A Proposal for a Growth and Fiscal Compact

Many people think that the European Union is about the creation of the single market. It is not. After hundreds of years of internal wars and millions of deaths, of tyrannies playing on nationalism and division, we tried to build a different, united Europe. Although they are extremely relevant, the single market and the common currency are only two means to achieve the wider project. We are now facing the most serious threat to this construction. National egoisms and division are reappearing because of the uneven costs produced by the current crisis. We left the European construction to become a technocratic superstructure, with no real democratic accountability. National interests impeded significant shifts of sovereignty to EU democratic co-operative decisions. The viability of the euro construction depends on the political and institutional framework of the entire European Union. The peculiarity of the EU with respect to traditional models is to keep together sovereign states by means of international treaties whose objective is to produce gradual political, social and economic homogenisation. That path has not yet reached the stage where some significant form of federalism is possible. This obliges, now and in the near future, member states to match the common currency more with consistency than homogeneity. If we have to accept the imposition of more consistent policies, this does not mean that we have to focus solely on the fiscal compact, which will be selfdefeating. A Growth Compact, in addition to the Fiscal Compact, appears as the current preferable approach to tackle current problems and to give a viable perspective to Europe.