Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: The Euro

[NATO AIR]

From FP's excellent latest issue:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3161

The Euro
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

By Christopher Hitchens

"So,” said Jörg Haider with a slightly unpleasant smile, “you like the new Esperanto money?” I was interviewing the leader of Austria’s Freedom Party in early 2003, at a time when he was also applauding Saddam Hussein and supporting the suicide bombers in Israel and Palestine. His sarcastic comment about the newly introduced euro notes made me want to believe in the new currency even more. On a long reporting trip to Europe, I had been rather affected to find myself using the same money in Paris one evening as I had used to pay a Berlin taxi driver in the morning. I remembered how the Franco-German coal and steel agreement that was the nucleus of the European project was designed to make war within continental Europe “materially impossible.” On New Year’s Day 2002, it suddenly became possible to employ the same currency in Finland as in Greece (which surrendered the world’s oldest surviving monetary denomination in the form of the drachma). Why should one listen to any sneering about that, especially from a man not fully reconciled to the outcome of the Second World War?

My internationalist prejudice is not something for which I feel like apologizing, even now. I remember how I twisted with embarrassment when Norman Lamont, British Prime Minister John Major’s chancellor of the exchequer, returned from Brussels with the grand news that he had won the right to keep the visage of Her Majesty the Queen on any British version of the euro bill. If the Germans could make the remarkable sacrifice of the deutsche mark, their greatest postwar achievement, then why quibble over the insignia of the House of Windsor? I looked forward to showing my children the old British currency, just as I had kept a sentimental box of the ancient British coinage that had been making holes in our pockets before decimalization.


And now I can’t quite believe that my children, or their children, will be using the “Esperanto money” after all. As suddenly as it began, the whole idea of a common currency seems to have receded. The likelihood of new countries adopting the euro has become remote ever since the French and the Dutch repudiated the proposed European constitution earlier this year. But more than that, there is a pronounced nostalgia for the old money in Germany and in other nations that have already adopted the euro. If a referendum is involved, I cannot see the British electorate voting to abandon the pound, with or without the queen’s head, in any circumstances. The Scandinavian periphery now seems less, rather than more, persuadable. As for the new and aspiring members, such as Poland and Turkey, one winces to think of the disillusionment that will set in now that so many brave promises will be postponed.

This economic setback is determined in part by political and bureaucratic failures large and small. Europe’s passport, to take a tiny example, could have been worth flourishing at a frontier post. But a series of dull compromises reduced it to a tawdry paperback, bound in some off-color maroon: too obviously a document designed by a committee. Then I should like to know at what dire meeting it was decided that the first seven words of the preamble to the European Constitution would read: “His Majesty The King of the Belgians…” Until Albania or Belarus joins, which seems a long way off, Belgium and its monarch come first in the European alphabet. But this is not how things were done in Philadelphia, and the emphasis is not at all designed to produce a more perfect union.

I take absolutely no pleasure in saying this. I did not at all care for the alliance of parties, from xenophobic to post-Stalinist, that combined to defeat the constitution and that now yearn for the euro to be undone. But I can’t rid myself of the memory of that smirk on Haider’s face. If the euro is going to be only one currency among many, then it will have lost its essential point. Esperanto aimed to replace the Babel of competing languages with one universal tongue, and it succeeded only in adding an extra tongue that was a mere hybrid. A euro that is legal tender only in some parts of Europe will not only emphasize the continent’s failure to eliminate differences: It will itself become one of those differences.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School University. His most recent book is Thomas

Jefferson: Author of America (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).

 

[padisha emperor]

it suddenly became possible to employ the same currency in Finland as in Greece (which surrendered the world’s oldest surviving monetary denomination in the form of the drachma).

with the grand news that he had won the right to keep the visage of Her Majesty the Queen on any British version of the euro bill

If the Germans could make the remarkable sacrifice of the deutsche mark, their greatest postwar achievement, then why quibble over the insignia of the House of Windsor? I looked forward to showing my children the old British currency, just as I had kept a sentimental box of the ancient British coinage that had been making holes in our pockets before decimalization.

...

If the author don't like the Euros only because it's a rupture with the past, it shows the weakness of his position...

All the countries abandonned their moneys, France dropped the Franc, used since 200 years. And ? Sad, but if it can be better, well.
When Napoleon introduce the Franc Germinal as new money, nobody said "oh no, we want to keep our old money instead if this progress".
Same thig : imagine if we have rejected the metric system in the XVIIIth, to keep the ancient and bad system...only because it is "our identity".

People and countries make evolution. When people want always live in the past, it's dumb.


For the british : I don't know why this guy says " the grand news that he had won the right to keep the visage of Her Majesty the Queen on any British version of the euro bill".

Not a victory, but a normal thing : Belgium, Netherlands, Spain....They have their monrachs' faces on the coins.
IN Germany they' ve got the Eagle, in France we've for the 1 and 2 euros' coins the Tree of liberty, and for the smaller (0.50 ; 0.20 ............) Marianne.

Each country has a personal side for the coin : one is the EU, with the map, and the other : the face of the Nations. (Austria has Mozart, Greece has the Owl of Athena, Italy the Universal Man of Da Vinci ....................................)

So, it's not a rupture with our past and tradition, but an evolution, with our times, but nobody forget the ancients national moneys.

To me, there is only one bad side witrh the euro : I used to make calculs in Francs, to buy something, during 16 years and a half, and since 3 years : all is changed, you have to count in Euro (1 euro : 6.55957 Franc....)

 

[Annie]

...

If the author don't like the Euros only because it's a rupture with the past, it shows the weakness of his position...

All the countries abandonned their moneys, France dropped the Franc, used since 200 years. And ? Sad, but if it can be better, well.
When Napoleon introduce the Franc Germinal as new money, nobody said "oh no, we want to keep our old money instead if this progress".
Same thig : imagine if we have rejected the metric system in the XVIIIth, to keep the ancient and bad system...only because it is "our identity".

People and countries make evolution. When people want always live in the past, it's dumb.


For the british : I don't know why this guy says " the grand news that he had won the right to keep the visage of Her Majesty the Queen on any British version of the euro bill".

Not a victory, but a normal thing : Belgium, Netherlands, Spain....They have their monrachs' faces on the coins.
IN Germany they' ve got the Eagle, in France we've for the 1 and 2 euros' coins the Tree of liberty, and for the smaller (0.50 ; 0.20 ............) Marianne.

Each country has a personal side for the coin : one is the EU, with the map, and the other : the face of the Nations. (Austria has Mozart, Greece has the Owl of Athena, Italy the Universal Man of Da Vinci ....................................)

So, it's not a rupture with our past and tradition, but an evolution, with our times, but nobody forget the ancients national moneys.

To me, there is only one bad side witrh the euro : I used to make calculs in Francs, to buy something, during 16 years and a half, and since 3 years : all is changed, you have to count in Euro (1 euro : 6.55957 Franc....)

PE probably a language thing. Hitchens liked the Euro., the fact that the same money could be used in France and Germany. The point of the article is that the doubters are beginning to look correct. The Euro may be voted out, country by country.

 

[nosarcasm]

my parents hated the hike in prices that came with the Euro
but like being able to pay with Euros when they go on vacations

With vacations being 6 weeks on average in W. Europe
I doubt a majority would go back to the old times.

Just bitching and moaning imo.

 

[theim]

It'd probly be too much of a pain in the ass to change the national currency again in the span of less than a decade or so.