Posts Tagged ‘France’
Currency or Politics?
Posted by: Peter Sain ley Berry in EU on February 16th, 2010
The financial turmoil arising from the Greek government’s indebtedness is likely to have a profound effect of the future constitutional development – and enlargement – of the European Union. So anyway it seems to me. All the improbable articles in the British press about the threatened collapse of the euro and the end of civilisation as we know it are, in a sense, correct. Apart, that is, from the euro collapsing.
The euro will not collapse; it is one of the world’s reserve currencies, underpinned by the world’s largest trading block. And if in recent months there has been some readjustment against the dollar that is principally the result of the dollar recovering some of its value lost in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other Wall Street institutions.
Greece – and a number of other countries in the European Union – are, as we know, burdened with unsustainable budget deficits and high levels of public debt. Britain, though not in the eurozone, is among them. Whether Britain’s public finances would have been in better order had she not – in an act of hubris – turned her back on the Single Currency project in 1997 and 1998 – is a moot point.
What is certain is that the pound has in the last year or two lost some 20 per cent of its external value – something that impoverishes us all and whose lesson – (you can’t make yourself richer by devaluing) we thought had long been learned. Certainly Britain’s finances will not again meet the qualifying terms for joining the euro for many a long year to come.
Britain now faces massive cuts in public expenditure which should hold in check the inflation that this devaluation might have otherwise unleashed. So does Greece. The Greek government has pledged to reduce its deficit from 12.7 per cent of GDP to below 3 per cent in 2012. It plans to cut the deficit by 4 per cent this year alone which surely must qualify as one of the more memorable triumphs of hope over expectation.
Besides Britain, other countries – Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland – have deficits that are cause for concern. And while Britain is outside the eurozone, economic turbulence across the Channel has an impact elsewhere and especially upon already fragile Ireland beyond.
The European Union – in effect France and Germany – have pledged to save Greece should that need ever arise. By implication they have also pledged to save any other country in the eurozone in danger of defaulting on its sovereign debt. How is not specified.
I am sure both Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel are rather hoping that the need will not arise, or if it does that they will by then have moved on to other and better things leaving erstwhile colleagues to deal with the problem. Meanwhile Greece is being squeezed and pressed on every side to increase the severity of its austerity budget.
How have countries got themselves into this mess? It’s not just the recession. This has deprived governments of revenue and presented them with un-forecast bills for additional unemployment. But there is a real argument which says that this crisis in public expenditure was bound to happen anyway; that the recession did not cause the crisis, simply brought it forward.
British public expenditure, for example, has increased in the past ten years by £235 billion or 50 per cent – in real terms. And while we may have been profligate on the back of a booming economy, this sort of increase has been driven by the same factors that have driven all of Europe’s governments to spend more.
Our populations are getting older and therefore more demanding of care and medical attention. Medical treatment itself advances year by year, keeping us alive longer and at greater cost. This is a conundrum impossible to reverse. In every walk of life (except it seems personal responsibility and behaviour) legislators try each year, quite properly, to raise standards – in education, in social provision, in public services of every description.
Politicians like to subsidise and patronise and to otherwise spend on the arts, culture and sport of every kind. To remain competitive we invest in the latest technologies and infrastructure; we have international obligations as well as a moral imperative to bring social justice, peace, equality of opportunity, health and human rights to less happy lands across the world. As if this weren’t enough we face the threat of climate change and the need to invest in technologies to mitigate its consequences.
Each new investment, each new budget line, creates rights and obligations. It also has to be managed – so creating a vast and costly bureaucracy that feeds on itself and becomes a central pillar of the nation’s economy. Public expenditure is a seamless chain from which the removal of links thereby becomes increasingly difficult, while the insertion of new links is always easy, desirable and justifiable in the face of this tragedy or that statistic.
This is why cutting those deficits is going to be far harder than it looks and why therefore the European Union should be thinking rapidly about the unthinkable: that is bail-outs and management of failing economies. And that implies a new and hitherto uncontemplated constitutional relationship between the states of the European Union and its financial institutions that goes far further and deeper down the integrationist path than was ever envisaged in the Lisbon Treaty.
It will also change the basis on which countries may join the Union – for who wants to add to the burden of another state potentially failing on its obligations as it racks up debt to accommodate the ever burgeoning demands of the acquis communautaire – the body of regulations and standards and EU law that each new state has to abide by?
What we see at the moment is a battle for constitutional supremacy between, on the one hand, the politicians who together embody the 27 states of the Union and, on the other, its impersonal and abstract currency – the euro. The two forces live now in uneasy co-existence. I think in the future – for the reasons I have tried to explain – either the currency will drive European politics, or European politics will drive the currency. Strong euro versus a weak and collapsing euro. I predict that this battle will split countries and politics in Europe for a very long time to come.
Sarko’s Secret Plan?
Posted by: Peter Sain ley Berry in EU on December 1st, 2009
Baroness Ashton, who today takes up office as the Union’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy under the Lisbon Treaty, could do no better than study the life of another of her noble predecessors on the European stage – that of the Prince de Talleyrand-Perigord, Foreign Minister of the French Empire and architect not just of much of the present French state, but of much of present inter-European relations as well.
An aristocrat who served Louis XVI, the Directory, Napoleon, the Allies, the restored Bourbons and finally King Louis – Phillipe, no-one could claim to be a better survivor. But the twists, turns and accommodations that his tortuous life entailed, have left him a detested figure in much of France. Which is rather sad when you consider that but for his efforts to have it restored, the Tricolour might have flown for the last time at Waterloo.
Talleyrand’s negotiating skills were supreme: France even came out of the defeat of Napoleon, thanks to his negotiation, with more territory than she had had at the beginning.
But his crowning triumph, achieved when he was already into his ninth decade and on his final mission as Ambassador to Britain in the 1830s, was finally to align British and French foreign policy and to set it on the course that would result in the ‘entente cordiale’ and an unbreakable alliance that later survived two world wars.
That he should have done so in the aftermath of twenty years of bloody war with Britain’s traditional enemy, when Germany was the rising nation in Europe and when even the household language of the British court was German, should be enough to make any aspiring diplomat go weak at the knees with admiration.
Asked what had driven him throughout his long and turbulent life, he said that he had always acted in the best interests of Europe, believing that what was good for Europe would also be good for France and that what was good for France was also good for Europe.
Nevertheless, if Talleyrand is generally despised by today’s French politicians, his famous dictum seems still to be imbibed with their mothers’ milk. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the whole European construction, certainly in France’s eyes, turns on this very premise.
This is not necessarily something to be regretted, still less opposed. From a British perspective what is good for Europe can also be good for Britain. We too, in our own way, have wanted to civilise the world. So the French motivation is not necessarily something to fear, just to be aware of.
With that in mind – and if it is not too much of a bother – let us return to the much tilled ground of the Lisbon appointments. You remember that the initial reaction from the commentariat was astonishment when we learned that two relatively unknown figures – Mr van Rompuy and Baroness Ashton, had been appointed.
This astonishment was certainly real enough: we had been led towards thinking that while one group of politicians did indeed want a low key President of the European Council, others wanted a strong campaigning figure such as Tony Blair, who, at various times, was espoused by a raft of senior European leaders, including President Sarkozy of France.
Indeed, even as late as 19th June, and after he had dropped his support for Blair, Sarkozy was still saying: “…if we have Lisbon I’d like the first President of the Council to be someone strong and ambitious for Europe because Europe deserves and needs such a person.”
Once the Lisbon appointments had been made, however, the commentariat rapidly switched tack, arguing that no-one had wanted strong figures in these roles, that France and Germany did not want their national prestige usurped by some traffic-stopping figure; that what was required was a back room person, an organiser. And on the foreign policy side, someone who would not make waves.
I am still wondering whether this is correct. Has the leopard really changed his spots?
You remember Sarkozy’s French Presidency? (More Sarkozy’s than French you might think). The lavish expenditures, the rushing around all over the world waving the European flag. The frenetic pace continuing right to the very last day and last hour of the Presidency, trying to show what might be done, what ought to be done, with French leadership.
Put this together with Mr Barroso’s second Commission, now assembled. Its composition is very much in the French interest. The wings of free market liberalism – something for which Barroso’s first Commission was roundly criticised for embracing too closely – are now almost certain to be clipped. Agriculture, too, so important to France, is in safe and friendly hands. In Pierre de Boissieu, France has also secured the Secretary-Generalship of the Council.
Consider also that Sarkozy, has been careful to stress that Mr van Rompuy’s appointment as Council President is for two and a half years. Of course the appointment can be renewed for a further term when in comes to an end in May 2012. That is, if the member states so wish.
But whose term of office expires in April 2012? None other than Mr Sarkozy’s! Should he not stand again for the French Presidency, the Presidency of Europe – the ‘strong and ambitious’ figure that Europe ‘deserves and needs,’ could be his. Why not?
Fifteen years ago a newspaper cartoon from the dying days of the government of Edouard Balladur pictured the French cabinet as if in a game of Cluedo. Every minister was depicted as attacking another. Each was being shot, stabbed, clubbed, poisoned or strangled by a colleague. Meanwhile, through a window, we see Sarkozy, retreating from this mayhem with a gleeful smile.
Sarkozy’s volte-face, first supporting Tony Blair, then abandoning him, now becomes explicable. Britain is palmed off with the foreign minister post – which is not important because, should Sarkozy indeed become President of the Council, he will want to play the chief diplomatic role himself. Skilful, very skilful. Worthy of Talleyrand himself.
Talleyrand also said, memorably, that zeal was the enemy of diplomacy. That the best things came to he who waited. I am wondering whether Sarkozy has learned this injunction too; whether Mr van Rompuy is no more than his stalking horse. Having got his Commission ducks in order and disarmed his possible opponents, will Sarkozy now descend in two and a half years time to claim what he regards as his (and France’s) inheritance?
Reflections on Election Week
Posted by: Peter Sain ley Berry in EU on June 12th, 2009
By the time I headed for bed on Sunday night France and Germany had declared the results of their European elections, but comparatively few of the British results had come through, despite the fact that our polls had closed some 70 hours before theirs. Why, I wondered?
Indeed, the British results could not even be confirmed during the night as in some places, – the romantic and forsaken Western Isles for instance – and Northern Ireland, counting did not begin until Monday. For reasons of Sabbatarianism, I understand.
Should we rejoice at this quaint expression of European Union diversity – or simply be irritated when the count in certain electoral pockets is so far off the pace?
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It can’t be down to all the votes being lumped together. For courtesy of ‘Le Figaro’s’ excellent website I can even discover how the villagers voted in the little Auverne commune where I spend occasional holidays. As there are only seventy odd electors, the split of votes between the parties practically identifies who voted how.
We stay in an old water Mill located on the higher reaches of the river Célé, which river forms a practical boundary between two deeply rural communes. The Mill itself is in one, much of its forest and fields in the other.
You might think both would therefore vote in the same way, but no. In ‘our’ village, the French ‘Greens’ won 17 percent of the vote, contributing to the excellent result for them in France as a whole, where they managed 16 per cent and 8 seats.
But cross the little bridge into the walnut meadow and there, in the neighbouring commune, the Green vote was only 11 per cent. Still respectable, but 5 per cent below the national average. Why?
You can understand the appeal of the ecologists. Stand in the lovely medieval square of Figeac and survey the abundance of fresh meat and vegetables, the quality and taste of which can only be imagined by someone used to supermarket pap. In this deeply rural environment agriculture produces products of real excellence, yet farmers cling on by their fingertips in the face of the worldwide onslaught of fast food, low prices and industrial production. If I lived here permanently I’d also vote for the ecologists, I’m thinking.
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It was in France, too, that Libertas, the pan-European movement dedicated to the incongruous objectives of scrapping the Lisbon Treaty and making the EU more democratic, claimed its one sad success in the form of Philippe de Villiers, who allied his own party to the Libertas banner. Even Mr Declan Ganley, the party’s founder and driving force, failed to win a seat on his home turf in Ireland.
Many accounts have spoken of actions or omissions on Mr Ganley’s part, which, when taken together, seem to amount to something more distasteful than the mere cut and thrust of normal political campaigning. Whether true or not it scarcely seems to matter now, especially as Ganley has said that he will not lead the ‘no’ campaign in Ireland’s second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. He is in danger of vanishing from the political scene.
Nevertheless, though it was pretty clear that the goal of building a pan-European party from scratch and achieving any sort of impact in a few short months was forlorn and impossible, the fact that someone had the courage to attempt it surely deserves some commendation. However lightly, some pan-European ground has been broken and into it more profitable seeds may fall. For this service even supporters of the Lisbon Treaty can afford to be generous to Mr Ganley in his defeat.
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I was much impressed by the erudite debate that followed my last post. My only comment is to say that it has always seemed to me that Britain’s strategic policy interests of security and prosperity at home and advancement of the human rights agenda abroad were always most likely to be promoted through an active partnership of like-minded countries, rather than in a splendid and righteous isolation. Besides this, who determines the size of our car headlights is really quite irrelevant.
