Maastricht Treaty article written by Dr. Luciano Barra Caracciolo. This article is part of a series of articles concerning the European treaties signed by politicians corrupt by Banks and lobbies and their disastrous consequences on the peoples. Information is power. 

THE. The problem we must start from is whether the economic model imposed on us by Maastricht is suitable for the so-called production specialization that has proudly characterized the post-war Italian development. The answer, in the terms suggested by Guido Carli in 1974, as soon as he had the occasion to comment on the first project of a “single currency” contained in the so-called Werner report of 1971, can only be negative. Equally negative, at the time, was the response of eminent economists and managers of the national economy, such as Luigi Spaventa, Caffè, Graziani and Sarcinelli himself. Now, despite the favorable second thoughts to the "external constraint" that, for many, intervened in the 80s-90s, the results of those correct "prophecies" are there for all to see.

Denying this causal root of the Italian crisis no longer responds to any realistic political convenience.

II. The second question I propose is: would this model of economic and monetary union have been allowed by the Constitution?
The answer is of crucial importance: no political exponent who has the effective interest of his country at heart should miss the enormous support that a barrier based on the Constitution can provide for the very appropriation of its role. And we mean, to place ourselves on the constitutional level, a barrier at least equal to that which, for example, believes it can oppose the Federal Republic of Germany on the basis of its national interest sanctioned by the prevalence of its fundamental constitutional clauses unilaterally affirmed by its parliament and by his constitutional court.
The role that makes it possible to recover the re-appropriation of the constitutional model - founded on the principle of reciprocity and equal conditions established by the same article 11- is that, to better understand:

a) creator of political direction;
b) the holder of effective economic and fiscal policy instruments provided for in the Constitution itself and considered functional by the principles fundamental to full employment, understood as full use of the factors of production.
Without this effectiveness of powers, the "Europe wants it" now condemns any Italian government, and any level of territorial government (theme very current), within a short time, to economic-fiscal policies which, by violating the vital productive forces that STRUCTURALLY characterize our country, quickly lead to the loss of consensus.

III. The first and easiest test of constitutional compatibility that we can do is the one that goes through Article 11 of the Constitution:

“Italy repudiates war as an instrument of offense to the freedom of other peoples and as a means of resolving international disputes; it allows, on conditions of parity with other states, to the limitations of sovereignty necessary for an order that ensures peace and justice among nations; promotes and favors international organizations aimed at this purpose. "

The interpretative story that, by the Constitutional Court, has undergone this article, has clarified its character as a permanent clause of the Charter capable of impressing on relations of international law a constant compatibility with the fundamental principles, mandatory and not even subject to constitutional revision, contained , at least, in the first 12 articles of the Constitution.
These same fundamental principles, however, are placed in a necessary relationship, according to Mortati and the Constituent Assembly in its majority overwhelming, with the rules of the economic Constitution and with the organizational ones, but of "guarantee", of the Constitution itself; without the immediate and inalienable applicability of these further constitutional provisions, the first 12 articles would remain, said the constituents themselves, mere principles devoid of juridical effectiveness.

Only by recalling the premise just developed can we understand the sentence of the Constitutional Court on the subject of the so-called “Control limits” to international law of European derivation. The last and significant ruling on this issue, sentence 238 of 23 October 2014, is in the following terms:

"There is no doubt, in fact, and it has been confirmed on several occasions by this Court, that the fundamental principles of the constitutional order and the inalienables of the person constitute a «limit to the entry […] of the generally recognized international norms to which the legal system Italian law complies according to art. 10, first paragraph of the Constitution " (judgments n. 48 of 1979 and n. 73 of 2001) and act as "counter-limits" to the entry of the European Union regulations (ex plurimis: sentences n. 183 of 1973, n. 170 of 1984, n. 232 of 1989, n.168 of 1991, n.284 of 2007), as well as as limits to the entry of the implementing rules of the Lateran Pacts and the Concordat (judgments n.18 of 1982, n.32, n.31 and n. 30 of 1971). In other words, they represent the identifying and indispensable elements of the constitutional order, for this very reason also removed from the constitutional revision (articles 138 and 139 of the Constitution: so in sentence no. 1146 of 1988). "

If what has been said is valid with respect to general international law referred to in Article 10 of the Constitution, all the more reason it acts as a limit to international law "by treaty", even if "European", which is a source of lower rank, in the Constitution and in law international, with respect to the "general". And the Court, while not being required to say so in the dispute that gave rise to this 2014 ruling, did so significantly reaffirmed.

The statement is therefore made with a "clarity" that leaves no misunderstanding.

IV. Well, the Maastricht Treaty with all its subsequent developments does not correspond to any of the conditions set by Article 11, which is a principle fundamental of the Constitution not subject to lawful revision. To reach this conclusion, however, it would be necessary for the Constitutional Court, beyond the abstract enunciation of the counter-limits, which have never reached an application that effectively barred, in concrete cases, the application of the rules of the European treaties, to take a coherent position on the cases, which are currently not lacking, of financial and reform laws that seriously limit fundamental rights in application of EU impositions.
First: there was no level playing field. If a single limit was set ab initio, and moreover INTENDED as IMMUTABLE, of deficit-indebtedness public debt, the burden of rigidly reaching that limit, imposed on countries with different public debt burdens, would have been immediately and severely disparate.

Suffice it to say that Germany and France, in the early 1990s, did not exceed an interest expense of 3%; and LATER HAVE NEVER GET OVER IT. Our burden at the time was about four times the amount. And still it is practically double. 
According to: any accession to a treaty establishing an international organization can be ONLY AIMED TO ENSURE PEACE AND JUSTICE BETWEEN NATIONS. The Constituents explicitly dealt with this point, excluding for conclusive facts the economic treaties that were not strictly and objectively functional for this purpose.

And hardly an economic treaty, inevitably free-trade in nature, actually aims to this end. And this is all the more true for TTIP.

Now, the Union, beyond emphatic and impracticable statements according to the same provisions of the treaties, is not aimed at this aim of peace: the fruit of a vision of free-trade, it is AS SUCH, led to the enunciated and exasperated COMMERCIAL COMPETITION BETWEEN STATES. This is a competition, as we have seen, based on the express theorization of the "social" market economy which has become a supranational parameter (Article 3, paragraph 3 of the TEU treaty), and therefore, transposed from the original setting of Germany to a free trade model euro-binding: that is, conforming to the theoretical roots of Ricardo and the more recent model of free-trade, Hecksher-Olhin-Samuelson.

It is a situation of "internationalized opening" of the economies of the individual states, which realizes the principle of specialization of the respective productive sectors, that is, but massive and compulsory deindustrialisation of entire supply chains that have become uncompetitive within the selective pressure exerted by the single currency : the principle of specialization, according to the parameter of “comparative advantages”, is invariably favorable, and increasingly, to the economically stronger countries.

Furthermore, coordinating with the liberalization of the circulation of capital and with the constraint of a fixed and invariable exchange rate, that is with the intrinsic effect of the single currency, the free-trade system of the treaty deprives Italy of any possibility of correcting competitiveness that is not entrusted to alignment, a posteriori, with traditional German practices, commercially aggressive, therefore based on wage dumping and indirect fiscal support for own exports.

However, these latter conditions of correction, if adopted not as a preventive measure (i.e. as a priori position of mercantilism, in the case of Germany), but following a current account imbalance crisis, -
inevitably generated by this type of regulatory framework of the treaties and of the single currency, they force the pursuing State to pursue fiscal policies that have no other purpose, as Monti himself clarified, of "killing internal demand".

That is, by increasing the tax burden and reducing public spending, imports are restricted, but also, inevitably, an unprecedented high level of unemployment is caused. The consequent deflation does not even allow to respect the fiscal parameters of "rigor" that are linked to this type of forced correction; that is, obliged by the Maastricht rules and by their inevitable development, logical and economic, which materialized in the fiscal compact and in the incorporation into the Constitution of that totally "spurious" provision, with respect to the fundamental principles affirmed by the Constitutional Court, which is the balance of balance.

Here too the results are there for everyone to see: never has the spirit of cooperation and common and solidarity belonging to the European house been so low: I would not like to have to recall the Greek story and the more recent one in Portugal. Peace and justice within the European continent have never been at such a low level since 1945.


V. I dwell on this exasperated conflict between states, with the serious deterioration of the cooperative spirit and of the same mutual "trust" (buried under the contemptuous judgments of the country which thus imposed the mercantilist model of the treaties); it is the necessary corollary of what was sanctioned from the outset in the Maastricht Treaty and also constitutes the means with which one is, - in a "veiled" way (or rather, in Amato's words, "illegible"), and therefore not understandable to the electorates and even to the executing parliaments in the process of ratifying the treaties - the neo-liberal model of deactivation of European economic democracies re-affirmed.

Among these, we cannot hide it, by virtue of its more advanced Constitution, and the previous and extraordinary dynamism of its economy, Italy has been the "big target" and even preferential.

This is because, we repeat, the treaty, in its fundamental rules, only promotes a highly competitive economy, between states, and price stability which is the typically free trade corollary.

Furthermore, the treaty, - with the articles 123-124 and 125 TFUAnd, it establishes the prohibition of any monetary financing in favor of the States, both from European institutions, such as the ECB, and from other States: that is, it prohibits, as a mandatory rule and characterizing the structure of the monetary union, precisely that federal government of transfers that today are unrealistically indicated as a solution, forgetting that Germany has in the meantime adhered to the EU treaty as this was, once and for all, explicitly excluded.

A further confirmation of this is the same "apparent" clause of solidarity ex Article 222 TFEU: it also explicitly excludes, that is, prohibits any solidarity nature; and it does so, in no uncertain terms, relegating to the availability of
symbolic budget of the Union, even interventions in favor of individual States in the event of serious terrorist attacks and major natural disasters, (such as the earthquakes and floods that have hit and affect our country), or in the event of sensational humanitarian emergencies (what is the current problem of uncontrolled and deliberately uncontrollable migratory flows).

Solidarity resources are programmatically lacking in the Union: the political will of individual states to help another member of the EU, very hypothetical and remote, according to the same art.222, can be exercised through bilateral agreements, which, however, the States could even before, and in any case, conclude even without this being, in a purely emphatic way, foreseen by the treaty!

But, as the Greek crisis and the treatment reserved for PIGS debtors, there certainly do not appear to be conditions of availability and cooperation to face, in an adequate and solidarity way, any type of emergency within the Union (indeed, the interventions of individual States to alleviate, in the event of a natural disaster, the difficulties of businesses in the affected and often "razed" territories are considered "state aid" and hit with repayment obligations borne by economic operators and sanctions borne by the state that seeks to "rebuild" ...)

And therefore this exclusion of solidarity (fiscal and any possible social policy of "rescue" to economic imbalances between different members) between States of the Union cannot fail to be considered an essential clause to which, with all evidence, the "stronger" countries ( that is, those who started from traditional and structural lower inflation rates) have coessentially subordinated their adhesion:

qhis political and economic foundation of the European Union provides us and must never be forgotten:

it constitutes the first, realistic and fundamental datum on the margins of negotiation actually practicable to change the treaties.
Therefore peace and justice are not pursued by the EU but the neo-liberal and free-trade competitive logic of strengthening the strongest countries to the detriment of those who, for reasons still not clear, have suffered this content of the treaty.

 

Third: the Constitution does not admit TRANSFERS of sovereignty, and neither could any democratic Constitution admit them, because it fears the irreversible danger of compromising the MODERN ROLE OF SOVEREIGNTY:


this consists in CARE OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS and the well-being of ITS CITIZENS. Because, let it be clear, this is the substance that, according to modern democratic constitutionalism, has sovereignty today. And therefore the sacrifice of sovereignty is placed in a direct equation with the sacrifice of fundamental rights sanctioned by the Constitutions themselves.

The Constitution admits, or rather theoretically “admitted”, only LIMITATIONS, that is, reversible and conscious attenuations OF THEIR OWN ECONOMIC POLICY INSTRUMENTS, inseparable from the pursuit of the fundamental social rights of Italian citizens; and provided such limitations were permanently aimed at promoting the effective welfare of his parents
citizens.

The set of things said so far, should therefore exclude the constitutional legitimacy of any constraint deriving from an economic treaty that IS NOT SUBJECT TO A TERM and is not aimed at strengthening rather than restricting the fundamental rights of its citizens, as well as eliminating, rather than to accentuate the economic and political tensions between states
involved.

Having to be brief, and hoping to be able to integrate this relationship with an exchange of questions and answers, I come to realize the effects of the functioning of EMU characterized by the confluent combination of

A) rigid and perennial limits on public debt;
B) single currency involving - obviously - fixed exchange rates that are equally immutable. 

The second aspect is easy to say: it is enough to compare the trend of the balances of our current account of the BoP starting from the fixing of the parity with the mark (as is known, occurred on the relative exchange rate of 1996: for Germany a positive reversal and for the 'Italy the reverse).

The waning of foreign demand, in a destructive and manifest progression, is evident. And it involves a FIRST EFFECT of CONTRACTION OF THE TAX BASE which immediately forced (since the post-Maastricht need to respect the "convergence criteria"), Italy to increase the tax burden and carry out massive privatizations that
they dismantled the public industrial sector, a true flagship of our manufacturing, in a growing and seemingly endless pursuit.

The first effect mentioned, that relating to the fiscal rigidity of the treaty (on deficit and public debt) is even more evident: if I cut the public deficit, I inevitably cut the formation of savings through taxation and by cutting public spending, I inevitably reduce private income. , and the GDP itself. Especially if the passive burden of interest on the debt is higher than the deficit ceiling allowed me (unlike for other "competing" countries).

This, in punishing the formation of national savings, contracts, as the eloquent trend of gross and net investments recorded in Italy starting from the financial maneuvers that followed since 1992, reduces the effective possibility of investment; consequently, it must be said, we are even more forced to increase the tax burden due to the further lower growth, or even to its negative balance, with the constant lower tax base deriving from the output gap, or from the recession, generated by primary balances.


THIS POINT DESERVES A DEEPENING.

What is missing, in the entire Italian ruling class, is, if anything, the degree of widespread awareness that makes the solution suggested here again shared and operative from the beginning of this intervention: that is, the recovery of the CONSTITUTIONAL MODEL OF PARTICIPATED DEMOCRACY AND WORK, in all its forms and instruments constitutionally
sanctioned (which is particularly clear in the intent of the Constituent Assembly).

To achieve this goal, a progressive channel of communication, critically argued, should be built and documented ideas and explanations proposed for months and years: but we would arrive in time, before it is too late, in the face of the obstinate denial of the current demand crisis. (attested by persistent deflation and high unemployment)?


No: and we know why. The Italian media system, with a compactness probably unparalleled in Europe, continues and defends the indefensible, against all evidence and repeating the same slogans for 30 years, without even bothering to update them.

A disturbing spectacle of collective blindness: but if for 30 years the same "normotypes" of rulers have always proposed the same recipes as "new", complaining, if anything, that THOSE FIRST did not have the courage to carry them out to the extent necessary (i.e. not destroying enough domestic demand and the level of employment), the incongruity of
all that?

Self Beloved, Padoa Schioppa, Monti, they enter the halls of power, each in the moment of his respective "crisis" and say that medicine is always the same and only that higher dosages were needed, it does not come to mind to any sick person, or rather to all the "sick-guilty ones "To get out of bed and run away?

Yet this is not the case in Italy: rather, we are witnessing the sleight of hand of the attack on the tax burden, assuming to mitigate it by reducing public spending.

That is, the sick, unaware that medicine - reduction and "privatization" of the state - has rather heavy side effects - that is, the tax burden, originating from divorce and the Maastricht parameters -, throw their heads down against these effects , but clamoring for further additional intoxication of the same lethal drug.

A very visible game, but hidden with this method:

- GDP is stagnating or we are experiencing recession (for 20 years following Maastricht and then with the ECB-fiscal compact policies);

- spending is growing less and less than GDP; despite having its natural tendency to remain in its structural growth dynamics slightly higher than that of GDP, for demographic and technological-environmental reasons,
AS IN ALL CIVIL COUNTRIES OF THE WORLD;

- iThe absolute volume of public spending, however, despite this trend (typical of all civil systems), assumes a decreasing value (i.e. no longer subject to its natural structural increase). And in fact, "real" primary public expenditure, net of inflation, according to the European database AMECO, also in relation to GDP, decreases, even if
having been the GDP in even more marked decline. And this despite the growth in social security and welfare charges: we are talking about the automatic stabilizers that help in the event of an economic and employment crisis, due to the explosion of unemployment and therefore to the various forms of "social safety nets": which will be, indeed already are, the next target of cuts in the medium term !;

the level of services provided to citizens necessarily falls, at all territorial levels: the blame is given in moral terms to the State, as a national solidarity body, and to its territorial articulations. But there is no managerial virtue that holds if, beyond the contingent ballets of the figures, the ordoliberal program of the treaties must be implemented, which leads to the State
minimum, to balance the budget, to the State as a family: a program that leaves every possible solution to economic crises to flexibilisation and precariousness of work, and to wage deflation;

- following this trajectory, further reduction of public intervention is then invoked; hence a further decline in GDP, a further decline in tax revenues, and a further reproach of the excessive incidence of expenditure!

It is forgotten ("cleverly") that not only the run-up to the decrease in public spending is reflected in the level of services, but that it is the most incident cause of the decline in GDP, given that the fiscal multiplier of expenditure, for the well-known law of Haveelmo , is double that of taxation (in practice, if I finance 100 tax cuts with 100 spending cuts, GDP will decrease by 100).

We have said of how unemployment makes public welfare expenditure incompressible, if not increasing, which is then a desperate support for demand and, fiscally, an uphill remedy for the contraction of the tax base.

Even if this welfare expenditure were to decrease, because there is an illusory statistical decrease in unemployment, by counting the under-employed (atypical, casual workers, involuntary part-time and redundant workers), often with incomes below a decent subsistence, the result is in any case the growing phenomenon of working-poors. And again, the urgent needs to correct the demographic trend of the Italian population and to rehabilitate an area abandoned by essential public intervention (ie minimum protection, "survival" of the territory) are betrayed.

But by dramatically reducing the structural functions of public intervention, as is evident in Italy, this is to the detriment of countercyclical intervention in support of the real economy (now impossible due to the need to achieve a balanced budget). And this to the detriment of public investments, in programmatic decrease, and of the same relationship between public intervention and the widespread system of small and medium-sized enterprises.

A propaganda nightmare (€ urotrained, but carried out with enthusiasm by our governments), which starting from a crisis of demand becomes destructive of supply and, ultimately, of Italian society itself.

Today, then, we must take note of the medium to long-term unsustainability of this situation precisely on the indispensable private investments - investments that the private sector can autonomously generate thanks to the formation of PRIVATE savings allowed by the public deficit. Hence the growing and now irreversible DEINDUSTRIALIZATION I provide only one data:

"... in the last decade over twenty-seven thousand Italian companies have outsourced production abroad, creating over 1.5 million foreign jobs and leaving the State with a 15 billion euro bill for social safety nets ... only 10% of these companies are you go beyond the European borders (especially in Asia) while the remainder remained in Europe, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and above all in the Balkan countries ”.

But another fundamental aspect must be added.

EVEN WHEN, through this compression of domestic demand and therefore inflation, THE HOPED EXPORT GROWTH IS REALIZED, this is not INDIFFERENT on WHO REALIZES THE SAVINGS deriving from this economic policy imposed by EMU: an exclusively export-led growth which, by the way, no one has EVER realized
with an OVERVALUED CURRENCY LIKE THE EURO, not even Germany (in fact for it the euro is UNDERVALUED currency).

But let's get to the constitutional reflections of belonging to the euro area.  

Being outside the system of constraints imposed by the single currency, the Italian State could have activated normal anticyclical policies, in the case of stagnation and recession, setting the public spending deficit to an extent that effectively supports demand (as all countries have done of the Union not belonging to the euro area).

Among other things, this support in Italy has practically ceased since the post-Maastricht through a spectacular series of PRIMARY BALANCES, unparalleled in the history of the modern economy. In this case, having available the flexibility of the exchange rate and fiscal sovereignty, the savings could have corresponded to full employment trend (ie it would have translated almost entirely into investments).

And this is, or would be, the explicit will of articles 1, 3, second paragraph, and 4 of the Constitution. We recall the fundamental statement of article 4:

"The Republic recognizes the right to work for all citizens and promotes the conditions that make this right effective".

The rule refers, it is clear, to any type of work that is the prevailing expression of the citizen's personal activity. While the “promoting the conditions ”had been clearly understood by the Constituents as the use of the economic-fiscal policy instruments provided for by articles 35-47 of the Constitution, that is, by that economic Constitution which is emptied and paralyzed by the breaking of the European treaties and the external constraint.

The Constitution also wants, with the STRICTLY connected art.47 of the Constitution, that SAVINGS BE DIFFUSED, that is, not placed only in the financial profits and of a limited number of exporters.

And this explicitly to achieve the objectives that the Constitution considers indispensable and connected to the very fundamental principles just mentioned: favoring the access of every citizen to home ownership, to direct agricultural ownership and to equity investment "in the large production complexes of the country" ; and the Constitution also wants savings to be aimed at favoring the protection and development of the artisan enterprise (Article 45, paragraph 2, of the Constitution), that is, of SMEs correctly understood.

Therefore, if I ZERO OR REDUCE THE DEFICIT according to an IMMUTABLE CAP DETERMINED BY A TREATY, the possible savings will be, at best, concentrated in the exporting companies - provided that the Nation is able to keep the ownership - and will be NULL OR NEGATIVE FOR ALL THE REST OF THE ITALIAN POPULATION.

Therefore, following the policy dictated by joining the euro, the Constitution is completely subverted (as Guido Carli pointed out):

not only will full employment and income protection be irreversibly abandoned, but there will be, - and indeed there has been-, ua drastic reduction in access to home ownership, with a crisis in the construction sector, a reduction in the survival capacity of artisan businesses, with progressive destruction of the fabric of SMEs, and a dramatic spread of insolvencies, that is, of "bad debts" which then trigger the credit crunch-.

All this is under your eyes today: and the Constitution does not allow it. Or it wouldn't "allow" it.

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