The REAL Eurozone Crisis Is About Much More Than Debt

Europe is in crisis, and it's not just about occasional flare-ups in peripheral sovereign debt markets anymore.

In fact, it's really never been about that.

The European continent has for decades since the end of the Second World War struggled to create a transnational identity, the fulfillment of a dream to end military conflict between continental superpowers like France and Germany that has plagued it for centuries.

However, that identity – and the institutions like the EU and the ECB that embody it – has come at a great price. Voters in euro area member states have found that they are able to exercise less and less control over their own governance at the ballot box. In short, democracy is in crisis.

Now, Europe is at a historic crossroads, brought about by the disastrous implementation of the euro – it must either cede even more power to the supranational level, where voters aren't represented by elected officials, or face the fallout in financial markets.

The European Union was just awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for its contributions to democracy in Europe

On October 12, the European Union was awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Interestingly, its contribution to strengthening democracy in Europe was cited as a key driver of the Nobel prize committee's decision, per the press release:

In the 1980s, Greece, Spain and Portugal joined the EU. The introduction of democracy was a condition for their membership. The fall of the Berlin Wall made EU membership possible for several Central and Eastern European countries, thereby opening a new era in European history. The division between East and West has to a large extent been brought to an end; democracy has been strengthened; many ethnically-based national conflicts have been settled.

The admission of Croatia as a member next year, the opening of membership negotiations with Montenegro, and the granting of candidate status to Serbia all strengthen the process of reconciliation in the Balkans. In the past decade, the possibility of EU membership for Turkey has also advanced democracy and human rights in that country.

The EU is currently undergoing grave economic difficulties and considerable social unrest. The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to focus on what it sees as the EU's most important result: the successful struggle for peace and reconciliation and for democracy and human rights. The stabilizing part played by the EU has helped to transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace.

In contrast, the EU's critics usually say democracy is the EU's biggest enemy...

German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger argues that anti-democratic principles are part of the core construction of the European Union.

Enzensberger writes in his essay, Brussels, the gentle monster:

Officially, [the core problem of the EU] bears a euphemistic designation. The 'democratic deficit', as it's called, is considered to be a chronic deficiency disease, apparently difficult to treat, which is both lamented and played down. Yet it is far from being a medical puzzle; rather, it represents a quite deliberate decision of general principle.

As if the constitutional struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had never happened, Council of Ministers and Commission already agreed at the foundation of the European Community that the population at large should have no say in their decision. By now no one believes any more that this relapse into preconstitutional conditions can be cured by cosmetic corrections. The deficit is, therefore, nothing more than a fancy term for the disenfranchisement of Europe's citizens.

And that the structure of the EU is not conducive to the democratic process

Austrian writer Robert Menasse says that the way the EU is set up, the institution's effect on democracy in Europe is like a black hole:

We can only talk of developed democracy when there is a separation of powers...

In the EU, however, the division of powers has been done away with. The parliament is certainly elected, but has no right to initiate legislation (or now, after Lisbon, only through the back door): only the Commission has the right to initiate legislation...

But the Commission is the institution in which, in the end, democratic legitimation is annulled: here an apparatus is at work which is not elected and cannot be voted out and which has abolished the separation of powers...

In terms of democratic politics, therefore, this triad of Parliament, Council and Commission produces a black hole into which what we used to understand as democracy disappears.

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