Socio-Economics History Blog

Socio-Economics History Blog

Collapse of the European Integration ‘Is On The Cards’ – Professor

by mosesman

  • Collapse of the European Integration ‘Is On The Cards’ – Professor
    by https://sputniknews.com/
    With 2019 beginning and the EU as fractured as ever, increasing scrutiny has been placed by leading economists on the bloc’s single currency the EU. Which they argue has caused more harm than good.
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    Sputnik spoke with Stavros Mavroudeas, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Macedonia for more insight on the issue.
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    Sputnik: Is the Euro a failed project?
    Stavros Mavroudeas: I think the Euro overall is a problematic project. It’s not a success story; it’s actually proving to be a story of a failure. The Euro is a part of the European integration project, and this in my opinion is an imperialist project.
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    Imperialism meaning; at least in Marxism, that a country or bloc of countries exploits other countries economically. The European integration was inaugurated the Second World War under the auspices of the US, with the aim of securing economically and politically Western Europe, from the Soviet threat.
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    It changed radically after the nineteen seventy three global capitalist crisis; because by then the US supremacy faltered, and there was another time after nineteen eighty nine, when the Soviet bloc collapsed.
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    By then the European integration acquired greater independence from the US and even aspired to dethrone it, as the new economic capitalist superpower of the world.
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    The former European Monetary Union is the necessary evolution of this course of European integration, because after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, particularly its exchange rates system; that was based on the dollar and was a system of fixed exchange rates.
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    Once this system collapsed; and it did so because of the US under the Nixon administration withdrew from that system and acted unilaterally, then the European integration needed a currency for its common market. They moved towards creating ultimately, after several previous failed attempts in creating the European Monetary Union, that is the Euro.
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    Sputnik: Would the collapse of the Euro mean the collapse of the EU?
    Stavros Mavroudeas:    I think that the possibility of either a collapse or a fragmentation of the European Integration and its monetary union is on the cards.
    –
    read more.

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