| European monetary union (EMU) now seems almost certain. But the politics of running the single currency are not straightforward. Germany wants to free the running of EMU from national political influence. Under the terms of a stability pact, EMU member states would be fined automatically if they broke fiscal targets. Similarly, Germany and the other core European states aim to ensure that monetary policy is smoothly controlled by an independent central bank, the European Central Bank (ECB), in the style of the Bundesbank. So the euro will be strong from the outset and kept so. Thus Europe's voters will have little influence on either European monetary or fiscal policy. They will elect national politicians and parties, who will select executives and leaders who will make up the Council of Europe (formerly the Council of Ministers), which will elect the ECB's executive board, which will dominate monetary decision-making. Also, if there is to be a stability council (to run the stability pact), made up of EMU countries' finance ministers, then responsibility for fiscal policy will also have largely been shifted to a distant institution. And even if there is no stability council, the automatism of the stability pact itself would ensure that fiscal policy becomes even less subject to democratic discretion and sovereign decision-making. |