[lbo-talk] French Push Euro Countries to Confront ECB

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 7/18/07, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Yoshie quoted:
>
> French push euro countries to confront ECB
> By Katrin Bennhold and Carter Dougherty
> Tuesday, July 17, 2007
>
> According to central bankers and finance officials, the drive is seen
> mainly as an effort to bolster the ailing French export industry.
>
> [WS:] This seems to be consistent with an interesting phenomenon in Europe,
> which for the lack of better terminology I call right-wing populist
> Keynesianism.  It denotes policies of essentially conservative parties of
> mobilizing popular support by espousing socially conservative issues
> (nationalism, religion, etc.), pursuing protectionist economic policies, and
> increasing social spending (in a similar manner, social spending in the US
> rose to the record high under Bush - 16.2% of the GDP in 2003, compared to
> 14.6% in 2000 - the last year of the Clinton administration.)  At the same
> time, the left-leaning parties flirt with neo-liberalism.

The phenomenon you speak of -- populism of the "Right" and
neoliberalism of the "Left" -- takes the most depressing form in
Hungary.

In the case of France, though, it's more a case of the "Center-Right"
literally integrating the "Center-Left" into its own political
formation than anything else.  The number of right-wing socialists
that Sarkozy has incorporated into his administration is striking:
Elaine Sciolino, "Socialist Defectors in France," 17 July 2007,
<http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/17/news/france.php>.  As for the
stance toward the ECB that Sarkozy has taken, it is akin to that of
Royal during her presidential campaign: "Ségolène Royal s'en prend à
la BCE et prône une 'Europe des gens,'" 7 December 2006,
<http://www.lemonde.fr/cgi-bin/ACHATS/acheter.cgi?offre=ARCHIVES&type_item=ART_ARCH_30J&objet_id=969039&clef=ARC-TRK-G_01>.

 Convergence is the name of the game here.

Monetary policy, it seems, has become more of a battleground than
before, because all other traditional Keynesian policy instruments
(progressive taxation, social welfare programs, public works programs,
etc.) have been, to one degree or another, abandoned by most
socialists and social democrats: Simon Kennedy and Matthew Benjamin,
"Central Banks Face Rising Pressure from Politicians," Bloomberg News,
19 February 2007,
<http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/19/business/banks.php>.

Moreover, on the global scale, Euro zone politicians who are still
attached to the statist tradition, like French politicians across the
ideological spectrum, probably feel that contradictions of the
mutually dependent relations between the USA and East Asia have been
solved at Europe's expense, requiring state intervention on their part
to counteract them.
-- 
Yoshie