m a y / j u n e 2o12
Volume 91 • Number 3
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Europe After the Crisis
How to Sustain a Common Currency
Andrew Moravcsik
Europe After the Crisis
How to Sustain a Common Currency
Andrew Moravcsik
[54]
Andrew Moravcsik is Professor of Politics and International Aªairs
and Director of the European Union Program at Princeton University’s
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Aªairs.
From the start, the euro has rested on a gamble. When European
leaders opted for monetary union in 1992, they wagered that European
economies would converge toward one another: the deficit-prone
countries of southern Europe would adopt German economic
standards—lower price inflation and wage growth, more saving,
and less spending—and Germany would become a little more like
them,by accepting more government and private spending and higher
wage and price inflation. This did not occur. Now, with the euro in
crisis, the true implications of this gamble are becoming clear.
Over the past two years, the eurozone members have done a
remarkable job managing the short-term symptoms of the crisis,
although the costs have been great. Yet the long-term challenge
remains: making European economies converge, that is, assuring
that their domestic macroeconomic behaviors are su⁄ciently similar
to one another to permit a single monetary policy at a reasonable
cost. For this to happen, both creditor countries, such as Germany,
and the deficit countries in southern Europe must align their trends
in public spending, competitiveness, inflation, and other areas.
Aligning the continent’s economies will first require Europe to reject
the common misdiagnoses of today’s crisis.The problem is not primarily
one of profligate public sectors or broken private sectors in debtor
countries. It is rather the result of a fundamental disequilibrium within
the single currency zone, which applies a single monetary policy and a
	 foreign affairs . May/June 2012	 [55]
Europe After the Crisis
single exchange rate to a diverse group of countries. Policy proposals for
budgetary austerity, the micromanagement of national budgets, fiscal
federalism,bailouts,or large funds to stave oª speculators are insu⁄cient
to solve this problem alone. Instead, Europeans should trust in the
essentially democratic nature of the eu, which will encourage them
to distribute the costs of convergence more fairly within and among
countries.The burden must be shifted from Europe’s public sectors and
deficit countries to its private sectors and surplus countries. If this does
not occur, the survival of the euro will be called into question and
Europe will face a long-term economic catastrophe that could drain its
wealth and power for the rest of this decade and beyond.
a risky bet
Since Europe began cooperating on monetary issues in the 1970s,
nearly every agreement has been negotiated on terms set primarily
by Germany. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which committed Europeans
to the euro, was no exception. Germany’s main motivation
for a single currency, contrary to popular belief, was neither to aid
its reunification nor to realize an idealistic federalist scheme for
European political union. It was rather to promote its own economic
welfare through open markets, a competitive exchange rate, and
anti-inflationary monetary policy. Most German business and government
leaders believed then and believe now that the European
economy would be best supported by independent central banks
that are like their own Bundesbank, which almost always prioritizes
low inflation over growth or employment.
In France, Italy, Spain, and other countries that have traditionally
had weaker currencies, politicians viewed monetary union in part as
a means to emulate Germany’s success by committing themselves to
low inflation and low interest rates, reforming the structures of their
economies, and encouraging cross-border investment. Yet they also
saw the euro as an instrument to bring Germany closer to their own
economic models, thereby relaxing external constraints and competitive
pressuresontheireconomies.Theseweak-currencycountrieshadsuªered
many debt and exchange-rate crises in the 1970s and 1980s that were
driven by the gaps in prices, spending, and wages between themselves
and Germany. To avoid repeating this, they hoped to encourage
Andrew Moravcsik
	 [56]	 foreign affairs . Volume 91 No. 3
Germany to accept a European structure that would allow for higher
domestic spending, wage increases, and inflation.The two approaches
would meet somewhere in the middle.
It didn’t work. Even Jacques Delors, who was president of the
European Commission from 1985 to 1995 and who is often considered
to be the father of the euro, told me shortly after the Maastricht
Treaty was negotiated that he saw the single currency as a failure
because he had been unable to persuade the Germans to compromise.
Berlin’s nonnegotiable demand in exchange for monetary union
was a European central bank that would be even more independent
in its design and even more anti-inflationary in its mandate than
the old Bundesbank. No provision was made for fiscal transfers or
bailouts among European states.
From the start, then, the single currency imposed high risks on
some European governments. If deficit countries, such as Greece
and Italy, could not persuade Germany to change its behavior, then
they were betting their future prosperity on their own abilities to adopt
German standards of wage discipline, government spending, and
international competitiveness. These were ambitious goals, because
such standards are deeply embedded in national social compromises
and political histories. The eurozone had to become more of what
economists call an“optimal currency area,”in which economic behavior
is similar enough to justify a single monetary policy.
In practice, getting there would be very di⁄cult, because the
euro system required governments to surrender the tools that they
had traditionally used to oªset their gap with Germany. These had
included unilateral control over interest rates and the money supply,
restrictions on capital flows, and the manipulation of exchange
rates. Faced with a debt or competitiveness crisis, a country would
have to act directly to push down economic activity through wages,
private consumption, business investment, and government spending.
This is a risky course for any government, because it imposes immediate
and visible costs across the entire society. Yet the creators
of the euro apparently thought other European countries would be
able to converge on something resembling the German model, or
that Germany itself would relent, because they made few provisions
to address bank collapses, sovereign debt crises, or other potential
consequences of failure.
	 foreign affairs . May/June 2012	 [57]
Europe After the Crisis
growing apart
At first, other European economies seemed to bring their policies
in line with Germany’s,as optimists had expected.Weak-currency governments
restrained wages, government spending, and consumption—
or presented statistics that made it seem as if they had done so. Adopting
the euro reduced interest rates for these countries and encouraged northern
European lending to their economies, stimulating growth.
Yet underneath the surface, the eurozone was a ticking time bomb.
Europe’s economies once again grew apart,the consequences of which
were made clear after the U.S. and British financial collapses in 2008.
Deficit governments immediately came under pressure from international
markets: speculative domestic markets crashed, interest rates
rose, external debts ballooned, and growth plummeted. By contrast,
Germany, after a short hiccup, has enjoyed an unprecedented economic
boom. These disparate trajectories have called into question
the viability of the euro.
According to conventional wisdom and the o⁄cial rhetoric in
Germany and elsewhere, the crisis was caused primarily by excessive
public spending in a few extravagant eurozone countries. Solving the
crisis, and preventing future ones, would therefore simply require
imposing tight restraints on government budgets in deficit countries.
To this end, the so-called fiscal compact recently negotiated by eu
members would, if ratified, enforce budgetary austerity across the
continent. Some economists, including Mario Draghi, who now
heads the European Central Bank, also believe that cutting budgets
is good for growth.
Yet this is a misleading diagnosis. Although some southern European
countries, like many Western democracies, might do well to cut
government deficits, public profligacy was not the main cause of the
crisis. The eurozone countries have relatively prudent fiscal policies;
most have run up smaller deficits than Japan, the United Kingdom,
and the United States. Greece is the only eurozone country with an
average deficit above three percent of gdp, the maximum level permitted
by the Maastricht Treaty, and Portugal was the only other
one plagued by major public-sector deficits before the crisis. Spain
was actually running a surplus. Far more important in causing the
crisis was shortsightedness in and lax regulation of the private sector,
Andrew Moravcsik
	 [58]	 foreign affairs . Volume 91 No. 3
which bred imprudent banking policies in Ireland, insu⁄cient competition
in markets in Italy, and a housing boom gone bad in Spain.
Nor is there any reason to blame the crisis on the bankruptcy of the
continental social model. The recent solvency and competitiveness
of northern European economies suggest that prudent welfare and
labor-market reforms can keep the European model viable.
A chorus of German critics, from the tabloid Bild to Josef Joªe,
the editor of the respectable Die Zeit, have blamed the crisis on a
unique southern European culture of corruption and ine⁄ciency,
which they contrast with northern sobriety. Yet this dichotomy is
also misleading. Severe housing and banking crises are hardly specific
to southern Europe; they have recently occurred across the
Western world. Between 1999 and 2008,
despite tough competition from emerging
markets and central and eastern Europe,
the Greek economy grew by almost a third.
All the countries in crisis have nearly
matched or surpassed Germany in some combination of growth in
gross national product, labor productivity, and hours worked. This
explains why ill-fated investment in southern Europe did not come
solely from domestic sources; those sober French and German bankers
and bondholders helped finance it with low-interest loans.
Although big deficits and broken private sectors may have been
part of the problem, the deeper cause of today’s crisis lies in contradictions
within the euro system itself. Ten years after adopting a common
currency, Europe is still not an optimal currency area. Instead,
the single currency exaggerates existing diªerences and eliminated the
policy instruments required to overcome them. Bankruptcy in southern
Europe and prosperity in Germany are two sides of the same coin.
Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain have spent the last decade accumulating
large and increasing current account deficits, and so they
are accused of ine⁄ciency and overspending. But German policies are
equally to blame for the deficits. At the founding of the euro in 1999,
the European Central Bank set a continent-wide two percent target
for inflation, based on trends in Germany’s labor market. Yet
Germany subsequently moved the goalposts by dampening its price
and wage growth below that level. To see how this helped cause
the crisis, consider the most important component in measuring an
Germany is acting like
the China of Europe.
	 foreign affairs . May/June 2012	 [59]
Europe After the Crisis
economy’s external competitiveness: the cost of labor per unit produced,
also called unit labor costs, which should ideally rise at the
same rate as inflation. Between 1999 and 2008, the average unit
labor costs in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain rose by one percent
per year over the target, slowly rendering their economies uncompetitive
and signaling the need for reform. During the same period
in Germany, by contrast, sluggish wage growth, weak domestic
consumption, labor-market reforms, and cuts in government spending
meant that unit labor costs rose by an average of less than one percent
per year, well below the European target. Over a decade, this combination
of excessive rises in unit labor costs in some places and
wage suppression elsewhere generated a 25 percent overall gap in
competitiveness between Germany and its European partners.This
chiefly benefited Germany’s export sector—the only part of its
economy to enjoy net growth over the decade—at the expense not
just of foreigners but also of German workers and taxpayers, whose
wages were not keeping pace with inflation.
Many observers, and not just in Germany, view Germany’s competitiveness
as the well-deserved fruit of a decade of domestic reform and
restraint, during which the government and unions worked together
to deregulate labor markets and dampen wages. Southern European
countries, they maintain, should simply emulate Germany’s success.
There is some truth to this view, but it misses the fact that Germany’s
wage suppression was excessive, fueling both trade imbalances and
imprudent international lending. Because Germany is in the eurozone,
its external competitiveness was not oªset by a rising currency. Germany’s
real exchange rate today, under the single currency, is roughly
40 percent below where it would be if the deutsche mark still existed.
The result:Germany’s trade surplus,at $200 billion a year,is the world’s
largest, even greater than China’s. Forty percent of the surplus comes
from Germany’s trade within the eurozone—a total roughly equal to
the combined deficits of the crisis countries.
Accumulating export surpluses and suppressing domestic consumption,
moreover, generated a surplus of capital. German banks
and investors lent their extra cash to southern Europe at historically
low interest rates, ignoring the longer-term risk. So southern Europe’s
deficits are as much the fault of northern European lenders as they are
the fault of southern European borrowers. In using an undervalued
Andrew Moravcsik
	 [60]	 foreign affairs . Volume 91 No. 3
currency to accumulate trade surpluses, Germany is acting like the
China of Europe. Yet its eurozone membership spares it from
the kind of criticism that China regularly suªers.
This euro-induced disequilibrium helps explains why Germany’s
export-driven economy has recently been growing at three to four
percent per year, while neighboring economies remain mired in crisis.
Such large imbalances have historically been more than enough to
trigger severe crises in debtor economies. Yet in trying to catch up
to Germany, southern European governments are further hampered
by the euro system, which stripped them of the main tool they had
traditionally employed to keep up with their economically competitive
neighbors: currency devaluation. Devaluation reduces the price of
exports and increases the price of imports, shifting some of the burden
of adjusting to deficits to foreigners whose products have become
relatively less competitive.The euro has also forced southern European
governments to surrender unilateral control over interest rates and
inflation as instruments to tweak prices or reduce their debt burdens.
The only remaining policy option deficit countries have to make up
for the 25 percent competitiveness gap is to drastically cut wages,
private economic activity, and government spending, leading to a
reduced level of aggregate consumption. In any country, such direct
cuts tend to be controversial, politically costly, and di⁄cult to carry
out. Germany, meanwhile, although it bears a large part of the blame
for the gap, faces no immediate market pressure to share the cost
of adjustment.
money in the bank
In the face of these tensions, keeping the eurozone together requires
European governments first to address the crisis of liquidity
by stabilizing debt-ridden countries and shoring up European banks
and then, in the long term, to bring about the fundamental convergence
of European economies.The eurozone countries appear to have successfully,
if perhaps only temporarily, addressed the first challenge.
After two years, bank balance sheets have stabilized, stock and bond
markets have rebounded, and the immediate pressure on debtor
countries has been relieved.To achieve these goals, the eu, reputed to
be slow and cautious, has acted with remarkable flexibility.
	 foreign affairs . May/June 2012	 [61]
Europe After the Crisis
Starting in May 2010, European leaders created a series of funds
that totaled nearly 800 billion euros, including commitments from
the International Monetary Fund (imf) and agreements reached
between individual countries, aimed at preventing uncontrolled
defaults. A permanent European stability mechanism is slated to
take over the function of many of these funds in July of this year,
potentially with even more money. The European Central Bank
bought bonds from the distressed countries,which were subsequently
discounted, although doing so may have violated clauses of the
Maastricht Treaty that ban bailouts and monetary financing of budget
deficits. In February, European governments forced Greek bondholders
to accept a 53 percent loss and lowered the interest rates on
the country’s remaining debt.
The eu has also stabilized its financial sector. In recent months, the
European Central Bank shored up the continent’s banking system by
oªering banks 600 billion euros in three-year loans at the very low
interest rate of one percent. It has hinted that it might supply more
such loans, if necessary. The eu has passed important new banking
regulations, which increase the amount of capital banks must keep on
hand, and has clarified its responsibility in regulating banks.
Berlin has exceeded most expectations by consistently supporting
such bold actions, in the process taking on great costs and risks.
But it has not done so out of idealism or charity, despite Chancellor
Angela Merkel’s well-timed inspirational calls for greater European
political union. Germany is the greatest beneficiary of financial
stability and the common currency. A sudden default by a eurozone
country or the collapse of the currency itself would devastate the
German economy, particularly its export industry. Moreover, because
bailouts are unpopular in Germany, eu support for deficit countries
has so far oªered the most cost-eªective and politically expedient
way for Berlin to ensure that German banks and bondholders get
paid back for their imprudent international loans. It is no surprise,
then, that strong support from German businesses has been decisive in
ensuring a multiparty majority in the Bundestag behind committing
resources to defend the euro.
It is less clear whether the euro serves the long-term interests of the
deficit countries. In these countries, the strongest argument for staying
in the eurozone has been that the costs of pulling out would be
Andrew Moravcsik
	 [62]	 foreign affairs . Volume 91 No. 3
prohibitive. Were Greece to abandon the euro, for example, the costs
imposed by the rapid outward flow of capital, the mass bankruptcy of
banks and businesses, and the adjustment to a national currency would
likely total one trillion euros. And the risks of a Greek collapse pale in
comparison to those of the contagion reaching Italy or Spain.
The American and European media have criticized Merkel for her
indecisive leadership, which they say has produced a slow European
response focused more on imposing austerity than on rekindling
growth. It is true that facing unrealistic
expectations for recovery, Germany initially
opposed bailouts and debt restructuring
and then organized loans at punishing
interest rates. Only in October 2011, and
largely at the insistence of the imf, did
Europe begin to trim Greek sovereign
debt. The best technocratic solution might
instead have been for Germany to back a
swifter and more generous restructuring of
Greek debt, with private bondholders in
northern Europe taking their share of the losses, and for the eu to
provide more generous funding to pull distressed economies through
the recession. This might have prevented those economies from
accumulating debt, leaving better prospects for tighter budgets and
structural reforms in the long term.
Yet expectations for that kind of outcome underestimate the
inherent political di⁄culty of debt negotiations, which involve
bargaining with deficit and creditor governments while worrying
about the responses of financial markets and taxpayers. Had Greek
debt been forgiven sooner, or had a larger “firewall” been created
to protect Italy and Spain from collapse, the incentives for the debtor
countries to reform would have diminished. Germany is rightly
committed to squeezing significant domestic change out of the
process, particularly given its willingness to risk funding other
countries without a firm guarantee of repayment. In coping with
the short-term consequences of the debt crisis, and in saving a
system from which they benefit, German leaders have displayed
bolder political leadership than at any other time in the history of
European monetary integration.
A more balanced
eurozone is not just a
pragmatic necessity;
it is a democratic
imperative.
	 foreign affairs . May/June 2012	 [63]
Europe After the Crisis
when in rome, do as the germans do
Unfortunately, managing the short-term symptoms of the crisis
is not enough. Resolving the immediate liquidity crisis has bought
European governments several years to address the deeper challenge:
how to encourage fundamental economic convergence. For as long
as the eurozone countries continue to take such radically diªerent
trajectories regarding labor costs, government spending, private-sector
behavior, and competitiveness, Europe will remain no more of an
optimal currency area than it was when the euro entered circulation.
Now that they know this,most member states today would probably
not opt for a common currency. At the eurozone’s founding, proponents
justified the currency with the claim that painful short-term adjustments
would generate long-term economic health. Now, the argument
has been flipped: it may have been ill advised to create the euro, but
now that it exists, the short-term benefits of sticking with it (compared
with the catastrophic alternative) outweigh the long-term costs.
New reform-minded governments have taken o⁄ce across Europe,
led by Mario Monti in Rome, Mariano Rajoy in Madrid, Pedro Passos
Coelho in Lisbon, Lucas Papademos in Athens, and Enda Kenny in
Dublin.These governments are committed to making the euro work,but
they face tough choices. Opposition politicians in Greece and elsewhere
increasingly advocate leaving the eurozone rather than enduring austerity.Meanwhile,prominent
German business and economic leaders have
suggested that Germany could survive in a smaller northern eurozone or
with its own currency, as Sweden has. These issues will be resolved not
in Brussels or Frankfurt but in national capitals. Preserving the euro in
its current form depends on crafting a politically sustainable compromise
on which countries and which groups within those countries will
shoulder the burden of getting Europe’s disparate economies to converge.
The German view—that the future of the euro rests on countries’
making tough reforms and cutting public spending—is partially
correct. It would be foolhardy for Germany to assume liabilities for
deficit countries without such reforms.That is why Berlin has insisted
that the eu fiscal compact require governments to incorporate balancedbudget
provisions into their national constitutions. Yet this still leaves
unresolved two crucial questions about how to distribute the costs of
Europe’s adjustment, both within countries and among them.
Andrew Moravcsik
	 [64]	 foreign affairs . Volume 91 No. 3
First, how will Europe’s private sectors be reformed? Diªerent
private-sector wage and business practices are a greater obstacle to
economic convergence than diªerent public-sector spending. Yet it
is often unclear exactly how national governments can encourage
reforms of wage and business practices or how the eu can assure that
such reforms are actually implemented. It is often easier for governments
to slash public spending than to impose solutions on powerful
banks, corporations, or unions. As a result, even if a crisis originates
in the private sector, the cost of stabilization often falls disproportionately
on public-sector beneficiaries.
Second, which countries will need to chart new economic paths?
Germany benefits greatly from the current system, in which deficit
countries must do nearly all the adjusting by cutting spending and
Germany provides the funding to assure that they repay their loans,
which also serves to bail out northern European banks and bondholders.
The new fiscal compact would
institutionalize this. Yet imposing the primary
cost of recovery on deficit countries
in the form of austerity is likely to fail both
pragmatically and politically. Economies
without growth cannot support or sustain
debt reduction or structural reform. Even
o⁄cial eu and imf reports do not project
that the current policies will generate sustainable
competitiveness and convergence.
This is why even Monti, the technocratic Italian prime minister,
recently made clear that the deficit countries could embrace austerity
and reform only if Germany changed its policies to accept a greater
adjustment burden.
The economist Paul Krugman and others argue that such a burden
could come in the form of a more centralized European fiscal
federalism. If only Europe possessed a common political identity that
supported fiscal transfers among governments—not unlike the transfers
among U.S. states carried out through the federal government—
the eurozone countries could bring their economies into alignment.
This analogy is not entirely persuasive; Europe is not America.
Washington allows U.S. states to function under a single currency not
through fiscal federalism and orderly bailouts but through local
The EU will remain
the most successful
example of voluntary
international
cooperation in history.
	 foreign affairs . May/June 2012	 [65]
Europe After the Crisis
balanced-budget rules backed by the often brutal departure of firms,
capital, and people to more economically buoyant regions. When
traditional manufacturing collapsed in Michigan, federal intervention
did not save the state from suªering a decade of a shrinking population
and shrinking incomes; Michiganders and their money simply
moved south. (The intense controversy over the auto-industry bailout
proves what an exception it was.) Moreover, northern Europeans
are even less willing to support large direct transfers to their foreign
neighbors than Americans in southern states are willing to bail out
Michigan. Although northern Europeans have accepted European
financial bailouts for the time being, such funds are insu⁄cient to
salvage large countries, such as Italy and Spain, and so they have not
supplanted the need for a more fundamental convergence.
Since austerity and fiscal federalism cannot bear the entire burden
of adjustment, particularly for large debtors, Europe’s convergence
will also require a shift in the domestic policies of Germany and other
surplus countries. Berlin must move to increase its public spending,
wages, and consumption at a faster rate. This would help bridge the
competitiveness gap between surplus and deficit countries, encourage
the deficit countries to grow and export more, and reduce current
account deficits across southern Europe. A fall in the value of the euro
would have a complementary, if weaker, eªect. Within Germany, such
a shift might well earn support from unions, service industries, the
public sector, and left-wing parties, all of which would benefit directly
from the policies. The trick is to convince Germany’s export industry,
its inflation hawks, and Merkel’s own conservative coalition that the
long-term benefits of a stable currency outweigh the risks of inflation
and of the country’s commitments to bail out its neighbors. German
chancellors have historically been more willing than neoliberal economists
and central bankers to contemplate increases in spending and
wages, especially around election time.
There is some evidence that Germany is moving in this direction,
despite what its politicians and diplomats sometimes say; the costs of
inaction in the short term are too high. But absent a deeper convergence,
the eurozone’s long-term economic fundamentals are stacked
against success. Whether or not Germany will ultimately make the
tough political decisions required to save the euro will likely depend
on the contours of the next financial crisis.
Andrew Moravcsik
	 [66]	 foreign affairs . Volume 91 No. 3
democratic surplus
Many Europeans complain that the crisis has revealed the eu to
be undemocratic. European institutions can appear distant, technocratic,
and unfair to the common people, as the scholars Timothy
Garton Ash and Larry Siedentop, among many others, have argued.
In most cases, such claims contain little truth.The eu remains tightly
controlled by elected national politicians.True, each country surrenders
some unilateral control over its domestic policy,but in exchange it secures
influence over the policies of other countries that aªect it. In the
eu, concurrent decision-making by national o⁄cials and directly
elected European parliamentarians amounts to a form of limited
government that would make John Locke and James Madison proud.
No one’s democratic rights are restricted as long as the people of
every member state freely choose to act in union, and cooperation
preserves the same public input and transparency that Europeans
expect in domestic policymaking.
Judged by this standard of democracy, however, the single currency
has always come up short.The problem is not the role of technocratic
central banks, or even temporary technocratic governments. Nearly
every modern country accepts that a credible commitment to
monetary stability requires that national central banks be more
autonomous than parliaments or presidents. The problem is rather
that the European Central Bank is more independent than any
comparable national bank—without any obvious technocratic or
democratic justification. The reason is instead political; it was
Germany’s price for creating the euro. The result is a system tilted
toward German priorities: low inflation, austerity, and the repayment
of creditors.
The political and social costs of adjusting to a common currency,
meanwhile, have fallen disproportionately on the poor and the powerless.
Over the past two years, the eu has called for cuts in the minimum
wage and government spending, but it has asked less of wealthy citizens,
bankers, and the citizens of surplus countries. A fairer system
would demand better enforcement of income tax collection (on average,
rich Greeks illegally withhold one-quarter of what they owe), as well
as reforms to housing and business practices. Watching technocratic
governments in Greece, Italy, and elsewhere agree to impose what
	 foreign affairs . May/June 2012	 [67]
Europe After the Crisis
appear to be one-sided policies, backed by European authorities,
naturally makes many citizens nervous.
This problem makes clear that a more balanced eurozone, in which
as much is required of Germany as of debtor countries, is not just a
pragmatic necessity; it is a democratic imperative. Still, despite its
serious structural biases, at the end of the day, if the eurozone collapses,
it will be because of an abundance of democracy as much as a
lack of it. Divergence among European states reflects local priorities
and preferences. No long-term solution to Europe’s woes can be imposed
on a member state without the consent of its government, and
any government—even the technocratic governments that now sit in
Athens and Rome—requires an electoral mandate. (Ireland went even
further to secure democratic consent when, in February, it announced
that it would put the eu fiscal compact to a referendum later this year.)
Democratic governments often find it di⁄cult to commit to the types
of long-term reforms that both northern and southern Europe require
today. In this case, if they cannot, then the euro will not remain viable.
the end of the affair?
The euro crisis will shape not just the fate of the single currency
but also the future of the whole continent. The recent turmoil has
made clear that the alignment of European domestic policies is a
prerequisite for mutually beneficial cooperation. This is typical of
the eu. Where basic national interests and regulatory styles have
converged, as in the area of trade, governments have developed strong
rules to coordinate their policies, and these policies have remained
stable through the crisis.In the areas where countries have not brought
their policies in line, regulation remains voluntary and largely national.
So the outcome to the euro crisis will depend on how well northern and
southern Europe can close the gaps in their macroeconomic behavior.
But the di⁄culties in getting European countries to adopt similar
monetary policies suggest that the eu’s leaders may have pushed integration
as far as it will go.
In this regard, the euro crisis is only the latest development in a
two-decade-long trend toward the leveling oª of European integration.
At the time the Maastricht Treaty was ratified, many observers
expected the eu to start regulating more and more policies, including
Andrew Moravcsik
	 [68]	 foreign affairs . Volume 91 No. 3
those on social welfare,health care,pensions,criminal justice,education,
issues of culture and language, local infrastructure, national politics,
and, above all, taxation and fiscal priorities. Little of this has occurred,
and Europe now puts forward few policies that open up new areas to
centralized regulation. Today, European states retain far more control
than Brussels over justice and home aªairs, immigration, intellectual
property, and social policy. And when the eu does launch a new centralized
policy, it is rare for every government to sign on or implement
it entirely. Not every eu member uses the euro, just as not every eu
member adheres to the Schengen agreement, which eliminated border
controls, or participates in all eu foreign policy and defense actions.
Yet none of this vindicates the Euro-pessimists. No country has
issued a serious challenge to any of the eu’s core activities. Nor has a
single prominent European politician advocated withdrawal from the
eu, as that would amount to economic suicide. Brussels continues to
manage about ten percent of national policies, from business regulation
to European migration, under a unified legal system. The union has
recently expanded, from 12 members at the time of the Maastricht
Treaty to 27 today, leaving lasting movement toward open markets, democracy,and
the rule of law in its wake.Countries have not responded
to the euro crisis by turning to protectionism or refusing to enforce eu
policies, because cooperation in these areas is firmly grounded in common
interests.The euro crisis itself has even allowed European policy
to intensify in existing areas, such as monetary and banking regulation.
And even a collapse of the euro would not jeopardize the existence of
the eu, despite what such commentators as Walter Laqueur and Wolfgang
Münchau have at times suggested. Whatever the outcome of the
crisis, the eu will remain without rival the most ambitious and successful
example of voluntary international cooperation in world history.
Still, the crisis does signal that the process of European integration
is reaching a natural plateau, at least for the foreseeable future, based on
a pragmatic division between national policy and supranational policy.
The movement toward the“ever-closer union”of which the eu’s founding
fathers dreamed when they signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957 will
have to stop at some point; there will never be an all-encompassing
European federal state. But within the increasingly clear mandate of a
stable constitutional settlement, Europe will continue to respond to the
challenges of an increasingly interdependent world.∂