“Maastricht Is A Half-Baked Half-Way House”

I frequently quote Wynne Godley’s Maastricht And All That written for the London Review Of Books in 1992. Here’s from another article (paywalled) for the same magazine from 1993:

I am in favour of Britain having much closer ties with other European countries, provided that appropriate institutions are created and the whole thing is brought under effective political control …

… The tract made only two points: that a single currency would remove the instability caused by fluctuating exchange rates, thereby enabling business to plan more reliably, and that international traders would no longer incur ‘transaction costs’ in the form of the small margin they now have to pay dealers when they buy and sell foreign exchange. It was as simple as that! The brief contained no reference whatever to the obvious fact that by joining a currency union, member countries would be giving up powers of independent action which at present they possess. It follows a fortiori that the document said nothing about who those powers would be given up to, and how the new authorities would exercise them …

… And if an individual country cannot issue its own money, it has no more power to conduct an independent fiscal policy than has a local authority, say, or an erstwhile colony in an imperial system …

… But to the extent that national governments can no longer be effective, this points to a pressing need for some supranational authority, call it a federal government, to carry out these functions …

… It is a good moment to start again. I think the Maastricht enterprise was built on a premise that has turned out to be completely mistaken: namely, that there can exist some kind of union between countries which is much more than a community of independent nations with special trading arrangements but much less than a full-blown political union. Maastricht is a half-baked half-way house and, with the CAP always at the back of my mind, I cannot agree that it is right to support it on the grounds that it is the only route ahead, the full nature of which will only be revealed in due course. Going forward should now mean that we explicitly hand over the main instruments of independent policy-making to some properly constituted body under appropriate political control. If this is not what Britain wants, is it completely out of the question that we now deliberately go backwards?

[italics in original, boldening mine]

– Wynne Godley in DerailedLondon Review Of Books, 1993

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