Otmar Issing in his article today (‘Get your finances in order and stop blaming Germany’), states that the member countries of the Eurozone remain sovereign when it comes to their economies and that plain democracy requires this principle to be respected.

The problem is that the Eurozone member countries are not sovereign when it comes to managing their economies. They cannot devalue and the wretched consequences of this can be seen across most of the Eurozone, with the significant exception of Germany. Furthermore, the political consequence of this impotence is that, so far from embedding and sustaining stable democratic principles in the Eurozone members, democracy is being steadily eroded in many member countries, as the emergence and growth of reactionary populist parties in Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and France attests.

If there is a sustainable solution to this regrettable state of affairs, it would seem to be that, rather than uncompetitive members leaving the Eurozone, as Dr. Issing recommends, it is Germany, which has enjoyed an undervalued Euro exchange rate at, it must be said, the expense of the other members, which should acknowledge its exceptional economic character within the Eurozone, quit the currency union and reconstitute the DeutschMark.

Giles Conway-Gordon