Bernard Godement offers some excellent commentary on yesterday's post regarding German chancellor Gerhard Schröder's plea to amend the European Council's growth and stability pact.
I remember a private meeting in 1991 with someone who has since held top positions within the Eurozone central banking system where the coming Maastricht treaty was explained to me. The 3% and 60% rules (a French proposal!) were already basically agreed then by the technicians so-to-speak and stemmed from resolving the debt stability equation under 3% long run growth of real GDP...
They were thus equally aware of the political leeway that going technical would offer to politicians. And in fact the worm was inserted right in the fruit in the original Maastricht treaty as this explicitely stated that it would be heads of state who would judge under qualified majority voting whether a number was above 3% or not. Back in the real world, it takes a child to know if 3.5% is higher or lower than 3%, though it does take a very, very smart fiscal expert to know if a government has cooked its accounts as the ECB recently found out to its dismay. In any case, these precise numbers were indeed inserted in the 1992 Maastricht treaty and all politicians later did was reaffirm them. International treaties happen to be binding to their signatories - except of course for the US, but that is another subject entirely...
Thus in reality these clauses were there only so that the Germans could be reassured that they would not come to own unlimited obligations to the Mezzogiorno. Little did they realize of course that they had just bought themselves their own giant mezzogiorno West of the Oder-Neisse.
Read the whole thing, which is in the comments section following the post. (You'll find pgl's two-cents -- I think he is leaning in Schröder's direction -- there as well.)