European political economy

It would cost each of us… but perhaps we should force ourselves, before rushing out to buy Michel Aglietta and Nicola Leron’s book, to read the impressive literature of reports, roadmaps and other memoranda that form the framework of the reformist discourse on the government of the eurozone. A surprising mixture of economism and technocratic thinking runs through this whole, crossing a firmly anchored belief in the autonomy (and, consequently, the apoliticism) of “economic logics” and a no less strong adherence to the instrumental logic of the dashboard and the toolbox, the only ones capable of “repairing the euro” (“ fix the euro »). The difficulties of the single currency? A story of “economic sub-optimality”. The challenge of a Union budget? A matter of macroeconomic stabilisation. A European public debt? A problem of sustainability. Politics does not disappear, of course, from this literature of reports, but it is inevitably relegated to the concluding parts and reappears in a light where the imprecision of the terms competes with the vagueness of the objectives (“better involve parliaments”, strengthen “democratic governance”, etc.). Everything seems to indicate that we are then leaving the stable and comfortable universe of economic rationality to switch to the sphere as strange as it is disturbing of democratic passions.

It is on this fracture line between politics and economics, constitutive of the European Monetary Union as it was formed historically, that the Dual democracy. And it is this inseparably intellectual and political challenge that makes the great value of a work that works to reweave at the European level the multiple links between the “big words” of the economy (currency, budget, debt, etc.) and those of politics (sovereignty, political community, democracy, etc.). After two decades of denial of the strictly political part of the Economic and Monetary Union, the task seems immense. But it must be said that the moment is right. The rise in power, over the course of the crisis, of a real government of the Eurozone, equipped with a multiplicity of coordination, surveillance and sanction tools (budgetary treaty, banking union, economic memorandum, etc.), but also the politicization The growing inequalities and asymmetries linked to monetary integration at national and European level have profoundly shaken the narrowly economic vision of the common currency.

For a European political economy

To rebuild these links, the authors have taken up the long-abandoned torch of a political economy European. This is undoubtedly one of the still open enigmas of the history of the European project: why has such a discipline not experienced an intellectual boom and institutional recognition comparable to those of Community law, or even of the “European studies” of political scientists? It nevertheless seemed to have been born under the best auspices since the first president of the European Commission, Walter Hallstein, had immediately called for thinking about the ” economic-political European”, thereby pointing to the singular formula of a political Union built on economic foundations. But, probably blocked in its development by the dazzling success of a mathematicized economic science with universal pretensions, this European political economy will never have seen the light of day as a scholarly discipline – the void having been quickly filled by the emergence, on the immediate periphery of the Brussels institutions, of an economic expertise with a strong bureaucratic imprint.

On the still unexplored path of this European political economy, the book attempts new disciplinary alliances. If Michel Aglietta continues here a work engaged for a long time, he has taken care this time to work with a political scientist specializing in European institutions and law. We can of course regret that historians and sociologists do not participate more in this new alliance of knowledge – which would have made it possible to insist on the sociological and historical slope lines of the Economic and Monetary Union. But the interdisciplinary approach of the two authors is not cosmetic and does not amount to begging the question: it proposes a real co-construction of European objects and issues at the crossroads of economics and political science. And not without success, because the book brings back to political and social life a set of objects lost from the European debate.

Seen through this prism, currency, budget and debt come back to us as so many boundary objects at the intersection of politics and economics. The common currency is no longer this neutral instrument that naturally crowns the single market; it is — through the transnational payment system that it brings into existence — a “common principle of coordination” of economic subjects and an essential marker of the “bond of trust” between citizens. Public debt no longer simply represents a cyclical economic lever but becomes constitutive of a political community — the very one in whose name the debt was contracted.

But there is more. Together, money and debt directly touch on the issue of sovereignty. A public debt issued in a foreign currency, or a public debt that cannot be repurchased directly by a central bank, as is legally the case under the Maastricht Treaty (the “debt” clause) no bail-out “), inevitably becomes a “debt private ” contracted on the financial markets, which exposes the political entity in question to the risk of insolvency. We can therefore better measure the political coup de force carried out by the ECB in the very course of the crisis, when it actually took over “the sovereign monetary function of the lender of last resort”, thus occupying within the institutional system of the eurozone the place of the sovereign that the States had long since refused to embody.

Between these two sides of European economic politics (currency and debt), there is a third pillar, that of the budget, a unique institutional form born at the intersection of politics and economics. Because it is the place where the public goods of a political community are identified and its financing is ensured by tax collection or debt, the budget is far from being able to be reduced to the status of a cyclical economic instrument that it is given today in discussions on the reform of the eurozone. On the contrary, as one becomes fully convinced upon reading the book, it is the privileged framework for the articulation between representative democracy and economic policies.

The European “public thing”

By thus exhuming the political dimension of the pillars of the European Monetary Union, the book also gradually outlines, from “public goods” to “public debt”, from budget to “public power”, the paths to a rehabilitation of a European “res publica”. This is not insignificant at the European level, which has more often constituted a lever of indifference and blurring of the boundary between private and public – let us think here, among many other examples, of the diffusion, at the heart of the European Commission, of the idea of ​​the efficiency of a regulation by the markets themselves, or even to the central role of competition policies guided by the principle of equal submission of public and private actors to the criterion of the “informed private investor in a market economy”. In this enterprise of “remotivating” European public power, the idea of ​​European public goods plays a pivotal role: through the social debt that they lead to contracting, through the tax that they suppose to raise, it is they which give the Union its concrete reasons for being and which build its specific legitimacy in relation to the Member States. This is to say the importance of the path thus opened, even if one can regret that the authors have not also brought into play here the virtues of interdisciplinarity by calling upon a political theory which could have allowed to think further about the possible contours of these public goods Europeans and the procedures by which these might in the future be defined.

But these are not just a few notes taken from this fascinating reconstruction of the economic and monetary objects of European politics. And, when it comes to diving back (reluctantly) into the meanderings of the technocratic literature mentioned above, we can see the political path taken by the work, which has detached us from the narrow economic functionalism that continues to weigh on our ways of thinking about European monetary integration. The euro is no longer simply a European public policy like any other, even if it is more important than the others. The European currency is in fact constitutive of a political and social contract whose new political subjects as well as new sovereigns must be revealed. And the incompleteness of the euro is no longer what we think it is. It is not the strictly technical or functional one that would require, above all, the institution of a European Minister of Finance or the creation of a European Treasury. It is not even just the size, as we know, of this European budget which recalls that the European Union is first and foremost a regulatory State, built from the judicial and bureaucratic construction of a market. The incompleteness of the euro is first and foremost political, and refers to the astonishing work of evacuating the democratic dimension of the single currency which presided over the writing of the Treaty of Maastricht and the establishment of theEMU. A denial which did not lead, as one might expect, to the evaporation of politics but which in fact resulted, at least until the financial crisis of 2008, in a form of delegation of coordination and regulation functions within the Eurozone, for the benefit of a government deprived of the Euro and debt by the financial markets.

Represent and decide at European level

At the end of this reading, we will in fact only mention one real regret; that this incursion into the world of money and debt, which contributes to giving the budget all its historical political depth, does not return to the institution that is historically associated with it, namely the parliament, whether European or national. Having reached the threshold of political institutions and at the moment of reaping all the intellectual benefit of this long detour through the boundary objects of political economy, the authors seem to have been overcome by shyness. Because, no more than the budget and money are simple instruments in the toolbox of economic decision-makers, parliament is not a simple instrument at the service of the institutional engineering of constitutionalists. And just as money or debt inevitably give rise to a political community, so parliaments draw – through the choice of the electorate but also through the type of legislative, budgetary and control powers conferred on them – a certain idea of ​​the political community in whose name they express themselves. Proof of this timidity, no doubt, is the idea, paradoxical after all at the end of a work that seeks to rehabilitate the political dimension of European economic and monetary choices, of establishing a “European budget agency”, a new independent agency responsible for defining the European budget, as well as a very modest “parliamentary committee from national parliaments” responsible, without further details, for giving a “democratic dimension” to the European budgetary procedure. But that is probably not the main point, since it is true that this work is part of a collective effort that today makes it possible to break with the postulate of the neutrality of the economy and to consider the necessary rearticulation, at the European level, of economic policies, public power and representative democracy.