Democracy in Europe is no more. The New York Times has a piece on how unelected technocrats have been called in to pull Europe back from the brink of chaos. In other words, leaders who were elected by the people are being replaced by wonks who don't answer to the people. In Greece, the country that exported democracy to the world, George Papandreou has stepped aside for someone who has served both the European Central Bank and the Boston Fed and in Italy, there is a view that only a technocrat can dislodge the entrenched culture of political patronage that has grown worse under Mr. Berlusconi. And so Berlusconi will be replaced by economist and former European commissioner Mario Monti.
The Financial Times says that getting rid of popularly elected leaders is the only way to save Europe. "In effect, eurozone policymakers have decided to suspend politics as normal in two countries because they judge it to be a mortal threat to Europe's monetary union. They have ruled that European unity, a project more than 50 years in the making, is of such overriding importance that politicians accountable to the people must give way to unelected experts who can keep the show on the road."
The problem is that the European Union is slashing its growth forecast and warning that Europe is facing a long recession, if it's lucky. No technocrat can handle that. Getting the debt under control by increasing tax revenue when an economy is heading backwards is impossible. So the technocrats will fail.
But then, as Christopher Booker writes in The Telegraph, the EU's original architects never saw the EU being a democracy. When they first conceived the plans back in the 1920s, they envisaged a United States of Europe, ruled by a government of unelected technocrats. And so finally, it's happened. Not that it will help, Europe's problems are too entrenched.
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