Should Britain Feel Left Out?
Reuters is reporting that the EU has effectively isolated Britain, and they way they tell it, it’s a disaster for Britain. From my point of view, it may lead to that country’s salvation. Insofar as I can determine, what happened may look like a British set-back according to Reuters, but for the life of me, I cannot see how. If British Prime Minister David Cameron were smart, he’d play this up, and seek to withdraw entirely from the Union. As the Reuters article makes clear, Britain has never been fully accepted by other EU members because they’ve neither joined the common currency nor accepted the Schengen Treaty that provides open borders between signatory nations. The assessment is that Cameron had been “constrained by domestic politics,” but I view that as a victory for the people of Britain. Rather than getting drawn even deeper into the quagmire of the EU, Britain may yet find itself able to maintain its sovereignty.
This is part of the problem the US faces with its Euro-entanglements. Also mentioned in the Reuters piece is the fact that US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was making his presence known during the flurry of meetings and negotiations happening across Europe throughout the week:
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had spent several days in Europe before the summit. The United States, like all of Europe’s trade partners, had been watching the accelerating debt crisis with profound concern, worried for their own economies and banks.
No! This is the thing about which I have been warning you for some time, with the Euro currency teetering on the brink of total collapse: The United States has extended itself to cover Eurozone banks to an extent that is reckless and dangerous. Geithner was on hand to try to lend his assistance in shepherding the process along. In the end, what came out of it was what Sarkozy had wanted all along. There will be a new intergovernmental agreement among nations of the Eurozone as a sidebar to the main EU treaty. This effectively cuts Britain out, but it also gives Britain every justification in breaking all bonds with Brussels.
What is at stake is the notion of tying the budgets of EU nations to some sort of formal, centralized process, by means of which they hope to get control of the staggering debt. They have extended and leveraged and borrowed in every conceivable fashion, and yet they still look to do more. The single currency has been a problem even before its official beginning, since the manner in which it was created was based on some rather generous calculations of the value of the original members’ currencies, and because no budget discipline was installed at the time. Think of this as an incremental approach to a single central government for the entire zone.
In meetings with the head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, and euro zone finance ministers the conversation was all about the two-year-old debt crisis and how to resolve it. The issues: the role of the ECB, how far should or would it stand behind countries to buy them breathing space, the scale of the euro zone’s rescue fund, the part to be played by the IMF, and should the EU let private bondholders off the hook.
This should cause further concerns for Americans, because the IMF will get much of its funding from the US Federal Reserve, drawing the US even further into the Euro-debacle.
On Monday, Nicolas Sarkozy insisted that Britain is needed as part of the Eurozone trading bloc, but it’s hard to imagine how this remains that case, and Sarkozy admits as much, in stating:
“We did everything, the chancellor and I, to allow the British to take part in the agreement. But there are now clearly two Europes,” Sarkozy said in an interview with the French daily Le Monde.
This is a typically continental view of the issue, but it’s clear to me that Angela Merkel and Germany will bear the brunt of the strain. Nevertheless, it’s my view that as dire as some would like to make this out to be for Britain’s sake, I’m unmoved by their insistence that Prime Minister Cameron has made a mistake:
“I think that’s a shame because we need our British friends in Europe,” he said, arguing that Cameron’s centre-left predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would not have made “the same mistake”.
I think it was a terrible mistake for Britain to tie their nation to this mess in the first place, and I think that was true of Germany as well, but while the British have maintained some independence, the Germans have not, and now they will pay. If this all goes as badly as it seems that it may, Merkel and Sarkozy may be looking for non-extradition countries to which they can flee.
Apparently, I’m not alone in my dim view of the Euro, as one Telegraph writer points out the real reason for the Europeans’ anger toward Britain:
No, they aren’t really angry with us for opposing the new Treaty for Fiscal Union. The reason our brother and sister Europeans are so chronically enraged with the British is that we have been proved completely right about the euro. For more than 20 years, British ministers have been coming out to Brussels and saying that they just love all this single-market stuff, but that they doubt the wisdom of trying to create a monetary union. And for more than 20 years, some of us have been saying that the reason a monetary union won’t work is that you can’t do it without a political union – and that a political union is not democratically possible.
We warned that you would need a kind of central Euro-government to control national budgets and taxation, and that the peoples of Europe wouldn’t wear it. Now look. It wasn’t the Anglo-Saxon bankers who caused the trouble in the eurozone, Sarkozy mon ami. It was the utter failure of the eurozone countries – starting with France, incidentally – to observe the Maastricht rules. It was the refusal of the Greeks to control their spending or to reform their social security systems. In Greece and Italy, the democratic leaders have been effectively deposed in the hope of appeasing the markets and saving the euro; and what makes the leaders of the eurozone countries even more furious is that it doesn’t seem to be working.
Boris Johnson is absolutely right about this. It’s damned-well time somebody said it. Britain shouldn’t fear being cut out of Europe at this point. They should call it “Independence Day” and celebrate. In my view, the sooner they can dis-entangle themselves from the entire fiasco, the greater their chances of avoiding at least some of the calamity that will ruin the continent. I only wish our own leaders here in the US would do the same.
Note: In the US, by mid-afternoon Monday, the Dow was off more than 200 points, or roughly 1.7%, on fears about the continuing European crisis.
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