A logic of solidarity

“In the past, the European Union has often been challenged by adversities” thus ” we cannot rule out the possibility of setting up an extra solidarity that could lead to stronger and lasting economic ties to face the current financial market dictatorship”. Is the message delivered by Jérôme Vignon, President of Social Weeks of France (Ssf). In an interview published by the French Catholic newspaper “La Croix” (23/02), Vignon spoke of “three views” of the European economic government. “Economic Governance” and “virtuous behaviour”. “In one of his first public speeches, the new European Council president Herman Van Rompuy spoke about the creation “of a European Union economic government” Vignon recalls. This is the reason why “commentators see in the extraordinary aid to Greece (the EU has offered complete solidarity, but imposed also vigorous measures for a 4% deficit cut by 2010) as the fulfilment of this idea, even if the modality is still rather vague”. “In order to assess the potential consequences of the unusual solidarity among the Member States, one must go back to the history behind the idea of economic government, strictly linked to the origin of economic and monetary Union that was launched by the European Council in 1989, under Spain’s presidency and proposed by the former EU President of the Commission Jacques Delors”. For Vignon” according to this view, still prevailing in the Union’s new treaty, Eurogroup’s economic government headed by Claude Junker is an economic governance, which guarantees virtuous behaviour by monitoring through yearly approved guidelines and a growth and stability pact that includes slippages”.Strengthened cooperation. Successively, during the “European languor” at the end of the nineties that accompanied the “euro’s first steps”, Vignon recalls “voices that emerged from different places”, especially that of Jacques Delors, in favour of an “economic government” as a ” proactive cooperation attitude within the Eurogroup”. Certainly not to “re-launch budget procedures” but as a way to “benefit from complementarities in domestic economies: encourage more vigour in some”, start ” in a concerted way difficult fiscal reforms”, define “a long term agenda of structural reforms such as longer working cycles”, find an agreement “on structural investment funding”. The President of the Social Weeks pointed out how this new view entailed ” the acknowledgement of the Eurogroup’s leading role” in a compulsory juridical framework of “strengthened solidarity”. This view was however rejected because considered “excessively federalist by most of the Member States during the long negotiations in the Convention headed by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing”.A logic of “solidarity”. Today, according to the article’s author, we have come to “the third view of the economic government”. The situation’s criticality has led to a “temporary device” that “implies an extraordinary financial solidarity towards mostly vulnerable States, asking them for higher “virtues”, even if the term is an euphemisms”. We must rejoice of today’s logic of solidarity”, even if linked to specific needs , “that hadn’t emerged in the previous European Council meeting in March 2009, when Hungary and other Baltic States were left at the mercy of the International Monetary Fund”. In difficult times such as in 1978, “the European monetary snake (community system created in 1972 for monetary stability in the European Community, precursory of the European Monetary system, 1978, and first step towards monetary union and the single currency) has been the outcome of the denial of excessively speculative markets, source of a crisis that jeopardized mechanisms of common agricultural policy”. Following this procedure that marked the beginning of the coordination activities of national economic policies of EEC Members, “extra solidarity” can today lead to “stable and stronger economic cooperation”. “It is up to the European Council that benefits from the continuity of its decisions and that of the Eurogroup Council with its specific ruling powers”.