Posted on 12/06/2014 1:43:01 PM PST by Olog-hai
Britain is already a lame duck within the EU’s internal governing structure and is losing influence “by the day” in Brussels, even before David Cameron holds a referendum on withdrawal. This self-isolation has upset the European balance of power in profound ways, leading ineluctably to German hegemony and a unipolar system centered on Berlin. […] Such is the verdict of Roman Prodi, the former Italian premier and ex-president of the European Commission. […]
“Germany is exercising an almost solitary power. The new presidents of the Commission and the Council are men who rotate around Germany’s orbit, and above all there is a very strong (German) presence among the directors, heads of cabinet and their deputies. The bureaucracy is adapting to the new correlation of forces,” he said.
“Even the Americans are doing so. When there is a problem between Europe and the United States, President Obama telephones Mrs. Merkel, not the British prime minister. In short, Germany has become the referee of Europe. As is well known, the rules in football are enforced when the referee whistles, and right now Germany is issuing the yellow card to a lot of countries,” he said. …
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Makes me wonder why Prodi has such a problem with this; as a former president of the Commission, he ought to have known that this was the game plan.
Deutchland uber alles.......
Don’t mention the war.
Who’s game plan?
Not France’s...
Nope, not at all. Goes back to Adenauer, in fact.
If you can’t conquer them with tanks, regroup and use banks.
Yep, fewer leeches in the British till. Germany might not want to carry Europe by itself. If the euro goes down, so will unemployment because national currencies will adjust for relative productivity. All of that is a good thing. Besides, I would rather have banks call the shots compared to eurocrats in Brussels.
No, that’s not the plan at all.
I didn't say that it was, as not all is going according to "plan."
Hence, please provide a source reference to said "plan." IMO, such best-laid things do have a way of coming apart pursuant to the vagaries of economic reality.
Or it could just be an “I tried” tactic.
Either way, he isn’t wrong about how much control Germany has over the EU even as is.
Sure, but not every plan falls apart right away.
The whole united Europe plan with Germany in charge dates back to the 1950s. This was even Konrad Adenauer’s intent, who said he wanted such a bloc to act as a “third power” between the leaders of the First World (the USA back then with the UK in second place after the war) and the Second World (the communist bloc with USSR out front). With Russia being newly hegemonic, a renewed push for unification will be on the heels of any crisis, and Berlin will certainly take the lead again.
If I recall correctly, I remember Milton Friedman predicting the euro would fail in The Economist back in 1988 based upon the observation that undisciplined fiscal policy is usually discounted as inflation of the national currency; centralize the currency across borders and that no longer works, so it shows up as unemployment and a resulting drop in national productivity and therefore total wealth.
The dream of enforcing fiscal discipline in democratic states was doomed before it started. So, yes, it fell apart, not right away but as predicted. I don't call that a "plan" but a "debacle."
That was part of the plan with the euro from the start. All of the economists were warning what would happen, but the “euro fathers” actually wanted a crisis so that the EU could take more political power away from the member states. And that would not benefit Brussels, but Berlin; and also Frankfurt were the European Central Bank is located.
Seems to me your house is crashing around your head but you'd rather complain about your neighbors house color!
By that logic, if you call polluting your own currency by diluting assets a "benefit," then they lost it with the two wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan. By letting us fight those wars, the Euro never became the drug trade currency of choice. Similarly, when Saddam Hussien announced that Iraq would trade oil in euros, his fate was sealed, and so was the euro. Therefore Germany's gambit to make its European economic hegemony into leverage with which to become a reserve currency was doomed in advance by the existence of overwhelming European pacifism. That makes it into a stupid "plan."
Undoubtedly they have a backup plan. The chaos is just the first step. They’ve been repatriating a lot of their gold, and buying up other gold to boot.
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