Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 23:20:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis R Godena <louisgodena-AT-ids.net>
Subject: M-I: Re: The potential of the Eurostate



Dennis Redmond writes:

> the Eurostate certainly has the resources to finance a
>boom throughout Eastern Europe. I'm not saying it's destined happen this
>way, just that the Euroleft (that shadowy, amorphous alliance of workers
>and their parties from Birmingham to Novosibirsk) ought to be pushing for
>European-wide solutions -- a literal and figurative Eurokeynesianism.


I wonder if Dennis is being a bit optimistic here.  When one recalls the
theory behind the euro -- the maintenance of monetary discipline,
undergirded by sanctions against government "profligacy",  to insure the
"credibility" of the single currency (and thus force competing governments
to do the same -- one must wonder at the reasons for such optimism.  The
Eurostate is capital's answer to the vexing problems of nation-states and
majority voting; both will become irrelevant.  Once the "boom" in eastern
Europe has run its course, that is; when the last state-owned firm has been
privatized, and national governments have been "starved" out of existence,
people there will be pretty much on their own.  The Eurostate, at least for
the foreseeable future, with its phenomenal unemployment and its sputtering
economy, will be ill-suited to "finance" anything outside of its own
shrinking circle.

"Flexibility" (which many are now brandishing like a talisman) will only
make matters worse, leading to a Union divided into a hard core of states
willing to co-operate in a large number of matters which others, forming a
peripheral group, are unable to join.  How can "Eurokeynesianism" exist in
such a milieu?

Louis Godena



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