Crisis In Euroland

[Geee]

American Spectator:

The euro, that artificial Funny Money used by 331 million Europeans in17 nations -- the 17th, Estonia, joined the euro just this week -- was conceived in sin and born in corruption. The New Year brings the prospect that the sins of the European Union's founding fathers will be visited on its hapless citizens in the form of financial turmoil and fiscal pain.

The original sins at the euro's conception included stealth, lies, and hypocrisy. That at least was consistent with the creation of "Europe" in the 1950s, when politicians with mixed motives recklessly signed off behind closed doors on whatever was necessary to bring forth the European Economic Community, later optimistically re-baptized as the European Union, a.k.a. "Europe."

Contrary to the organic, bottom-up growth of a real nation, this was all done top-down with little or no democratic consultation with Europe's citizens. (The Brussels-based Eurocracy, now occupying gargantuan buildings in the Belgian capital, euphemistically calls this a mere "democratic deficit.") But the fact that there was no true political union, and even less centralized economic and fiscal authority, did not deter the EU from declaring a phony monetary union in 1991.

The pretense that this was a step to political unity was at best wishful thinking, at worst pure hypocrisy. The unstated reality was France's goal of using the euro as 1) a weapon against the dollar, and 2) a way to hobble an increasingly powerful Deutsche Mark and soon-to-be reunified Germany before it left France in the dust. Premier Helmut Kohl, like the great majority of Germans, was cool to the idea on both counts. But he reluctantly went along with the euro when President François Mitterrand sweetened the deal with French backing for German reunification and defense guarantees including France's nuclear weapons.