Claus Offe: Time is running out for EMU reform, as divide between winners and losers grows

MF: As the largest Member State and as the economic powerhouse of Europe, one would expect Germany to somehow serve as a benign hegemon, capable of reconciling her own national interests with the interests of others and especially with the  long term economic and political sustainability of the EU

CO: During the long crisis Germany has in fact largely abdicated its responsibility in and for Europe. The German government’s obsession with rules, austerity and conditionality has been the main driving force behind the growing divergence of EMU economies and the devastating social shocks which has hit Southern member states.  Germany has tried to push through her own economic and social model, based on flawed assumptions that we might call a "flower pot theory”. Such theory is the favorite mode of thinking of winners. Their message: the rules that have worked so advantageous in "our" case are the same that would work to the benefit of "you" as well – if only you could overcome yourself to follow "our" rules which you are most welcome, in fact required, to adopt and follow. Flowers in separate flower pots develop similarly if you use the same seeds, the same fertilizers etc. What is wrong with this comfortable mode of thinking is that it ignores and denies systemic interdependence. However, there is a powerful intellectual antidote. It is captured in a sentence by authors  Mathijs and Blyth, often quoted in the scholarly literature on the EU. It reads: "The Eurozone as a whole cannot become more like Germany. Germany could only be like Germany because the other countries were not." Germany is like Germany, we might add, because of its reaping of unreciprocated advantages from the system of EU member states and their interdependencies – the opposite of separate flower pots.

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