Both bank regulation and fiscal policy require a great deal more Europeanization. The most obvious way is to use existing mechanisms and institutions, in particular the ECB or the European Commission.
The difficulty with such a suggestion is that it would imply a relative weakening of the national states, including the largest, Germany and France. They would most likely resist, and try to stay in their own bathtubs.
Indeed, the crisis has turned France and Germany once more into the key players of the European process.
But the more the crisis affects them, the more they think largely in national terms.
From the perspective of Berlin or Paris, there should be no systematic Europeanization. Instead, the large states are now promoting informal groupings to look for worldwide solutions. Overtones of the 1930s are amplified, clearly exposing the EU’s predicament, because of an odd coincidence: the Czech Republic now holds the EU’s rotating presidency. The Czechs, probably the people with the most vivid historical memory of the bad regionalism of the 1930s, succeeded France, the European country that today is the least constrained in asserting its national interest.
The clash of two visions of Europe is eroding the political stability of an area that once represented the best model and greatest hope for benign regionalism.
Harold James is a professor of history and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, and professor of history at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.
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