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Tuesday 6 December 2016

Brexit and the Future of European Integration: A Trans-Atlantic Perspective


Ivaylo Iaydjiev (St Antony’s College, Oxford)

Speaker: Russell Kincaid (former IMF director)
Chair: Charles Enoch (St Antony’s College, Oxford)

Since the June referendum a lot of ink has been spilled on the causes and consequences of Brexit for the UK and for the future of European integration. Given the rather inward focus of much of the discussions so far, experts with more distance from the immediate issues can sometimes shed more light. This is exactly what Dr. Russell Kincaid offered to participants in this PEFM seminar by presenting a transatlantic perspective on Brexit and the EU.

Dr. Kincaid argued that the key issue from the US perspective is what Brexit tells us about the future of European integration. Overall, US policymakers see a number of structural problems that plague the EU and believed that they have a better chance to be addressed with the UK inside rather than outside the Union. Indeed, Brexit will not provide solutions to any of the EU and euro problems and instead the resulting complex negotiations risk turning into a powerful distraction for EU policymakers.

More fundamentally, Kincaid identified the source of many of the EU problems as the lack of a clear vision about the ultimate ambition. He recognized that the incremental approach was fundamental to the process of European integration, but noted that it has mostly been an elite-led project suffering from a democratic deficit. Until now, a permissive consensus has allowed integration to proceed, but today these elites find themselves instead constrained by distrust among European publics. 

Monday 5 December 2016

Book launch: Governance of the European Monetary Union

Blogpost: Alexandra Zeitz, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford

Speaker: Francisco Torres, LSE
Chair: Charles Enoch, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford

The edited volume Governance of the European Monetary Union, published by Routledge in 2016, is dedicated to the memory of Max Watson, honouring his scholarship, policy-making and commitment to interdisciplinary research and cross-disciplinary conversation. That commitment to reaching across disciplines and forging common understanding seems particularly necessary in these fraught and challenging times for Europe. 

Francisco Torres (LSE) introduced the book to an Oxford audience at a PEFM seminar in December. In his presentation, he outlined the contributing authors’ case for urgent institutional reforms in the European monetary union. Torres said the book, which he edited together with Erik Jones (Johns Hopkins University), is based on a broadly consensual narrative of the Eurozone crisis.

In this narrative the crisis is understood to have emerged from pervasive economic imbalances among Eurozone members, with flows primarily going from Germany, Netherlands, and France to Spain, Italy, Greece, and Ireland. Excessive public and private debt, which mostly took the form of foreign borrowing, left economies vulnerable to a “sudden stop” in credit. Torres explained that these imbalances arose out of EU countries’ failure to internalize the common objectives agreed upon in the Lisbon Treaty or the Stability and Growth Pact, with necessary reforms delayed in the absence of market pressure or binding and enforceable rules. 

Friday 2 December 2016

Brexit – what are the options?

Ivaylo Iaydjiev (St Antony’s College, Oxford)

Speaker: Anatole Kaletsky (Gavekal, Reuters, International Herald Tribune)
Chair: Adam Bennett (St Antony’s College, Oxford)

Since the referendum, the options facing Britain have been debated extensively (except by the government which remains tight-lipped), and the discussion is only likely to intensify further as the prospect of invoking Article 50 looms. Anatole Kaletsky, who last appeared before PEFM in January 2016 to discuss the evolution of capitalism in light of the global financial crisis in 2008, returned to PEFM eleven months later to divulge his thinking on the implications of the shock Brexit referendum of 2016, a political and economic event that has finally eclipsed the events of 2008 as the inexorable topic of everyone’s conversation (at least in the UK). Kaletsky’s overarching thesis was that there was still a real possibility that Brexit might not actually take place.

Kaletsky began by deciphering the underlying reasons for the Brexit vote. In light of the US presidential election, it is arguable that the referendum had less to do with particular European issues but is rather symptomatic of a global phenomenon sweeping across the West, driven by demographics, educational attainment and regional disparities. However, Kaletsky sees limited evidence in globalization driving the voting patterns, noting that supporters of Brexit usually had slightly higher incomes than average and were to a large extent outside the labour force (chiefly older retired voters and non-working women). Indeed, those potentially most affected in terms of the impact of immigration on jobs – those just entering the labour market, see freedom of movement not as a threat, but as a benefit of the EU.