No democracy please, we're Europeans

So David Cameron wades in on the Greece crisis - sense of irony failure there I think.

Anyway, the Greeks are coming under pressure to vote for mainstream, pro-austerity parties, despite having voted for something else less than a month ago. This tells you everything you need to know about the role of democracy in the Eurozone.

In fact, the decline in democratic accountability is not an accident: it is the result in part of a certain demobilization of mass electorates in western countries, which has a variety of structural causes, but in part also of the determination of powerful interests to remove popular consent from a range of key economic decision making arenas. This, in turn, exacerbates the trend towards popular apathy, or at least resignation.

So currently, a set of institutions of 'governance' in the Eurozone have not only allowed a disaster to take place, but have also blocked any proper discussion of alternative ways out of the disaster. So the key actor in the management of the crisis is the ECB, an entirely unelected and unaccountable body with a tight connection to the world of finance, and largely impermeable to other interests. What makes you think that an institution like the ECB would ever be inclined to adopt policies in the interests of the non-rich majority of the Eurozone population?

The role of electorates, in the ECB/Merkel view, seems to be to elect governments that will follow policies the ECB, and by extension financial interests, want, even if this is going to lead to all of the burden of adjustment falling on the bottom 90-odd%. The Euro system was deliberately designed in this way to avoid politicians responding to popular demands for spending and low taxes. Clearly popular policies are not always in the long term interests of an economy, but surely it is the job of the democratic institutions to determine what those are?

What we have now is a technocratic approach to government which is not only democratic, it is very likely applying the wrong policies. If we have to have wrong policies, let's at least choose them through democratic means. And who knows, given the chance people might surprise the political class and the economics profession by choosing governments and policies that work in their interests.