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The European Union is like a matriarchy: a group of essentially equal participants who, having no herd, have no herd leader. However, this community also needs a matriarch to take the initiative because without it, the group will fall apart.
In the second half of 2020, Germany would have had the opportunity to show how it envisions the leadership of the European Union after assuming the rotating presidency of the union from July to December. However, the bloody coronavirus epidemic came to an end, pushing Europe into a health and economic crisis and chaos. European countries would expect Germans to show solidarity with the southern EU member states that suffered the most in the crisis, but will see indifference instead, says Andreas Kluth, a Bloomberg publicist and former head of the Handelsblatt article, about the possibilities of Germany’s leadership in the EU. editor.
The situation is eerily reminiscent of the eurozone debt crisis that erupted ten years ago. At the height of the Greek crisis, many experts, led by leftists and southern Europeans, demanded that the eurozone jointly issue bonds to ease the financial burden of the crisis. The reason was that although successive Greek governments had managed the country’s money irresponsibly, this will not be the case in the future thanks to reinforced EU control, and the German economy has reaped huge profits thanks to the European single currency. , with the Spanish, Italian, weakened by the Greek, Portuguese participation. If the independent brand had been retained, it would have been very strong, which would have seriously hampered German exports.
Time bomb
Now, the case is the same, with the difference that Italians and Spanish want to issue more Eurobonds to raise money to face the serious consequences of the economic crisis. The Germans, led by the member states of the northern European eurozone, are opposed to the idea. They don’t understand why this is so important, since they give you a lot of money. During the Greek crisis, they took their share of the bailouts, in which the Greeks gave brutal austerity in exchange for soft loans, now contributed to the redistribution of EU money, the monetary easing of the European Central Bank and the use of the Fund Security Council, the European Stability Mechanism.
Southern Europeans have the problem that all these resources will increase their public debt, risking state bankruptcy in the long term. The Germans and their friends, on the other hand, do not want to pay the debt on their behalf, and if the euro bond is issued jointly, there is a good chance that this is the end of the story, since the joint debt will have to be maintained even if one of the parties has no money to pay. So the parties are talking side by side and the misunderstanding, according to a Bloomberg publicist, is a time bomb that could blow up the euro zone and the EU.
Design errors
They are mainly due to design flaws in European unity, namely that the Union is an unfinished construction. Every community needs a leader, so state communities also need a leading country to function. This was the case during empires and in areas of influence such as the Americas, where the United States leads Latin American countries as herd leaders. Regarding the EU, German professor Christoph Schönberger suggested in 2012 that he needed hegemonic power.
It is not a brutal oppressor, but a state that is capable and willing to make sacrifices that go beyond its national interests to maintain a larger system. For example, it could play the role of the ultimate lender that Britain played in the gold standard financial system and the United States in the post-World War II Bretton Woods monetary system.
In this sense, Germany could also be a hegemonic state of the EU if the Union had not been created so that, after many centuries of constant war, there would never be such a country in Europe. This contradiction has been sought to be resolved for decades by the union governed by a pair, tandem, French-German engine. The problem with this is that, in terms of their economic power, the parties are not in Paris. One way out might be to create a European state with independent tax revenue, but this is not what the vast majority of European society wants today.
Left and right
Under external conditions, there are no interiors for Germany to become the “matriarch” of the EU. The left rejects this possibility due to its dark past, arguing that the Germans must submit to the will of the international community. And the right rejects such a transfer union: it fears that the price of leadership is a steady stream of money from German taxpayers to the south to pay the debts of member states of the southern eurozone.
So the conversation continues: the Germans keep saying they want more Europe, but without saying where the money would go to finance that surplus. A Bloomberg publicist asked Schömberger how he sees the situation eight years after the publication of his writing. The answer was that there was more tension and fewer resources to solve the problems. Either the Germans take on the role of “matriarch” or no one else and the EU structure collapses.
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