By Nick Ottens.
Germany’s upcoming federal elections have put European plans to form a banking union “on ice,” less than a week after the Dutch government announced that “the time of an ever-closer union in every possible policy area is behind us.”
The two countries, which are among the wealthiest European Union members, have repeatedly resisted ambitious economic and political integration schemes since the start of the debt crisis that has left their voters increasingly frustrated after being asked to bail out profligate states in the eurozone’s periphery while seeing their own budgets and economic growth rates cut.
While both countries remain far from leaving the eurozone, almost half of Dutch and German citizens believe joining the single currency was a mistake. A recent Gallup Europe poll conducted for De Telegraaf in the Netherlands found 39 percent of respondents favored leaving the body altogether. The anti-European Freedom Party is the largest in the polls.
Unlike her Dutch counterpart Prime Minister Mark Rutte, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel doesn’t face a formidable Euroskeptic opposition. However, her own right-wing voters are growing restless. She can ill afford to embrace far-fetched plans for “economic governance” in the eurozone, as French President François Hollande suggested last year. Neither can she afford to push for a banking union, the latest proposal to remedy the currency union’s woes.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine’s Nikolas Busse suggests the only ones who still believe in an “ever-closer union” are those employed by the EU in Brussels. “In most member states,” he wrote June 27, “any sense of European romance is lost.”
The Netherlands took a particularly dispassionate view toward future European integration in a memo released June 21 when it identified dozens of areas in which the EU shouldn’t interfere, ranging from food safety laws and social security systems to working conditions and the media. The government also criticized plans to harmonize tax rates across Europe, a proposal that is backed by Germany, likely for the purpose of lowering rates in the less competitive member states. Germany and the Netherlands have among the lowest business taxes in Europe.
The Netherlands’ resistance to deeper European integration must have startled some of the English-language press that last year predicted the incoming Labor-Liberal coalition would pursue a more pro-European policy. The Financial Times described the parties’ spectacular performance in elections that year as “a decisive and surprising rebuke for populist Euroskeptic politics.” The Guardian predicted the country would tilt “the balance of power in the eurozone toward President François Hollande’s socialists in France and away from Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.”
Far from it, the nation of almost 17 million has leaned heavier on German leadership in Europe and, if anything, strengthened ties with Britain and Sweden, countries outside the single currency that regard warily the eurozone’s steps toward closer integration.
German Euroskepticism (or perhaps more appropriately, euro fatigue) is similarly underestimated. When the European Central Bank signaled last year that it was willing to finance highly indebted eurozone states’ deficit spending, it was to many Germans’ alarm. Their newspapers forecast “nightmares” and “economic catastrophe.”
Even the liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung warned a “red line” was being crossed. “In a community governed by law, the ends cannot justify the means,” it argued. “A European community that is based on the breach of contracts will always be based on fragile foundations.”
As two of very few European nations with a pristine credit rating, Germany and the Netherlands will not be strong-armed into integration schemes they dislike. If proponents of an “ever-closer union” fail to recognize that popular sentiment in two of the EU’s founding member states are increasingly tilted against it, the planned banking integration is doomed.
http://ottens.co.uk/nick/2013/07/germany-netherlands-resist-ever-closer-union/
