The EU’s techno party is hollowing out democracy
BRUSSELS - Not everybody's into techno music. Some folks are a little bit country; others a little bit rock and roll.
But under what one Brussels wag recently called the EU's 'techno-party' strategy - replacing elected representatives with technocrats and an end to consideration of fiscal policies by parliaments in favour of fiat by civil-servant 'experts' - nobody has any choice any more about what kind of music they want to listen to.
Economic policies will be decided for them, by the experts, by, if you will, those bangin' bureaucrat and banker DJs in Brussels and Frankfurt.
Fiscal policy, like monetary policy, is simply too important for it to be 'politicised', the argument goes. The eurozone cataclysm is so serious that we no longer have time for "political games", as European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso put it last Monday (21 November), speaking alongside Greece's new unelected leader, ex-European-Central-Bank (ECB) man Lucas Papademos.
And so in Athens and Rome, EU power-brokers have imposed a pair of temporary technocratic governments that claim to be above politics - a former central banker to head Greece and an entire cabinet of technocrats to shepherd Italy along the path of austerity and structural adjustment.
If Spectrezine could afford to give an award for the best article on EU affairs of 2011, Leigh Phillips would win it. Read the rest of his superb analysis from EU Observer.
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Churchill the technocrat
Just to put all this nonsense about "technocrats" into perspective. Since A.J. Balfour became PM in 1902, 20 people have been PM of the UK. Of those, 12 were not "elected" to that position. 4 of those never won an election at all and one, the greatest of them all, Winston Churchill, who, like Monti and Papademos, came to power in a moment of great crisis, lost the immediately following election. British democracy seems to have survived all these "unelected" PMs, so we can safely suppose that Italian and Greek democracy will also survive. Prophets of doom are usually proved wrong!
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