Let’s start with a little bit of background history. In the mid-eighties when the euphoria about Europe was at its peak I said to an economist…We cannot erase over a thousand years of history in a few decades.
Suddenly the Portuguese aren’t going to love the Spanish, the Spanish the French and so on …And for that reason, it would have been much better to integrate the countries of the European Union gradually, by trading and building trust with each other. That economist called me stupid and ignorant and said that I had no idea of what I was talking about.
The humble me accepted and waited to be proven wrong. To be perfectly honest, before 2008 I was very doubtful if my theory was correct, really very doubtful.
Europe looked like heaven on earth and I was accepting my stupidity.
Then 2008 crashed on us. Suddenly we aren’t Europeans anymore; we are from the spending south or the hard-working north. We belong to the Creditors Football Club or the Debtors Football Club!
Ooops, suddenly our beloved North Europeans didn’t enjoy visiting the lazy South Europeans that spend all the money on alcohol and women (Jeroen Dijsselbloem March 2017)
Then to punish the debtors we needed a victim, in this case, Greece. The perfect victim – overspent, no control, corruption…you name it! Let’s teach them a lesson. They have spent the money of our hard-working Northern European citizens, they have borrowed too much money from our creditor banks. My question is….if I go to the bank and ask for a loan of €100 million and the bank grants it, whose fault is it? Mine because I’m irresponsible, lazy and only spend my money on alcohol and women? Or the honest, hard-working bank that professionally lends the hard-earned money to the lazy southerners?
All of this made the European Union a mere North-South creditor-debtor “union.” And now COVID-19 arrived to expose all the old and new wounds of the EU. The old I work hard, you are lazy (Funny enough we are all Lazy at the moment). The old You spend too much, I lend it to you but I’m good.
To the new, “Union” is missing this is just the old EEC (European Economic Community). That solidarity is an unknown word to many governments in Europe.
That this is only a union of winners and losers. The winners, the ones that do fiscal dumping and then point the finger at the others because they don’t take care about their finances. The winners who are the single beneficiary of the union (Check Target2) that doesn’t follow the rule of the 6% surplus but want 100% following the other rules to the others. The losers, the same ones of 2008 because they still spend their (Northern money) on alcohol and women.
And to help, the new star of the show, Wopke Hoekstra (Dutch Finance Minister) wants to investigate why the Southerners-Debtors-Lazy cannot manage this crisis by themselves.
Dutch finance minister Wopke Hoekstra even claimed that the EU “should investigate countries like Spain that say they have no budgetary margin to deal with the effects of the crisis provoked by the new coronavirus in spite of the fact that the eurozone has grown for seven consecutive years”.
The Portuguese Prime Minister replied: António Costa, has described as “repugnant” and contrary to the spirit of the European Union comments by the finance minister of the Netherlands.
Clever. With all of this I ask :
– Why do lazy southerners still want to be in a “union” that actually destroys their industries, because in the Euro they have NO chance to compete with the honest hard-working northerners!
– Why do lazy southerners want to be in a “union” that shows no solidarity in times like this (COVID-19)
I’m sad to say that I still think that it is much better to return to the EEC (European Economic Community) that was a fantastic project because it fomented trade but at the same time incorporated mechanisms to level trade so that all the countries could compete more fairly.
In the current situation of distrust and without mechanisms that balance the inequality, I still think that the “Union” is doomed, is just a question of time!
