Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-27-Speech-3-116"
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"en.19991027.3.3-116"2
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"I voted against the European Parliament resolution on the 1998 annual report of the European Central Bank (ECB), since it approves this report, which itself is aligned with the prospect of transition to a completely unified European monetary system. Indeed, like the economists of the Association for the Monetary Independence of France (
), I think that this is not a desirable objective, and that on 1 January 2002 it will be necessary to retain national currencies alongside the euro which will serve as a common currency.
Moreover, the European Parliament resolution discusses at length the technical measures to improve the transparency of the ECB. This is an apparently laudable objective, but one that is impossible to achieve. The European Parliament has indeed just proved this by getting into an imbroglio which it has not been able to get out of. Actually, the initial text of the resolution required that the way that the various members of the Governing Council had voted should be made public following each decision on monetary policy. Mr Duisenberg, the president of the ECB, asserted that he did not agree with this idea, for all sorts of reasons, each one worse than the last. In particular, he stated that making voting public would be an incentive to exert undue pressure on the members of the Governing Council. Professor Buiter, a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, rightly replied that if the votes were to remain secret then this pressure would be applied in secret, and that would be even worse.
The European Parliament Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs eventually withdrew the relevant section of the draft resolution so as not to get into trouble with Mr Duisenberg, and the European Parliament has just backed up this withdrawal.
The matter is more serious than it first appears. In the first place, it demonstrates the timidity, nay subservience, of the European Parliament in its supervisory capacity. In the second place, it must be recalled that open voting is accepted in all great central banks throughout the world, particularly in the United States and Japan. Why should the European Central Bank be the exception to the rule? Why should it play the card of less transparency? The answer is simple. The central banks which I have just mentioned all work within a single nation, while the European Central Bank works with several different nations and several different peoples. By virtue of these differing circumstances, it is far more afraid than the other banks that particular Member States may exploit its internal conflicts. And to stave off this danger, it is forced to be that much less transparent. So, it’s all connected. Because it has jurisdiction over an area that is too diverse, the European Central Bank must distance itself even further from social reality. In so doing, in the short term it may calm things down on this or that vote, but in the long term it is ultimately condemning itself by cutting itself off from the peoples of Europe.
Understandably, in these conditions, I cannot give my approval to either the European Parliament resolution or the annual report of the ECB for 1998."@en1
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