January 2, 2012
Cassandra has fond memories of the occasion, ten years and one day ago, when he first took possession of euro notes (I was living in beautiful Paris at the time…). Fond, because Europhiles such as I foresaw a glorious future in which the EU’s single market would be more-or-less completed with the free flow of capital, goods, services and people. It has not, of course, worked out quite as we had hoped—there is still plenty of subtle protectionism, especially in services—but until Greece woke us up to the sovereign-debt crisis it seemed as though the euro was as solid as, well, the dollar.
Now, of course, we know better, with Chancellor Merkel of Germany and President Sarkozy of France struggling—against plenty of people’s odds—to save the euro zone from a split, if not a collapse (hence the miserable new year’s messages from the two of them). The thing is, of course, that we should have known better long ago. I remember when I was based in Brussels being slightly amused that a vengeful European Commission had sacked one of its senior civil servants, Bernard Connolly, for rubbishing the euro project as long ago as 1995 in a well-argued book, The Rotten Heart of Europe. Poor Mr Connolly was pilloried by the Brussels elite for noting that perhaps the emperor would end up with no clothes. In contrast, some other Britons were praised rather than pilloried in what the French call the "Anglo-Saxon" press because they were journalists working for some rabidly Eurosceptic British newspapers (notably, though not invariably, those owned by non-Britons…).
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