Press Europ (Link)
- Andrzej Talaga (June 27, 2011)
On June 2 in Aachen, Jean-Claude Trichet, the President of
the European Central Bank, announced that the EU should only have one finance
minister. At the same time, he also called for the transformation of the EU into
an unprecedented confederation of states with a common budgetary policy — a
vision that amounts to a severe blow to national sovereignty.
A “super-finance” ministry, with the power to veto certain
public spending decisions and to control the budgetary policies and
competitiveness of Europe’s member states, as well as an EU financial sector
that is fully compliant with European rules: this would amount to establishing a
system for the control of national budgets, at least for those countries that
have adopted the euro. According to Trichet’s proposal, those states would then
become semi-independent, perhaps to the point where they only retained
territorial autonomy. Nowhere in any dictionary of politics has such a state
been defined.
However, these proposals are not exactly new. In response to
the Greek crisis, the plan is to make aid to the Athens government contingent
upon strict supervision of the country’s finances by the supranational troika of
experts from the European Commission, the ECB, and the IMF.
This is something that has never been seen before in the EU.
Certainly, Ireland and Portugal have been obliged to rein in their public
spending, but it has yet to fall under external control. On the other hand,
Greece, which has come under pressure for the mishandling of its financial
affairs, is being forced to handover control of its budgetary policy to
foreigners: yet another step in the loss of sovereignty which began when it
joined the euro and relinquished control of its monetary policy.