Twenty-Euro Note: The EU Has Some Beautiful Currency
David Marsh is an Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, which published one of his pieces yesterday entitled "The Euro's Lost Promise".
It's a good example of how a large topic can be presented in relatively few words -- and is one of the best brief descriptions of the history of the Euro I've read in a while.
Americans don't really care about that history, or a common European currency -- unless you're a currency trader, or are vacationing there just now (and now would be a good time: 1.00 Euro is worth 1.24 US. A few weeks ago, the exchange rate was 1.48 US to the Euro, and San Francisco was full of German and French tourists).
Can't we all just get along?
Europe, a collection of nationalities and near-tribal subgroups, has a history of trade wars and religious wars and wars of national conquest and national unification going back over 1,300 years.
The dream of a Europe united under a single set of laws and currency wasn't really Napoleon's -- though he's often credited with it, that idea was just an extension of his personal ambitions; the same is true for German hegemony in Europe between June, 1940 and June of 1944. Unification has swirled around the edges of European history for generations, mostly gaining traction around the rise of Socialism before the Great War, and Communism after. But, the reasons it was so attractive as an idea (national chauvinism; right- and left-political radicalism; trade) were the same reasons it was politically dead: European governments couldn't get over themselves.
A case in point are Franco-German relations. Germany took the province of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, a war that humiliated France, which plotted Revanche and a final reckoning with the hated Hun... which didn't occur until 1919, when France got Alsace back, but the Versailles Treaty paved the way for Hitler, with a little help from Wall Street and the Great Depression, ver. 1.0. A resurgent (and nazi) Germany kicked France to the curb in May of 1940, which endured years of occupation until being liberated in the high summer of 1944.
It took the rise of the nazis, the Holocaust, and the Second World War (also known as the Great War, Part II) and its political aftermath to make any European government believe unification was desirable, even possible.
We Don't Get Fooled Again
The specter of fighting another intra-European war was too terrible to contemplate. In addition, the Soviets had swallowed up the eastern third of the continent, and Western Europe was dependent on the United States for financial and military aid (and, particularly in Germany, for lots of bulldozers).
Ultimately, the EU and the Euro were attempts to force Europeans to interrelate with each other in the face of what was then still a Communist Russian threat, and to build a political and financial structure which could hold its own in the face of American domination and the eventual rise of China.
These are serious ideas for Europeans. It's an opportunity for them to create a model of separate, sovereign states acting in collaboration, not competition. There's an obvious tendency for Americans to perceive the EU in terms of 'states', like those in the U.S., but that's laughable, because, well... Europe is not America!!!
There are other questions involved here -- whether Europe's privately-owned banks were ready for a common currency; whether human beings can ever cooperate through long-term coalitions like the EU or the UN; or if 'human nature' is inherently selfish and evil. (A good number of Europeans like the cooperative model, and might ask If not now, when? If not us, then who?).
But, read Marsh's article. You'll learn something.
UPDATE (5/21/10): The German Bundestag has given a vote of support to the EU/IMF $750-Billion Euro (about $1 Trillion US) loan package to Greece and other EU countries through the European Central Bank, primarily due to the efforts of Die Eisenen Kanzellerin, Angela Merkel, and her CDU-dominated coalition.
We'll see what happens next.
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