Crisis in the Eurozone. Costas Lapavitsas

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СКАЧАТЬ are several imponderables. The first is the opposition of workers to austerity, leading to political unrest. Further, the eurozone lacks established mechanisms both to provide bridging loans and to enforce austerity on peripheral members. There is also strong political opposition within core countries to rescuing others within the eurozone. On the other hand, the option of forcing a peripheral country to seek recourse to the IMF would be damaging for the eurozone as a whole.4

      Yet, despite legal constraints, it is not beyond the EU to find ways of advancing bridging loans while at the same time enforcing austerity through political pressure. The real problem with this option is not the institutional machinery of the eurozone. It is, rather, that the policy is likely to lead to aggravated recession in peripheral countries making it even more difficult to meet public borrowing targets. Poverty, inequality and social division will increase substantially. Even worse, it is unlikely that there will be long-term increases in productivity through a strategy of liberalisation. Productivity increases require investment and new technologies, neither of which will be provided spontaneously by liberalised markets.

      Peripheral countries would probably find themselves lodged in an unequal competitive struggle against Germany, whose workers would continue to be severely squeezed. Attempting to remain within the eurozone by adopting austerity and liberalisation would lead to sustained falls in real wages in the vain hope of reversing current account deficits against Germany. The eurozone as a whole, meanwhile, would continue to be faced with a weaker world economy due to the crisis of 2007–9. It is a grim prospect for working people in the periphery, and far from a bed of roses for German workers.

      The second alternative is to reform the eurozone. There is almost universal agreement that unitary monetary policy and fragmented fiscal policy have been a dysfunctional mix. There is also widespread criticism of the ECB for the way it has provided abundant liquidity to banks, while keeping aloof of borrowing states, even to the extent of ignoring speculative attacks. A range of reforms that would not challenge the fundamentals of the Maastricht Treaty, the Stability and Growth Pact, and the Lisbon agenda might well be possible. The aim would be to produce smoother interaction of monetary and fiscal forces, while maintaining the underlying conservatism of the eurozone.

      There is very little in such reforms that would be attractive to working people, or that could indeed deal with the structural imbalances within the eurozone. Hence there have been calls for more radical reforms, including abolition of the Stability and Growth Pact and altering the statutes of the ECB to allow it regularly to lend to member states. The aim of such reform would be to retain monetary union, while creating a ‘good euro’ that would be beneficial to working people. The ‘good euro’ strategy would involve significantly expanding the European budget to deliver fiscal transfers from rich to poor countries. There would be an active European investment strategy to support new areas of economic activity. There would also be a minimum wage policy, reducing differentials in competitiveness, and lowering inequality across the eurozone.

      The ‘good euro’ strategy, appealing as it sounds, would face two major problems. The first is that the eurozone lacks either a unitary or a federal state, and there is no prospect of acquiring one in the near future, certainly not with the required progressive disposition. The current machinery of the eurozone is entirely unsuited to this task. The strategy would face a continuous conflict between, on the one hand, its ambitious pan-European aims and, on the other, the absence of state mechanisms that could begin to turn these aims into reality.

      At a deeper level, the ‘good euro’ strategy would clash with the putative role of the euro as world money. If fiscal discipline was relaxed among member states, there would be a risk that the value of the euro would collapse in international markets. Were that to happen, at the very least, the international operations of European banks would become extremely difficult. The international role of the euro, which has been vital to the project from the beginning, would come under heavy pressure. It is not clear, then, that the ‘good euro’ strategy would be compatible with monetary union. In this light, a ‘good euro’ might end up as ‘no euro’. Those who advocate this strategy ought to be aware of its likely implications, i.e., leading to the end of monetary union; their institutional, political and social demands have to be tailored accordingly.

      The third alternative is to exit from the eurozone. Even here, however, there are choices. There is ‘conservative exit’, which is increasingly discussed in the Anglo-Saxon press, and would aim at devaluation. Some of the pressure of adjustment would be passed onto the international sphere, and exports would revive. But there would also be losses for those servicing debt abroad, including banks. Workers would face wage declines as the price of tradable goods would rise. Devaluation would probably be accompanied by austerity and liberalisation, compounding the pressure on workers.

      Long-term improvements in productivity would, however, occur only if market forces began spontaneously to develop new capacity in the tradable goods sector. This is extremely difficult for peripheral eurozone countries, with middling technology and middling real wages. It is notable that the ruling elites of peripheral countries are aware of these difficulties, as well as of their own lack of capacity to deal with them. They have implicitly admitted that they possess neither the means nor the will to pursue an independent path. Consequently, conservative exit might lead to stagnation with repeated devaluations and decline in incomes.

      There is, finally, ‘progressive exit’ from the eurozone, which would require a shift of economic and social power toward labour in peripheral countries. There would be devaluation accompanied by cessation of payments and restructuring of public debt. To prevent collapse of the financial system there would have to be widespread nationalisation of banking, creating a system of public banks. Controls would also have to be imposed on the capital account to prevent outflows of capital. To protect output and employment, finally, it would be necessary to expand public ownership over key areas of the economy, including public utilities, transport and energy.

      On this basis, it would be possible to develop industrial policy that could combine public resources with public credit. There are broad areas of the national economy in peripheral countries that call for public investment, including infrastructure. Opportunities exist to develop new fields of activity in the ‘green’ economy. Investment growth would provide a basis on which to improve productivity, ever the Achilles heel of peripheral economies. Financialisation could then begin to be reversed by lessening the relative weight of finance.

      A radical policy shift of this type would require transforming the state by establishing mechanisms of transparency and accountability. The tax and transfer payments of the state would then take a different shape. The tax base would be broadened by limiting tax evasion by the rich as well as by capital. Public provision for health and education would be gradually improved, as would redistribution policies to alleviate high inequality in peripheral countries.

      A policy of progressive exit for peripheral countries would come with evident costs and risks. The broad political alliances necessary to support such a shift do not exist at present. This absence, incidentally, is not necessarily due to lack of popular support for radical change. More important is that no credible political force in Europe has had the boldness to oppose austerity hitherto. Beyond political difficulties, a major problem for progressive exit would be to avoid turning into national autarky. Peripheral countries are often small and need to maintain access to international trade and investment, particularly within Europe; they also need technology transfer.

      International alliances and support would be necessary in order to sustain flows of trade, skills and investment. These would be far from easy to secure if the rest of the EU remained under the spell of monetary union. But note that progressive exit by the periphery would also offer fresh prospects to core eurozone countries, particularly to labour which has suffered throughout this period. If the eurozone unravelled generally, economic relations between core and periphery could be put on a more cooperative basis.

The order of analysis in Part 1

      Part СКАЧАТЬ