Should the EU be considered a model for ASEAN?

6 August 2017
Author: Laura Allison-Reumann, Nanyang Technological University, and Philomena
Murray, University of Melbourne

The debate about whether the EU is a model for other regions has been around for some time.
Former British foreign secretary David Miliband suggested in 2007 that the EU should be a
‘model power’ rather than a ‘superpower’. The EU would show ‘other actors that European
norms can also work for them, … provide economic incentives for adopting these norms’ and
‘shape policies of global competitors by example and persuasion’.

European Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium 14
June 2017. (Photo: Reuters/Francois Lenoir).

But there are significant problems with classifying the EU as a model, as well as with creating
an image of the EU as a model power.

External perceptions of the EU in Asia do not often reflect or culminate in a classification of an

‘EU model’. The realities of regional integration outside of Europe — such as in the case of
ASEAN — do not sit well with ideas of mimicking or emulating a model.

Rather than copying the EU model, when ASEAN has responded to pressures such as
changing international humanitarian expectations or questions of economic governance, it has
done so by simultaneously consolidating ASEAN’s normative integrity, its independence and
adopting best practices from a wide array of sources.

The independence of ASEAN’s decision-making and its own priorities and objectives challenge
the idea of an EU model for Southeast Asian regionalism. There is some evidence that it
remains a source of inspiration and reference, but it rarely features in ASEAN elite narratives or
official documentation.

When it comes to similarities, it is true that the EU and ASEAN have both used economic
integration and community-building to foster and maintain security and further economic
development. In the broadest and loosest sense, the idea that the EU has been a model for
Southeast Asian regionalism may have once had some legitimacy. But this claim would need
proof of a causal relationship between ASEAN developments and EU influence. The substance
of ASEAN integration, ASEAN’s priorities and norms and institutional innovations all point to the
significant limitations of any ‘model power’ of the EU.

It is difficult to discern a desire by ASEAN leaders to emulate the EU, even though many
statements over the years have expressed admiration for the EU. Especially since the Brexit
referendum, there is a rise in scepticism of EU-style regional integration.

Former secretary general of ASEAN Surin Pitsuwan has long suggested that the EU is an
inspiration rather than a model for ASEAN. Similarly, Singaporean scholar Reuben Wong has
argued that the EU does not exercise ‘model power’ and that ‘the EU exerts some power over
ASEAN — but merely as a reference point’. He argues that the EU has a passive rather than
active influence on ASEAN.

Indeed, research shows that when learning from the EU, ASEAN actively and judiciously
accepts, rejects or adapts aspects of EU integration that suit its own context. In other words,
ASEAN officials and policymakers have been more likely to turn to the EU for reference, support
or inspiration based on functional utility rather than the normative attractiveness associated with
models.

The EU has toned down its own language regarding a putative model over time. It has also
shifted its approach to supporting Southeast Asian integration. Although the EU is a strong
supporter of regional integration in Southeast Asia, over time it has also recognised that ASEAN
has its own process to follow, and that European support should be guided by ASEAN, rather
than the EU projecting a model.

There has been considerable willingness on the part of ASEAN to learn from the EU. Visits such
as those made by ASEAN’s Eminent Persons Group for the ASEAN Charter to Europe in 2006
and by the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) officials in 2011,
2013 and 2015 attest to this.

ASEAN also went beyond the EU in the search for inspiration for the ASEAN Charter, looking
also to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) with its short
constitution, which proved to be a more suitable format for ASEAN than the EU’s lengthy
treaties. For one ASEAN official, the EU offers lessons on what ASEAN should avoid in that
‘sometimes the EU experience is good for us because we learn what not to do’.

The use of regional ‘models’ should be treated with caution. This practice emphasises emulation
and downplays learning, mutual lesson-sharing and cooperation, essentially reducing the EU’s
partners to passive mimics rather than dynamic innovators. It allocates all agency to the EU and
effectively assigns a receptive or passive role to the other regional body, with little or no
reflexivity.

It also creates subjective benchmarks that do not allow for feasible alternatives to a dominant —
and in this case Eurocentric — experience to be given sufficient credit and attention. This is not
to suggest a morally or culturally relativistic disregard for models, but rather an
acknowledgement that adherence to, and support for, the intrinsic values of the EU can be
pursued through other means than projecting an EU model.

Further, other regional bodies may not share the values that the EU espouses, just as some
would regard the EU’s institutionally embedded governance structure as not appropriate or
exportable. The dangers of integration snobbery come to mind.
Finally, the question must be asked as to the source of the idea of a ‘model’: is it self-
proclaimed, determined by those seeking a model or template, or is it created by outside
observers? Unless all parties agree, there is a high probability that the credentials of any
asserted model will be debatable, and partnership should instead be emphasised.

To an extent, the EU has attempted to promote its experience as a form of external driver of
ASEAN. But that experience is not a model.

The Failure of the E.U.

by Bruce Thornton

The European Union has long excited American progressives, who want the United States to
model itself after the European body. As each year passes, it has become difficult to understand
this admiration. These days the E.U. acts more and more like a bloated bureaucracy staffed
with elites armed with intrusive regulatory power and insulated from citizen accountability. The
success of Euroskeptic parties in this spring’s European Parliament elections casts doubt on the
whole E.U. project.

The electoral victories of nationalist and populist parties in Britain, France, Austria, Denmark,
and the Netherlands reveal the chronic dissatisfaction with the E.U., which has grown worse in
light of the sluggish economic growth, high unemployment, painful austerity measures, and
morally hazardous bailouts that have beset the continent. More troubling for many are the E.U.’s
intrusions into national sovereignty, like its increased oversight over national budgets, the Fiscal
Compact Treaty that subjects nations to fiscal discipline, and moves to create a banking union
with a common supervisor and mechanism for dissolving failed banks. Given these discontents,
public trust in E.U. institutions has reached all-time lows.

To add insult to injury, the E.U. Parliament recently named Jean-Claude Junker as European
Commissioner. Junker has long been a champion of increased centralization. Selecting the
commissioner has traditionally been a privilege reserved for the Council of Ministers, the 28
heads of government that guard the sovereignty and interests of the member states. As the
Financial Times reported, this “crude institutional power grab by the parliament,” ignoring as it
did the strong anti-E.U. protest vote in many member nations, “is an affront to democratic
accountability.”

Those who champion reforming the E.U. are well intentioned, but their reforms could never go
far enough. The problem with the E.U. is that it was, at its founding, grounded in false
assumptions about human nature and the role of the nation in creating a people’s identity.
These assumptions have for 200 years been accepted as facts, when actually they are
questionable ideas challenged by history.

The E.U. is just the latest example of the powerful Enlightenment idea that human nature and
civilization, through the expansion of scientific knowledge, are progressing away from the
cruelty, oppression, and collective violence created by irrational superstition, religion, and ethnic
or nationalist loyalties. Once liberated from this destructive ignorance, people can create
political and social orders that will promote peace, social justice, political freedom, and
prosperity. Most important will be what Immanuel Kant, in his influential 1795 essay “Perpetual
Peace,” called a “federation of free states” that would form a “pacific alliance . . . different from a
treaty of peace, . . . inasmuch as it would forever terminate all wars.” Kant predicated the
possibility of such global peace on “the uniformity of the progress of the human mind.” A
universal human nature progressively becoming more rational and possessing more knowledge
about itself and the world can craft a global order that would lessen if not eliminate the evils that
had afflicted the human race for all of its previous history.

In the nineteenth century, transnational treaties, conventions, and institutions were created to
realize the dream “of establishing and securing international peace by placing it upon a
foundation of international understanding, international appreciation, and international
cooperation,” as Nicholas Murray Butler, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, wrote in 1932. The Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, and the
establishment of an international Court of Arbitration had all reflected this ideal. The Preamble
to the First Hague Convention in 1899 sounded the Kantian note in it goal to ensure the
“maintenance of the general peace” and the “friendly settlement of international disputes,”
based on the “solidarity which unites the member of the society of civilized nations” and their
shared desire for “extending the empire of law, and of strengthening the appreciation of
international justice.”

The assumption behind such internationalism was that the national and ethnic differences
underlying people’s collective identities were not as important as the new universal,
transnational identity created by the expansion of scientific knowledge, globalized trade, and
globe-shrinking technologies such as the steamship, railroad, telegraph, and telephone. More
important, this belief in a unified human identity assumed that all people everywhere desired the
same things as Westerners––political freedom, human rights like equality, and prosperity. The
other aims that peoples historically have more often pursued––obedience to their gods,
exclusionary ethnic or tribal loyalty, land and resources violently appropriated from others,
unequal social hierarchies and roles, revenge for injuries or dishonor inflicted by others––were
deemed remnants of our barbaric past soon to be left behind by the progress of the human mind
and the improvement in peoples’ material and political circumstances.

The unprecedented carnage of World War I, in which the peoples of highly civilized Europe
killed each other with nationalist and ethnic fervor, did not lessen enthusiasm for such idealistic
internationalism. In the two decades between the wars, the League of Nations, which called for
collective security, disarmament, and the resolution of conflict through arbitration; the 1926
Locarno Treaty, in which “France and England Ban War Forever,” as the New York Times
headline put it; and the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which condemned “recourse to war” and
enjoined all settlement of disputes to be sought only by “pacific means,” all included the future
Axis aggressors among the signatories and participants. Nor did the even greater horrors of
World War II disabuse the West of its idealism, most obviously manifested in the creation of the
United Nations, which has done little to save the some 41 million victims of invasion, genocide,
civil war, political murder, and ethnic cleansing since World War II.

This record of failure would not have surprised political theorists from Thucydides to the
American framers. In that tradition, human nature is permanently flawed by what James
Madison called “passions and interests” that necessarily conflict with those of other people or
nations, and often lead to violence between them. For example, John Adams in his Defense of
the Constitutions of the United States in 1787 wrote, “Though we allow benevolence and
generous affections to exist in the human breast, yet every moral theorist will admit the selfish
passions in the generality of men to be the strongest. There are few who love the public better
than themselves, though all may have some affection for the public . . . Self-interest, private
avidity, ambition, and avarice, will exist in every state of society, and under every form of
government.” Nor did these realists believe that better education or prosperity could
permanently rein in these flaws of human nature, for dangerous world of “imperious
necessities,” as Thucydides called the tragic contingencies of human existence, would always
create stresses that prove “a rough master that brings most men’s characters to a level with
their fortunes.” The gruesome carnage Europeans inflicted on each other in the twentieth
century proved Thucydides correct.

Equally suspect is the assumption that national identity should be weakened and marginalized
because it is irrationally exclusionary and parochial, and as such incites zero-sum conflicts
between peoples. Particularly after World War II, the evils wrought by fascism and Nazism
supposedly proved that nationalism is inherently bellicose and thus hinders the spread of
universal human rights, tolerance, and the rational adjudication of disputes, all of which would
eventually result in global peace and prosperity. This tarring of nationalism with the brush of
fascism and Nazism was one of the mechanisms for selling the transnational European Union
and the weakening of national sovereignty it required.

But this assault on national identity was not just historically dubious, but blind to the role the
nation-state played in creating the collective identity and solidarity that made liberal democracy
possible. For as French political philosopher Pierre Manent has emphasized, “The sovereign
state and representative government are the two great artifices that have allowed us to
accommodate huge masses of human beings within an order of civilization and liberty.” Shared
language, history, mores, folkways, cultures, values, political virtues, and landscapes give
people--––bound as they are to a particular, concrete place and time in which they pass their
daily lives––the foundations of their shared existence that transcend their individual differences.
To quote Manent again, “If our nation suddenly disappeared and its bonds were dispersed, each
of us immediately would become a stranger, a monster, to himself.” Without those complex “ties
that bind,” a people cease being a coherent political community, and become instead a
congeries of fragmented, discrete groups with irreconcilable interests and aims.

The tiny elite of cosmopolitan, globetrotting writers, journalists, professors, businessmen, and
Eurocrats may live in a postmodern, post-national world, but the mass of ordinary Europeans do
not. This stubborn nationalist sentiment becomes vocal at times of crisis, such as during the
financial meltdown in 2009, when hardworking, thrifty Germans protested bailing out indolent
wastrel Greeks, and the Greeks in turn evoked the brutal German occupation of their country
during World War II as justification for demanding that Germany rescue their broken
government.

Moreover, Europeans still have to live with neighbors who are passionate about their
nationalism, none more so than Russia. The EU “postmodern” foreign policy based on
“supranational constraints on unilateral policies and the progressive development of community
norms,” as Oxford’s Kalypso Nicolaides puts it, has so far been impotent in the face of Vladimir
Putin’s irredentist ambitions in Ukraine and elsewhere. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and
continuing violence and subversion in eastern Ukraine have dismissed the economic sanctions
and diplomatic warnings that are no match for the Russians’ wounded national pride.

The growing strength of frankly nationalist, Euroskeptic political parties, evident in their success
in the recent European Parliament elections, testifies to the continuing hold national identity has
on millions of Europeans. Given the conflicting “passions and interests” of human nature, this
disparaged and disregarded nationalism is unlikely to remain content with sporadic protest-
votes or flag-waving during soccer championships. How it will manifest itself in the future––
through peaceful political change, or through violent reaction––is still an open question. But
there is no question that the E.U. has little for the U.S. to emulate, and much to avoid.

Europe has a democracy problem

Will Europe’s leaders ever accept that their voters might have a point?

Douglas Murray

This week the EU revealed its true nature. Rather than hand power to a Eurosceptic, the Italian
President Sergio Mattarella defied the democratic process, and the wishes of most Italians, and
put a puppet in place. Once again a major European democracy has seen the results of a
legitimate vote dismissed; swept aside because the EU can’t countenance dissent. It’s hard not
to conclude that those who voted Leave in our own referendum so as to ‘take back control’ had
a point. The governing elite in Europe simply can’t afford to relinquish control. They can’t let real
people have a real say in who leads them because the grand EU project matters above all.

In Italy, in March, the people went to the polls and were deemed to have returned the wrong
verdict. Since then the main winners have been trying to put together a governing coalition. As
they come from unfathomably different political directions this was always going to be a
challenge. And yet last week Five Star and the League managed to agree on some framework
priorities for a coalition government.

All seemed to be going swimmingly by Italy’s political standards. The parties even agreed on an
unknown academic called Giuseppe Conte (lets call him ‘Professor A’) becoming the new Prime
Minister.
Yet although Mattarella (who has the right to approve the government) seemed content with
someone who has no experience of politics becoming Prime Minister, he drew the line at the
coalition’s proposal for Italy’s new finance minister for the simple reason that he had not, in the
past, shown enough support for the EU and the eurozone. Worse, 81-year-old professor Paolo
Savona (let’s call him Professor B’) had expressed concerns about the whole project of
monetary union, even floating the idea that at some stage Italy (where unemployment now
blights the lives of a third of young people) might need to find a means of exiting the currency.
President Mattarella could not permit such a heretic at the heart of government and refused to
bless the appointment of the finance minister. So it was that Professor B brought down
Professor A because of Professor B’s support for Plan B, sending both professors back to their
classrooms and ending one of the more easily understood episodes in contemporary Italian
politics. In the last few days there have been calls for Mattarella to be impeached — but he had
no choice. The EU required compliance.

By way of a coda President Mattarella made a last-ditch attempt to appoint somebody as Prime
Minister who at least fulfilled the minimal criterion of being unelected. The President’s only
problem was that his proposed Prime Minister — Carlo Cottarelli — is not unknown. ‘Mr
Scissors’, as he is known in Italy, was also the candidate of the IMF and reviled for his loyalty to
the EU and its advocacy of ‘austerity’ economics. Neither Five Star nor the League are willing to
approve this appointment, and so at some point soon the Italian public must return to the polls in
order to engage once again in the charade of voting in order to appoint a charade of a
government.

Of course, as so often, Brussels had its own clear views on this mess. Most especially on the ill-
disciplined, unreformable Italian electorate. The EU Budget Commissioner Günther Oettinger
swiftly gave an interview in which he said: ‘My concern and expectation is that the coming
weeks will show that developments in Italy’s markets, bonds and economy will become so far-
reaching that it might become a signal to voters after all to not vote for populists on the right and
left.’ Many Italian voters, as well as fans of mafia bluster, might be familiar with this type of talk.
‘Awfully nice country you’ve got there. Shame if anything happened to it.’

Perhaps recognising that this didn’t quite hit the right note for a democratic project, Günther was
swiftly corrected by Donald Tusk (the President of the European Council) who tweeted out the
reminder: ‘To all EU institutions: please respect the voters. We are there to serve them, not to
lecture them.’ A comment that drew a swift retraction from Günther’s office, and admiration from
connoisseurs of chutzpah from Athens to London.

The EU was meant to be a unifying force. Yet look what is happening now. The German papers
denounce the Italians as lazy spendthrifts. The Italians accuse the Germans of using the euro to
achieve what the Nazis couldn’t. The French condescend to the eastern Europeans, treating
them as scabs undercutting wages. The eastern Europeans feel they are being treated like
second-class citizens. And the EU’s songs about openness and transparency now sound
slightly off-key.

In election after election over recent years the European publics have heard a similar response
whenever the people have come back with the ‘wrong’ result. On these terms the Brexit vote
was self-evidently wrong. The crippling of Angela Merkel in the recent German elections was
clearly wrong. The election of a hard-right coalition in Austria even more wrong. Whereas the
Dutch electorate apparently got it ‘right’ in reappointing Mr Rutte. And of course the French
electorate got it the most right of all by appointing a man who had no existing party and who
broke the political paradigm solely on the strength of his own personality. And since Mr Macron
is an advocate of further EU integration he cannot under any circumstances be described as a
‘populist’.

‘Populist’ is one of those terms in the new European playbook reserved only for those (like the
would-have-been government of Italy) who are allegedly walking the ‘wrong way’ in this great
march. The sort of people who mislead the public with slogans. Unlike ‘En Marche!’, for
instance. They are also the type of people who ‘simplify’ matters — presenting complex matters
in a simple manner, as opposed to true democrats who lay out every matter to a level of such
complexity that only those with a diploma in Austrian economics can be deemed to exercise the
franchise responsibly.

And it isn’t just in the south that the voters keep showing themselves in their true, irresponsible
lights. In central and eastern Europe people are also consistently voting for the wrong parties.
Faced with half a million people walking across their country in 2015, the Hungarian government
failed to take a sufficiently multicultural approach to the whole matter. As a result — like the
governments in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — they are regarded by Brussels and
Berlin as countries that are going in a fundamentally wrong direction. Since there is no
compelling evidence of vote-rigging (not that this has stopped people making such accusations
during recent times) their voters are alleged to have been led astray. Their governments are
accused of having dealings with their neighbour, or near-neighbour, Russia. And when a leader
like Hungary’s President Orbán declares that his country is a ‘Christian democracy’, Brussels
and Berlin, like the BBC, react as though he has gone full fascist. At every juncture they declare
the illegitimacy of these governments and berate them as though they were vassals, rather than
partners.

Central and eastern Europe provide especially striking examples. In April the Hungarian public
voted Viktor Orbán into office for a third consecutive term. The EU could have responded by
wondering whether Orbán may conceivably be right in some ways. Or have any points of merit?
After all, it is in Berlin today, not Budapest, that Jews are now told to be careful about appearing
in public with Jewish symbols. But self-reflection never happens. Instead, the people who vote
the wrong way are subjected to the new playbook of accusations, including (though not limited
to) ‘Russia, populist, nationalist, racist, Cambridge Analytica’.

As of this month the EU is in the process of losing one of its largest contributing members (the
UK), has alienated most of central and eastern Europe (notably the Visegrad group), and faces
a sullen set of Mediterranean countries. All with the possibility that Italian voters might return to
the polls in a few months’ time to issue an even louder ‘screw you’ than they did in March.

Most pragmatic institutions might learn lessons from all this. A couple of weeks ago when
President Macron received the somewhat hubristic ‘Charlemagne Prize’ he warned that Brexit,
like elections in Italy, Poland and Hungary should be seen as an ‘alarm bell’. And yet there is no
evidence that anyone in charge in Brussels, Berlin or Paris wanted to listen. Any more than
anyone at the Commission has paid any political price for losing Britain from the EU on their
watch. Instead there is only ever the cry of onwards, forwards, faster, towards more integration.
No consideration, ever, of a hesitation or pause even to allow the public to catch up.

Of course, Britain is able to compete with the world’s best these days in the sport of foot-
shooting. And those bond markets that Günther Oettinger is so exercised about will be just as
bullish about a Britain that exits the EU and votes in Jeremy Corbyn as they would be with the
Mediterranean countries struggling to determine whether they are law takers (like the Greeks) or
still allowed to be law makers (as the Italians may be struggling to be).

Outside the House of Lords Britain still retains a generalised prejudice that the public should be
listened to. Across our continent — in the name of greater harmony — another view is
emerging. It is one that sounds ever more like the automated messages which customer-service
departments imagine to be placating. ‘Please hold the line. Your call is important to us.’

‘Your vote is important to us’, voters in Italy and Europe are politely informed, on a loop, by the
dead-voiced machine. ‘Please hold the line.’

Perhaps they will. Perhaps they won’t.

Trying to talk culturally suicidal Europe off the ledge

By L. Todd Wood - - Thursday, February 23, 2017
ANALYSIS/OPINION:

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Does Europe have a death wish? Inquiring minds want to know.

If not, Europeans sure are acting as if they have a real attraction to suicide, as a culture and as
a group of sovereign states. I watched and read several things this week that made me want to
write on this subject. All of the incidents fall into a long-term pattern of self-hating groupthink and
self-destruction

Take Europe’s reaction to Vice President Mike Pence’s attendance at the Munich Security
Conference.

I was amused to read the summary of the Lithuanian president’s conversation with Mr. Pence
on the need for increased Baltic security. Let me first say that I agree NATO has to find ways to
deter Russian aggression in the region. But also recall that Lithuania is not one of the NATO
nations that spend at least the recommended 2 percent of gross domestic product on their
defense.

The Lithuanian president told Mr. Pence of her “expectations” of American air defense assets
that need to be brought to bear in the Baltics. She brought with her maps and charts, lecturing
our vice president on what needed to be done. This all raises the question: Before a country
gives Washington its expectations of what the U.S. needs to do to secure said country,
shouldn’t that country be spending all it can for its own security? And not just 2 percent, but
maybe 3 percent or even 4 percent, as the U.S. does? Then maybe we could talk.

On another note, does Sweden really believe it doesn’t have a crime problem linked to high
levels of Muslim immigration?

If this problem doesn’t exist, then Sweden really needs to hire a good public relations firm
because the image the world is getting of the Nordic country is one of Islamic immigrant crime
and the destruction of everything Swedish. Riots, rapes and government cover-ups seem to be
the order of the day. The pompous, aghast Swedish reaction to the U.S. president actually
saying that the emperor has no clothes — Sweden’s identity as a Nordic nation is dying — is
emblematic of a country that no longer believes its culture and history are worth preserving. This
is globalist-style cultural suicide. Why do ordinary Swedes see this, and why do they put up with
it?

Finally, there was the image of EU and NATO representatives whining like jealous girlfriends to
Secretary of Defense James Mattis when he attempted to reassure the alliance that the Trump
administration still had their back. Oh, the pomposity!

They didn’t say, “Yes you are right, we have not borne our share of the burden. We will step up
our defense spending immediately.”

No, they acted the way elitists always do when confronted with an uncomfortable truth. They
stuck their noses high into the air and expressed their anger at being told that they are not
pulling their weight financially. They questioned the sincerity of the American delegation and
demanded more proof from President Trump that he really meant to defend them.

I read last year that only 49 of Germany’s combat aircraft can actually fly. Yes, Europe needs to
look in the mirror before it complains about the Trump administration’s behavior.

The United States does have a vested interest in a strong Europe and should continue to help
defend the Continent. But before that can happen effectively, Europe has to show that it wants
to defend itself.

Europe has to show it truly believes its own history and culture are worth saving. Europe needs
to love itself more than it loves Shariah law. It has to show it is worth America’s while to spend
its treasure to protect NATO’s borders.

The U.S. no longer can afford to give away hundreds of billions of dollars a year the way it has
since the end of World War II. Yes, we can help, but only if Europeans show they have the will
to work to defend their own survival.

ECONOMY
The European Union: A Failed Experiment
Bill Lee
JUNE 04, 2013
How long can this go on? According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the 17-nation
euro zone remains the “weakest link” in our global economy after years of economic stagnation,
mired in high unemployment, plagued with stalled or contracting economies, and paralyzed by
political dysfunction. Similarly, The Economist also lambasts eerily complacent EU leaders for
“sleepwalking through an economic wasteland.”

The resulting human suffering is sobering — tens of millions of Europeans who want work can’t
find it, and many of them are facing truly desperate situations. Here are just a few observations,
which I address not to EU officials — whose performance, to my mind, justifies their removal
(see below) — but rather, as a friend speaking to ordinary Europeans who are suffering under
their policies and who, unfortunately, have not been accorded the power to do anything about it.

In a phrase, it’s time to throw out the EU project itself. The whole thing, root and branch. Here
are just a few reasons why.

The EU has failed the most important test.

For more than three years now, EU officials have addressed the economic downturn with
remarkable single-mindedness. They’ve imposed severe austerity (reducing government debts
through drastic cuts in spending along with tax increases) — particularly in those countries with
the largest debts, the so-called “periphery.” How well is it working? Let’s use Ronald Reagan’s
test for Jimmy Carter: are people better off now than they were four years ago?

The region has just completed its six straight quarter of recession. Overall unemployment has
risen steadily for two years, now topping 12 percent. In several countries, unemployment rates
are at Great Depression levels — 17 percent in Portugal, 27 percent in Spain — and youth
unemployment is typically around twice that of the country averages. It’s clear that people in
Spain, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Greece and millions of unemployed elsewhere in the region are
worse off today than they were four years ago.

A growing number of officials around the world are getting this. In his recent New York Review
of Books article, Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman points to an October report from
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that basically apologizes for its austerity
recommendations in the last few years — backed up with evidence. The report shows that those
countries forced into austerity measures by the EU experienced steep downturns in their
economies, contrary to predictions. Further, the more drastic the austerity (measured by
calculating spending cuts and tax increases as a percentage of GDP), the greater the economic
downturn.

Yet EU officials — apparently convinced of the infallibility of their theory on how economies work
— seem unmoved by such evidence and the human suffering that goes along with it. As Mr.
Krugman put it, in the EU “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” Which brings me to
the next point.

The EU system is undemocratic.

Consider Portugal. With unemployment rates at dangerous levels, and its economy predicted to
contract by 2.3% this year — its third straight year of contraction under austerity policies — the
nation’s Constitutional Court struck down several austerity measures enacted by the
government in compliance with European Commission requirements. That prompted
Commission officials to pressure the country’s government to simply ignore the ruling, under
threat of losing badly needed funding — prompting a constitutional crisis.

In such ways, EU officials are inserting themselves into the governance of member nations. Yet
the ordinary people whose lives are seriously affected by such measures have no recourse —
they can’t vote to “throw the bums out” as we might say here in the States. This lack of
democratic accountability poses a serious problem for member states and the system as whole.

It’s time to revisit the EU’s founding purposes.

The lofty purposes the EU originally set for itself included: to give Europeans the convenience of
one currency, to enhance mutual prosperity, and to reduce political tensions after centuries of
animosity and war.

We’ve seen how mutual prosperity is coming along. As for political tensions, a system whose
officials are responsible for the region’s faltering economies but who are not accountable to the
tens of millions of unemployed people in them, is obviously exacerbating those tensions rather
than alleviating them.

Moreover, by giving up their national currencies, member countries who experience wage
inflation can no longer temporarily deflate their currencies to make their exports more attractive.
Those that fall into an economic slowdown or recession can’t “print money” to finance their
safety nets for people who are unemployed or who face extreme poverty. Having your own
currency may not be such a bad idea after all. Fears that the use of such tools will lead to
runaway inflation and interest rates have proven completely unfounded. In the US, despite the
relatively sizable stimulus enacted by the Obama Administration, interest rates here remain near
all-time lows, and our deficit is now half what it was at the depth of the recession in 2009..

Meanwhile the costs and risks of the EU system are enormous. To take just one example, fiscal
debt or banking problems in tiny countries like Greece and Cyprus have touched off major
crises for the EU. A comparable situation in the US — where a state such as Rhode Island or
Louisiana, or even huge California, were to go bankrupt — would amount to nothing more than
a blip on the radar here.

However, the US system requires a substantial transfer of power to the center. This brings me
to my final point.

The prospects for effective EU integration are slim to none.

For the EU project to work, it would require, at a minimum, substantial political power at the
center to tax, control fiscal policy, and create a region-wide safety net capable of protecting
people in a downturn. Furthermore, that centralized power would need to be accountable —
voted in, not appointed.

Few Europeans seem to believe such integration is actually possible — many recoil at any
suggestion of a “United States of Europe.” Given the widespread ambivalence and lack of clarity
on how a reformed EU would look, the prospects for a successful integration look bleak. That’s
because even under the best of circumstances, achieving it would be an extremely difficult and
long haul.

It took the US the better part of 80 years — and a horrific Civil War — to complete our own
integration, transitioning from a loose confederation of colonies, and then states, into a true
union. Why should Europeans expect to have an easier time of it, particularly in view of their
deep cultural differences and centuries-long history of wars and acrimony?

My guess is that Europe will muddle on trying to “reform” the EU system around the margins.
European economists and officials will likely remain steadfast in their belief that their policies
have been right all along, that all they need is yet more time, and that the real fault lies with the
moral defects of those living in the periphery nations — who must be compelled to do what’s
good for them and for the EU as a whole.

This sounds too much like old Europe to me (and not in a good way). It would be better to start
now directing our efforts and energy to winding down the whole EU project as quickly as
possible; and in parallel to ramp up efforts and policies to help European economies to prosper
as separate nations, learning how best to work together.
A more recent WSJ article contained the news that a new book by a Portuguese economist shot
instantly to the top of the best seller list in that country — even beating out Fifty Shades of Grey.
It’s called, “Why We Should Leave the Euro.”

Perhaps it’s the start of a trend.