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… Currie also thinks what happens after Emu is a question that can be shelved: ‘Adopting the single currency means, by definition, surrendering control over monetary policy, but no further loss of national sovereignty would necessarily be bound to follow. Europe’s governments may well choose that course. Or they may choose otherwise.’ I don’t think this covers the ground.

First of all, if a government stops having its own currency, it doesn’t give up just ‘control over monetary policy’ as normally understood; its spending powers also become constrained in an entirely new way. If a government does not have its own central bank on which it can draw checks freely, its expenditure can be financed only by borrowing in the open market in competition with business firms, and this may prove excessively expensive or even impossible, particularly under ‘conditions of extreme emergency’.