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Questo articolo è stato pubblicato il 22 dicembre 2010 alle ore 15:37.
MUNICH – By 2010, Europe was to be the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based society in the world. This was the official proclamation in 2000 of the European Commission in the so-called Lisbon Agenda. Now a decade has passed since that bold pledge, and it is official: Europe is the world’s growth laggard rather than its champion. While current EU members grew by 14% over the last ten years, North America grew by 18%, Latin America by 39%, Africa by 63%, the Middle East by 60%, Russia by 59%, Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, and Taiwan by 52%, India by 104%, and China by 171%.
The Europeans wanted to achieve their goal through, among other means, further environmental protection and more social cohesion – desirable aims, but certainly not growth strategies. The Lisbon Agenda turned out to be a joke.
The European Stability and Growth Pact of 1995 has fared no better. EU countries agreed to limit their fiscal deficits to 3% of GDP to ensure debt discipline under the euro, so that no country could use the new currency to take its neighbors hostage and force them into bailout operations. In fact, the EU countries exceeded the 3% limit 97 times.
In 29 of these cases, the breaches were permissible under the Pact’s original formulation, because the countries were in recession. In the remaining 68 cases, however, deficits above 3% of GDP were clear violations of the Pact, and the European Council of Finance Ministers (Ecofin) should have imposed sanctions. Yet not a single country was ever penalized.
The political debt constraints that the eurozone’s members had self-imposed were never taken seriously after that, because the sinners and the judges were one and the same. A subject worthy of Kafka and Molière.
Indeed, this year, two countries, Greece and Ireland, were bailed out by the rest of the EU, even though Article 125 of the consolidated EU treaty stipulates that no member state is to stand in for the debt of another, a guarantee that Germany required as a pre-condition for giving up its beloved Deutschmark. That doctrine of hard discipline was abolished in a coup in May 2010, when it was claimed that the world would collapse unless Germany opened its purse.
It is emblematic of the laxity with which the Stability and Growth Pact was pursued that Greece was able to join the euro through plain fraud, claiming that its deficit ratio was below the 3%-of-GDP threshold when it was, in fact, far above it. In view of Greece’s deceptive behavior, Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency, declared that its Greek counterpart and the supreme Greek supervisory authority had deliberately falsified the data. But no matter, Greece was already in – and willing and able to take its fellow EU members hostage.
