“What Manner of Union Is This?”

The title of C. J. Polychroniou’s latest policy note, “Neo-Hooverian Policies Threaten to Turn Europe into an Economic Wasteland,” gives you a pretty good idea of where he’s coming from:

There can be no denying that, despite the experiences provided by the Great Depression and the numerous financial crises that have taken place since 1973, policymakers have been dismally wrong in their assessment of the 2007–08 global crisis and governments dreadfully incompetent in developing a clear strategy for addressing it appropriately. The reason for this lies with an economic ideology, a conceptual framework with which government officials and bankers deal with economic reality, that is fundamentally flawed.

As a way of addressing some of the flaws of the eurozone policy architecture, and of counteracting the ideology of austerity that is embedded in that architecture (the “fiscal compact” currently being debated, which would place more automatic penalties on governments that deviate from severe limits on budget deficits, goes even further in embedding this ideology in the setup of the European Monetary Union), Polychroniou is looking to a “United States of Europe” model, with an expansion of EU-level fiscal policy powers.

As he observes, however, the European project is moving in the opposite direction:

Indeed, in an indication of where Europe may be headed politically, the EU’s budget was slashed by four billion euros in 2010, with some governments arguing that the EU budget, in the words of British Prime Minister David Cameron, should be progressively “reduced rather than increased”—and this appears to be the definite trend in Euroland.

What manner of union is this?

Read the policy note here.