What we see right now is that the UK was right not establishing the Euro in their country.
the economic systems are obviously too different and different systems having the same currency – that was a mistake. But people didn’t think rational and we discussed in Germany years ago the idea of expanding the EU and integrating Turkey.

Now we think about “breakup of the euro and Eurozone and the return of national currencies” ?

Thats a very crazy development. But I think/hope we have the power to keep the euro, and eurozone.

Excellent analysis, Mr Guillaume.

The faultlines within the single currency were there for all to see prior to this crisis, as indeed was the large democratic deficit within the EU itself. Both have been tested and found wanting.

Will the LibDem leadership now revise its previously uncritical cheerleading?

Iceland is going through a pretty big fiscal, economic and currency crisis. Perhaps they too should “disband”. After all, they never used to have this kind of trouble back in the good old days when the island was just a collection of fishing villages.

I’m sure the pound would be doing a lot better too if we decided to chuck out certain underperforming regions. There are bigger differences in prosperity between London and Solihull than between Germany and Greece.

Blaming the current situation on the Euro smacks of kneejerk populism, which may sound good in the short term, but the reason villages (long ago), regions (less long ago) and more recently some countries decide to band together is because they believe that in the long term the benefits to all concerned will far outweigh the costs. The groupings that truly fail are not those that go through difficult periods occasionally (and usually emerge stronger), but those that give in to headless chicken syndrome at the first sign of trouble.

Oh, and “violation of Irish democracy” ?! Maybe you should spend some time in countries where your democratic rights really are violated before throwing around glib phrases like that. Nobody forced the Irish to vote yes.

After the Greek story broke, The Euro plummetted from 1.37 dollars to err, 1.35. And then back up to 1.36 – run for the hills !

I am in favour of the EU, I am certainly not in favour of the single currency…

The reason is this. Countries with different financial realities, be they levels of personal debt, financial travesties etc. need the ability to set an interest that is right for their fiscal reality, with the common currency unable to take into account the differences in economic situations it can’t be right for every country all of the time, and as such I would be against taking on the common currency despite the benefits it may bring in the good times… I am sure that Vince Cable would hold a similar position to my own?

Mike,

What’s so democratic about holding a vote in one small corner of Europe (Ireland), and saying that if that small corner says no, then the whole of Europe should be bound by the result? Whereas you hold a vote in another small corner of Europe (Spain), that small corner says yes, and that result just gets completely ignored by everybody?

What sort of system is it if you need to hold a vote in 27 constituencies, and win it in all 27 of them, in order to get progress made? A system tailor-made to gerrymander for the eurosceptics!

There should have been one single referendum, all across Europe, yes or no.

No-one would suggest abolishing the US dollar when one state of the union (and some are very poor relative to others) falls into serious fiscal problems.

“There should have been one single referendum, all across Europe, yes or no.”

You can’t be serious, David! Nothing would be surer to hasten the exit of the UK (and probably a few others) from the EU than such a blatant sweeping away of national independence. Even the USA has a seriously high bar to making any constitutional amendment – not all 50 states admittedly, but 75% of them need to sign up. And the USA has and has always had a much more coherent sense of nationhood than anything that could be said to exist across the EU.

This last point is also (part of) the answer to Antony’s argument:
“No-one would suggest abolishing the US dollar when one state of the union (and some are very poor relative to others) falls into serious fiscal problems.”
The two cases simply aren’t the same, as the EU “government” has even less legitimacy – and far less economic clout – than the Federal government of the USA. Though having said that the situations are different, it’s worth noting that some states of the US are persistently lagging behind the rest in economic terms, and suffer from the lack of ability to run an independent economic policy. All that keeps them afloat is constant cross-subsidy from the more successful states: precisely what Europe is nowhere near being politically capable of providing, as the German reaction to Greece’s difficulties shows.

Ah, okay. Apologies, David: I read you too simplistically.

Even so, I think any such model would need to have provision for a strong majority of states to approve the change, so that several smaller states aren’t in effect presented with an ultimatum by a handful of the largest countries that amounts to “do it our way or sod off”. 75% seems like a minimum – even then, I’m not sure that politically the EU could justify going ahead with significant constitutional change that six of its members had rejected in a vote; though as you say, it could be up to each country to decide what to do then.

To be honest, though, I’m beginning to think I might outlive the EU; and I’m not sure I’m that bothered if I do. It’s horribly undemocratic and incorrigibly remote; it may be the best defence we have against the power of international capital, but I’m ever less convinced either that that’s true or that it’s worth the price. And part of the very problem is the constant evolution of “ever closer union”, which means that everyone’s joining a pig in a poke, so to speak.

More europhobic jumping and pointing – but to a mirage. Should the eurozone have included Greece? Probably not, but at the time it was hard to judge since the Greeks lied about their national accounts. Was Greece better off in the eurozone? Yes, certainly – they benefitted from the cheap borrowing that allowed their boom.

Has it made a massive cost liable by other euromembers? Not really, and the currency depreciation is probably what the eurozone needs. The analysis leaves out another brlliant alternative, outlined in the Economist about a ‘Europena Monetary Fund’ to deal with problem states.

It’s a huff about nothing. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems, especially to do with fiscal federalism, to be sure. But you can’t cite German whinging as evidence that they’re right. They also whinge along with the French about an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy – is that true?

A few years ago California had a serious structural deficit to the point where the lights were going off. I’m not aware of a federal bail out taking place?

Mike wrote:

“The US were a State from the outset, had a single currency right from the start and American citizens (bar some Southerners and a few others) define themselves as American. Germans, French, Swedes et al. will always remain what they are. The very notion of a political union is a chimera.”

For some years after independence the 13 colonies / new states existed under the Articles of Confederation which were arguably looser ties than EU state have today, had existed for almost 2 centuries before that as distinct social and political entities. The eventual ratification of the US Constituion was highly controversial. In some states like New York, ratification was doubtful. The “Federalist Papers” are pamphlets written for swing voters in NY to persuade them to join the US.

There also plenty of other states that had long term poltical and economic existance prior to joining the US- Texas, Louisiana, and Hawaii which only joined about 50 years ago.

So I’m not sure that “US were not a state from the outset”.

Creating the US dollar was also controversial and when it started it had a fixed exchange rate with the pound. Spanish currency was also legal tender in the US until 1857 and several of the states issued currency (there was a New York Pound, a New Jersey Pound) from independence in 1776 until 1792.

Regarding “American citizens (bar some Southerners and a few others) define themselves as American”

I know New Yorkers who identify themselves as such.

Isn’t the point that identity is not one or the other but several-fold- I’m Kentish, English, British and European, not to mention a professional identity, an identity as a liberal, and others.

“Germans, French, Swedes et al. will always remain what they are”

Will they? Germany didn’t exist until 1870. Norway was once part of Sweden. France did not always have a single national identity, nor did Spain or the Swiss. Italy did not exist until 1871. Yugoslavia and Czechoslavakia at one time looked like permanent nations. Belguim did not exist until the late 1800s and might not exist by the end of this century.

The idea of “Britain” as a single entity at one time seemed ridiculous as Linda Colley explores in her classic “The Forging of the Nation”. It was basically an invented identity.

My feeling is that as history goes on more people will feel more European.

You can’t reasonably equate the differences between the original American states – a collection of mostly Anglophone, British-ruled colonies with a common (short) history of settlement in a foreign land – to the deep differences between European states, which not only have several centuries of distinct and often mutually hostile history behind them but have major language differences and very different legal and political traditions. You don’t need to believe in some drecky ideas of mystical national identity to see that we lack anything like a common European political culture. There is, as somebody somewhere has said, no European “demos”: this is why there are no genuine European political parties, no body of government that can possibly be considered to be democratically accountable at a European level, and elections are fought – and votes cast – entirely on the basis of voters’ attitudes to membership of the European Union and to their national governments (rather than on what policies they think the European Parliament or Commission, much less the European Council, should adopt).

The answer to this is apparently (and Anthony is by no means unusual in saying this):

“My feeling is that as history goes on more people will feel more European.”

Perhaps they will, perhaps they won’t. Why should people who don’t currently feel more European than, for example, British, French, Polish or Ruritanian, be shoehorned into an unwanted and remote political union just because you or I might believe that they ought to “feel European” and that perhaps there children or grandchildren will eventually (give up and) feel it?

To be clear: I’m not a nationalist. I’m utterly uninterested in mystical notions of nationhood, and deeply suspicious of anyone who makes a lot of noise about preserving or ‘protecting’ cultures or bangs on about ‘identity’ or ‘values’ as if these were magically transmitted through the bloodline and define the nature of the people born within one more-or-less-arbitrary set of borders rather than another. It’s all tosh. What I am bothered about is that people, and communities (the real ones that we actually live in) should have, and feel that they have, the maximum possible control over their own lives and their public spaces. This is just about tenable in a nation-state, where (thanks to quite arbitrary historical outcomes) most people understand themselves to be talking the same language (literally or metaphorically) about the same issues, and accept that there are common bonds and obligations between them all. We’re a long long way from any such sense of ourselves as a European entity, which is why the EU is perceived as an alien organisation without democratic legitimacy, whose attempts to push the population in directions they don’t generally want to go are therefore resented and resisted.

I do dislike threads like this. I start out feeling broadly, though sceptically, pro-European and by the end I’ve almost convinced myself we should be campaigning to pull out altogether. So it goes.

So if we don’t enthusiastically endorse the EU and ever closer integration, we obviously don’t care about “giving our grandchildren a decent chance of dying in their beds”? That’s rubbish, David, and unworthy of you: a real case of ‘my way or the high way’.

As for your other points:
There’s a world of difference between “only empathising with people who speak your own language” and my actual claim, which was about having a shared political culture – in which a common language certainly is a significant factor (look at Belgium’s tribulations, for pity’s sake!) but not the only one. The point is that within an established ‘demos’ such as exists here, we can argue about the way forward and switch our vote between parties that are more or less trying to represent the nation, on the basis of different philosophies and policies, and different ideas about what is in our common interest; attempt that on a larger scale, without a political commonality, and you either get the domination of the biggest/most powerful group, or rule by a detached elite with plenty in common with one another but little with any of the people they’re supposed to represent. Better at that point – though undoubtedly slower and more difficult for decision-making – to proceed by agreement between each polity acting as a single unit.

What about Copenhagen? Well, it’s all very well to suggest we’d have got a ‘better’ outcome there if only Europe had been united; but even if it’s true that a united EU could have overcome US and Chinese reluctance, the idea that that’s desirable in general is presumably based on either (1) Europe is generally going to be right about the best way forward for everyone (anyone for cultural superiority?) or (2) It’s a dog-eat-dog world, we’d better look out for ourselves against those swine out there, and we can do that better if we’re part of a big gang (which doesn’t sound like the Europhiles I know and love – though given your closing “colonies of India” remark, perhaps it’s what you meant). If what’s important is doing what’s right then a plurality of voices is a good thing, though terribly untidy.

Mike- pointing out that the emf would achieve things not possible without doesn’t to me seem like a strong criticism…

As a geberal point, it’s all very well saying we should allow people tio have control over their lives, and the EU is seen as foreign, therefore we should oppose it. Actually, surely that is a reason for defending it? for showing that the only way we can tackle issues such as fishing, internation crime, immigration, climate change, mobile raoming charges or whatever people feel is important, that in any way imcorporates other countries around us (which is most issues); the only way to help grow the economy and allow firms access to the best talent, and people to be able to work in other countries, and access to markets for our firms; to ensure peace and stability in europe; and to project european (and thereby British) intrerests in the world, such that we are taken seriously and not some dusty irrelvant old colonial power – we need the right sort of EU.

Malcolm – your choices gloss over the fact that europe *was* the region putting forward the most radical proposals at Copenhagen. I don’t know if you meant it, but saying that acknoledging this is cultural supremacy, seems bizarre. The Americans, the Chinese, will have no scruples. Indeed all I got here in China at around Copenhagen was how brilliantly the Chinese handled it, the most responsible country there. David Allen is sadly right that the rest of the world may well steamroller Europe (and thereby Britain – the idea that we would be stronger alone is absurd)

“Some smaller economies have demonstrated economic performance and social welfare without being or aiming to be big.”

Yes, those which pay third-world wages but have begun to offer first-world capabilities have done pretty well. Good for them, but we can’t match what they are doing, unless we want to start with a massive reduction in our standard of living!

Otherwise, well, people used to cite Japan as a nation which was doing great things in terms of economy and technology without being big. The technology still works, the economy has languished. Being on your own can make you do some desperate things with your economy, look at Iceland!

I’m not emotionally attracted to the grandeur of the big superpower idea. I would be much happier living in this romantic idyll of a small liberal nation-state with a vibrant democracy, thrving culture, no wars or terrorists, money growing on all the trees. But fantasy is no basis for political action!

Evrophyles is defininetly a Greek name. Why not address Plato or Aristotiles ? Europhiles must not cause mayhem in the english language. as it is a noble name and will not bear comparison With many other gentlemen like Evroskepticon Hygienikon an old friend who lives next door to me. The more I hear those Romantics and dreamers who think yesteryear was better and see the English Nation under threat by immigrant hordes, I am reminded of those ignorant pupils who in so called Public Schools did badly in the classics because they somehow had a better time playing cricket and rugby than studying their grammar. I believe that Ptolemy knew the importance of Britannia and had placed Albion in the outer spheres of Europe for a very good reason. If that’s where these rude folk want to be so let it be. Kierete!.