Has the expanding (even with Britain's exit) European Union succeeded in its longstanding goal of an ever closer union that benefits Europeans?
European incomes would have been roughly 5 per cent lower today in the absence of the EU.’ Hardly a momentous achievement. Nor has intra-EU trade increased greatly since the Union, the over-valuation of the euro favouring imports from the US, China and other countries, while diverting trade from within the EU. More generally, the socio-economic and geopolitical heterogeneity of the fifteen members of the Union in 1995, further stretched by the arrival of another twelve over the next decade or so, made it decreasingly possible to arrive at common Pareto-efficient decisions.
I had to look up Pareto efficiency. America neither has nor expects this. And despite American political divisions, it is expected that federal spending is used to sustain the parts of the country that are currently faltering while the prospering parts pay. Although it helps that American states are better off than European states, in general. Those parts fluctuate for the most part. Europe lacks the common identity to accept the lack of Pareto efficiency but pretends it can achieve it to avoid further separatism.
The Euro can't be a common currency with the lack of common identity combined with more divergent national economies in the EU. But this is kind of funny:
Even if ‘the introduction of the euro into a fundamentally flawed currency zone was a huge mistake, the same applies by now simply to undoing that mistake,’ since the dissolution of the Eurozone would be ‘equivalent to a tsunami of economic as well as political regression’. Hence the ‘trap’ Europe is in – it can neither move forwards, nor backwards.
Of course "Europe"--the European Union--can move "forward." The very nature of the anti-democratic EU means that it will move forward using force if necessary. Sure, the initial force is the bureaucracy and legal system enforcing a thousand cheese regulations rather than security force hard power to compel ever closer union. But it is force in whatever form is used. As the article goes on to recognize:
Fritz Scharpf, to whom Offe looks for counsel, is less categorical. Also as of 2015, he concluded that the EU decision to rescue the single currency rather than dismantle it was creating an economically repressive and politically authoritarian euro regime that was enormously counter-productive. By forcing member states in trouble to adopt fiscal austerity and internal devaluation, reducing labour costs with the beggar-my-neighbour effects of a permanent downward pressure on wage incomes, social transfers and public transfers, official policy was ‘utterly devoid of democratic legitimacy’.
And if that bureaucratic power is insufficient, don't comfort yourself that the proto-imperial EU won't use hard power to get its ever closer union over the objections of local loyalties and the failure to provide actual real economic benefits to the people of Europe, and finally discard the prefix.
