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Today Europe finds itself in a crisis that casts a dark shadow over an entire generation. The seriousness of the crisis stems from one core political contradiction at the heart of the European project: namely, that what urgently needs to be done is also extremely unpopular and therefore virtually impossible to do democratically. What must be done - and almost everyone agrees in principle on the measures that would be needed to deal with the financial crisis - cannot be sold to the voting public of the core member states, which so far have been less affected by the crisis than those on the periphery, nor can the conditions that core members try to impose be easily sold to voters in the deficit countries.
The European Union is therefore becoming increasingly disunited, with deepening divides between the German-dominated ‘core’ and the southern ‘periphery’, between the winners and the losers of the common currency, between the advocates of greater integration and the anti-Europeans, between the technocrats and the populists. Europe finds itself trapped by the deepening divisions that are opening up across the Continent, obstructing its ability to deal with a crisis that has already caused massive social suffering in the countries of the European periphery and is threatening to derail the very project of the European Union.
In this short book, Claus Offe brings into sharp focus the central political problem that lies at the heart of the EU and shackles its ability to deal with the most serious crisis of its short history.
- Sales Rank: #815634 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-01-30
- Released on: 2015-01-30
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"The title of his book says it all: Europe finds itself in a trap of its own making. Offe has no easy answers as to how the continent might escape. But his 130-page essay is a model of analytical clarity and should be required reading for anyone who wants to grasp the core issues of the crisis—and eschew simple slogans and facile apportionment of blame to single nations (whether Germany or Greece)."
Current History
"This is a strangely heart-warming book. While Claus Offe analyses the weaknesses and failures of European integration with ruthless precision, he also reminds us powerfully of the values of the European ideal, and shows how we could come closer to realising them - if only political leaders had the will and tenacity to do so. In the current climate of Europhobia, this is the nearest thing to realistic optimism that we are likely to get."
Colin Crouch, University of Warwick
"Claus Offe has written a passionate, probing, and deeply perturbing book that both excoriates the European Union and provides a glimpse of hope in the struggle for a social Europe."
Gary Marks, UNC-Chapel Hill and RVU Amsterdam
"After so many years without a resolution, it is hard to feel hopeful about the euro crisis. If there are grounds for hope they lie in this volume. In it Claus Offe describes how the citizens of Europe, and of Germany in particular, frame the crisis. He explains how that framing defines the range of feasible policy options. Offe shows how it is in the capacity of those citizens and their leaders -- of European society, in other words -- to modify that framing in ways that open the door to a more constructive policy response. Offe's careful analysis deserves a wide audience. If it receives one, Europe will be a better place."
Barry Eichengreen, University of California, Berkeley
"At the core of this book is the proposition that, though the Euro was a mistake, its undoing would be a greater mistake. Around this insight, Offe describes the logic of the economic, institutional, political and cultural traps that have been sprung on European polities. The great merit of this book is that it poses the fundamental question implicit in any attempt to escape such traps: who is to be the agent of change? No one reading this book will think that this question has an easy answer; they will realise that an answer is desperately called for."
Albert Weale, University College London
About the Author
Claus Offe is Professor of Political Sociology at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. He is author of numerous books, including Contradictions of the Welfare State, Disorganized Capitalism, Modernity and the State, and Reflections on America: Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
The biggest danger lies elsewhere
By Alyssa A. Lappen
I'll agree with Claus Offe (who quotes Fritz Scharpf on this point), precisely those European Union "institutions that have the greatest impact on the daily life of people...are the farthest removed from democratic accountability: the European Central Bank, the European Court of Justice, and the European Commission."
Europe faces, he says, "a deep divorce between politics and policy," in that Europe's citizens in effect have nothing whatever to say about what is done, much less by whom.
How we got to this juncture, Offe lays at the feet of economic and market action derived, he says, from "conservative" arguments in favor of integration that nevertheless originated on the political Left. He calls the resulting "negative" integration via demolition of borders, trade barriers, and destruction of inefficiencies "a machinery of market liberalization that disempowers states and democratic constituencies along with their ability to determine policies themselves."
I'd argue that this is not all about "constitutionalization of economic freedoms."
On the contrary, I'd refer Offe and all his readers to Bat Ye'or's Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, which I think does a far better job of describing the nature of the crisis now afflicting Europe than this little, all but impenetrable tome. The book could have used a far better editor. That might have made it far easier for the layman to grasp than it is.
But there is a much bigger problem with this book than the poor writing and editing.
Offe holds, at the outset, that Europe finds itself in the midst of a crisis cumulatively resultant from financial market crisis, sovereign debt crisis, economic/employment crisis and institutional crisis all wrapped into one. Alas, he focuses almost exclusively on economic and market outcomes and that is not the half of it.
Yes, the euro was a bad idea to begin with, and ought never have been formulated much less brought to fruition.
But if Offe thinks the euro's unraveling would be worse than its creation, he ought to give far more weight than he does to consideration of the dire long-term consequences of denying Europe's people the right to self-determination. For that is what the creation of Eurabia has done, quite intentionally. And therein lies the biggest danger.
Some readers might gain a tinge of understanding from this volume, but they will take away nothing in the way of solutions. And there are far better analysts of the real worms eating at Europe's flesh, heart and soul.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Good Information on the Origins and Nature of Eurozone Crisis. Feeble on Other Points.
By mirasreviews
"Europe Entrapped" is one of many dissertations on the crisis of the European Union published by European intellectuals in recent years. Claus Offe is German, Professor Emeritus of Political Sociology at the Hertie School of Governance and Humboldt University. He focuses primarily on the crisis of the Euro, whose disintegration he believes will result in the unraveling of the entire European project, and addresses the European Union's (EU) broader problems and proposes his own solutions in the last couple of chapters. Claus Offe is ideologically hard-left and a supporter of the EU, as it was envisioned, somewhat abstractly, by similar-minded persons. Like many European intellectuals, he disapproves of the technocratic rule and democratic deficits that characterize the current political structure of the EU. His view that one nation, Greece, leaving the Eurozone will result in the abandonment of the Euro and eventually the EU project is alarmist, and I don't agree.
I should say that I am anti-EU -and not for the reasons that Offe mentions- but I appreciate this book, because it lays out the unviability of the Euro, as conceived, in several chapters. I don't think Offe will ever be accused of being an eloquent writer, at least not in English, but I didn't find the book difficult to understand. It is written in what I take to be typical German style for this type of analysis: The organization is straightforward, but the prose is less so, which is could be off-putting if you're not accustomed to it. Offe begins by identifying the Eurozone crisis as "the cumulative outcome of a financial market crisis, a sovereign debt crisis, and economic/employment crisis, and an institutional crisis of the EU, its Eurozone and its democratic qualities." By its nature, the crisis has paralyzed the forces that might be capable of overcoming it, so we will be looking for some agent that can get the job done, the difficulty being that a solution cannot be democratically accomplished.
In his first chapter, Offe presents the features of the model of political economy that he will be using in his analysis. In short, it is a state-instituted capitalist market society which is far from self-enforcing or self-sustaining, principally because it is easy to subvert in the pursuit of one's own interests and considerably moreso in the EU-wide market than it was under the regulatory regimes of individual nation-states. Now that we know where the author is coming from, Chapter 2 discusses the Euro's two major defects: It was created wrongly in a "highly inhomogeneous market space, the divergence of which it further propels," and "it is institutionally deficient as its policy-making capacity is severely limited in areas of fiscal, economic, and social policies." The next chapter leans toward turgid. In it, Offe explicates four "doom loops", which pit financial industries, Eurozone states, the real economy, and citizenry against one another in basically a bunch of paralyzing Catch-22s.
Chapter 4 lays out Offe's argument for the Euro as an "irreversible arrangement." He admits, loudly, that the Euro was a mistake, but he believes strongly that undoing it would be a bigger mistake. We all know how the core Eurozone nations benefit from the Euro and would suffer from its breakup, but his arguments for the benefits of the Euro to the periphery nations is weak. Greece would lose its political leverage at the European level, and it would suffer inflation. Chapter 6, "Finalitées", is an exploration of the purpose of the EU, not the Eurozone, seven goals and visions that theoretically drive the integration process, followed by Offe's analysis of whether or not the EU has met these goals. Pretty much "no," so Offe admits that arguments for Europe have lost force so that "the stealth mode of self-propelling incremental integration...is no longer viable." The next chapter takes on four groups or ideologies that oppose European integration and concludes that they are impotent.
Offe believes that Germany has a responsibility to be the agent of change that Europe needs, as it has benefitted the most from the European Monetary Union. So far, Germany has refused. I think Offe wants Germany to reduce its dependence on exports by increasing domestic spending and wages, forgive some Greek debt and recapitalize Greek banks. Interesting to a non-German is Offe's explanation of the "semantic ambiguities" employed by German politicians and partisans to promote the austerity for periphery nations and deflect blame. After the requisite criticism of the European Central Bank, European Court of Justice, and European Commission for being so removed from democratic accountability, Offe posits the EU as a "supranational democracy" but admits in a footnote that achieving this is unlikely. The last chapter includes Offe's proposals for how to politicize the EU, mostly through European-wide social welfare guarantees and lots of taxes.
"Nothing less will do than a carefully designed set of EU-sponsored material entitlements." Claus Offe wants to use the EU crisis to promote a leftist utopia. This doesn't address the EU's fundamental flaws. It only attempts to buy the support of a disgruntled citizenry. To what practical end, I'm not sure. Oh, yes, the seven goals mentioned in Chapter 6. Most are either unappealing or implausible. The others can be accomplished by a European trading bloc, without reviving the outdated concept of an unwieldy, unadaptable, transnational empire, this time with ideological basis. That's a discussion for another day. Offe's proposed solutions for the EU are very much what one expects from a European leftist academic. You could read Jürgen Habermas or any number of others and get the same idea, though Offe seems to have a better grasp of finance than Habermas. I don't give his vision for Europe much credit, but his analysis of the Eurozone crisis is cogent and interesting.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Europe Entrapped - Informative and well written
By Big Miles Davis Fan
The question confronting the European Union as constituted today is whether to proceed with further, deeper integration for economic development or admit its original lofty goal of integration for the purpose of cohesion to stave off communist engulfment at the height of the cold war, and also to end centuries of war once and for all is unrealistic and an overreach. As I have written elsewhere (in an earlier book review) today’s European Union began as a customs union of three small European nations which then morphed in the course of time into the European Common Market (an economic entity) and next into today’s quasi political EU. Along the way the entity adopted the Euro as a common currency to facilitate ease of commerce among member states, and to promote growth and prosperity. Following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe the Eurozone expanded to include several former Eastern-bloc nations as well as less developed Western nations like Malta, Cyprus, Greece, Portugal and Spain.
What has become clear in recent years within the Eurozone is that disparities in economic development within member nations have created a situation in which northern nations like France, Austria and Germany must lend billions to a member like Greece to meet its payment obligations, both domestic and international. In return Greece must swallow the bitter pill of adhering to taxation and pension reforms imposed externally. But the very reforms, for the moment at least, constrain development and generate high unemployment with the potential to foment violent upheaval against governments. Thus rather than unity and cohesion tension is fast developing between the lender and borrower nations which threatens the very existence of not only the Eurozone but also of the European Union itself.
Author Claus Offe attributes the crisis in the Eurozone to (among others) cheap money supplied by central banks, reckless risk taking by major commercial banks and a state like Greece relying increasingly on debt finance. Moreover, he adds, the Eurozone is “institutionally deficient as its policy making capacity is severely limited in the areas of fiscal, economic and social policies…”
Given the clearly troubled state of the Eurozone one should think that exit from membership might be a desirable option for some nations and thereby assure a better future for the Euro. Here Claus Offe sites another flaw with the currency: the Euro, for all practical purposes, is “an irreversible arrangement” as neither northern nor southern members of the group has a great interest in deserting. There are no prescribed rules for quitting the zone while maintaining membership in the European Union. If the currency is a mistake to begin with undoing the mistake will have equally undesirable consequences, leading to “a tsunami of economic as well as political regression”.
What role should Germany, the elephant in the room, play in the situation unfolding? The official German point of view is that German taxpayers should not be liable for the irresponsible practices of another country’s banks. Germany will not reward bad policies and the call by others to play Godfather must be resisted. But neither are the poorer members of the bloc prepared to accept German hegemony for reasons rooted in two world wars and lingering resentment of the Bundesbank’s role in European economic matters. The EU and the Eurozone are “entrapped” because total integration a la United States of America does not offer much appeal to centuries old independent states. Neither does a return to status ante offer much appeal to the heavyweights in the north who also stand to lose the economic advantages they now reap from the loose union.
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