Editing Maastricht Treaty (section)

===The Maastricht economic-policy model===
Critics felt that, in limiting the role of the future ECB and euro in national, or Union-coordinated, reflationary policies, Maastricht affirmed what by the late 1980s was the general economic-policy orthodoxy within the Community. This has been described as a "reversed [[Keynesian economics|Keynesianism]]": macro-economic policy not to secure a full-employment level of demand, but, through the restrictive control of monetary growth and public expenditure, to maintain price and financial market stability; micro economic policy, not to engineer income and price controls in support of fiscal expansion, but to encourage job creation by reducing barriers to lower labour costs.<ref name="McDowell" /> The commitment to monetary union and the convergence criteria denied member states the resort to currency deflation to ease balance-of-payments constraints on domestic spending, and left labour market "flexibility" as the main mean of coping with asymmetric economic shocks.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Tsoukalis |first1=Loukas |title=Tsoukalis, L (19The New European Economy Revisited: the Politics and Economics of Integration. |date=1997 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=Oxford |isbn=978-0-19-877477-8 |page=15}}</ref>

These constraints were to become the focus of political scrutiny and public protest in the new-century [[European debt crisis]]. Beginning in 2009 with [[Greece]], the governments of several [[Eurozone|Euro-zone]] countries (Portugal, Ireland, Spain and [[Cyprus]]) declared themselves unable to repay or refinance their [[government debt]] or to bail out over-indebted banks without assistance from third parties. The "[[austerity]]" they had subsequently to impose as a condition of assistance from Germany and other of their trade-surplus EU partners, raised calls for new arrangements to better manage payment imbalances between member states, and ease the burden of adjustment upon wage-, and benefit-, dependent households. Greek finance minister [[Yanis Varoufakis]] credited the Maastricht criteria with framing of a union of deflation and unemployment.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Varoufakis |first1=Yanis |title=The Weak Suffer What They Must: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future |date=2017 |publisher=Avalon Publishing Group |location=New York |isbn=978-1-56858-599-4}}</ref>

Taking issue in defence of the Maastricht criteria, German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble argued that "the old way to stimulate growth will not work." There is a real "moral hazard" in allowing Member States to accumulate higher debts within the Eurozone – higher debts which, ultimately, have no relationship to higher growth. The Maastricht criteria, he insisted, were correct in placing the onus for growth on "competitiveness, structural reforms, investment, and sustainable financing".<ref>{{cite web |last1=Schäuble |first1=Wolfgang |title=Wolfgang Schäuble: "Europe will only work if the rules are the same for smaller and bigger member states" |url=https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2016/03/07/wolfgang-schauble-europe-will-only-work-if-the-rules-are-the-same-for-smaller-and-bigger-member-states/ |website=blogs.lse.ac.uk |date=7 March 2016 |publisher=London School of Economics (LSE) |access-date=29 September 2020}}</ref>