Professor Terrence McDonough:

That is an excellent question and a difficult one. In general, I would have been quite sympathetic to a process of political unification across Europe but I would have always been supportive of basing that process of political unification, at the very minimum, on traditional European social democratic values. I think that in the current period, especially in terms of the negotiations which have taken place between the Greek Government and the European Union institutions over the past two weeks, a line has been drawn under the traditional social Europe model. What has developed in the era of monetary union is very difficult to defend not only philosophically, but also economically.

Basically taking exchange rate policy out of the hands of local governments has proven to be extraordinarily damaging. The separation of local governments from the ability to conduct their own monitoring policy has been extraordinarily damaging. Setting governments in competition with one another within the EU around the questions of tax policy and expenditure, without creating a more federal capacity to spend and address problems when they arise, has been extraordinarily problematic. I think a militantly independent central bank, insulated from democratic control, is not defensible.

Beyond that, the European Union has unfortunately participated in a general tendency to separate economic decision-making from democratic and representative bodies and rest that decision-making in what were initially faceless bureaucracies but they have now, more or less, acquired a bit of a face. We can now talk about these personalities. People know who Wolfgang Schäuble and Mario Draghi are but that is problematic in itself. These people should not be as important as they are and I think that calls, as Michael Noonan would have said, the practice of the European-----