Thursday, June 02, 2005

Rip It Up And Start Again: Euro Misery

The euro was a terrible idea - prematurely implemented to hasten European union, and calculated to bring financial misery to its sponsors - but once the currency was in place, the blog hoped against its better instincts that it would somehow work, as the price of failure would be too high.

Now many voices are saying it is time to scrap the euro, too. The price of maintaining it, they say, is too high.

What they have realised is that the weaknesses of the euro and the now rejected draft constitution are identical: both may serve the interests of nascent supranational governance, but not of the individual nations and citizens intended to be governed.

And there is nore to this than "one size doesn't fit all"; it is often more like "one size doesn't fit any."

The blog always assumed that a euro crisis would happen when markets saw that the political will to prop the currency up was sapping away. The political will was ditched a while back, along with the Stability Pact, earlier this year. The markets only overlooked that because the relative weakness of the dollar disguised the euro's plight.

But now the voters of Holland and France are signalling, as clearly as an electorate can possibly do, that the European project has already gone too far for them in terms of surrendering national to supranational policy-making. The euro looks to suffer as a result.

But the taxpayers who funded the whole ghastly state-building experiment will suffer far, far more.

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