Euro Error

Jean-Jacques Rosa

gen 1999 · Algora Publishing

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Does Europe still have a choice? Do we still have a choice? The Euro was eagerly adopted by governments, the media and sometimes even by European citizens. They promised us less unemployment and more freedom. But the outcome was not so certain. It was high time for an economist, independent minded and free from special interests, to sound the alarm. Jean-Jacques Rosa denounces the creation of the European single currency as the most serious error made since the deflationist policy of the 1920s, which turned the 1929 stock market crash into a decade of tragedy. In coming to this judgement, Jean-Jacques Rosa applies logic, the truths of everyday existence, human experience and statistical proof. Isn't the Euro, then, really just the political desire to melt the European nations into one state? But wouldn't the right size for today's nations be infinitely more modest? Starting with the formation of the common market at the end of the 1950s, intended to restore the free exchange of goods, services, men and capital after the wave of protectionism and isolationism of the depression years and the war, the European leadership elites have gone on to erecting a plan for a monetary -- and thus a political -- Europe, that of a very great State and a single State. Otherwise, they suggest, we will be relegated to decline and impotence and finally to obliteration. Not to want Europe unified, statist and monetarist would be not to want Europe, as if the latter could admit only that one definition, only that one design. A typical example of politically correct thinking. Against the trend of intellectual conformity, the timidity of the elites and the knee-jerk approbation of Franco-German integration, Jean-Jacques Rosa, often polemical, suggests it's time we exited from this impasse -- from our European error. This book was originally published by Editions Grasset and Fasquelle in 1998. It is translated from French by Andrea Secara.