Cooperative Behaviors in the European Union. Some Keynesian Reflections on the Way out from the Crisis

The paper connects the eurobonds issue to the political aspects of the current eurozone crisis. It firstly emphasizes that the possible future issuance of Eurobonds, or the refusal to do so, represent signs of the emergence of cooperative or, alternatively, non-cooperative behaviors among eurozone countries. Such a dichotomy, in turn, appears as a clear proof of the political roots of the crisis. Accordingly to this perspective, the persistent demand for a full European political integration as the decisive step out of the crisis is reviewed by analyzing a long list of works, ranging from the original federalist contributions by Mario Albertini, the conclusions of the Reflection Group on the future of the European Union, the final annual observations of the Governor of the Bank of Italy, among others. The authors sadly note the close similarity between the kind of problems raised by the above contributions and the observations by John Maynard Keynes on the blindness of European countries’ Heads of governments at the time of the Paris peace agreement at the end of the World War I. In the final part of the paper a comparison between eurozone macroeconomic records and public balance-financial data (i.e. the dynamics in the debt-to-GDP ratio and in the corresponding government bonds’ yields) from monetarily sovereign countries is carried out. Full political integration and mutualization of public debts through a central (federal) government budget seem to impede “debt intolerance” to emerge in monetarily sovereign countries. Once again, the political cooperation among eurozone member States turns out to be the ultimate solution to the existing problems.