German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy pose for photographs at the Franco-German summit in Paris. Photograph: Gao Jing/Xinhua Press/Corbis
Old resentments die hard in Europe. Sixty-six years after the end of the second world war, and 50 years after the Berlin Wall went up, the so-called unreconstructed Germans are allegedly at it again: seeking hegemony over the rest of Europe. Only this time it's through financial muscle rather than military might.
Tuesday's Franco-Prussian, sorry, Franco-German summit in Paris between Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy, the latest in a series of failed attempts by the deluded duo to overcome the sovereign debt crisis, ended with ringing tones of a "true European economic government".
Cue alarm bells this side of the Channel at the prospect of the 17-strong eurozone at the very least being transformed into a fully-fledged fiscal union, nay a united federal state, with headquarters in Berlin. Germany would dictate the terms of its creation, oversee it and severely punish those which failed to live up to its own standards of Disziplin und Ordnung, Sparsamkeit und Stabilität.
This paranoid fantasy was expressed most crudely in yesterday's Daily Mail by Simon Heffer, whose lengthy rant, not only eurotoxic but virulently anti-German, ended with the phrase: "Welcome to the Fourth Reich." Pitiful if it were not so perniciously poisonous.
Even the notion that Merkel and Sarkozy are talking about an "economic government" is wholly erroneous. When the German chancellor talks ofWirtschaftsregierung or the French president of gouvernement économique the Brits would say "economic governance". In Paris it's shorthand for reining back politically the European Central Bank's independence; in Berlin for fiscal probity.
The Franco-German pair did little more on Tuesday than rehearse arguments and notions that date back to at least earlier this year for improved economic governance in the wake of the initial Greek crisis. This means turning the EU's discredited stability and growth pact into a more effective mechanism for preventing excessive budget deficits, imposing stricter debt ceilings and resolving economic imbalances.
This, say Heffer and his ilk, means "every spending department in every government in the eurozone would have its policy made in the old capital of Prussia". Quatsch. The idea that a modern, democratic Germany would abandon its relatively new finance ministry (housed in Goering's old air ministry) or France hand over "Bercy" (its equivalent ministry of economy, industry and employment) to a nebulous eurozone entity controlled by Berlin is plainly ludicrous. The German supreme court would not allow it for one thing.
Not only that. The idea would be killed stone-dead within the eurozone itself, with none willing to end the sovereignty over tax-and-spend policies bestowed on national parliaments. Nobody, least of all in Germany, believes the often vague ideas embraced by Merkel and Sarkozy and set out in their letter of Wednesday to Herman Van Rompuy, the European council president, stands a cat in hell's chance of adoption.
Thus, the notion that Olli Rehn, the EU's current economic and monetary affairs commissioner, would be empowered to veto national budgets for their failure to comply with the stability and growth pact – hinted at by the French and German leaders – is a non-starter. All we're really talking about is Van Rompuy's own idea, endorsed by the commission, for a "European semester" – a six-month period in which Brussels scrutinises and suggests amendments to national budgets.
What Merkel and Sarkozy, both facing re-election within the next nine to 24 months, are talking about is reinforcing their political control of the eurozone – and possibly the EU. Van Rompuy is their choice as president of a eurozone version of Harold Wilson's national economic development council for two good reasons: he's an efficient, effective but pliable general secretary; he'll clip the wings of Jean-Claude Juncker, current and much-criticised chairman of the Eurogroup of finance ministers. This new body will meet twice a year, they say; it already has met twice in 2011.
The so-called German takeover of Europe is, in reality, a typically messy stand-off/compromise between the EU's two biggest protagonists: France and Germany. Sarko gets Merkel finally to back his European version of the Tobin tax on financial transactions (a total non-runner) and she gets him finally to back the German model of a "debt brake" written into national constitutions (ditto).
Just over two decades ago, the price the former occupying powers exacted for a divided Germany to be reunited was that the country reject any temptation to dominate Europe ever again. And, until very recently, its political leaders played down national interests in favour of Europe as a whole.
Now, as Germany becomes more self-assertive politically as well as economically, some people both inside and outside the country fear it is seeking a "German Europe". But its political class is experienced enough to know it simply won't get its way. Even if it wanted to. And it doesn't.
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