Posted on 04/19/2017 9:39:39 AM PDT by Lorianne
One of the various smokescreens that were erected by the European Commission and the bevy of economists that it either paid or were ideologically aligned to justify the design of the monetary union around the time of the Maastricht process was the concept of subsidiarity. In 1993, the Centre for Economic Policy Research (a European-based research confederation) published its Annual Report – Making Sense of Subsidiarity: How Much Centralization for Europe? – which attempted to justify (ex post) the decisions imported from the 1989 Delors Report into the Maastricht Treaty that eschewed the creation of a federal fiscal capacity.
It was one of many reports at the time by pro-Maastricht economists that influenced the political process and pushed the European nations on their inevitable journey to the edge of the ‘plank’ – teetering on the edge of destruction and being saved only because the European Central Bank has violated the spirit of the restrictions that a misapplication of the subsidiarity principle had created. It is interesting to reflect on these earlier reports. We find that the important issues they ignored remain the central issues today and predicate against the monetary union ever being a success. One of the authors of the 1993 Report, Jean-Pierre Danthine has recently reflected on the work some 25 years after its publication.
In his Op Ed (April 12, 2017) – Subsidiarity: The forgotten concept at the core of Europe’s existential crisis – he argues that “the disenchantment with Europe can arguably be traced to the failed application of the subsidiarity principle that was enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty.” He recognises that: “Europe’s deep-seated institutional design problem is tied to the inevitable trade-off between efficiency-enhancing centralisation and democracy-enhancing sovereignty.” Let’s go back to the Delors Report 1989, which I argue in my book – Eurozone Dystopia: Groupthink and Denial on a Grand Scale – misapplied the concept of subsidiarity. It is clear from the historical record that the Delors Committee mainly relied on the concept of subsidiarity to justify the absence of a European-level fiscal function in the plan it outlined for monetary union.
The term, subsidiarity, a long-standing concept in political theory (as far back to Aristotle), entered the European dialogue in 1989 as part of a new ‘Eurolanguage’ as the political leaders were intent on pushing through the economic and monetary union. The Oxford Dictionary defines subsidiarity as “(in politics) the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level”.
The concept was popularised by the Roman Catholic Church in the 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, which pronounced that: “It is a fundamental principle of social philosophy, fixed and unchangeable, that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and/or industry.”
SNIP
Umm. . .doesn’t that sound a bit like Federalism? Does anyone know what the differences are?
The founders definitely believed in that, but it has just about disappeared in today’s America.
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