Fools united over Greece

By Nikolaus Blome

EU leaders have left Pandora’s box wide open.

Europe’s leaders are emperors with no clothes.
Alexis Tsipras and the others have mostly agreed upon points that had already been accepted several times since 2010. Those famous €50 billion to be cashed from privatization, for example. Or the general overhaul of Greek bureaucracy. Or the end to nepotism, corruption and tax fraud. Or the enhancing of growth by liberalizing markets and closed-up professions.

All of that made it into an agreement that might grant Greece another bailout worth €85 billion, and that clearly would buy some time. Yet the Greek prime minister, in his own words, does not believe in that agreement, nor does half of his Syriza party. Thus he has to rely on those parties he humiliated only recently when winning an anti-agreement referendum. It’s lunacy.
On the other hand, Angela Merkel was said to have ruled the waves during that famous 17-hour summit. She did not. She won over Tsipras when it came to putting some strong language in the summit conclusions. But she has no means of enforcing their  implementation. She is not in a position to overrule that lack of will or capacity so often shown by Greece’s dysfunctional political and public system.

From now on every country of the eurozone is either too important a member to be (temporarily) suspended or too proud a nation to be put under adequate control.

Again, it will be all about trust, of which Merkel said she had no more just a day before she signed a paper based on nothing but … trust. That is lunacy, too.
When Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, saw his idea of temporary Grexit dismissed, it was like passing the point of no return. From now on every country in the eurozone is either too important a member to be (temporarily) suspended or too proud a nation to be put under adequate control. This tacitly rolls back the Lisbon treaty, which set out rules on how to bring to order misbehaving member countries. It’s a shame.
And it makes you think of a federal state. Among its key caracteristics are, first, no limits to internal transfers; second, the vow to keep together the territory that has been accumulated; and, third, the relinquishment of some specific sanctions such as suspension of membership rights.
By taking the EU way down the road toward a federal state, leaders unleashed a debate on deeper integration of the eurozone. Pandora’s box has been opened. Almost every day, new proposals are sketched out in public. They all come at an inappropriate point in time. And they might backfire.
Not only the U.K. is challenging the notion that the answer to every single EU crisis ought to be More Europe: So do Germany and a couple of Nordic states. More integration and less national veto rights: following that path might turn out right one day. But it won’t right now.

There is no such thing as a free bailout.

The Greek experience has injected a heavy dose of distrust into the system among governments as well as nations. The consensus has eroded what is good and what is bad for the eurozone as a whole. If European heads of state and government can’t get the Greek drama straight in five years, how could an “economic government“ succeed in doing so, as French President François Hollande suggested?
If every member state that wishes can take part in Schäuble’s avant-garde — that old idea of having a small group of states move forward into deeper Integration while others deliberately stay behind — how is that different from today’s inefficient union of equals?
As of now, people all over Europe simply won’t buy it. As of now, parliaments will not melt national budgets into a common European one as long as rule-breaking comes at no major cost. So why discuss a very distant future when so much else is of immediate consequence? It won’t help the cause of European integration. Quite the contrary.
There is no such thing as a free bailout. Ever since April 2010, tiny little Greece has sometimes brought the best out of European leaders. Now, it has brought out the worst, possibly changing the Union for a long time.