07 November 2011

Presseurop: Technocracy is no way to go

Governments of "experts" that have been proposed in Italy and Greece could be good at taking emergency decisions, but would deepen European citizens' diffidence towards ever more indirect democracy.

The proposal – since withdrawn – by outgoing Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou for a popular referendum on austerity policies mandated by the European Central Bank definitively underlined that the real problem regarding the rescue of the euro is far more political than economic, and that the consensus of Europe’s citizenry will be required sooner or later.

This anomalous technocratic control over the economies of Member States can yield three possible outcomes.

The first, and by far the most troubling, is that a number of states are forced to leave the eurozone, creating the kind of global financial chaos that is feared, as President Barack Obama noted during the G20 meetings, even by the United States, a country that for nearly identical reasons finds itself in serious trouble.

The second consists, unimaginably, of a euro cut in two, with the stronger half belonging to those states with more ordered economies, such as Germany and northern European countries; and the weaker half tied to the countries of southern Europe, at risk of default.

The third hypothesis would resolve all the current problems. It calls for working to complete Europe’s original political design, as a “free and united” entity, to paraphrase the Athens Manifesto. This in fact was the intention of Europe’s founding fathers.

Reaching this goal means that blind financial-technocratic governance, which so far has produced nothing but inequalities among the citizens of individual Member States, yields the playing field to politics, which uses deliberated democracy to create a truly European citizenry to which all people belong, based on the values of parity and equality. This is the only solution that avoids “the Agora vendetta” and the only one that abolishes the disparities among the citizens of Member States and that consolidates, in the context of a federal Europe, an authoritative and non-dispersive presence.

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Original article 'L'Europa tecnocratica, la «vendetta dell'agorà»', © Il Sole

© Presseurop