Uma intervenção importante

The current instability of the financial markets is driven by the risk that an individual country might become insolvent, and that risk can only be eliminated, or at least limited, by collective guarantees for government bonds issued within the eurozone. There are concerns that this could create disincentives, and these should be taken very seriously. The only way to allay these concerns is to ensure that collective guarantees are combined with strict collective control over national budgets. This means, however, that the degree of fiscal control necessary to underpin collective guarantees is no longer achievable within the context of national sovereignty via contractually agreed rules.

There are only two coherent strategies for dealing with the current crisis: a return to national currencies across the EU, which would expose each individual country to the unpredictable fluctuations of highly speculative foreign exchange markets, or the institutional underpinning of a collective fiscal, economic and social policy within the eurozone, with the further aim of restoring to policymakers their lost capacity for action in the face of market imperatives at a transnational level. And looking beyond the current crisis, the promise of a "social Europe" also depends upon this.

Only a politically united core Europe offers any hope of reversing the process – already far advanced – of transforming a citizens' democracy built on the idea of the social state into a sham democracy governed by market principles. For this reason alone – because it leads on to this broader perspective – the second option deserves preference over the first.

If we wish to avoid both a return to monetary nationalism and a permanent euro crisis, then we need to do now what we failed to do at the time of the euro's launch: we need to begin the process of moving towards political union, beginning with the core Europe of the 17 EMU member countries.

We believe that we should be entirely open about this process. It is simply not possible to retain the common currency without also espousing the idea of collective responsibility and redressing the institutional deficit in the eurozone. The proposal by the Council of Economic Experts to set up a collective debt redemption fund has been rejected by the German government, but its appeal lies precisely in the fact that it puts an end to the illusion of continuing national sovereignty by openly establishing the principle of collective responsibility. It would, however, make more sense to mutualise eurozone debt within the Maastricht criteria – so up to the 60% threshold, rather than above that level.

As long as European governments fail to state clearly what they are really doing, they will continue to undermine the already weak democratic foundations of the European Union. 

(Jurgen Habermas, Peter Bofinger e Julian Nida-Rumelin, artigo publicado no Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung de 3 de Agosto, tradução do Guardian)