Europe

For the first ten months of 2019, the European Central Bank (ECB) will still be chaired by Mario Draghi. His term, which lasted for eight years, cannot be further extended. In the meantime, Heads of State and Government will ponder the choice of his successor. During this last period of Draghi’s presidency, difficult decisions are expected, which the Board of Directors will have to take in a concerted manner while promoting harmony and continuity as the presidency changes.

It’s the moment we’ve all (not) been waiting for: the 2019 European Parliament elections. As if Europe didn’t have enough problems at the moment, citizens of the rebranded EU-27 are set to go to the polls in May in what many observers consider the most consequential EP election since its founding in 1979.

The year just ended has been marked by exhausting negotiations between London and Brussels. While the European Union has shown a significant – indeed, perhaps unexpected – degree of cohesion behind its chief negotiator Michel Barnier, the United Kingdom has turned out less and less united behind Prime Minister Theresa May. It is worth recalling that the Brexit referendum originated in the (unsuccessful) attempt by her predecessor David Cameron to heal the deep divisions within the Conservative party on EU membership.

Real growth in the global economy over the last two years (2017 and 2018) was 3.7% a year, the advanced countries (led by the USA) managing 2.5% and the emerging countries around 5%, buoyed by the excellent (and continuing) performance of the south-east Asian economies, especially China and India. The International Monetary Fund expects a slow-down in 2019; but the question all observers are asking themselves is whether that slowing will take the unpleasant form of a world-wide crisis just as we had almost forgotten the last one.  

Are we really isolated within Europe? The quick and simple reply, judging from immediate experience, could be “yes”: we have given Europe problems, and have not managed to find either agreement or allies ready to support us.

A closer examination and more carefully articulated response, however, might lead to a more nuanced conclusion.

Is Europe falling apart? A deliberately provocative question, though grounded in more than trivialities. Our first answer could seem paradoxical, but has the facts on its side: the enormous difficulties faced by the United Kingdom in actually implementing the outcome of the Brexit referendum show that Europe is too strong to fall apart.

With the so-called “Gilets jaunes movement”, France has gone through a political mobilization which is both “déjà vu” and radically new. The “déjà vu” dimension is linked to the historical tradition of protest and political violence in a country where the representative channels and the intermediary groups are and always have been sociologically weak and politically illegitimate since the 1789 revolution. This French peculiarity has little to teach to other democratic systems which are usually better equipped with instruments of mediation both at the societal and political level.

The escalating trade war between the United States and China will be one of the hot issues during the Buenos Aires G20 meeting. This trade conflict, probably the most important since the second world war, started last January with the US introducing safeguard tariffs on imports from the world of solar panels and tariff rate-quotas on imports from the world of washing machines. These tariffs have been introduced in response to requests by US manufacturers.

As G20 leaders arrive in Buenos Aires to start their 13th summit on November 30, 2018, many observers wonder if they will fail, for the first time, to produce a collective communiqué at their summit’s end. Most assume that if they do, it will contain only a collection of watered-down, general platitudes, in sharp contrast to the 529 precise, future-oriented, politically obligatory commitments that they made at their last summit, in Hamburg, Germany, in July 2017.