Il buon vecchio Bagehot.Lyndon79 ha scritto:Cioè?BackhandWinner ha scritto:A quanto ho letto (e capito), il massimo sforzo in questo senso l'ha fatto piuttosto Sarkozy, e con notevole successo.Lyndon79 ha scritto: Tra l'altro, Mrs Merkel ha fatto di tutto per tenere le istituzioni comunitarie il più lontano dal tavolo (reale) delle decisioni.
In particolare:
Bagehot in his blog ha scritto:It is worth being clear about this. Mr Cameron says he refused to sign up because he was defending British national interests in the long-term. In the immediate term, he took the decision to reject a new EU treaty because he was not sure he could get it through the House of Commons.
Having failed, he walked away, empty-handed. Just three other countries walked with him—Hungary, Sweden and the Czech Republic—and one or all of them may yet end up joining the new pact. We are not very far away from a final division of the club with 26 countries on one side, and one on the other.
This moment was both predictable and predicted. Everything dates back to a first meeting between the newly-elected David Cameron and Angela Merkel in Berlin in May 2010. By chance, in my previous role as Charlemagne, I was in the chancellery that day as one of a small group of Brussels correspondents invited for briefings from the German government. Mrs Merkel badly wanted Britain to stay on the inside track of the EU, we learned, fearing that she would find herself alone in the room with France and the Club Med countries. She wanted Britain and others for balance, and was anxious not to push away allies such as Poland who in theory plan to join the euro one day and are desperate to avoid being in an outer core.
Thus Mrs Merkel wanted to push ahead with new treaties to save the euro at the level of all 27 countries. I stayed on to watch Mr Cameron's meeting and joint press conference, and heard the British prime minister explain that he wished the euro well, but could not commit Britain to any involvement in deeper integration. I wrote this:
Mr Sarkozy dreams of building a new power structure round the 16 euro-zone countries. But Mrs Merkel wants economic policy to be decided by all 27 EU members, precisely because she likes to balance “Club Med” members of the euro zone with more liberal countries, including Britain, Sweden, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Poland. Yet David Cameron, the British prime minister, is adamant that deeper economic co-ordination in Europe must affect only the 16. That may be savvy British politics, but it risks pushing Mrs Merkel into France’s arms.
A year and a half later, at some time around 4am last night in Brussels, Mr Cameron pushed Mrs Merkel into the arms of the French. She went along with this, and this was predictable too. In November I wrote a column from Berlin (sorry, last quotation from myself), setting out the German view:
there is frustration in Berlin at what are seen as British double-standards. Mr Cameron tells euro-zone members to do more to save their currency. Yet Britain does not offer to help and demands to be consulted on big decisions, for example on bank recapitalisation. In Brussels Mr Cameron tells the EU to beware of breaking up the single market, and stoutly defends free-trade rules that apply to all. Yet back in London, ministers talk of special opt-outs giving British business low-cost, deregulated membership of the common market.
In Berlin the belief is that rewriting single-market rules would lead to many countries demanding more protections—the opposite of what Britain wants. Belgium, for instance, might push for more workers’ rights. Facing a tough re-election fight, Mr Sarkozy last week declared that Europe should not be a “dupe” when it came to global trade, and proposed EU import taxes to help pay for European welfare systems.
Germany’s priority is rules establishing unprecedented oversight of euro-zone economies. If Britain asks too high a price for its consent, Germany will reluctantly agree to a new treaty outside the EU system. This, it is expected, would involve more than 17 countries but fewer than 27. Britain would lose its veto
Berlin offered one more, very clear message: that British Eurosceptics were wrong to declare that Britain could become the leader of the 10 countries that do not use the euro, the ten "outs". There is no club of outs, I was told, and Mr Cameron had a bruising taste of this reality at an October summit when Mr Sarkozy angrily told some of the countries outside the euro that they had no interest in siding with Britain.