Much like the US Senate, the whole point of the European Monetary Union was to suppress democracy and to take policy out of the hands of popularly elected governments. The EU, as a economic and monetary union and a weak to nonexistent political union, is a profoundly right wing project and it always has been.
It's truly hilarious to see people around here routinely confuse the existence of social democratic safety net programs that abound in European countries with the existence of the EU. Those programs were all the work of sovereign national governments with their own currencies, who had to recreate their societies out of the ashes of WWII. It helped that WWI had discredited and dismantled the vestiges of feudalism and monarchy, and WWII did the same to the parties and ideas that represented right wing responses to the end of feudalism. The Maastricht Treaty creating the EMU was drafted and ratified 40-50 years LATER and has NOTHING to do with social democracy, nor with safety nets and is in fact constitutionally HOSTILE to national governments as primary economic actors. First conceived of by conservative euro elites as a way for Europe to compete with the economic hegemony of the United States, the EU is rapidly annihilating the social-democratic welfare programs of its member states, along with the national sovereignty which created them, Americanizing them in a race to the bottom, and it is placing all of Europe's peoples under the vassalage of the banks.
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