From Der Spiegel:
How a Good Idea Became a Tragedy
The Greek crisis has revealed why the euro is the world's most dangerous currency. The euro was built on a foundation of debt and trickery, where economic principles were sacrificed to romantic political visions. The history of the common currency is the story of a good idea that turned into a tragedy of epic proportions. By SPIEGEL Staff.
This is Part 1 of SPIEGEL's recent cover story on the history of the common currency. You can read Part 2 here. The remaining installment will be published in English on Friday.
Before Germany's Horst Reichenbach had even stepped off the plane in Athens, the Greeks knew who was coming. He had already been given various unflattering nicknames in the Greek media, including "Third Reichenbach" and "Horst Wessel" -- a reference to the Nazi activist of that name who was posthumously elevated to martyr status. The members of his 30-strong team, meanwhile, had been compared to Nazi regional leaders.
The taxi drivers at the airport were on strike, while hundreds stood in front of the parliament building, chanting their slogans. One protestor was wearing a T-shirt that read: "I don't need sex. The government fucks me every day." Within the first few hours, Horst Reichenbach realized that he had landed in a disaster area.
Reichenbach is the head of the task force the European Commission sent to Athens to provide what Brussels officials call "technical assistance" in the implementation of necessary reforms. For the Greek media, the task force is the advance guard of an invasion force, the bureaucrats that have arrived to transform beautiful Greece into a German colony.
Reichenbach describes his tasks as follows: restructure the tax system, streamline the administration, accelerate privatization, strengthen legal certainty, open up access to protected professions, restructure the energy and healthcare sector and remove structures that are hostile to investment. The effort, says Reichenbach, requires "thinking in terms of years instead of months." He was the vice-president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and had planned to retire at the end of December. But then he received a call from European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, who then dispatched Reichenbach on this mission impossible.
He is a middleman between two Europes, the north and the south. The euro was intended as a currency that would help Europe grow together, but the first major euro crisis is in fact pitting the north and the south, the deutschmark economy and the lira economy, against each other. To make matters worse, there are also two different speeds in Europe, with one part of Europe moving at the high-paced speed of financial markets and banks, while the other drags along at the speed of governments and parliaments. And then there is also the Europe of two versions of the truth. One is at home in Brussels, Berlin and Paris, in the centers of power, while the other resides in the living rooms and on the streets of European cities.
As admirable as it is for Reichenbach and his 30 nation-builders to be bringing order to Athens, no amount of reorganizing can simply do away with €350 billion ($473 billion) in government debt. How to cope with this debt without ruining the European project is the most pressing question of recent weeks. After 20 years of bad decisions, spineless reforms and postponed actions, it isn't the citizens but the markets that have forced united Europe into an endgame over the euro. How can this currency have a future? Is there a risk that Greece is only the first domino in a row that could end with Germany? Is the euro zone a faulty design?
A team of SPIEGEL reporters went to Brussels, Luxembourg, Athens, Berlin and elsewhere to find answers to these questions. They have reconstructed the rise and fall of a currency that can only survive if the mistakes that were made over two decades are corrected in the next few months.
Act I: The Birth of the Euro (1991 to 2001)
Why the mistakes that would later threaten the euro were already made in the foundation phase. How Greece and other countries cheated their way into the monetary union. Why the common currency is a trillion-euro bet made by politicians against the markets -- and one that they would ultimately lose.
The bold, visionary project of creating a common currency for different countries and populations cannot be understood without reminding ourselves that the Berlin Wall came down in the late 1980s, the world still felt that World War II was a relatively recent event, and that Europe was still discussing whether Germany could pose a threat again.
Jacques Delors was the president of the European Commission for 10 years, and he was the lead author of the Maastricht Treaty, which defined the basic features of the euro. Now Delors is forced to listen to the daily criticism of how illusory his vision of a common currency was. But if he had had his way completely, he says, Europe would have been far better equipped, would have a more uniform constitution, and would be centrally governed by a Commission whose work would not be constantly undermined in the European Council, which comprises the heads of state and government.
Delors always wanted to go further than the political elite he was dealing with. At the time -- unlike today, he says -- that elite was consistently filled with dedicated Europeans, people like then-French President Francois Mitterand, then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, then-Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers and then-Portuguese Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva. But they too were not bold enough to integrate their countries to a degree that could count as true European coordination.
The Maastricht Treaty, which marked the establishment of the European Union when it was signed in 1992, made it all possible. It placed Europe on "three columns," the first of which was an economic column, complete with an "Economic and Monetary Union." The treaty provided the necessary legal framework, so that a common financial policy would have been conceivable, as would a coordinated fiscal and interest-rate policy. But the political will to fill out the Maastricht framework was missing.
The "United States of Europe" remained little more than a soundbite. And yet the introduction of the euro created a fait accompli that could no longer be rolled back. This European Big Bang, if you will, was to be followed by a process of evolution, during the course of which all the details were to be resolved.
Perhaps most importantly, the common currency was also a political symbol. Delors says that he always perceived Greece as being very far away, different and foreign. The country's acceptance into the euro zone happened much too early, he adds. But at the time, in the 1990s, politicians stood up in front of microphones and said that Europe was inconceivable without Athens, the "cradle of democracy." And Portugal, with its Carnation Revolution, also surely deserved to be part of the club. And the Irish, oppressed for so long by the British, had to be helped too. And who would have wanted to show Italy the door, merely because of its high unit labor costs and inflation rates?
And so, when the euro zone became a reality, elephants like Germany and France came together with mice like Portugal, Ireland and Luxembourg. Stable, prosperous countries of the north shared their common currency with shaky, underdeveloped countries of the south, mature industrialized nations joined forces with what were hardly more than developing countries. Strict Protestants mixed with sensual Catholics.
The promises of the euro were recorded in the Maastricht Treaty. It was to be a currency that would make Europe strong in a competitive globalized world; that would bring the European economies closer together; that would oblige countries to limit their debts and deficits; that would guarantee that no country would be liable for the debts of another; and that would promote political unity.
And the details? Well, they would be ironed out later.
