Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

A few weeks ago Peter Jay, Britain’s former ambassador to the US and former economics editor of the BBC, recalled in an article in The Times of London how he had been present as a very young man at a lunch in the British embassy in Paris in 1952 at which the European Union’s founding father Jean Monnet had been a guest.  Jay recalled how Monnet had spelled out his vision for re-establishing French global influence through the creation of a European union.  According to Jay, Monnet said this could only be achieved gradually “by zig and by zag” until nationalist sentiment was finally transferred to a new entity called Europe.  Fast-forwarding to today’s euro crisis, Jay wrote: “The very dysfunctionality of the euro was its chief attraction to the ‘Bonapartists’.  They could safely rely upon it to cause the periodic acute crises that then supplied the political context for the next great leap forward to Euro-centralization, edging ever closer to one country...”

One doesn’t have to believe that the European political elite has been engaged in such a cynical conspiracy to accept the key points, namely that a single currency without a single government is “dysfunctional”; that as a consequence there will be “periodic acute crises”; and that the proposed solution to each crisis will be ever-closer union (because failure of the euro would be catastrophic in the short term, and because external powers such as the US and China are not at all concerned about pushing for a solution that entails further loss of democratic accountability and sovereignty for the eurozone’s member states).

But that there is and will continue to be fierce resistance to such a solution is certain (because the people of Europe’s constituent countries do mind about sovereignty and democratic accountability), and that in turn suggests that any respite in the euro crisis can only be temporary.