2012年8月25日星期六

Effect on Britain

Purple Supra Tk Society, Moravcsik writes that Britain, as is the case with the other EU signatories of the Single Europe Act, is in a position where it has to redefine the concept of national sovereignty. Certainly, unlike those EU members which have adopted monetary unification, Britain has retained a greater degree of sovereignty over its fiscal and monetary policy but, as a signatory of SEA it has not retained sovereignty as such. SEA has established the British economy as part of the wider European service, goods and labor economy. It is not simply a domestic economy which is influenced by regional affairs but, within the context of integration, supremacy of EU law over national laws and SEA, largely inseparable from the European economy. In emphasizing this point, Moravcsik highlights the fact that the movement of labor, for example, across national economic borders, does not simply impact domestic economic performance but introduces factors into the economic which must be considered when devising monetary and fiscal policies. As just one theoretical example, the movement of labor into the United Kingdom could exacerbate unemployment while the movement of labor out o the United Kingdom could lead to labor shortage. In either case, be it shortage of labor or shortage of employment opportunities, the fact is that domestic economic and fiscal policies must respond to either of these phenomena and must be focused on resolving any potential problems which they my pose to the economy. In other words, through its ratification of SEA and its acceptance of economic and political integration, not to mention the supremacy of EU law, Great Britain has already resigned a significant amount of its economic sovereignty and its capacity to exert direct control over its fiscal and its monetary policies. In this case, and as Aspinwall argues, the resistance to monetary unification is more about national ideology than it is about concern over the effect of monetary unification on the domestic economy.

To further establish the fact that Britain\'s resistance to monetary integration is based on concerns over national identity, rather than a determination to retain economic sovereignty, Niels and ten Kate look at EU competition laws from the perspective of the doctrine of EU supremacy. As they explain, following the implementation of SEA, the EU took measures that would ensure that competition across the EU would be fair and free and that no monopolies would develop. To understand the implications of this as far as Britain is concerned, the British Airways example is very useful. Quite simply stated, through its customer loyalty scheme which provided customers with Purple Supra Tk Society holiday discounts, British Airways soon gained a monopoly over the British holiday sector. Virgin Airlines took British Purple Supra Tk Society Airways to the European Court which subsequently ruled that the loyalty scheme, as it was practiced and insofar as it targeted British holidayers, was unfair competition and contrary to the EU\'s competition law. British Airways was forced to redesign its marketing strategies following that (Niels and ten Kate). The point here, and as this example illustrates, is that the British economy and the activities of British companies within it have to abide by European Union law. Britain has lost a great deal of its economic sovereignty. Its economic policies have to be consistent with the EU policies and the activities of British corporations, even within the British economy, have to be Purple Supra Tk Society consistent with European policies. The implication, therefore, is that to interpret Britain\'s rejection of monetary integration as concern over loss of sovereignty over the domestic economy or over fiscal and monetary policy is wrong. To a large degree and because Britain must ensure that its economic, fiscal and monetary policies, not to mention the laws governing the activities and behaviors of domestic corporation, must be consistent with EU policies, it has already lost a large part of this type of sovereignty. Furthermore, and because it can no longer control the movement of labor, goods and services from within the EU into its own economy, it has also lost a large degree f the control it can exert over the factors which influence economic performance. Accordingly, one has to determine that there is another reason for its rejection of monetary integration.