Eurosclerosis
|
This article or section was due to content flaws on the quality assurance side of the editorial history entered. This is done in order to bring the quality of the articles in the field of history to an acceptable level. Articles that cannot be significantly improved are deleted. Please help fix the shortcomings in this article and please join the discussion ! |
The term Eurosclerosis is used for the crisis phase of European integration between 1973 and 1984, in which the states of the European Economic Community (EEC) reduced their efforts to open up European markets and in some cases returned to a national economic policy.
Definition of terms
The term Euro sclerosis is an art and portmanteau of the words "euro" (Europe / European) and " sclerosis (medical: induration / calcification / clogging of arteries, organs, etc.)." It was coined in 1985 by the German economist Herbert Giersch . Picked up by his colleagues and the media, it became a catchphrase for describing European politics in the 1970s and 1980s.
causes
Eurosclerosis had various causes that hampered European integration in the early 1970s. After two decades of rapid economic growth, the European Economic Community , founded in 1957, experienced a deterioration in economic activity for the first time , which was intensified by the oil crises following the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1979 Iranian revolution . At the end of 1973, a delivery embargo imposed by OPEC on the Netherlands highlighted the lack of cohesion among the EEC states: instead of showing solidarity with the Netherlands, the other member states tried to find national solutions during the oil crisis.
Added to this was the international currency crisis , which was triggered in 1973 by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and led to large exchange rate fluctuations between European countries. This meant that the monetary union of the EEC states proposed at the Hague Summit in 1969 and developed in the Werner Plan in 1970 became obsolete, only the European exchange rate union established in 1972 could continue to exist.
In the following years, attempts at national solutions also dominated other economic sectors. Weak economic sectors were - contrary to the competition goals of the EEC Treaty - supported and subsidized by the nation states; Market barriers were created by national regulations in order to make the free movement of goods and the activities of foreign companies in the respective domestic markets more difficult; the common agricultural market was largely undermined by national agricultural subsidies . Overall, none of the member states was ready to cede market regulation powers to the EEC.
Further signs of crisis
The uncoordinated national approaches to combating the economic crisis - while France, for example, relied on stimulating the economy through higher inflation , Germany sought exchange rate stability and supply-side measures - further increased the economic differences between the European countries and made them even more vulnerable to the crisis. The phenomenon of stagflation occurred in numerous European countries : rising prices with a persistently weak economy and rising unemployment .
Another problem arose when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in Great Britain in 1979 and set out to reduce net British contributions to the EEC. The main focus was on the common agricultural policy , with which the community subsidized European farmers: This took in the majority of the EEC budget, from which only the agricultural countries, especially France and Italy , but not industrial Great Britain, benefited. Thatcher therefore called for a reform of agricultural policy, which France in particular opposed. This in turn led, under the slogan “I want my money back!”, To Thatcher's policy of blocking the other EEC policy areas.
Also affected by Eurosclerosis were the applications for membership of the EC from the southern European states of Spain and Portugal , which are also dominated by agriculture ; Greece , which had applied for membership in 1975, was formally admitted in 1981. However, accession negotiations with Spain and Portugal have been delayed, particularly due to economic and financial concerns from the original members. So France and Italy, and later Greece too, feared competition e.g. B. in wine and tropical fruits as well as through the Spanish fisheries: A rapidly growing market would have increased the already very high burden on the Community budget in this area due to the agricultural subsidies. Conversely, the candidate countries feared that their backward industrial production would not be able to face competition from the Community and called for various special regulations.
The inability of the Community to reach consensus solutions on important issues was ultimately evident in the case of Greenland . This island, which became a member of the EEC in 1973 as a region of Denmark and had had a statute of autonomy since 1979 , repeatedly came into conflict with the other member states due to the European fisheries policy . On February 23, 1982, the people of Greenland decided in a referendum to leave the community, which took place on January 1, 1985. Greenland thus became the first and, until the Brexit referendum in June 2016, the only area that left the community again in the course of European integration.
Integration steps despite the crisis
Despite Eurosclerosis, there were also some significant steps in the integration process in the 1970s. At the institutional level, this included in particular the permanent establishment of the 1974 European Council , a summit meeting of the heads of state and government of the EEC that takes place several times a year. This created a new “engine” for the integration process, which meant that despite the national differences, important issues of the community could be discussed regularly together.
A second important step was the adoption of the 1976 direct election act , which made the first European elections possible in 1979. This gave the European Parliament - at that time little more than an advisory institution, whose members had previously been appointed by the national parliaments - a new democratic legitimation which was supposed to serve to better involve the citizens in the integration process. However, this first European elections initially had hardly any noticeable effects on the general mood of crisis.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) also became an important promoter of European market integration . With the Dassonville ruling in 1974, which it essentially confirmed in the Cassis de Dijon ruling in 1979, the ECJ declared every national trade regulation “capable of directly or indirectly, actually or potentially hindering intra-Community trade” to be equivalent with a quantitative import restriction, as expressly forbidden by the EEC Treaty. In doing so, he declared many of the market barriers set up by the member states during the economic crisis to be contrary to European law and promoted the free movement of goods as a cornerstone of Community law.
Overcoming Eurosclerosis
The integration process did not begin to pick up again until the mid-1980s. The overcoming of the second oil crisis , which had peaked in 1981/82, contributed to this, but above all the agreement on agricultural policy and British contributions that was reached at the European Council in Fontainebleau in June 1984: the common agricultural policy only became superficial reformed; In return, Great Britain received a 40 percent discount on all of its compulsory contributions to the EC budget, which had to be offset by increasing the EC's own resources from VAT . This so-called British discount repeatedly led to conflicts in the later development of the community, but was suitable for overcoming the blockade in the short term.
The next year the accession negotiations with Spain and Portugal also broke through, when the two southern countries agreed to long transition periods during which they partially waived the subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy. Greece, which opposed enlargement to the end, finally agreed after certain special privileges had been guaranteed so that Spain and Portugal could join the European Communities on January 1, 1986.
At the end of 1985, the member states finally agreed - also on the initiative of the newly appointed Commission President Jacques Delors in 1985 - on a comprehensive reform package to revive European integration. This Single European Act (EEA) was adopted in 1986 and came into force the following year. Among other things, it contained a first expansion of the competences of the European Parliament and the resumption of the plan for European political cooperation for the foreign policy coordination of the EEC states , decided in The Hague in 1969 . Above all, however, the EEA contained the project of a common European internal market with largely uniform rules and competitive conditions and thus drew the political consequences from the experience during the crisis. With the implementation of this internal market project, which took place up to January 1st, 1993, the European unification process experienced a significant boost, with which it left the phase of Eurosclerosis behind. The high point of this new dynamic of integration was the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which established the European Union .
Later use of the term
Due to the EU membership referendum in the UK on June 23, 2016, the term 2016 was also used in this context.
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Herbert Giersch: Eurosclerosis , Kieler Discussion Contributions, 2, Kiel 1985.
- ↑ Yvonne Kollmeier: "Minimum social standards in the European Union in the field of tension between economics and politics", (p. 8)
- ↑ Brexit referendum that would mean the British exit from the EU for the EU institutions June 21, 2016 FOCUS Online, accessed June 5, 2016
- ↑ Video: "Dax due to Brexit with the biggest price fall since 2008" ( Memento of the original from August 11, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Robert Halver from Baader Bank June 24, 2016, T-Online-TV.
- ↑ Brexit - And now? June 24, 2016, wallstreet: online , accessed June 25, 2016
