sábado, 11 de julio de 2015

sábado, julio 11, 2015

Contributing Op-Ed Writer

It’s Time for Greece to Leave the Euro

 
HAMBURG, Germany — DOES democracy trump debt? Of course not, not even in Europe. No bank clerk here would be impressed if a family told her that they had voted to have the terms of their housing loan renegotiated — that’s not how loans, either personal or international, work. Yet leaders are gathering for a special summit meeting in Brussels on Tuesday because the Greeks have done exactly that: voted against the conditions the eurozone demands for a third bailout program for their country.
 
Of course, negotiations are a good in themselves, especially in Europe. But even in Brussels, there comes a time when losing your nerve is a rational choice. I don’t say it lightly, but I believe this point is here now. Europe has more to lose from a Greece that remains part of the eurozone than from a controlled exit, in which Greece softly steps out of the single currency.
 
There was a point when things looked promising. After the European Union and the International Monetary Fund stepped in with their first two bailout programs, Greece made considerable progress on closing its deficits. Between 2010 and 2014 it implemented spending cuts virtually unprecedented in a developed country. Those cuts meant hardship to many in Greece. But they began to pay off: By the end of 2014, Greece was spending less than it was collecting in taxes (if you leave aside interest payments).
But the cuts to social-welfare programs and public-employee salaries also drove up support for the radical left Syriza government, which took over earlier this year. It stopped the reforms and blurrily demanded other, bigger changes, including a “new deal” for all of Europe — whatever this is supposed to mean.
 
It may well be that most of the 61 percent of the Greeks who voted “no” on Sunday to the latest demands for cuts by the eurozone countries merely want changes in the details of a new bailout deal with Brussels. Sure, such demands could be up for debate. Yet it has become hard for those seated across the negotiating table from Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to believe he is interested in a pragmatic solution. The radicals who back him in Parliament want changes to the currency system and Europe’s economic model itself. And while he may yet have a trick up his sleeve, Mr. Tsipras appears intent on using the outcome of Sunday’s referendum to fuel his crusade against the chimera of a “neoliberal” Europe.
 
True, Mr. Tsipras sacked his controversial finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. But one ideologue fewer doesn’t make this government less ideological. As childish as it sounds, Mr. Tsipras and his fellow fighters are still raging against the triviality that you can spend only what you earn. Leaving aside Syriza’s Nazi-Merkel comparisons and accusations of “terrorist” behavior by creditors, over the past five months Europe has heard way too much from his government about the impossibility of further cuts and way too little about possible sources of new income.
 
Still, patience with Greece in her party, the conservative Christian Democrats, is waning rapidly, as it is in Germany’s staunchest economic allies, the Netherlands, Finland and the Baltic States. To many Northern Europeans, both the Greek government and the Greek people have finally demonstrated that, according to them, no given rule is ever fixed. This mentality is not just alien to the rather Protestant northerners. It also holds a danger for Europe’s political fabric.
 
Right now many observers are fixated on the risk of Greece’s exiting the euro. But the risk of keeping it in at all costs is even higher. Consider this scenario.
 
Unemployment in Italy, Portugal and Spain remains high, and anti-European Union populists are on the rise in all three. The conclusion that people there could draw from a third bailout program for Greece would almost certainly be that voting for radical parties and obstructive behavior are eventually rewarded. You just have to be cocky enough. And if that happened — if, say, a Syriza clone came to power in Spain, or if the leadership in those countries expressed a strong sympathy for Greece’s position — the counterreaction in the creditor countries could be harsh, even hostile. Europe could end up with a calamitous north-south divide along camps known from the Cold War: the “socialists” there, the “capitalists” here.
 
Neither the eurozone nor Europe is best served by holding on to Greece. Instead, the European Union needs to come up with a smooth way out of its dilemma, namely an orderly exit by Greece from the euro.
 
This solution will be expensive, too — among other things, the European Union will have to make sure that Greece’s post-euro currency isn’t so cheap that Greeks can’t afford vital imports, like oil and medicine. Yes, Greece still must be rescued. But no, it need not be rescued within the eurozone.

0 comments:

Publicar un comentario