Mario Draghi now criticises the neoliberal and Atlanticist EU he promoted and enforced

Draghi is the clearest expression of the kakistocratic nature of EU politics, where failure is not punished but rewarded, and where incompetent leaders routinely fail upwards

I’ve written for UnHerd about the absurd eulogising of Mario Draghi — “Super Mario”, as the sycophants call him — in the European mainstream discourse. Following his recent speech Friday at the annual meeting of the influential Catholic activist group Comunione e Liberazione in Rimini, Italy, Draghi is once again being praised as one of the continent’s most insightful thinkers for his blunt assessment of the sorry state of Europe.

Yet this reputation is profoundly undeserved. Draghi’s so-called analyses usually amount to little more than stating the obvious — facts that are evident to anyone not blinded by ideology or vested interests.

What makes them stand out is not his intellectual depth but the sorry state of Europe’s mainstream discourse, so steeped in delusion and detachment from reality that even the most elementary observations are hailed as groundbreaking. His acclaim, in short, says less about Draghi’s brilliance than about the poverty of European public debate.

But even more importantly, while Draghi may correctly grasp the surface symptoms of Europe’s malaise, he consistently fails — deliberately so — in properly diagnosing their underlying causes. As I write in the article:

Draghi is right to say that the EU’s neoliberal policy framework — based upon state retrenchment, fiscal austerity, wage compression and obsession with boosting exports — has weakened Europe. It’s a concept he conveyed in even more explicit terms on other occasions. However, what Draghi fails to mention is that he himself was one of the major architects and enforcers of that model.

Already in the early Nineties, when he was director general of the Italian finance ministry, he emerged as a leading advocate of the concept of vincolo esterno (“external constraint”) — the idea that only by “tying the hands” of national governments via a political-economic straitjacket could neoliberal reforms, which lacked popular support, be forced through. That external constraint was, of course, the European Union, and above all the single currency, whose roadmap was laid out in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. In that position, Draghi was also instrumental in driving forward the large-scale privatisation of Italy’s state-owned enterprises.

Over the next three decades, moving between the private sector (notably Goldman Sachs) and senior public posts, Draghi established himself as one of the foremost champions of neoliberal orthodoxy. This role reached its fullest expression during his tenure as president of the ECB from 2011 to 2019 […].

Overall, then, few figures over the past decades have been more unwavering in their commitment to advancing undemocratic neoliberalism than Mario Draghi. But his responsibility for Europe’s downward spiral extends well beyond his role as neoliberal enforcer-in-chief. In his speech last week, he effectively conceded that the EU had been vassalised by the United States. Yet, once again, Draghi omitted any mention of his own role in bringing about this sorry state of affairs: he has always been a staunch Atlanticist, and as such has played a key role in ensuring the EU’s structural subordination to Washington. […]

All this raises an obvious question: how is it that Draghi continues to be an enlightened statesman for denouncing the consequences of flawed policies he himself promoted? In a normal world, he would be laughed off the stage — or pelted with rotten eggs.

Read the article here. If you’re a paid subscriber and can’t access the article, write to me at thomasfazi82@gmail.com.

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Thomas Fazi

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