Currencies After the Crash: The Uncertain Future of the Global Paper-Based Currency System

CHAPTER 4

WHAT HISTORY TELLS US ABOUT THE EURO’S FUTURE

JOHN TAYLOR

“What we should grasp, however, from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom; and third, European unity has been tried before, and the outcome was far from happy.”

—Margaret Thatcher, Stagecraft, 2002

In the last few decades, more than a few fashionable writers have followed the lead of Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), treating his thesis as a given and implying that the world has advanced—or at least changed—so much that any analysis of previous historical events and ...