News article on the EU’s ‘European Semester’ originally published in the EUobserver on 09.06.11.
The European taskmaster has cracked the whip. However much austerity has been imposed by EU member states, it is simply not enough.
That is the overriding message from the European Commission that runs through its recommendations for each of the 27 member states in the new, post-crisis system of radically centralised oversight and correction of national economic policies by the EU known as the ‘European Semester’.
“We are now implementing the new system of European governance,” commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, heralding the unveiling of 27 detailed – or ‘granular’, to use the adjective EU officials use – national prescriptions, telling member states what they are getting right and wrong with their fiscal policies and what they must do to ‘fix’ their economies. Continue reading →
LEIGH PHILLIPS 