This time, it’s not a Baby Ruth! When Greece poops, it’s everyone out of the Europool.
This demonstration that the euro is, in fact, reversible would lead, in turn, to runs on Spanish and Italian banks. Once again the European Central Bank would have to choose whether to provide open-ended financing; if it were to say no, the euro as a whole would blow up.
I don’t get it. What’s with the Master and Commander transcription? Another insightful parallel? If so, screenplay format might be an easier glean…
I just love that line and there was no YouTube link to him saying it… So I had to improvise. 🙂
Ah, got it! I didn’t make it all the way through the transcript so it was lost on me! 🙂
But back to the matter at hand: Funny, isn’t it that the question of European integration initially hinged on strengthening the post-WWII alliance of France and Germany (and didn’t that blossom into a grand alliance)?
As the parameters of an emerging European community were debated, the ideas of delimiting nationalist rivalries and eliminating military expansion fell (primarily) into two opposing camps:
Those who argued political union must be achieved prior to economic unity
and
Those who argued that the foremost key to lasting European integration was economic alignment.
Sovereignty being the issue that held back political unification. Curious events indeed. Perhaps we now see the evidence for which theory was the more valuable. Of course, the United States never took part in influencing which of these two approaches to centralizing Europe would become the most viable. Pfft!
What I find galling is Europe, from a purely moral standpoint, owes a tremendous debt to Greece for its involvement in WWII. I can’t help but contemplate the irony given how the European situation has unfolded. What also peeves me is the public/private distinction when it comes to unification. The European public sphere and its heritage have no value whatsoever within the neoliberal framework that is the current EU. There’s no concern for world heritage, common heritage, shared history. As it stands, the European Union is a dismal failure for the very reason Krugman alludes to: liberalizing economies without a solid political foundation. Greece should exit the Euro and pull an Iceland.
But further, Europe and the Americas should reenter into serious discussion about Post-Cold War, Post-911, Post-Globalization security, sovereignty, and economics. Recreating imperialism in the form of an unaccountable supranational hydra is much more dangerous a threat than anything any continent has ever experienced. I defer from Krugman’s assertion that European success (and by extension ours) is up to Europeans to deliver. We share in the responsibility of creating the conditions that have culminated in the world economic crisis. We have more than our fair share of responsibility in not only getting out of it, but getting out of it on humanitarian grounds. We share in the responsibility of getting out of it with leadership that learns from the recent past and the not-so-distant past.