ONE NATION - ONE MONEY

'Europe will be built through a currency, or it will not be built at all.' said the EEC's founding fathers, or put another way 'One Reich, one money'.

At the center of the Europlot is the uneasy relationship between France and Germany, but this is a one way street. The political independence of the Bundesbank cuts against the French political and economic weakness, as an unequal partnership. The public cannot be told, the Eurocrats are 'liars and cheats'. The truth is not allowed to be told about the 'Franc-Fort'. He describes one incident, where in June 1993 [page 308] during the terminal crisis of the ERM, where a French Treasury official, Edmond Alphandery, arrogantly and publicly called Bundesbank officials to France to try to order them to cut German interest rates. An official overlooking financial news screens said the game was up for the ERM 'Alors, c'est bien foutu, le systeme'. ('The system is well and truly fucked') Alphandery is described as 'The man who told the truth about the ERM'. This is how fragile the Euro system is.

UNLEASH THE DRUNK MADMEN

Part of it is to do with the difference between the economies. Denmark and Benelux, Germany and France, Portugal, Spain and Italy, and Ireland. It breaks apart into separate zones, which run at different speeds, with the weaker economies dragging down the strong. The unification of Germany after the November 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall threw a spanner in the works. The villains of the piece are the 'Enarques' - graduates of the Ecole Nationale, French senior civil servants, characterized as arrogant and stupid beyond belief. The rot at the heart of Europe is depicted as a conspiracy by the Enarque caste to capture control of the Bundesbank. Were they to do this, Europe's economy would be wrecked. Putting the Enarques in command would be like letting a drunk madman drive the car.

LOADSAMONEY... ?

Nigel Lawson is blamed for destroying the late 1980s boom, destroying the 'feel good factor' and bringing in the 1990s recession. Lawson cut UK interest rates before the May 1987 General Election, to engineer a spending boom, but thereafter things began to go horribly wrong. The series of stock crashes starting on 16th October 1987 undermined confidence. Lawson abolished double mortgage relief, generating a rush to beat the deadline which first helped push house price increases up to 30% p.a. and then brought negative equity. It was Nigel Lawson's obsessive shadowing of the ERM which did most damage, doubling inflation from 7.5 to 15%, Connolly believes. Lawson and Geoffrey Howe conspired together to bounce Margaret Thatcher into the Maastricht Treaty. 'The Chancellor, as well as the Prime Minister, was taken for a ride by the Foreign Office, the sort of ride you don't come back from' [p 70]. Correctly, Norman Tebbit described the ERM as the 'Eternal Recession Mechanism'.

BUCCANEER CAPITALIST CURRENCY SPECULATORS TO THE RESCUE

If these 'toothless tigers and tearful clowns' like Lawson, Leon Brittan, Douglas Hurd and Thatcher's 'nerdish' successor, John Major, are at fault, Connolly's heroes are the free market currency speculators. George Soros, for example, who had a $10B war chest. Soros later wrote a defiant letter to The Times (9th June 1993) attacking the policies of the Bundesbank. 'You can't buck the markets'. Deepening recessions and rising inflation caused by this 'one size fits all' banding of currencies, with currency speculators pesetas, liras and quids in against their central banks' incapacity to devaluate, and pathological unwillingness to help each other. Norman Lamont was singing in the bath after 'White Wednesday' and the booting of Britain out of the ERM.

KNOCKABOUT PREJUDICE

Some of this is straightforwards knockabout stuff, almost Sun like 'Up Yours Delors!' rhetoric; the characterization of French politicians kowtowing to the Bundesbank as 'Vichyites' or comparing Eurocrats' thinking to the Nazi science of Meteorology. Dr Bernard Benning, chairman of the Bundesbank, first tried out a forerunner to the ERM back in 1941 as an instrument of policy for the Nazi Reichsbank. Much of this is from the Basil Fawlty 'Don't mention the War' school of diplomacy. There is also an unpleasant anti Roman Catholic feeling to it [eg p 170]; in the relish with which he tells us that Tietmeyer, a Bundesbank official, is a product of a Jesuit Theological College in Westphalia, or the nasty way he criticizes the Irish Catholic Church for their hostility towards his precious currency speculators [p 224] as 'get rich quick and don't care who suffers'. This mars an otherwise interesting book. This idea that money trading takes place in a moral vacuum needs challenging, but this is not covered here. Unemployment leads to social disorder, which creates fear of crime, strengthening right wing parties electorally, and building up the racist search for scapegoats. Nevertheless, the EC is a superstate, and needs opposing. In my opinion, the facts described in this book go a long way towards exposing the corruption inside this European superstate, even if the author's belief in the free market is wrong.

– Steve Booth

Green Anarchist: Front Page Current Articles First 10 Issues See: uk.indymedia.org for more on the university expansion.

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