The Covid-19 pandemic has cancelled this year's Richard Wagner festival in Bayreuth, but a fitting replacement comes via Germany's constitutional court, three hours east in Karlsruhe. At its simplest, Wagner's four-opera ring cycle is a parable about how obsession with flawed power destroys even the mighty.
The 110-page German ruling has all the ingredients for a great European tragedy. Unlike the opera, this real-life drama was not triggered by dwarves guarding an enchanted ring, but judges guarding postwar Germany’s greatest treasure: the post-war Basic Law or constitution.
For years the German judges have been barking about contradictions they see between the Basic Law and European law. This month they decided to bite. Their ruling threatens to call time on German participation in emergency bond-buying programmes unless Karlsruhe sees proper justification from the European Central Bank (ECB), which devised the programme nearly a decade ago to prop up the single currency.
Not satisfied with dubbing ECB actions disproportionate, Karlsruhe has challenged the primacy of Europe’s highest court in Luxembourg. Its finding in favour of bond-buying was “incomprehensible” to the German judges and thus, they ruled, invalid. The ruling throws salt in several open wounds. One is where the European court, as guardian of the treaties, exists vis-a-vis member state courts as guardians of their own respective constitutions. And it adds new urgency to the debate over the euro’s central flaw as an economic union without a full political union.
The euro's unresolved flaws have political roots and require political solutions
This reality gap was the root of tensions in the euro crisis and has returned via "coronabonds". The question is how much political union bond-backers in southern Europe – and Ireland – can accept to calm northern European nerves over moral hazard, allowing them to back joint debt and other EU financial transfers?
The Karlsruhe ruling may be resolved at surface level, but its deeper implications will leave a mark on the European integration process.
European politicians have grown used to the ECB as euro fire-brigade, hosing down currency conflagrations and patching things up after. But the euro's unresolved flaws have political roots and require political solutions. After years of fence-sitting, to the despair of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel appears determined to use this crisis as an opportunity to push for further European integration. That means reviving divisive debates on a European finance minister, a stronger European Commission and parliament and, finally, joint debt. In hindsight, this moment of Wagnerian melodrama could end as one of two parables: the moment the EU grabbed its last chance to survive, with an integrationist leap forward; or the moment EU leaders realised they'd left it too late to do so.