03/06/2012
Booker picked up the crisis fatigue from last week, telling us
in his column that the media had become more than a little battle-weary about the slow-motion collapse of the euro. Nevertheless, it took them quite a while to wake up to the gravity of the crisis building up over the latest episode â the impending bankruptcy of Spain.
On Thursday â while even the EU's economic affairs commissioner was warning of the "disintegration" of the eurozone, and a former Spanish prime minister spoke of "a total emergency, the worst crisis we have ever lived through" â one internet summary of the day's top stories (headed by "Jeremy Hunt") ranked Spain only 20th on the list.
Both Booker and I though have noted how so many commentators, even those who have tried to put this latest crisis into perspective, often reveal how hazily informed many of them are about the history of the EU and what a central role the creation of the euro has played in it.
Thus, almost wearily, Booker tells us about the BBC's Robert Peston who was not the only one to "explain" how the idea of a single currency was concocted by Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand after the fall of Communism in 1989.
That so many people get it wrong, however, is not just a curiosity. One cannot, as Booker says, grasp the significance of the euro without realising that its history goes much further back than that. So he tells the story one again.
It all goes back, as the man says, to 1957 and Jean Monnet â who was the real organising genius behind the gradual building of "Europe" into a single, unified state.
It was he who suggested that it was only through monetary and economic union that the "political union which is the goal" could be achieved. "There are no premature ideas", he wrote, "only opportunities for which we must learn to wait".
By 1970, Monnet's ideas were being fleshed out by the Werner report, which saw monetary union as the key step towards political union. But in 1978, another report for the European Commission, by Sir Donald McDougall, warned that it would be reckless to create a single currency unless Europe was first given an all-powerful government, with the power to tax, and to make a massive transfer of resources from the richer states to the poorer.
In the 1980s, though, that other great integrator Jacques Delors (second only to Monnet in his influence on the drive to European political union) decided to ignore the advice of McDougall and others and to launch the single currency without the suggested preconditions. To move straight to fiscal union, he knew, was not on the cards. But if the single currency was put in place first, it would create exactly the kind of strains which had been foreseen â making fiscal union the only way out.
Delors was banking on that same principle that Monnet had relied on ever since the "European project" was launched in 1950: the "beneficial crisis" â one which can be used, as so often in the EU's history, to justify giving a whole new tranche of powers to Brussels.
Those responsible for setting up the euro in the 1990s knew that it would eventually bring about the kind of strains between richer and poorer countries that could justify their moving on to the fiscal and political union that was always the real goal.
And there we have the crunch. What they hadn't reckoned with was that the crisis, when it came, would be so immense that it would spiral out of anyone's control.
Thus, amid the present shambles, we hear distracted voices calling for "more Europe" â more powers for Brussels, a new treaty â but the truth is that the chaos has gone way beyond their ability to solve it. They are not going to get their new powers, their "eurobonds", their fiscal union.
As the ultimate "beneficial crisis" that the architects of Europe dreamt of arrives â it is not turning out to be so beneficial after all. As Shakespeare put it, they have been "hoist with their own petard", as "purposes mistook fall on the inventors' heads".
They have been horribly caught out, and the result, as we begin to see, is a catastrophe which could be about to take a great deal more of their "European dream" with it.
For all that, there is nothing we can do about it. Those vainglorious zealots thought they knew better than everybody else. They didn't. And we are going to have to pay the price.
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