In April 2020 Nina Jetter (my wife) and I, together with Gian Giacomo Migone, co-wrote an open letter to the then German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The letter was asking Merkel to shift German historic opposition to European debt by leading the European Council to adopt Eurobonds. The open letter was signed by two Nobel prizes, 500 European intellectuals and more than 2 thousand European Citizens. It can be found at this link. On May 18th, 2020, Chancellor Angela Merkel ended Germany’s historical opposition to debt mutualisation in a video conference with Macron. On the 20th of July 2020, the European Council finally reached a plan for a European economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic financed by the creation of European bonds. On the 15th of June, 2021, the European Commission issued the first tranche of these new European bonds, At this link, Nina and mine reflections on the initiative a year later.

Below the text of an interview about the initiative I gave to Lena Kronenbürger and published by New Europeans on 22 April 2020.

Interview with Italian activist who wrote to Angela Merkel to urge Germany to take lead on Eurobonds

Andrea Pisauro is a research associate in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and an influential activist.

When did you first feel that you were a European citizen?

I was very young indeed! I was born in Rome which has historically a strong European identity. My mum used to teach French and brought me to France many times and told me many things about European history and cultures. And my second mum, the second wife of my father, was born in Brussels from one of the first EU official working for the first Commission and studied at the European school there. I grew up European thanks to their stories about European history and stories, the human factor and the political and cultural elements that built the fabric of my European identity.

What are you fighting for (or dreaming of) when it comes to Europe?

I am fighting for European democracy, the antidote against nationalisms and xenophobia. More democracy and accountability to govern the eurozone. More democracy increasing the powers of the European Parliament and making all EU decisions accountable to it. More democracy by giving the citizens more tools to make their voice heard. I dream of a Citizens Assembly made up of a rotation of EU citizens chosen by sortition and meeting in Strasbourg, acting as a check and balance to the Parliament in Brussels. But this is a dream for another interview 🙂

You wrote a letter to none other than the German Chancellor which has attracted over 700 signatures from intellectuals across Europe. What does it say? (Please also briefly explain who else wrote this letter with you and when do you think about “sending” it to Angela Merkel)

The letter was written by me and my German girlfriend Nina. We wrote it after many days in which we were worried by the growth of euroscepticism in Italy, which felt left alone by the EU during the beginning of the pandemics. We asked help to Gian Giacomo Migone, an old friend of mine who is a former Italian senator and historian (a true European globetrotter, born in Stockholm and grown up in Paris). We thought that a European response at the level of the crisis was needed and that the response should be led by Germany, to reverse its historical opposition to European debt. We chose chancellor Merkel as the German chancellor and as a physicist who understood better than any other European leader the depth and implications of this pandemics.

We ask Merkel to make an historic step to build a European response to the economic crisis induced by the pandemic. We make an historical reference. After the first world world Germany was let in ruin in a decade long recession by the sanction imposed by the other EU countries after the First World War, sanctions that John Mainard Keynes and many intellectuals of the time opposed. We all know how that ended. We built the EU precisely not to repeat history so politicians now need to listen to the advise of a large majority of European economists who are saying: it is time for Eurobonds.

Eurobonds – hardly anything else was so fiercely debated during the euro debt crisis. While the pandemic accelerates, the idea has resurfaced lately. Why do you think that European bonds are the right way to “tackle an emergency that could otherwise turn into a eurozone crisis” as you put it? (Could you please also briefly explain in your answer what European bonds are?)

European bonds are the way to create European debt, which means raising money to invest in the recovery as Europeans and not as individual member states. This is important. All states will need to hugely increase their level of debts to face the consequences of the pandemics. If they all compete with each other to sell their bonds on the market, the interestes and the spreads are bound to explode and a new eurozone crisis is inevitable. If we issue European bonds there is no competition, just cooperation and the interest on the debt would stay low, because they would be guaranteed by the European Central Bank.

What is the strongest argument of the opponents of Eurobonds? What do you tell them?

Some of them say it’s a way for southern European states to get cheap money to fix their financial problems. These people need to understand that the recession induced by the pandemics will be way more severe than anything anyone has seen in their lifetimes. All countries will have enormous economic problems that the markets won’t be able to solve. We need a strong, coordinated public intervention which should be European, funded by European money and partly by European debt. We are all in this together and we should react together.

As a researcher in Neuroeconomics, you study human decision-making. From this perspective, do you understand why European bonds are so hotly debated?

Very interesting question 🙂

I think much has to do with the framing of the narrative in different countries. Decisions are shaped by how you frame them. If in the Netherlands citizens are told that Italians want their hard worked money to fix the Italian broken economy, surely they would say no to eurobonds. If on the other hands they are framed as a financial tool to provide a EU wide response that can help all EU citizens, one would give a very different response. The deep question is why there are so different narratives in different states. The answer seems to me a complex combination of cultural, historical political and economic reasons. History is important. A politician who has said for many years that eurobonds are wrong, because they didn’t support ideologically, the bail out of Greece or because it fears the nationalistic right in his country, has a hard time changing his stance. Humans are stubborn and struggle to change their mind in general. Yet this fictitious politician shouldn’t be surprise if he gets defined “the Ebenezer Scrooge of the EU”. 

In your letter to Angela Merkel, you mention Willy Brandt, who was committed to a peaceful and united Europe, not only during his time as chancellor. In your opinion, is Angela Merkel a chancellor who shares these values, will she go down in history as a European?

I do think Angela Merkel is a sincere European. She certainly care about solidarity as she shown welcoming a million Syrian refugees in 2015. And she has a chance to build a legacy as European leader by overcoming Germany historical opposition to sharing debt with the rest of Europe.

Symbolically, creating European bonds means that EU leaders signal to the world that they are ready to do whatever it takes to preserve our precious Union and in fact strenghten in in the fact of hardship as we say in the letter. I can’t imagine a better legacy for the longest serving European leader.