When Britain abandoned the gold standard in 1931, it was not only forsaking a system for managing the currency but also acknowledging that it could no longer bear the mantle of empire, The Economist reported. When America broke the dollar’s peg with gold in 1971, it ushered in a decline that continued until Paul Volcker re-established confidence in the currency in the early 1980s. As Joseph Schumpeter, the great Austrian economist, once wrote: “The monetary system of a people reflects everything that the nation wants, does, suffers, is.”
In the same way, the crisis that has engulfed the European Union (EU) is about much more than the euro. As government bonds, share prices and banks swoon and global recession knocks on the door, the first fear is of financial and economic collapse. But to understand what is happening to the currency you also need to look at what is happening to Europe.
The euro will not be safe until Europe answers some fundamental questions that it has run away from for many years. At their root is how its nations should respond to a world that is rapidly changing around them. What will it do as globalisation strips the West of the monopoly over the technologies that have made it rich, and an ageing Europe starts to look increasingly like the western peninsula of a resurgent Asia?
Some Europeans would like to put up carefully designed fences around the EU’s still vast and wealthy market. Others, including a growing number of populist politicians, want to turn their nations inward and shut out not just the world but also the elites’ project of European integration. And a few—from among those same elites, mostly—argue that the only means of paying for Europe’s distinctive way of life is not to evade globalisation but to embrace it wholeheartedly.
This is not some abstract philosophical choice. It is a fierce struggle for Europe’s future, being waged in Athens as George Papandreou loses power to a temporary government of national unity, in derelict factories in France and Belgium and in the wasted lives of millions of unemployed young Spaniards. This struggle will set the limits on Europe’s welfare state. It will determine how the unbalanced partnership between Germany and France, and an increasingly detached Britain, will shape the EU. It will define the high politics of Brussels and the low politics of European populism. And it will decide the fate of the device that Schumpeter would see as the embodiment of all this: the euro. Read more.
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