Will the eurozone survive? The leaders of France and Germany have now raised this question, for the case of Greece. If policymakers had understood two decades ago what they know now, they would never have launched the single currency. Only fear of the consequences of a break-up is now keeping it together. The question is whether that will be enough.
(FT is funny, the way they say things like that I should not cut and paste; instead, they say I should "use the link below." They should explain their philosophy on that, but they just order me around.
I will just include the link at the top of my piece. That should satisfy them. Since I am an outsider incapable of intuiting what I "should" immediately intuit about the culture --- or, just the FT culture?)
So: what is the question here? From my point of view as a private scholar of in the economics area, I would ask why a single currency would seem to do so much good for the U. S. but not far the EU? From my slight bit of reading I think that I am supposed to say "Eurozone." Maybe that is where the one kind of money applies. What was the point? Why not just change your money at the border like an incoming tourist?
Making a one-currency system would correspond, in general, to reducing border issues, making more of a uniform society, or reducing ethnic difference. Difference in general would be reduced.
In the in the capitalistic world, should there be one dominant country? Or should all of the countries be combined into one? These are the relevant questions. Here is another bad illegal "cut and paste" from FT the finicky English on-line magazine.
(now seamlessly resume please): As Thomas Mayer of Deutsche Bank notes, (breathe): “below the surface of the euro area’s public debt and banking crisis lies a balance-of-payments crisis caused by a misalignment of internal real exchange rates” This means (I think) that the individual countries in the Eurozone were never equalized after all. They were not, in fact, equalized into one society. The currencies were made equal but they were still separate cultures or countries. Which sounds kind of normal ---
They are societies that differ. Everyone is not equal. What is surprising about there being different human cultures and countries in the world? For most of time, the world has had this. Did capitalism totally obliterate that, making us all one? Does "globalization" continue the project of obliterating ethnicity? What kind of society was ancient Rome in which every "other" society was simply killed or exterminated culturally, so that we know only the names of the nations obliterated by the Romans, and there were literally hundreds of such nations, not to mention continual rebellions like the two Spartacist revolts. And is this the type of society we are aspiring to now? Is it not the case that one of the characteristics of Europe, since the fall of the Roman epoch, is that of many individual countries, many of which do have their own recognizable culture? Europe has a variety of different countries in it, that is the case.
So: the idea of free trade is that all these individual countries should become more equal. This is implied by the idea of capitalism itself. Come to Papa and buy Papa's product and become Papa. Now you can feel it. You can just feel and intuit: there is a limit to that. At some point persons have to say "you can't boss me around any more." And that is what big business is scared of. What the "off Wall St." protesters are saying. Or Off Broadway? Whatever it was. Im not always a stickler for details, as you readers know.
Capitalism, of course, thrives when all the members of a given society participate. For the developmental period of capitalism), capitalism could not have been limited to, for example, just one class. It needs to include everybody.
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