@jacobinmag Some points I make in the piece: yes, Draghi “saved the euro”, but at the cost of transforming the eurozone from a dysfunctional but formally democratic monetary union into an unprecedented governance structure in which governments are disciplined and punished.
Through the mechanisms pioneered by Draghi and his “activist” approach to central banking, formal democratic processes have been systematically subverted through financial and monetary blackmail — first and foremost at the hands of the ECB.
Under the governance structures pioneered by Draghi, one may reasonably question whether eurozone member states can still be considered democracies, even according to the narrow “bourgeois” understanding of the concept.
Some examples: in 2011 forced Berlusconi to leave office in favour of technocrat Mario Monti, by discontinuing its IT bond purchases — thus deliberately causing interest rates to rise — and by making Berlusconi’s ouster the precondition for further support by ECB for IT bonds.
In 2015 in Greece he went event further, effectively crashing the country’s banking system in order to force the EU’s political agenda upon the elected left-wing Syriza government.
These episodes prove that in the eurozone the supposed benefits of central bank independence have instead been replaced by government dependence on central banks, no longer subject to any kind of democratic control.
Ultimately, Draghi symbolizes the dangerous rise to power of the unelected technocrats — “experts” who claim to be untainted by politics, but who in fact embody capital’s desire for unfettered domination.
