Wednesday, May 30, 2012
When all the choices are bad
When the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement was held I flew back from France to vote and if I still had an address in Ireland I'd be doing the same tomorrow. Trouble is I'm not sure what way I'd vote, not because I don't agree with Paul Krugman's cogent arguments for voting against the austerity pact, but because the price Ireland might pay for doing so could be really terrible. It comes down to a political calculation. If an Irish No vote was likely to provoke a crisis in the entire strategy of the European Union it would be worth the risk, but if not the chances are Ireland would be made an example of to illustrate just how dangerous it is to think that you really retain real political agency as a small country in the Union. In the end we probably should do the brave thing and get up on the barricade, but it would be nice if the Belgians or the Luxembourgeois got to be at the point of crisis and not us. It would also be comfortable to be able to persuade myself that the austerity programme is so irrational that it will collapse without any help, and so we could vote safely with a good conscience. But a sad history has confirmed that economic relations do not impose rationality on us and if we don't attend to the political moment on its own terms it just makes matters worse. Once more into the breach....
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