From The Times -
Why we must all learn to love Brussels
By Rosemary Righter
25th July 2005
AFTER WEEKS of behaving with all the rationality of a bear with a hangover, alternately wailing about “Europe in crisis” and hinting that the poor, deluded French and Dutch voters must have been out of their tiny minds when they rejected the EU’s irreproachably perfect constitution, the European Commission has come up with a bold plan. It is to hire 50 staff (to add to the 300 already on the job) to sell the EU to its dyspeptic publics. Well, Europe badly needs some job creation, but paying more EU bureaucrats to tell people why they should learn to love Brussels may strike its 20 million unemployed as somewhat beside the point. Particularly when there is barely a word as to what the sales prospectus will contain.
In case Margot Wallstrom, the “Communications Commissioner”, needs inspiration, here — making due allowance for the EU’s inability to admit that it has ever got anything wrong — is a rough draft.
Fellow citizens — for as such we are belatedly prepared to recognise you:
You have been following signposts we simply could not see, but you have arrived at a crossroads whose existence we are compelled to recognise.
You have arrested our march to political and economic integration, because you neither understand nor trust what has been done, in your name but with scant respect for the vagaries of differing national preferences. Disintegration is no longer unmentionable; our latest polls show that more than half of you, mistakenly but unmistakeably, want Brussels to back away from running your lives.
When complaints about red tape and doubts about ever- closer union were confined to the British and some Scandinavians, it was irritating but not serious — until Britain stayed out of the eurozone and, unlike most of you and contrary to all that we predicted, prospered mightily. But for the French to turn sour like this? Even more, the ever-reliable Dutch?
If you insist on rejecting full political union, in the absence of which no single currency in history has endured, you should get two things straight. First, unless the single currency becomes associated with economic success, monetary union could, even if not actually collapse, poison our great European venture. Secondly, success will not happen without genuinely open markets in goods, services, capital and labour — Polish plumbers and all.
You need Brussels more than you know, because we are far more enlightened than your — sorry, our — political masters. Look how they trashed our directive to free the market in services, which could be a wonder-drug to revive growth.
I’m prepared to concede that we Eurocrats may have pushed too far, too fast. Those words of Jacques Delors, that Maastricht might prove “a treaty too far”, return. We refused to believe that the euro, instead of uniting Europe, could exacerbate divisions. Our response to the emerging strains was another great push toward political union, with a constitution that would also make the euro work better by expanding our powers over economic policy.
Timing is not always our strong point. You seem not in the mood to be inspired. Also, it turns out that our definition of a “working” euro was not the same as yours. We were proud, rather than alarmed, when the euro soared against the dollar, because for us the euro is a political symbol of Europe’s coming of age as a world power. You, mundanely, were interested in whether the euro would help your own national economies, bolstering jobs, growth and personal prosperity.
Whether you look at jobs, growth or confidence, the euro’s first six years in circulation have been grim. Far from being on course to become the world’s most competitive economy by 2010, the goal we set at Lisbon in 2000, the eurozone is the developed world’s deadbeat.
We don’t mind too much that you blame the European Central Bank. Fight the price stability-versus-growth argument with them, by all means. But the blame is spilling off on us too, and that’s serious. So here is what we in the Commission propose to do.
We will play down economic convergence for now, because the more we try impose it, the more divergence we seem to get. Instead of treating the eurozone as the single economy it patently is not, we shall stick to our day job of completing the EU single market. We might even look again at some of our regulations, including ceilings on working hours, to see if they deter investors. And we intend quietly to exploit all those loopholes in the enfeebled stability pact. Why go on lecturing governments on deficits they are not going to do anything about unless growth picks up? Half the eurozone will break the 3 per cent deficit barrier next year and we cannot fight on all fronts. You will all have to find out the hard way, as Italy is, that if you let labour costs rip and cannot devalue out of trouble, you price yourselves out of the market and into recession.
You have to get the message about national reforms. I leave you with a couple of charts. The first gives the bad news on eurozone growth, or the lack of it. Not all your countries are doing badly, but the average will look awful till France, Germany and Italy get their acts together. After all that French moaning about global capitalism, I want you to look hard at the US and British record and ask: what are they getting right that we are getting wrong?
Then view the second chart, fresh from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and tremble. Most of you reckon the euro has made you worse off, but what this shows is that unless you all get on your bikes, today’s discontents are as nothing to tomorrow’s. If labour force participation does not improve, and productivity stagnates as populations age, it is not just actual growth, but the eurozone’s potential for sustainable growth, that will shrink, halving to less than 1 per cent a year by the 2020s — compared with 2.5 per cent in the US.
I know you think, resentfully, that Brussels rules the roost. But what my team will tell you is that it’s your fault, not ours, if “Europe isn’t working”.
Of course we are as dedicated as any of you to the European “social model” — only think of the regulations we have slapped on employers. But we, meaning you, must face facts. Growth comes from maximising the potential of capital and manpower, and mobile workforces that can adjust. Adjustment is disruptive; it is untidy; but though we do not mention that Thatcher woman, there is no alternative. What you need is politicians prepared to sweep out the soft corners of your lives. It’s the insistence of your unions on ironclad job protection, shorter working weeks and unaffordable social benefits that freezes millions out of jobs, dampens investment and productivity and makes Europe less and less competitive. Citoyens, you march with these unions. Think about it.
Your humble servant, MW
thetimesonline.co.uk
Why we must all learn to love Brussels
By Rosemary Righter
25th July 2005
AFTER WEEKS of behaving with all the rationality of a bear with a hangover, alternately wailing about “Europe in crisis” and hinting that the poor, deluded French and Dutch voters must have been out of their tiny minds when they rejected the EU’s irreproachably perfect constitution, the European Commission has come up with a bold plan. It is to hire 50 staff (to add to the 300 already on the job) to sell the EU to its dyspeptic publics. Well, Europe badly needs some job creation, but paying more EU bureaucrats to tell people why they should learn to love Brussels may strike its 20 million unemployed as somewhat beside the point. Particularly when there is barely a word as to what the sales prospectus will contain.
In case Margot Wallstrom, the “Communications Commissioner”, needs inspiration, here — making due allowance for the EU’s inability to admit that it has ever got anything wrong — is a rough draft.
Fellow citizens — for as such we are belatedly prepared to recognise you:
You have been following signposts we simply could not see, but you have arrived at a crossroads whose existence we are compelled to recognise.
You have arrested our march to political and economic integration, because you neither understand nor trust what has been done, in your name but with scant respect for the vagaries of differing national preferences. Disintegration is no longer unmentionable; our latest polls show that more than half of you, mistakenly but unmistakeably, want Brussels to back away from running your lives.
When complaints about red tape and doubts about ever- closer union were confined to the British and some Scandinavians, it was irritating but not serious — until Britain stayed out of the eurozone and, unlike most of you and contrary to all that we predicted, prospered mightily. But for the French to turn sour like this? Even more, the ever-reliable Dutch?
If you insist on rejecting full political union, in the absence of which no single currency in history has endured, you should get two things straight. First, unless the single currency becomes associated with economic success, monetary union could, even if not actually collapse, poison our great European venture. Secondly, success will not happen without genuinely open markets in goods, services, capital and labour — Polish plumbers and all.
You need Brussels more than you know, because we are far more enlightened than your — sorry, our — political masters. Look how they trashed our directive to free the market in services, which could be a wonder-drug to revive growth.
I’m prepared to concede that we Eurocrats may have pushed too far, too fast. Those words of Jacques Delors, that Maastricht might prove “a treaty too far”, return. We refused to believe that the euro, instead of uniting Europe, could exacerbate divisions. Our response to the emerging strains was another great push toward political union, with a constitution that would also make the euro work better by expanding our powers over economic policy.
Timing is not always our strong point. You seem not in the mood to be inspired. Also, it turns out that our definition of a “working” euro was not the same as yours. We were proud, rather than alarmed, when the euro soared against the dollar, because for us the euro is a political symbol of Europe’s coming of age as a world power. You, mundanely, were interested in whether the euro would help your own national economies, bolstering jobs, growth and personal prosperity.
Whether you look at jobs, growth or confidence, the euro’s first six years in circulation have been grim. Far from being on course to become the world’s most competitive economy by 2010, the goal we set at Lisbon in 2000, the eurozone is the developed world’s deadbeat.
We don’t mind too much that you blame the European Central Bank. Fight the price stability-versus-growth argument with them, by all means. But the blame is spilling off on us too, and that’s serious. So here is what we in the Commission propose to do.
We will play down economic convergence for now, because the more we try impose it, the more divergence we seem to get. Instead of treating the eurozone as the single economy it patently is not, we shall stick to our day job of completing the EU single market. We might even look again at some of our regulations, including ceilings on working hours, to see if they deter investors. And we intend quietly to exploit all those loopholes in the enfeebled stability pact. Why go on lecturing governments on deficits they are not going to do anything about unless growth picks up? Half the eurozone will break the 3 per cent deficit barrier next year and we cannot fight on all fronts. You will all have to find out the hard way, as Italy is, that if you let labour costs rip and cannot devalue out of trouble, you price yourselves out of the market and into recession.
You have to get the message about national reforms. I leave you with a couple of charts. The first gives the bad news on eurozone growth, or the lack of it. Not all your countries are doing badly, but the average will look awful till France, Germany and Italy get their acts together. After all that French moaning about global capitalism, I want you to look hard at the US and British record and ask: what are they getting right that we are getting wrong?
Then view the second chart, fresh from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and tremble. Most of you reckon the euro has made you worse off, but what this shows is that unless you all get on your bikes, today’s discontents are as nothing to tomorrow’s. If labour force participation does not improve, and productivity stagnates as populations age, it is not just actual growth, but the eurozone’s potential for sustainable growth, that will shrink, halving to less than 1 per cent a year by the 2020s — compared with 2.5 per cent in the US.
I know you think, resentfully, that Brussels rules the roost. But what my team will tell you is that it’s your fault, not ours, if “Europe isn’t working”.
Of course we are as dedicated as any of you to the European “social model” — only think of the regulations we have slapped on employers. But we, meaning you, must face facts. Growth comes from maximising the potential of capital and manpower, and mobile workforces that can adjust. Adjustment is disruptive; it is untidy; but though we do not mention that Thatcher woman, there is no alternative. What you need is politicians prepared to sweep out the soft corners of your lives. It’s the insistence of your unions on ironclad job protection, shorter working weeks and unaffordable social benefits that freezes millions out of jobs, dampens investment and productivity and makes Europe less and less competitive. Citoyens, you march with these unions. Think about it.
Your humble servant, MW
thetimesonline.co.uk