EDITADO:

“Op-Ed Columnist

The Euro Has No Clothes

By ROGER COHEN

Published: November 29, 2010

LONDON — Is the euro to the early 21st century what the League of Nations was to the early 20th: a fine idea that became a political orphan and was condemned to unravel?

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Roger Cohen

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As Ireland follows Greece in the great bailout domino game, and Portugal and Spain loom, the euro can no longer take its survival for granted just because its collapse would be unthinkable.

Both the League of Nations and the euro were conceived for worlds that vanished. The League emerged in 1919 from the ashes of World War I with the aim of preventing another war. But its idealism was an early victim of Hitler’s violent nationalism. Changed forces in Europe could not be checked by its covenant.

Jacques Delors’s “Report on Economic and Monetary Union,” laying out the path to a single euro currency, was presented in early 1989 just as all changed utterly.

Within months, the Berlin Wall fell, Germany was reunited, the Soviet empire imploded and Yalta’s imprisoned European nations were freed.

The report noted that “a transfer of decision-making power” from member states to the European Community (now Union) would be needed in “the fields of monetary policy and macroeconomic management.” A currency, in other words, needs a political authority: History is unequivocal about that. The euro was conceived to complete European integration.

But with the Cold War’s end, broadening of the E.U. trumped deepening. A 12-member community grew to 27. A united Germany no longer needed deliverance through Europe from Hitler’s painful legacy: Pan-Europeanism gave way to penny-counting. Ex-communist nations that had been pawns of Moscow did not want to be pawns of Brussels. A transnational currency was birthed as European federalism ebbed.

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Hay material suficiente para un amplio debate, pero lo cierto es que otras divisas se devalúan…¿Y porqué no el Euro?. ¿No son las intervenciones devaluaciones en sí mismas?. ¿Porqué tanta tragedia porque la UE tome medidas?. El Yuan Renminbi en precios “apuntalados”, el Dolar devaluado el mes pasado con una intervención de 600.000 millones de Dólares…¿Y la Libra?. Habrá que empezar a fijarse en Ella a ver si son sólo sospechas nuestras.

De lo que no se habla en estos artículos es de que la UE siempre ha avanzado a causa de grandes crisis. ¿No será que el Euro 2.0 finalmente habrá de ser una moneda mucho más fuerte?. Y no fuerte por el tipo de cambio, sino más resistente a las deudas soberanas. ¿No iremos hacia una deuda pública de la UE, a una centralización de la Deuda?.

No lo sabemos, pero la UE siempre le ha echado imaginación.

Haz de guía

Salu2.