What the Euro Has Wrought

Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the EU Commission, may be widely referred to as “the master of lies”, but when he spoke to a group of students in Belgium in early May he was not at his best. The Eurozone, he claimed, was an “area of solidarity and prosperity”. There are no reports of laughter but in Hades Tacitus could be heard repeating that old jibe of his, “ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant”: They make a desert and call it peace.

A desert it is, at least in the currency union’s south. About the only abundance is in miserable statistics. To take just a few, Greece’s GDP fell by roughly a quarter between 2008 and 2014. In Spain, youth unemployment stood at slightly under 50 per cent this March, some 10 per cent worse than in Italy, a country with an economy that has barely grown since the turn of the century. There has been a wave of emigration from Europe’s south in which the best and the brightest are over-represented. Talk of a lost generation is…