Europe beyond and without federalism

Ideology and political orientation are inseparably attached to the historical-cultural context that engendered and sustained them. To valorize the methods and objectives of a given system of values, as the ultimate telos of a political power impulse, is to bestow upon subjective ideas a supracontextual patina and to proceed with treating them as either self-evident truths of a functional-technical sort or as moral-legal axioms that justify ex ante specific courses of action or series of thoughts. All ideologies are potentially subject to the tendency of producing a concrete schema out of their complex of perceptions, convictions and logical concatenations; and, as a matter of historical fact, all ideologies can inwardly degenerate from their (self-) reformative/propositional form to their (self-) reactionary/conservative other, in the sense that what may enter the theatre of the historical-political as a struggle for the realization of the possibility to think otherwise, ends up morphing into a robust doctrine or of a set of sectarian shibboleths that determine an arbitrary terminus to thinking and doubting.

Greek bailout: what did the IMF really recognize as problematic?

On June 5, 2013, the IMF published an ex post evaluation of the macroeconomic adjustment programme for Greece. Not few were those who ventured to interpret parts of the content of this report as yet another mea culpa from the side of the international organization and from there proceed to criticize the other two EU institutions participating in the "troika" mechanism, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, for their unwillingness to publish anything that could qualify as genuinely self-critical. On the face of it, the argument seems plausible enough, given that the IMF does indeed enumerate certain issues it failed to accurately account for. In macroeconomic terms and with the privilege of hindsight, the IMF recognizes that it misjudged the extent of the contraction that resulted from the fiscal shock, in that it was assuming private sector activity to offset public spending cuts. Similar story for the level of the fiscal multipliers and for the presumption of the health of the domestic banking system. Yet as critical as such misrecognitions may have been, the exercise of evaluating a broader economic context of the past with new data can fall into the trap of becoming an error of historical projection and while this may have benign effects in changing methodologies and mentalities, it might as well provide just another basis for epistemologically questionable approaches to new phenomena, in the use of context-specific data to elucidate chimerical exact rules.

The German Constitutional Court and the inherent contradictions of the OMT

On June 11 and 12, 2013 the German Constitutional Court will be considering the legal foundations of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) of the European Central Bank (the Bruegel blog has an informative press review on the subject). This case is of great interest for a number of reasons which stretch beyond the confines of the realm of European political economy, into areas of constitutional law and institutional order or, more bluntly, to what effectively amounts to an incessant power struggle between the various strata of authority within the EU architecture, mainly manifested in the usually self-defeating tension between the supranational and the national levels. The decision of the German Constitutional Court on this very issue might well be of historical importance in setting a clear precedent on the delineation of competences between the Court of Justice of the EU and the national constitutional courts, tacitly though clearly removing some of the competence uncertainty that prevails over certain legal-political aspects of the present state of affairs and reducing the speculative scope of reactionary politics or, conversely, of reinforcing the skepticism over the supremacy of European law in those cases where conceptual lacunae may exist or made to exist.

Negation in European metapolitics (prolegomena)

The metapolitical is the topos where the formulation and concretization of the radical imaginary that underlies the institution of society takes place; this being the creation and explicit identification of the essential subject-object dichotomy, the mutually-invigorating binary providing the pillar on which a complex or complexes of significations and conceptions are attached, and from whence stem the primary and secondary rules, the tacit and explicit ones, that determine, specify, shape and systematize behavior across the various spheres of social life, in given-though-variable expected or normative patterns and modes of poiesis, praxis and theorisis and which, by the same token, delineate and segregate—in splendid arbitrary fashion—the being and/from the non-being, in a self-sustained process of conscious or subconscious confirmation of the existing-and-operating process of institution and alteration of the self and of the other; a process that may occur as a negation of otherness or as an affirmation of selfness, or indeed as a kind of indifference oscillating between the two.

Inflation in Germany is not an automatic remedy for the periphery's economic woes

While having already addressed the argument which asserts a mechanical alleviation of the economic duress in the eurozone's periphery by virtue of spontaneous or instigated rising inflation in the core, Germany in particular, I continue to feel an inclination to restate my position on the matter, after having been stimulated or inspired to proceed thus by a discussion I held with a friend earlier this day, which reminded me of the assemblage of questionable assumptions still prevalent in certain political or intellectual circles, concerning ideas on the most optimal response to the eurocrisis.

Critique on the ex cathedra pronouncement of Barroso that there is no eurocrisis

The present author finds it pertinent to express the feeling of amazement that is always born in him following an exposition to the Olympian pronouncements of the European Commission's President, Mr. José Manuel Barroso; amazement not in the sense of a positive impression, but rather as a profound bewilderment blended with an uneasiness that stems from the fact that evident truths of the empirical order of things have become the subjects of a meticulous exercise in obfuscation, whose function is to mislead and misinform and whose end is to place the ideocentric foundations for the top-down policies to come. After having abused and distorted the term "federation" and its derivatives, inwardly transforming it from a firm political position against nation states to an intergovernmental, confederalist conception where the nation state lies "at the heart" of the whole venture, Mr. Barroso has now taken it upon himself to deny the systemic aspects of the localized economic crises witnessed across the Euro Area, in propounding the well-known conservative postulate of certain powers of the establishment, that "there is no such thing as a eurocrisis". The present critique shall be forwarded against the remarks included in Mr. Barroso's speech at the State of the Union conference in Florence on May 9, 2013. On the issue of the eurocrisis qua trapping of some leftist's or "populist's" imaginary, Mr. Barroso spoke thus:

The meta ta politika of Europe

Fellow citizen Ralf Grahn (@RalfGrahn) recently suggested that European bloggers should consider producing an article under the twitter hashtag #MyEurope, in light of the commemoration of Europe Day, on the 9th of May. The idea is to invite the authors to publicize their perhaps idealized conception of Europe, of its politics in their broader sense, so as to participate in—and enrich the—public debate on the present and the future of the European Union (or of the Euro Area) and, most importantly, to provide a renewed impetus to the eurologosphere, the aggregation of all European blogs or "eurologs", to the (re-)consideration and (re-)examination of the immediate issues at hand as well as the prospects for Europe in the years ahead.

Footnotes on Jürgen Habermas' lecture in Leuven about the European crisis

On April 26 2013, I had the great honor to attend a lecture on Democracy, Solidarity, and the European Crisis by one of the foremost thinkers of our age, Professor Jürgen Habermas. The event, which can now be watched online, took place at the premises of a very important center of knowledge in Belgium, if not worldwide, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and was introduced by the President of the European Council, Mr. Herman Van Rompuy.