In your opinion, what is the most important European experience of twenty years of the single currency?
I see two lessons. The first is that a narrow layer of power holders and big money can do incredible damage. They create one problem after another and are unable to even contribute to alleviating those problems, let alone solve anything.
This is clear to most people today, as we see the Green Deal, the migration disaster, and ultimately total incompetence during the epidemic. But twenty years ago, it wasn’t so clear. Moreover, that generation of politicians and officials did not have the grandiose incompetence of the current one.
The second lesson is that the anti-EU opposition in any country with the euro has failed to come up with a sensible plan to protect its citizens, whether by leaving the common currency or otherwise.
The euro came into being in the 1990s and was a product of the specific atmosphere of that decade, when it seemed that EU countries could get away with any project they embarked on. Could a common currency project emerge outside this “historical window”?
Absolutely yes! When we see utter nonsense and outrageousness being approved and implemented, why couldn’t some disastrous idea around a currency get through? If it is possible to import radical jihadists, and if it is possible to close power stations and massively introduce electric cars at the same time, then absolutely anything is possible.
The euro project is actually interesting in that it was originally relatively rational and was introduced at a time when EU leaders were still expected to act quite reasonably. From the point of view of the advocates of a single European state, it makes good sense. Remember in the 1990s when the Czech Prime Minister Václav Klaus explained that speed was the most important thing in the transition strategy? To push through change as quickly as possible, and deal with the consequences later. This is exactly what the creators of the common European currency did.
Today’s Euro-elites are different. Their current actions are nonsensical even in terms of their own intentions. Pure self-destruction.
I think people like Helmut Kohl could have solved the problems that arose later. Or at least mitigate those problems. They just failed to imagine how weak-minded the next generation of European elites would be.
Today’s Euro-elites are different. Their current actions are nonsensical even in terms of their own intentions. Pure self-destruction.
