The Single Currency and European Citizenship: Unveiling the Other Side of the Coin.

Farquhar, C.N.

The Single Currency and European Citizenship: Unveiling the Other Side of the Coin

Giovanni Moro

Bloomsbury Books, 2013

Author Giovanni Moro, a political scientist at the University of Macerata in Italy, has completed an efficient study, although it is not one that is totally free bias. His study was supported by the European Commission, and seems to take for granted the desirability of merging all the people of Europe into a single economic and political unity. Its subtitle "Unveiling the Other Side of the Coin," is well chosen, and conveys a sense of foreboding, a fear that the troubles of the Euro have provoked a nationalist reaction to political unification. His thesis is that most who urged a single currency on Europe did so in the belief that a single currency would help bring the diverse political states that comprised war-torn Europe together into a single political unit--possibly, some even felt, as a step toward a globally unified world state. There seemed much logic in the idea; one might even say, inevitability. In a small, crowded continent, in which political boundaries often covered only the smallest of areas, the idea of a single currency appeared to make economic as well as political sense. For those who saw unification as an inevitable and necessary solution to Europe's problems, the introduction of a single currency that would facilitate free trade, and free tourists from tiresome currency restrictions, seemed to be good sense. It was also help shoo nationals who would otherwise prefer to keep their own political and cultural identity into a position where they would eventually accept economic, political, and eventually ethnic unification.

But, as Moro shows so effectively, the idea of a single currency shared by separate politically independent and economically diverse nations led to economic problems that have caused many European nations to blame each other for the resultant problems. Economically weak nations in the Euro zone can no longer devalue their currency at will, and wealthy countries find themselves burdened by the need to support the countries with weaker economies.

One important issue to which Moro does not do justice is the north/south divide that is very real in Europe. The northern countries have proved more dynamic than the southern countries, and this has led to a new nationalism, even though governments have tried to control nationalism, which threatens the goal of further political unification.

Nationalism is to some extent racialism in a more culture-conscious than biological form. How long it can survive the massive movement of peoples across borders in search of either work or welfare one cannot say, especially in light of migratory pressures from the exploding population of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. But Moro has exposed the "other side of the Euro" very effectively: the Euro has not been an unalloyed success as a unifier of European member nations. The economic stresses caused by the Euro have tended the sense of national identity in Europe. However, unless the move toward nationalism strengthens even further, Europe fifty years hence is likely to be the scene of competition not so much between European national groups as between immigrant-descended ethnicities of diverse non-European origin, whose loyalties and antagonisms may prove to be stronger than European ethnic antipathies. Asian and African immigrants do not mix, and Hindus and Moslems do not mix, and their sense of identity seems to be far stronger than that of Europeans. Whether the Euro will then survive will turn more on economic and local political issues than on any grandiose goal of a single, unified, "European" nation-state.