*There's such a drumbeat of doomy alarm in the Eurozone this month that I'm hard put to enjoy a hot shower and a brioche.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,799237,00.html
(...)
"A Quiet Coup d'État
"Zur Verfassung Europas" ("On Europe's Constitution") is the name of his new book, which is basically a long essay in which he describes how the essence of our democracy has changed under the pressure of the crisis and the frenzy of the markets. Habermas says that power has slipped from the hands of the people and shifted to bodies of questionable democratic legitimacy, such as the European Council. Basically, he suggests, the technocrats have long since staged a quiet coup d'état. (((Well, yeah, but as long as the borrowing spree was workin' out, nobody beefed.)))
"On July 22, 2011, (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel and (French President) Nicolas Sarkozy agreed to a vague compromise – which is certainly open to interpretation – between German economic liberalism and French etatism," he writes. "All signs indicate that they would both like to transform the executive federalism enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty into an intergovernmental supremacy of the European Council that runs contrary to the spirit of the agreement." (((That's 'cause they imagine they'd be running it. Also, they don't have any choice. They could go camp out in their own front lawns in an Occupy tent, but when they tried to sneak back in to the Presidential Palace it'd be as cold and dead and lightless in there as a Soviet automobile plant.)))
"Habermas refers to the system that Merkel and Sarkozy have established during the crisis as a "post-democracy." The European Parliament barely has any influence. The European Commission has "an odd, suspended position," without really being responsible for what it does. Most importantly, however, he points to the European Council, which was given a central role in the Lisbon Treaty – one that Habermas views as an "anomaly." He sees the Council as a "governmental body that engages in politics without being authorized to do so." (((And while we're at it, who elected Microsoft and Facebook?)))
"He sees a Europe in which states are driven by the markets, in which the EU exerts massive influence on the formation of new governments in Italy and Greece, and in which what he so passionately defends and loves about Europe has been simply turned on its head...."
