A German protectorate

The European political theater offers an ever more depressing show. Merkel and Sarkozy are on the TV screen every day. They have the last word on everything. The last word, we have always been given to understand, belongs to the possessor of sovereignty. But to give the last word to one government - in this case, the German - is not to transfer sovereignty to a higher instance. It is to return to the past, to accept the protectorate idea characteristic of the era of colonialism.

The former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt has called Merkel to order, reminding her that the EU was created to "consolidate the containment of a feared Germany," and that Germany is still more in moral and symbolic debt to Europe than the other way around. Schmidt belongs to a generation that believed in the EU project because they knew where we were coming from. They knew that the strength of the EU was founded on a taboo: that of war between Europeans. Yet they made a mistake: they took far too long in making common citizenship a part of the EU project. Enlightened despotism was their means of building an edifice that required huge precautions if it was not to collapse. Indeed, when citizens were allowed a voice, in the Constitution question, the edifice came down.

And now its reconstruction is in the hands of leaders of vague attributes, who preach pragmatism, but practice the impotence of a man adrift, who only attempts to stay afloat, without any defined route that can be discerned by the citizen. And we have passed from a culture of transference of sovereignty to a common space, to a culture of protectorate, in which Angela Merkel points to guilty parties, preaches to others and imposes the road to be followed, though nobody has elected her to this job.

From the very beginning of the EU, it was known that its success would depend on changes in the logic of sovereignty. If we spoke of the Europe of nations, it was because we knew that sooner or later the nations would have to cede sovereignty to Europe. We have got used to cessions of sovereignty. We know that many norms that regulate our lives emanate from Brussels and not from our national parliaments. We know, too, that sovereignty is a question of power, and thus a function of relations of strength. And that Germany is now the strongest nation in Europe, thanks to a summation of economic power and capacity for intimidation.

But the novelty of this crisis is that it is devouring the EU institutions in favor of certain national powers: Germany, with France in a subaltern role. And when the greatest sacrifices of national sovereignty are demanded, it is to transfer power not to supranational EU institutions, validated by the voters, but to the unequal Franco-German pair, in which Sarkozy has already accepted the supremacy of his colleague Merkel. Europe as a German protectorate, exactly contrary to what the EU was invented for.

No, this is not how to build a politically strong EU, capable of putting a leash on financial power and uncontrolled markets. The EU has entered a phase of stagnation, in which the particular interests of Germany have condemned other countries to accept austerity policies that block any possibility of growth and recovery. More and more voices are asking why we should follow a road, imposed as obligatory, which in the short term favors Germany, whose companies are financed more cheaply than others - but in the medium term, if EU economies collapse, Germany's will collapse too. Europe's problem is an economy stagnant for lack of credit, and the distrust prevailing among banks for lending to each other. Is it not time for the other states to stand up to Germany, so that public money can make up for the lack of investment?