The muddled future of the eurozone

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner    Thursday, September 30, 2010

Europe's debt crisis is not going away anytime soon, which means that the crisis over European monetary union won't be going away either. As it turns out, the European Commission is on this, proposing things like "excessive deficit procedures" and the like. 
Will this work? Well … let's go to the Economist's explanation for why the previous set of rules failed to prevent this from happening:   

The “stability and growth pact” was supposed to limit each country’s budget deficit to 3% of gdp and public debt to 60% of GDP. It failed, in part because France and Germany refused to abide by it -- and even rewrote the rules when they breached the deficit limit.
In contrast, the problems that arose because different economies responded differently to the zone’s common monetary policy were underestimated. The sudden drop in real interest rates on joining the euro in Greece, Ireland and Spain fuelled huge spending booms. (Portugal had enjoyed its growth spurt in the late 1990s in anticipation of euro membership.) Rampant domestic demand pushed up unit-wage costs relative to those in the rest of the euro area, notably in Germany, hurting export competitiveness and producing big current-account deficits.
The euro allowed these internal imbalances to grow unchecked and now stands in the way of a speedy adjustment, because euro-area countries whose wages are out of whack with their peers’ cannot devalue. 

So, what is to be done? In the past, European integrationists have been quite adroit at using periods of crisis and malaise to jumpstart further integration efforts. It's possible that this could happen again. 
In this case, however, integration efforts are going to be very costly. The Economist explains:

[T]here are three ways for a country to restore competitiveness: devaluation (which reduces wages relative to those in other exporting countries), wage cuts or higher productivity. In the euro area, the first option is out. The other two rely on easing job-market rules so that pay matches workers’ efficiency more closely, and workers can move freely from dying industries and firms to growing ones.

I'm thinking unions will develop breakout nuclear capabilities aren't going to be big fans of that second option. The third option seems like the ultimate political dream, except it involves eliminating regulations that likely benefit a lot of entrenched interest groups. 
Another possibility is greater fiscal centralization. The Economist is not keen on this, but that's besides the point -- as Mary Sarotte points out at Foreign Affairs, there's a Very Important Country that's not going to go along with the move:

The challenge now is governance reform, not expulsion of member states. Reverting to national currencies would drive the values of reissued southern currencies into the ground and the deutsche mark into the sky, thereby undermining Germany's export competitiveness and job market, to say nothing of the collateral damage to the European Union and the single market. The eurozone crisis should not signal the end of the euro but rather the start of a long-overdue overhaul. The idea of a European Monetary Fund, endorsed by Wolfgang Schäuble (an elder statesman from the days of German unification and now a subordinate of Merkel), faded after Merkel dismissed it but deserves broader support. Germany also needs to reconsider its calls for painful fiscal discipline on the part of the weakest countries until their economies regain footing. Ideally, but perhaps not realistically, Merkel should return to previous German form and spearhead a revision of the Maastricht Treaty, leading a fresh effort to do for political union what Kohl and Mitterrand did for monetary union.
The unlikelihood of such a move exemplifies a fundamental problem within the whole European Union: there exists a built-in tension between the lofty goals of integration and member states' collective unpreparedness to think through the consequences of their ambitious project. The great achievement of the past has been to reconcile these contradictory impulses by focusing on practical agreements. It is time to do so once again and realize that the necessary consequence of monetary union is greater political union.

In some ways, what happens from here on out will be an excellent test of whether economic interdependence really alters national incentives. As I blogged a few months ago, "When going backwards isn't an option, and muddling through is no longer viable, the only thing left to do is move further along the integration project." 
Of course, the European have spent the past few months muddling through some more. Given current trends, however, that option is going to disappear sooner rather than later. 

Developing …

drezner.foreignpolicy.com