Greece is haemorrhaging its sovereignty

One of the upshots of the euro was always a certain loss of self-determination. Even on a basic level, its member states had relinquished control of their monetary policy and handed it over, wholesale, to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. But — as James suggested last week — it’s only now that we’re seeing the dismal endpoint of that equation. The conditions attached to the bailout packages mean that Greece’s fiscal policy is ever more decided in Brussels, and decreasingly in Athens.

Which is why Jean-Claude Junker’s comments from over the weekend are worth returning to now, as an example of this unforgiving process. “The sovereignty of Greece will be massively limited,” is how the Eurogroup chief put it to a German magazine. “For the forthcoming wave of privatisations they will need, for example, a solution based on a model of Germany’s ‘Treuhand agency'” Which is to say, he’s pushing for the extensive