¿Por qué la UE no es un asociación de Estados Independientes? Armonización = Sumisión

Éxitos y (ocultos) fracasos de la UE. Se derivan de haber suprimido la competencia entre Estados en determinadas áreas bajo una supuesta "armonización", que en realidad ha retrasado los factores de desarrollo. Armonización se ha traducido en sumisión. Los "tigres asiáticos" son contra ejemplos de que Estados independientes pueden progresar armónicamente.

Europe’s golden age Interestingly, the era when Europe was strongest and most prosperous compared to the rest of the world was a period when it was divided into small states, which competed vigorously with one another. The great explorers set forth not from a united Europe, but from Spain, Portugal, England, the Netherlands, France and the various city states of Italy, including Genoa and Venice. They did so in a spirit of rivalry. Admittedly, this rivalry sometimes found its expression in war.

Revulsion against this form of competition is one of the strongest emotional arguments against the return to a Europe of competing nation states. While the fear is that competition between such entities is bound to be destructive, as it was before, this throws the baby out with the bathwater. It is possible to make institutional arrangements that prevent further European wars while maintaining rivalry in other ways – including in economic competition, just as happens already in everything from football to popular music.

So we have discovered a more fundamental reason for the EU’s under- performance that goes beyond the accountants’ totting up: the EU has suppressed competition between nation states. More than that, it has smothered them in a suffocating balm of harmonization and convergence. Simply to allude to this or that aspect of bad decision- making or mismanagement misses the point. These defects are systematic. They derive directly from the essential nature of the EU – which is most assuredly not the same as the essential nature of Europe.

The EU’s poor economic record Let us not get this out of perspective. The EU is not an economic disaster – yet. But in economic terms it is a considerable disappointment to many of its supporters. And, internationally, it is an under- achiever. The rapidly growing countries of Asia do not look to the EU as an example; they regard it as showing what they need to avoid.

What explains this under- performance? I have put forward eight reasons:

1. The EU’s designers put far too much importance on size alone as bringing benefits.
2. In the process, they under- estimated the growth of the world economy outside the EU.
3. They under- estimated the importance of good governance as the key to economic success.
4. The agenda for harmonization and regulation involved too much interference in business.
5. The European social agenda with regard to labour laws and benefits was, and was believed by firms to be, anti- business.
6. Europe’s leaders paid insufficient attention to getting the basics of economic success right – unlike so many of their equivalents in Asia.
7. They spent the EU’s (admittedly not enormous) funds badly.
8. The very objectives of harmonization and integration hid the consequence of bad economic policies and smothered the natural rivalry between countries that could have produced better economic performance.

NOTA: debemos incluir la competencia monetaria y fiscal, baneada en nombre de una supuesta armonización superior, como la CAUSA MAYOR del fracaso de Europa.

 

There is something else as well. As the EU has continued in sharp relative decline, the concentrated effort of the European elites should have been directed towards the requirements to raise productivity, employment and investment. Instead, European leaders have been obsessed by further harmonization and integration, by treaty change and, of course, by that ultimate form of integration – the euro.