Is the single currency worth saving at all?

by Aditya Chakrabortty

Guardian
May 14, 2012

Never in the history of the British media have so many commentators lavished such intense concern on so abstract a concept. I refer, of course, to the euro – because, once you get past the crude notes and coins, what could be more satisfactorily airy than the optimal conditions for a currency union across 17 nations? Over the past few days, from those first reproachful pips of the Today programme to the final credits of Newsnight, pundits and politicians, financiers and journalists have thrust and parried over how to rescue the single currency. Will it hold together if Athens marches out? Will Lisbon, Madrid even, have to lumber after it? But I have yet to hear discussion of a more fundamental question: is the single currency project worth saving at all?

In raising this, I'm not throwing in my cards with the Ukip-ers, half of whom still view Brussels as engaged in a knavish plot to straighten all known bananas. Nor am I forgetting those grand promises made upon the euro's launch just over a decade ago – it's just that I can no longer see how anyone might make them with a straight face, especially that prediction from Wim Duisenberg, inaugural head of the European Central Bank, about how an era of "peace and prosperity" would follow.

Tip-toeing between the absolutism of the 'phobes and 'philes, it is possible to draw conclusions about the worth of the single currency based upon how eurozone politicians and officials have behaved in office. Not just on their record of crisis management – which has obviously been woeful – but also in how northern European governments have rounded on southern nations in distress, forcefeeding them harmful diets of economic austerity and blithely exposing them to violent social turbulence while preaching that this is the way all responsible, adult countries behave. In other words, if the euro looks as if it is no longer worth saving, it is not because of some unconquerable defect of birth, but because of the way in which those at the top have behaved.

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