“SORTIR PAR LE HAUT”:
The Euro is one of the elements necessary to unify France and Germany. Fully constructing the supporting apparatus the Euro needs, entails, by itself, an entire hierarchy of unification projects subordinated to it.
So the problems the Euro creates are supposed to appear, and being solved, thereafter. How? By “coming out on top”. Division and bitterness, is coming on the bottom. Coming out on top means higher ideas, unification, harmony.
To reconstruct a European state is as if one were constructing a cathedral: one has to do the following. One decides to build it, and then make it so. Cathedral construction was modified, as needed. Arches were progressively added, and, when problems were found, they were fixed. When it was discovered that the gigantic Amiens cathedral was bulging out, and was going to collapse, and enormous iron belt was added to its waist. It survived the world wars.
Paris had an enormous Roman cathedral for nearly a millennium. However, in the Twelfth Century, Parisians decided that, instead of refurbishing it once again, and expanding it, it would be better to build an entire new cathedral in what was known then as the “Frankish style”. The church leaders explicitly stated this as a technological project to awe the masses, and instruct the plutocrats as to the new possibilities technology offered. So the old cathedral was demolished, and the present one built. (There are no picture of the previous building, it stood fifty meters west of the present one.)
What present day, patritotic Europeans do not want to see again:
By 1200 CE, The Renovated Roman Empire of the Franks Had Become A Big Disunited Mess. Wars Blossomed All Over
One thing can be picked up from the map: it is the French themselves, the Western Franks, those based around Paris, who created the mess, by insisting on going their own way, and that everybody had the right to go their own way.
Charlemagne himself had launched the way towards that mess: he let Venice stay sort-of independent (although the Frankish empire needed Venice’s fleet), and then Charlemagne outright created the Papal States (by giving territories to the Pope upon which he could exert material power).
It is finally Francois I who understood that France and Germany had to be unified again. But, although he had been elected king of France (by the kingdom’s council), he failed in the 1519 CE election as Roman-German emperor.
Instead, Spain, Germany and Italy (plus the Americas) got united. The result was nearly 200 years of war between France and Spain, which created the independent, tolerant, somewhat republican Netherlands, while finishing with still another world war, the War of the Spanish Succession, which France barely won (losing territory in the process, and fostering British and Dutch power).
By then the Netherlands, Britain and France, the former two created by the latter, and long the same polity, were at each other’s throats. To win, Britain heavily financed Prussia, while France enjoyed a succession of ill advised dictators (Louis XIV, Louis XV, Napoleon).
Clearly one should go back to basic principles:
Europe Was A Creation Of The Franks, Not Just As A State, But As A Concept:
The power, and vision, of the Franks created Europe. It was originally mostly motivated by survival, and the will to set right was Late Romans had set wrong.
We actually know enough about the rise of Frankish power to discern the philosophies at work. Aetius, a Roman commander-in-chief who had been brought up (from an exchange/hostage program) among the Huns all too long, naturally used the Huns all too much. After Aetius was assassinated in one of these conspiracies Late Rome was rife with, his closest collaborators took over. They switched back to the 150 year old alliance with the Federated Franks, the fiercest enemy of the Huns (who thereafter disappear from history).
Europe is a modern concept created by the Franks anew in the Eighth Century; the original Europe, in the Eighth Century BCE, 16 centuries earlier, designated continental Greece. But that name, itself, the name of a Princess, was an older myth which acknowledged the debt Greece had to Phoenicia (nowadays Lebanon, and, more generally, the Middle East).
If one wants to build something great, one has to start somewhere. A European currency exists, and France and Germany constitute an “optimal currency area”, all by themselves. They have very similar republics. Both have a very high minimum wage, German police can pursue thugs inside France at will (and reciprocally). Both consult continually, Germany has agreed to help France’s wars in a supportive role.
In truth, Germany has become France, after around two centuries of error under Prussian misguidance.
So what are the problems with the common currency? Well, all these problems it was supposed to bring. A first one, of course, is the problem of making a Banking Union. The situation there is quite complex, yet unification is under way: the 200 largest banks are supposed to be inspected (smaller banks are crucial to the German economy, but they tend to be bankrupt, so they have been spared the present inspection regime).
What is there not to like? Well, don’t ask American plutocrats and their obsequious servants; they will stat to recite again Friedman’s hare-brained, shallow and disingenuous arguments.
Finally all what the American plutocrats and their butlers have to stay is that, never, ever, could France and Germany get unified again, so they could not possibly share a common currency (aside from the dollar, which American plutocrats control, through their rogue financial system). What they should stay, if the truth was their goal, is that they dread an ever greater unification of France and Germany.
First, because they won’t control it as readily. Secondly, because of the tradition of revolution, for which France, in particular, is known.
Civilization means revolutions, plutocracy, its obsequious servants and greedy opportunists, hate both. Thus they hate European Unification.
Why is the USA different? Simple: countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia are gigantic, and full of recent immigrants. Recent immigrants in a giant country can always go somewhere else, where construction, expansion, conquest, fracking, tar sands, coal and iron ore, lithium, what-not, is going on. No such possibilities in Europe, or then tightly regulated.
Recent immigrants are also anxious not to be seen whining, complaining, talking back, agitating, rebelling, lest they be not trusted anymore. In countries such as France, or Greece, if you do NOT whine, complain, talk back, argue, rebel, it is the exact way around: it is a servile, anxious to please, fit and conform attitude, which is not trusted.
One could see this with Obama: for years, it was said by his opponents that he was not a genuine American. Actually, he was not even an American, they asserted. The American Constitution invites this: it distinguishes American-born Americans, and immigrants (the French and now German Constitutions do not). An immigrant American cannot be elected president.
Discrimination is more American than mother or apple pie. Anxious to conform, American Jews, such as Milton Friedman, who could not even bother to express concern on behalf of their brethren while they were in danger of being exterminated, now have the infuriating impudence to teach us about strife being hindered by division. Verily, some people learned nothing, and are the lowest of the low.
So should the French and the Germans have a common currency? Well, in a sense, they used to have one, what was called “Euro-dollars”. The dollar, was, de facto, Europe’s common currency.
France and Germany do not discriminate against their citizens on ground of their origins. This is one of many ways in which France and Germany are similar. Why so similar? Well, they spend a lot of thinking finding out which French, or German qualities, laws, regulations, habits, appreciations, they should adopt.
France and Germany are now closer in spirit with each other than they are with the USA. So they should have rejected the dollar as a common currency, and get their own, according to the very argument the Euro haters have been using. And that’s exactly what they did.
Patrice Ayme’
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 