Vox
January 25, 2012
In the last few months, several Vox columns have drawn parallels between Europe today and an emerging – and even less stable – United States in the eighteenth century. This column stresses that Europe’s leaders in search of a fiscal union need not seek to replicate the US experience but they should at least learn from it.
The Eurozone crisis and debate over fiscal reform have led many observers to pray for salvation by a modern, European version of Alexander Hamilton. By this they generally mean someone capable of leading a movement for a robust fiscal union and implementing this vision. (See for example McKinnon 2011.) Europe has instead, they lament, a collection of leaders who are primarily responsive to divergent national electorates rather than engaged in building a pan-European political movement. Consequently, they despair, instead of transforming the fiscal architecture of the monetary union, European officials are now dithering over the details of a ‘fiscal compact’, which is little more than an uninspiring upgrade of the Stability and Growth Pact.More
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