Euro or Chaos? Towards New Forms of Cooperation in Europe

Bruno Frey sees a « Europe à la carte » replacing the current forms of cooperation “if the euro collapses”.

Excerpts:

“… no chaos leading to an economic and political collapse of Europe is to be expected. Such a view is far too pessimistic.

The individual countries in Europe will quickly form new treaties among themselves. Collaboration will be maintained in all those areas where it has worked well. Some countries will remain in a newly formed and smaller Eurozone, for which the appropriate treaties will be designed. A similar reconstitution will take place with respect to Schengen, which will then encompass different members. Only those countries that find it advantageous will join a new convention on the free movement of persons. In contrast, those nations that do not find such new treaties attractive, or that are not admitted to them by the other members, will not join.”

The result, in a word, will be a new set of networks, partly overlapping as are the present European Union and the NATO, Schengen, and Euro treaties, substituting to an attempted construction of a singular hierarchical order (a superstate) in the centralized, XXth century, tradition.

This will be quite in line with the general organizational trend of the last quarter of the XXth century and of the first quarter of the XXIst, that is, the “shrinking hand” of hierarchies giving way to the development of the new network organization of large firms.

See my co-authored paper on the “shrinking hand” here.

And read the Frey piece here.