So this week we met with our last guest speaker of the semester. Most people would see this as being a good thing because it means winter vacation is almost here bringing with it a break from schoolwork. Well, I’m just going to say that this outlook is not shared by yours truly, and I would rather have hundreds of more guest speakers if it meant I got to spend more time in this amazing city learning all of the interesting things we do every week. Unfortunately, good things must come to an end and with this week, as mentioned before, comes our final guest speaker and the countdown of our final four field experiences. What this boils down to is the fact that I will be leaving this amazing city in 6 weeks and the best four months of my life will come to an end. The silver lining of this sad truth is that I could not have picked a better guest speaker to conclude the long list of amazing ones we have had this semester.
Wednesday, we were joined by Andras Baneth, who made the journey all the way from Brussels to talk to us. Andras said that he was briefly going to talk about the EU and more specifically the Euro crisis and after we would have a chance to ask questions and he would, to the best of his ability, answer them. The EU or European Union has 27 member states, soon to be increased to 28 with the inclusion of Croatia in the upcoming years. According to Mr. Baneth, this “union” lies between an international organization where governments cooperate on equal terms but it is still not equivalent to a United States of Europe. To put it simply, this is not one single entity, but the governments of various countries do work together to solve issues. I have always been interested in the EU and this fact has always made me question whether an organization like this could ever work. The pessimist in me thinks that without a strong hierarchy to control all of these member states, there is no way anything can get done because human nature would prevent people from putting other’s needs in front of their own without incentive. This organization is based on complete trust that if two or more countries have an issue they will choose to peacefully talk about it and come to a conclusion without any real authority pushing them to do so. However as we soon learned the European Union has succeeded in keeping the countries within Europe from fighting one another.
The EU was created after World War II to allow countries to communicate with one another and stop a third world war from happening in the future. This has proved successful in the fact that there have been no wars between the members of the EU states since it was created. As pessimistic as I sounded before, Andras made it sound like this was a great way for countries to have the option to “talk it out” so to speak instead of grabbing their guns and declaring war on each other. This is also supported by the fact that after WWII countries became more interdependent upon one another so they refrain from going to war with one another because doing so may hurt their economies more than just figuring out the problem peacefully. I would be inclined to say that by countries being interdependent; it provides the hierarchy I thought was missing before and is that incentive to not go to war. This makes the whole European Union successful in it’s goal of somewhat uniting Europe and preventing wars.
After our European Union background, Mr. Baneth went on to talk about the Euro and the ever-apparent Euro crisis. First off only 17 member states are on the Euro, which was a small number in my mind because I believed that when you joined to European Union, it was in a countries nature to go ahead and adopt the Euro. This thought was supported by the fact that the Euro was created in order to bring member states closer. Without a common language and no single ruling government, the lack of culture must be replaced with something and that something is currency. This idea of unity is a good one of course but like Andras mentioned, it is hard to have a single currency with so many different economies. Because of the variety of economies there are net players who are the key financers of the EU budget and include the Scandinavian Countries as well as Germany. The problem arises when these countries no longer think it is in their best interest to pay more taxes to help countries like Greece survive economically. Why would Germany want to pay higher taxes so the people of Greece can retire at the age of 60 or why should they bail them out when their economic crisis is mostly their own fault? This is becoming the issue around Europe and from what it sounded like to me, the Euro may not have a fighting chance.
However, Mr. Baneth cleared this right up and said that he does not in fact think that the Euro will fail and if it did it would be a huge loss for Europe. Going off of this very thought, the reason Greece is being supported is because if countries just give up on Greece, other economically struggling countries will look at the European Union and think they will too be given up on. Like I mentioned before it is all about trust between member states and what better way to create trust than saving someone’s economic future.
Mr. Baneth was an amazing speaker with all of his analogies and story-like approach. I was fully engaged the whole time and was so interested at everything he had to say. I am far from an expert on economics but Andras made things a littler more clearer in my mind and simplified what is such a complicated problem so that we could better understand the situation. In my mind I don’t know if I think the Euro is such a good idea but I think that now that it is in effect it must be kept up with. With its defeat would bring a loss of moral for the member states of the European Union and in the most extreme of cases could lead to the dismemberment of the European Union itself. So to all of you at home watching Greece on the news, its not just about cool riots and protests, it represents a much bigger issue that is sweeping across Europe; does the Euro as a common currency actually work? I’ll guess I’ll leave this up to all of you to decide. Have a good weekend!
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