Regole dell’economia e crisi europea

The crisis we are living in has highlighted that the present pattern of development is no more capable of ensuring future rates of growth of the international economic system that are comparable with the past. What is less straightforward is that the rules that underlie the present pattern of development are dramatically affecting the progressive establishment of the European Union. Free capital movements, the constraints and goals that depict the action of the ECB, banking reform, the policies carried out by international agencies such as the IMF, the existence of private rating companies: they all consist of rules that not only fail to mitigate the disparities among European countries and to enhance a convergence among them but they actually deepen and extend the gap between these countries. They are helping to push countries in opposite directions, and foster differences in opinion among the European people. Situations of relative weakness in Europe have turned into a fault, subject to moral judgment. Symmetrically, favorable circumstances have become paragons of virtue, thereby creating a new culture of exclusion that justifies—especially among the public opinion of the economically strong countries— the punitive behaviors that those rules determine towards the weak regions of Europe. This deprives social Europe of all content and diminishes internal cohesion, withinand among countries, in a cumulative process that must be somehow stopped.