German government will push for a European federation | Hacker News Reader

German government will push for a European federation

euractiv.com

32 pointsdoener14 comments

Helmut Kohl, the ex-Chancellor, understood very well that German might is better used sparingly and almost gently. Germany pushing anything is likely to revive many historical resentments.

Aside from the resentments, what really bothers me is the construction of the eurozone. At present, it is a club whose largest members - aside from Germany itself - are deeply in debt, with no prospect for debt reduction. There is already talk about relaxing the Maastricht stability criteria, because not even Belgium is capable to keep its public debt under control.

Does it mean that the future of the EU is an "Umverteilungsunion", redistributive union which takes from the relatively few members with balanced sheets and gives to the other ones? (That ISN'T what the Germans agreed to when the euro was created.) Or is the debt can going to be kicked down the road by keeping the basic interest rates at 0 forever, so that the indebted countries do not go bankrupt trying servicing their debt, and hoping that this won't lead to runaway inflation?

I agree, the euro was premature and rushed through, combined countries with too different economic systems together in one currency. Additionally the euro countries allowed 'advisors' like Goldman Sachs to help the southern countries fiddle the books to get in.

This really hurt Europe during the credit crisis. Because of this we had to 'save' Greece. If they'd not had the euro they'd just gone bankrupt and crawled back up within a couple years. Instead they're going to be paying us back for our 'help' for decades because their fall would have hurt the euro and the whole Eurozone.

I put this in quotes because another major reason we had to 'save' them was actually saving our own West European investment banks and pension funds which had bought cheap Greek bonds and didn't want to take the associated investment risks. But the problem was really combining such different systems in one monetary union which was our fault too.

So really we were saving ourselves :) And now we're dumping the burden of the refugee crisis on them too by not distributing the refugees across Europe as agreed.

I'm from Western Europe but living in a southern one (not Greece). I just think sometimes we give the southern countries too much flak. We just can't blame them for not having comparable economies and our help is more to help ourselves.

In my opinion Europe should have focused more on getting prosperity more equally distributed first, which would have made for a much more stable euro as well. And would have reduced disagreement between member nations.

As far as I can tell the whole "push for a European federation" is 100% interpretation of the linked source, and a jump of reasoning, too.

The new government is pushing for:

- a sovereign Europe

- using existing regulatory mechanisms more strictly against countries breaching EU agreements

- and similar

But that would (by far) not be enough to get anywhere close to a European federation.

Not only this a real European federation is in direct conflict with the German constitution and as such very very unlikely to ever happen.

correct link:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/german-...

Side note: if you are curious where the term "traffic light coalition" comes from: the traditional symbolic colors for social democrats, liberals and the green party are red, yellow and green respectively[0]. It is also a term that is less unwieldy to say in German ("Ampel" = traffic light) than it is in English. Referring to combinations of colors is a common way of describing coalitions of political parties here.

The names Kenya-coalition (black, red, green = conservatives, social democrats and greens) and Jamaica-coalition [1](black, yellow, green = conservatives, liberals and green) after the colors of the countries' flags are also commonly used. It might sound silly at first but it's a way of concisely describing combinations of parties without having to come up with new names all the time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light_coalition

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica_coalition_(politics)

That's why the 'loss' of the UK is important: it has increased Germany's dominance over the EU.

France is not well managed enough economically and is also still shackled to the post-war policy of not disagreeing with Germany on anything.

Belive me if France disagrees with Germany they will point it out.

Through I wouldn't be surprised if the France government is more interested in a European federation then the German one.

merkel orchestrated brexit?

There is no way to do this in democratic way, French citizens already voted against it in 2005.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_European_Constit...

No way its happening, so many countries have gained their independence recently in EU and are already fed up with the current format of union itself.

Those "recently independent" countries are fecked without EU, so they better jump on the train or be consumed by eastern threats

As far as physical security goes, the eastern members rely on NATO, which in practice means the USA. All the threatened countries (Baltics, Poland, Romania) rely on American deterrence as a last resort.

Within the EU, the German army is in no condition to fight, the British is, but UK left the club, and France is entangled in Africa.

To give some sense of how useless the German military is, a few years ago they didn't even have guns so they had to carry broomsticks and about shout "bang!".

https://www.newsweek.com/germany-cant-explain-use-broomstick...

At another point literally all of their submarines were broken. They couldn't send even a single one into combat.

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2017/10/20/all-of-germanys...

That was a rather flawed EU constitution document, not an attempt at federation. One could still have a federation with a sane constitution. (not saying one should, but it's entirely plausible)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com