Futuro de la UE: gris

De Wolfgang Münchau, en el FT

The main characteristic of today’s EU is an accumulation of crises. This is no accident. It happens because policies are not working. Political leaders such as David Cameron and Viktor Orban, the prime ministers of the UK and Hungary, are even questioning some of the fundamental values on which the EU is built — such as the freedom of movement of people.

 The EU is in an unstable equilibrium: small disturbances can produce large changes. We have reached this point because the various projects of the union now have a negative economic effect on large parts of the European population...

,,, The Danes, who last week voted against ending the country’s opt-out from EU home and justice affairs, also acted rationally. Why opt into a common justice system that still cannot produce adequate levels of co-ordination between police forces in the fight against terrorism?

Home and justice affairs are public goods. Why should a rational voter prefer a dysfunctional public goods provider?

The same holds for Finland. The country has been locked in a four-year long recession. There is now a parliamentary motion in the works that may end up in a referendum on whether to quit the eurozone.

I do not think that Finland will take that step, for political reasons. But, at the same time, I have not the slightest doubt that Finnish growth and employment would recover if it did. A currency devaluation would be a much more powerful tool than the policy that the Finnish government is trying to implement right now: improving competitiveness through wage cuts.

Both Finland and Italy are hanging on to their membership of the eurozone against rational economic interest. This is a situation that was never supposed to happen. The monetary union, the single market and all that were supposed to be economically neutral at the very least.

If the European Union were a democratic federal state, we would not be having this discussion. There would be no euro crisis, and no refugee crisis either. Such a state is currently not attainable, however. This is why the unstable equilibrium is pushing us now in the other direction, towards disintegration.

I am not talking about a formal disintegration of the EU, but of the informal kind: that is, a gradual erosion of political ­significance that leaves the EU ­formally intact — but as a glorified free-trade zone, with only the ­minimal ­technical infrastructure necessary for that purpose. In short, it will become something exceedingly uninspiring.

The consolation is that there is no destiny in disintegration, just as there was never a certainty of “ever closer union”, as it says so pompously in the preamble to the EU treaties.

Different outcomes remain possible. What I am increasingly convinced of, however, is that if there is to be another stage of integration, there will have to be a phase of disintegration first.