassung

The seriousness of the crisis is due to one core contradiction. In a nutshell: what is urgently needed to be done is also extremely unpopular and therefore democratically virtually impossible to do. What must be done, and everyone agrees on it ‘in principle’ (namely large-scale and long-term debt mutualization resulting in massive redistributive measures both between member states and social classes), cannot be ‘sold’ to the voting public of the core member states which so far have been less affected by the crisis than those of the periphery. Analogously, a rapid and sustained boost of the competitiveness of the peripheral countries, an adjustment of their unit cost of labor (defined as the ratio of real wages and labor productivity) leading at some point to their approximation to a balanced trade and sustainable levels of budget deficits – all of this is deemed to be ‘needed’ yet is evidently impossible to implement without thoroughly wrecking their democratic political systems.