Battle lines being drawn at Brussels summit

[WestVirginiaRebel]

AP:

BRUSSELS (AP) -- European Union leaders are tussling over how much power they want to cede to central authorities during a summit meeting in Brussels focused on how to ensure their debt crisis never repeats itself.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is pushing a proposal that the European Union's monetary affairs commissioner should become an enforcer of the bloc's budget rules - including the power to refuse member countries' proposed spending and tax plans and send them back for changes.

Germany hopes that having a "budget czar" - a move that's been bandied about for months - will help keep Europe from repeating past mistakes by stopping governments from overspending and needing expensive bailouts. But some countries, like France, are wary of handing control over their finances to unelected officials in a foreign capital.

"I am astonished that, no sooner does someone make a progressive proposal ... the cry immediately comes that this won't work, Germany is isolated, we can't do it," Merkel said in Parliament ahead of the summit.

President Francois Hollande of France - increasingly the counterpoint to Germany's weight in the EU - brushed off the suggestion as simply not on the table at this summit. But Hollande is backing another plan that would also see at least members of the eurozone - the 17 countries that use the euro as their currency - hand over a great deal of sovereignty.

"The only decision that we have to take, to confirm, is putting in place a banking union by the end of the year," he said. "The first step is a banking supervisor."

Hollande wants the bank supervisor in place because leaders have agreed that, once there is proper supervision, struggling financial institutions will be able to tap Europe's bailout fund directly. That would be a huge relief to countries like Spain, which are facing the prospect of taking on enormous debts - and worrying markets in the process - in order to bail out their banks.

After an apparently unanimous agreement on the need for a supervisor at a summit in June, some European governments - including Germany, the Netherlands and Finland - have tried to put the brakes on any decision about a banking union.

That could mean that few concrete decisions will emerge from meetings of the 27 national leaders in Brussels on Thursday and Friday.

Merkel again insisted Thursday that "quality must come before speed" in setting up the bank supervisor.

"There are a lot of very complicated legal questions, and I am not making the issue more difficult than it actually is," Merkel said.

With unemployment in the region at a record 10.5 percent, and growth grinding to a halt around the continent, the back-and-forth is beginning to frustrate some European officials. Jose Manuel Barroso, who is president of the EU's executive arm, the European Commission, criticized the heel-dragging ahead of the meeting.

"There is not all over Europe the same sense of urgency," said Barroso.

________

 

Ladies and gentlemen, this year's Nobel Peace Prize winners...