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I’m Scott Arnell and you’re watching Fast Forward on GenevaRoadShow.TV.
On Fast Forward we try to bring you a very quick, high level overview of a current topic.
Today we’re talking about the Euro.
I just came back from a couple of weeks in Asia
and many of the people that I spoke with feel like they’re helplessly watching a slow-motion train wreck
here in Europe relative to what’s going on with the Euro.
It also became clear to me that many of the people I spoke with
didn’t really understand how the Euro came about...
probably because they’re younger than me.
A LOT younger.
So in this episode we’ve cut together a few short bits
from a BBC presentation about the Euro
made a couple of weeks ago in the UK
presented by Robert Peston.
I gotta run and do something else right now – You enjoy… presented by Robert Peston.
I gotta run and do something else right now – You enjoy…
Three times great conflicts had erupted from French and German soil.
And the idea was after the war that this should never happen again.
And money as well as trade and political rapprochement
they were all keys to that particular door.
Winston Churchill was clearly very keen that France and Germany should
come together and no longer cause a problem for everybody else.
This is not a movement of parties, but a movement of people.
Europe can only be united by the heartfelt wish and vehement expression
of the great majority, of all the people, of all the parties
in all the freedom-loving countries.
No matter where they dwell, or how they vote.
Churchill was a promoter of the United States of Europe,
though with Britain on the outside.
The UK wasn't one of the European pioneers which signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957.
At the heart of the new European Community stood the historic enemies: West Germany and France
together with Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
As these countries removed barriers to trade,
the idea of a single European currency was always
in the background but made explicit in the late 1960s.
In 1981 François Mitterrand was elected president of France.
During the war, he had been a prisoner in Germany and he escaped three times.
Each time he met Germans who helped him.
Afterwards he became obsessed with the idea that there should
never be another war and that Europe should unite.
A year later Helmut Kohl became Chancellor of West Germany.
Kohl grew up only a few kilometers from the French border.
As a youth he lived through the second world war.
He lost a brother during that time.
He believed that there should never again be a war amongst the peoples of Europe.
Kohl, because of the history of Germany,
wanted to anchor Germany into Europe to make war impossible.
And Mitterrand had the same objective.
And that is what the Euro and the European Union, to some extent, are all about.
The common vision was to have a single currency from the Atlantic
maybe to the Urals that in some magical way would do everything.
The end of communism brought down the Berlin wall
and the face of Europe was about to change forever.
But a unified Germany would be an even stronger Germany.
When it became clear that the momentum towards German unification was unstoppable
the French president, François Mitterrand, needed a way of constraining German power.
The deal that was done, was that the Germans once unified
would then do everything they could to embark towards a single currency.
For the French, monetary union was as much about politics,
about the balance of power within Europe, as about economics.
The idea was to strengthen the institutions of the European Union relative to member countries
so that the growing power of Germany could be held in check.
Europe's leaders assembled in a small Dutch town to agree a treaty
that would shape and shake the continent.
It was an impossible dream that you could build a single European currency
without a single European state.
Everybody knew that it was a risk.
Everybody knew that you were putting the cart before the horse.
You cannot have a monetary union that works without a fiscal union.
It was arrogant because they thought that that way
they could override the democratic veto.
And it was irresponsible because they didn't say “Well this is a high risk project”
and I think that was a gamble, if you like,
which should never have been taken.