International

My Christian Democrat colleague Wim van der Camp tried it on Friday evening on the television talk show ‘Pauw en Witteman’; the parliamentary leader of the neoliberal VVD, Stef Blok, made a feeble attempt to do the same this morning on the Sunday politics programme ‘Buitenhof’: the SP, they said, would have no idea how to get us out of this eurocrisis. According to Van der Camp, that meant we had no right to say any more on the subject. How arrogant can you be? If they’d listened to the SP in the 1990s we wouldn’t now be saddled with a ramshackle euro. And if they’d listened to us just last year, the problem of the Greek debt would have been addressed in a timely fashion and there need have been no contagion to other Eurozone countries. And now, too, we have sound ideas as to how things should proceed, yet probably only ten years from now will they admit how good our analyses were.

It’s arrogant enough simply asking the SP for a solution, now that we’re sitting on the smoking ruins of a crisis which was caused first of all by speculators, and which then laid bare the euro’s inherent flaws. But okay, the SP is a responsible party and for that reason we have indeed tried in a responsible fashion to develop a means towards a solution. In the short term we think that, just as is argued by the US and UK, the European Central Bank will in the end have to accept its responsibilities. That means that it should change its policy to one under which interest and sovereign loans for all Eurozone countries are under control. The ECB must put a stop to the cat-and-mouse game in which just enough sovereign loans are bought up to stop matters getting totally out of hand, but not enough to quieten the markets. Such a change could lead to more inflation, but the chances of this happening in the current recession are not great. To avoid the ECB itself becoming a ‘bad bank’, it would be good were the Bank also to buy up dependable loans from, for example, the Netherlands or Germany, so that this sound paper was also included in the balance sheet. This would give these countries opportunities to stimulate their economies, because the interest on the sovereign loans would fall still further.

In the longer term we must ensure that the weaker economies in the Eurozone are given the chance to get themselves back on their feet. This means writing off a large proportion of the debt of those countries which are in essence bankrupt, such as Greece. It means also a stimulus policy in the Eurozone countries which are doing well, such as the Netherlands. Every business man and –woman is complaining about falling consumer confidence. Such a stimulus policy could give consumer confidence an enormous boost and the break the vicious downward spiral of austerity-negative growth-still more austerity.

Beyond that, the weaker countries must be helped. Of course, engagements must be fulfilled and an end put to swindling. On a more general level the fight against corruption and for fair and honest revenue collection must be fought. But if these conditions are met, then it would also be in the Netherlands’ own interests were the economies of these countries able to attract new investments. To start with, financial aid from Brussels would undoubtedly be needed, but when through rising consumption in the North and investments and innovation in the South economic relations were brought more into balance, the foundations on which the euro rests would be stronger. In the end we would all gain.

It’s a pity that the two governing centre-right parties, the VVD and the CDA, want to carry on with their budget fetishism. In this fashion it will not only be the economic development of the European Union which will be the loser; in the end it is the future of the euro which is at stake. If the Eurozone falls apart, this will not be the fault of the SP but of those parties which are doing precisely the reverse of what is needed, in refusing to write off debts or to support intervention in the sovereign loan market by the ECB, and in only making the recession worse with their mania for austerity.