The New Old World by Perry Anderson Page A

provocative topic of political union. Her explosion at Andreotti’s silken trap finished her. In London, Geoffrey Howe took a dim view of her reaction, and within a month she was ejected from office. No wonder she hated her Italian colleagues so cordially, to the point of saying: ‘To put it more bluntly, if I were an Italian I might prefer rule from Brussels too’. 29
    Thatcher respected Delors (‘manifest intelligence, ability and integrity’), liked Mitterrand (‘I have a soft spot for French charm’) and could put up with Kohl (‘style of diplomacy even more directthan mine’). But Andreotti she feared and detested from the start. At her very first G-7 summit, within a few months of coming to power, she found that
he seemed to have positive aversion to principle, even a conviction that a man of principle was doomed to be a figure of fun. He saw politics as an eighteenth-century general saw war: a vast and elaborate set of parade-ground manoeuvres by armies that would never actually engage in conflict but instead declare victory, surrender or compromise as their apparent strength dictated in order to collaborate on the real business of sharing the spoils. A talent for striking political deals rather than a conviction of political truths might be required by Italy’s political system and it was certainly regarded as
de rigueur
in the Community, but I could not help but find something distasteful about those who practised it. 30
    Andreotti’s judgement of Thatcher was crisper. Emerging from one of the interminable European Council sessions devoted to the British rebate, he remarked that she reminded him of a landlady berating a tenant for her rent.
    The increasing role of Italy as a critical third in the affairs of the Community was a significant feature of these years. The Report on Economic and Monetary Union of 1989 that laid the basis for Maastricht was drafted by an Italian, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, the most trenchant advocate of a single currency, and it was also the initiative of an Italian—Andreotti again—that at the last minute added an automatic deadline of 1999 into the Treaty, to the consternation of the British and of the Bundesbank. Nevertheless, the final shape of the bargain reached at Maastricht was essentially of French and German design. The central aim for Paris was a financial edifice capable of replacing the unilateral power of the Bundesbank as the
de facto
regulator of the fortunes of its neighbours, with a
de jure
central authority over the European monetary space in which German interests would no longer be privileged. In exchange Bonn received the security system of ‘convergence criteria’—in effect draconian conditions for abandonment of the deutschmark, which Italian theorists of a single currency had always rejected—and the fixtures and fittings of ‘political union’.
    The diplomatic origins of the Treaty are one thing. Its economic effects, if implemented, are another. What is the social logic of the monetary union scheduled to come into force by the end of the decade? In a system of the kind envisaged at Maastricht, nationalmacro-economic policy becomes a thing of the past: all that remains to member-states are distributive options on—necessarily reduced—expenditures within balanced budgets, at competitive levels of taxation. The historic commitments of both Social and Christian Democracy to full employment and social services of the traditional welfare state, already scaled down or cut back, would cease to have any further institutional purchase. This is a revolutionary prospect. The single obligation of the projected European Central Bank, more restrictive even than the charter of the Federal Reserve, is the maintenance of price stability. The protective and regulative functions of existing national states will be dismantled, leaving sound money as the sole regulator, as in the classical liberal model