Author / Erik Jones

Unknown's avatar

Posts by Erik Jones

Director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute.
by Erik Jones

Europe Is an Unsafe Haven after Trump’s Victory

The surprise victory of Donald J. Trump in the United States (US) presidential elections briefly pushed the euro, the Swiss franc, and the Danish kroner up against the dollar. It also pushed down the yields on high quality sovereign debt and it temporarily sent equity markets into the red. This was all to be expected. Like almost everyone, market participants thought Hilary Clinton would gain the White House alongside a predominantly Republican Congress. They placed their bets to take advantage of another four years of competent administration and legislative logjam. A Trump victory upset that calculation and so some of those market participants were trying to safeguard their capital until they could get a better sense of what is happening. The assumption they made was that Europe can act as a safe-haven. Unfortunately, that assumption is mistaken.

Continue reading →

by Erik Jones

The Left in Europe: A House Divided

The center left in Europe is ceding ground almost everywhere. The British Labour Party not only lost the May 2015 elections but then threw itself into the arms of Jeremy Corbyn. Barring a Brexit debacle for the ruling conservatives, Labour is unlikely to return to power in the next decade despite Corbyn’s success at recruiting new party activists. The Spanish socialist workers party (PSOE), having been weakened by widespread corruption, jettisoned its leader and looks ready to offer tacit support for a minority government led by the conservative Popular Party (PP) to avoid facing the voters this December.

Continue reading →

by Erik Jones

The Future of Central Bank Independence

Central bank independence is under attack. This is true particularly in the United States. When the dust began to settle on the presidential primaries in spring 2016, three of the four leading candidates – one Democrat and two Republicans – supported legislation to audit the Federal Reserve (or Fed) and to compel it to follow a rigid and transparent rule for changing policy in response to changes in a limited range of macroeconomic variables. The reason has a lot to do with the same populist resentment that swirls around global trade. And while the Fed has not received the attention given to the trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, for example, it is arguably just as important.

Continue reading →

by Erik Jones

Italy’s Referendum Risks

The U.S. Ambassador to Italy, John Phillips, caused a minor uproar by telling the Italians that international investors were going to be disappointed with a ‘no’ vote in the upcoming referendum on constitutional reforms.  At about the same time, Finch announced that a popular rejection of the reforms would put downward pressure on the country’s ratings.  The Italians responded that the ambassador should mind his own business and that the ratings agencies should find some new analysts.  Italy will be fine whatever the referendum outcome, they insisted.  If anything, this unwelcome foreign intervention is going to encourage the Italians to vote against the reforms just to prove a point.  The echoes with Brexit were obvious – and widely noted.  So is Italy headed for disaster or is this just another storm in a teacup?

Continue reading →

by Erik Jones

A Compelling Vision for Europe

Europe’s heads of state and government face a real dilemma. They want to attract support for European integration from the people of Europe and they also want to show the outside world that the European Union remains a major source of dynamism and innovation. So the question is how best to achieve those two goals. Should they propose a new project that will attract everyone’s attention or should they try to come up with some ‘vision’ that explains why Europe still matters?

Continue reading →

by Erik Jones

Referendums, Europe, and the ‘Forbidden Planet’

The British referendum sent shockwaves across Europe. Contrary to expectations, the vote to Leave defeated the vote to Remain by 52 to 48 percent. The turnout was high and the outcome was uniformly distributed. The only major exceptions were the votes in favor of remaining in the European Union (EU) cast in London, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. Without those areas of support, the vote to leave would have been even more decisive. The explanations are mostly negative. The English voted overwhelmingly against outside interference, elites, experts, and immigration. They also voted against ‘fear mongering’. What they voted for was a mixture of self-determination and something different. How they will use that autonomy remains to be seen. At the moment, the British ruling elite is too engaged in soul-searching and leadership contests to offer much in the way of vision.

Continue reading →

by Erik Jones

How Important is Religion for Attitudes toward European Integration?

If you wanted to explain why some countries seem more favorable toward European integration than others, what cleavage would be most important: North-South, East-West, rich-poor, or Catholic-Protestant? No doubt any difference matters, at least potentially, and many of these cleavages are overlapping. We could invent a few others as well related to linguistic families, kinship structures, or even physical geography. Nevertheless, it helps to tell the story if you can focus attention on whatever offers the best prospect of combining simplicity with coherence. By implication, you have to make a choice about what matters most.

Continue reading →

by Erik Jones

Why Brexit is (Still) a Bad Idea

The United Kingdom is going to leave the European Union (EU). The facts being created on the ground all point to that conclusion. Nevertheless, it is still worth pointing out that that a British exit from the EU (or ‘Brexit’) is a bad idea. There are many reasons Brexit is bad. The most important is that the campaign for leaving the EU rested on a fundamental misunderstanding of international trade.

Continue reading →

by Erik Jones

Italy Understood

Italy is a country where the past, present and future are all jumbled together. Moreover, the juxtaposition is intentional. When they redid the main street in Bologna, for example, the workers lifted out an old fragment of a tramline from the last century. The trams have long since been replaced by busses and the metal rails were peeking through, only poorly covered by tarmac. The city decided to replace the tarmac with new stone paving slabs and so it was necessary to remove the old tram track. Once the stone was in place, the workers cut two groves and fit the pieces of rail back into place. This way, the new road does not completely cover the city’s past.

Continue reading →

by Erik Jones

The Disintegration of the West

The British vote to leave the European Union (EU) is the first step toward formal disintegration that the West has experienced.  The closest parallel is France’s decision to step outside the integrated military command structure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1966.  But France remained a member of NATO; that decision was more like Britain’s opt-out from the single currency or Schengen, even if the shift of NATO’s headquarters from Paris to Brussels made it seem more dramatic.  By contrast, the British have now decided that they do not want to take part in the EU and that they want to renegotiate their relationships with the rest of the world on a case-by-case basis.  The West has not gone through anything like this since the end of the Second World War.

Continue reading →