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מיר נוצן דיין לאָגין צו צושטעלן אינהאַלט אין די וועג איר האָבן צושטימען און צו פֿאַרבעסערן אונדזער פארשטאנד פון איר. איר קענען אַנסאַבסקרייבז אין קיין צייט.

Whatever David Cameron was hoping to get by taking his family to meet Angela Merkel at the Schloss Messeberg, the German Chancellor had a limited agenda. It was a handy photo-opportunity to distract from the opposition SPD's party congress ahead of this autumn's federal election -and it's worth noting that she thought it a good idea to let the voters see her as a friend of Britain's Eurosceptic Prime Minister.

photo-op

It was a useful distraction from the further steps towards European integration, with Germany at its centre -and the the United Kingdom at its outermost edge. Progress towards agreement on banking supervision, however slow, is just the latest stage. Closer co-operation on taxation and economic policy will follow, for the Euozone at least.

For Germany's leader these are issues best talked about after the election but for less fortunate heads of government, there is no delay. What the Commission calls 'correction' is now very intrusive. Officials are certain that if it had been in place 10 years ago, Ireland would have been given formal warnings about unsustainable growth financed through credit. By 2005, direct pressure would have been applied, first the threat of sanctions and if necessary their imposition.

Delinquent governments are now told what to do -on housing policy and planning rules as well as on mortgage interest rates and even taxation of bank deposits. Democracy takes a back seat. Qualified Majority Voting goes into reverse, as the country facing sanctions needs to win a vote to block them, otherwise they kick in automatically.

The sanctions, though not the surveillance, are limited to Eurozone states. One German MEP, Sven Giegold from the Greens, argues that the bail-outs have benefitted creditors as well as debtors, yet there have been no sanctions on the countries whose banks did the lending. He claims that politicians hide behind the European Central Bank, letting it do their job for them.

His solution is to democratise the European Commission, with the Parliament choosing the President, who would then appoint the Commissioners, with member states obliged to put forward more than one candidate. That would mean MEPs and Commissioners from outside the Eurozone having a role in making policy for the single currency. Gielgold says that's a problem we just have to live with for a while. The Euro is already the secondary currency of many countries that are expected to join one day. He also does not want, as he puts it, to 'kick out the Brits'.

אַדווערטייזמאַנט

Nicolas Véron of the Bruegel economic think-tank in Brussels argues that a greater role for European institutions is essential because they are less 'captured' by national interests. He sees no alternative to building up democratic control at a European level. Peter Spiegel of the Financial Times has made the radical suggestion of having directly elected Commissioners. He also wonders if joint sessions by the European committees of national parliaments might be a useful addition to the European Parliament.

The Commissioner responsible for the Euro, Vice President Olli Rehn, recently left an Ecofin council press briefing early because he had a meeting with the European committee of the Finnish Parliament. The Irish Finance Minister, Michael Noonan, was chairing the session but the Commissioner was confident that he would not be offended; after all Olli Rehn was going to ask his fellow Finns to support new bail out terms for Ireland.

At the same briefing, the Internal Market Commissioner, Michel Barnier, described the agreement on banking supervision as a 'fundamental text' that would apply to banks throughout the single market. Such statements send shivers down British Conservative spines.

David Cameron is left trying to urge Angela Merkel to support integration within the Eurozone but resisting any extension of that integration to the United Kingdom. He sees a new treaty as his best hope of winning concessions for the UK ahead of the referendum that he has promised to call on its membership of the European Union. But the Commission is proving adept at finding ways of working within the existing treaties, for example grafting a 'Board of Supervisors' onto the governance of the European Central Bank.

It's as well for Cameron that it's Chancellor Merkel and not President Gauck who holds most of the political power in Germany. Joachim Gauck is an unabashed believer in 'more Europe', though even he admits to be less 'impetuous' about further integration than he once was. He recently told any British citizen who was listening that 'more Europe cannot mean a Europe without you'.

Yet the Europe he described in his speech was a mixture of the Eurozone and the Schengen area, two aspects of the European Union from which the United Kingdom has excluded itself. Gauck called the lack of an overarching economic policy for the Euro 'a structural flaw' but celebrated the freedom to travel without a passport 'from the Memel to the Atlantic'.

The Memel was a bit too specific, perhaps unconsciously evoking a long abandoned line in the German national anthem that the country stretched 'from the Memel to the Maas'. But the President's reference to the Atlantic was nicely ambiguous. There is no prospect of an end to passport controls between mainland Europe and Britain, which politically as well as geographically is still an Atlantic island as much as a European country.

 

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