As governments around the eurozone are felled by a widening sovereign debt crisis, a perceived loss of sovereignty to the IMF and the European Union is raising prickly questions of democratic legitimacy. Since the crisis began in late 2009, Ireland and Portugal have voted out governments that requested humiliating international bailouts after their borrowing costs spiralled out of control.
Now the Greek and Italian governments are both about to fall due to the strains of having to impose austerity measures and unpopular economic reforms to avert a debt meltdown.
And Spain's Socialist government, which implemented tax rises, pay and pension cuts and labour market reforms to try to escape a similar fate, is set to be trounced this month in an early general election, all polls suggest.
Many of these changes are the result of natural wear-and-tear on long-serving governments in times of severe economic stress, or of voters punishing perceived mismanagement.
But there is now a growing feeling that political change is being imposed from abroad in the name of saving the euro.
The International Monetary Fund and European authorities have applied strong pressure, particularly on Greece, for political consensus in support of bailout programmes.
Some EU and IMF officials, and many investors, yearn for non-partisan governments led by distinguished technocrats such as former European Central Bank vice-president Lucas Papademos in Greece and ex-European Commissioner Mario Monti in Italy.
Such administrations, they argue, would implement austerity measures and free-market structural reforms in the name of objective necessity in a national emergency without bowing to vested business, political and trade union interests.
That may seem an unacceptable intrusion into the democratic right of peoples to elect their government and the right of the opposition to oppose it.
But Sylvie Goulard, a French member of the European Parliament, said the crisis had merely revealed the extent to which European countries already shared sovereignty.
"We are completely interdependent, especially in the eurozone. We are no longer sovereign in the sense that many people think," she said in a telephone interview.
The crisis has shown the impossibility of trying to run a 17-nation European currency union in which each national parliament has to ratify decisions, Goulard said.
Instead of having an immediate single parliamentary session for the whole euro area to approve an increase in the powers of the bloc's rescue fund agreed in July, it took three months to complete the tortuous process in national parliaments, fuelling uncertainty in financial markets.
"We have to reverse the logic," Goulard said. "The Italians have in their hands the destiny of the euro for 330 million people. They are part of a club. The European Central Bank is buying their bonds to support them."
Countries in Asia and Latin America that went gone through IMF adjustment programmes in the 1980s and 1990s are all too familiar with the limits on economic policy sovereignty that come with the loans. But for western Europe, this has been a new and sometimes disturbing experience.
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