Hypocrites in Germany demand EU Reform, but Only as it Suits Germany – Mish Talk

Germany Demands Small Countries Give Up Their Veto on Foreign Policy

Please consider the Eurointelligence article, What Scholz Wants From the EU.

Ask what you can do for the EU, and not what the EU can do for you. That would be our response to Olaf Scholz. He demanded in a newspaper article this morning that the EU abolishes the national veto on foreign policy

Smaller EU countries would be mad to give up the veto in foreign policy in our view unless Germany commits to a shift towards a more EU-compatible economic model. The two are toxically intertwined. There was not a word on this from Scholz, no grand bargain on offer.

The fundamental problem we see is the complete lack of awareness inside Germany of how its own political choices affect other EU countries. 

Writing in FAZ this morning, Scholz is framing Germany’s problem as one of overdependence on Russia. But it goes deeper. The dependence on Russian gas is intertwined with a gas-guzzling economic model that requires large export surpluses simply to stay afloat. The times when Germany’s current account is in balance, as it is now, are the times when the country is in economic crisis. Germany dependence on Russia and China was not an accident. It was part of a wider strategy.

Others should respond to Scholz’ proposals not by rejecting them outright, but by making demands of their own. The most important would be, in our view, to complete the banking and capital markets union, which would leverage the EU’s ability to impose economic sanctions on third countries. We would even go further and insist on a full fiscal union, if only to prevent a situation where a common EU foreign policy is subjected to sectarian German and French economic interests.