I recite all this to suggest, not that sovereignty should not be given up in the noble cause of European integration, but that if all these functions are renounced by individual governments they simply have to be taken on by some other authority. The incredible lacuna in the Maastricht programme is that, while it contains a blueprint for the establishment and modus operandi of an independent central bank, there is no blueprint whatever of the analogue, in Community terms, of a central government. Yet there would simply have to be a system of institutions which fulfils all those functions at a Community level which are at present exercised by the central governments of individual member countries.

The counterpart of giving up sovereignty should be that the component nations are constituted into a federation to whom their sovereignty is entrusted. And the federal system, or government, as it had better be called, would have to exercise all those functions in relation to its members and to the outside world which I have briefly outlined above.

That was published 8th October 1992 – exactly 20 years back!

Worth your time if you haven’t read it yet. Even if you have, worth reading it again!

Here’s the link to the full article Maastricht And All That by Wynne Godley.

Wynne Godley

(photo credit: King’s College, Cambridge)

Also check out John Cassidy’s post The Man Who Saw Through The Euro written for The New Yorker last year.