Professor Cavazzuti reminds us (see first online last week) the "devastating" effects of the lira's exit from the European Monetary Snake in 1973 to warn against the easy illusions of those who believe they can solve our problems with what today would be called an Itexit, along the lines of the much talked about Grexit and Brexit: more than illusions, according to Cavazzuti, these are actually the reasonings of "childish" extremists.
However, the thesis convinces us only halfway. Because we all agree that leaving the euro now would be madness (if anything, we shouldn't have entered it immediately as they claimed with farsightedness Antonio Fazio and Cesare Romiti at the time), but neglecting the extremely fragile foundations on which the German-driven euro system rests and which are at the origin of many Euroscepticisms is dangerously naïve. In the matter of monetary unions, history teaches us and leads us to reach conclusions that frame the problem raised by Cavazzuti in a very different way.
In fact, the euro is an experiment with many precedents, some successful, others unsuccessful in relation to the degree of political integration achieved. In 1865 France, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland (to which numerous other countries subsequently joined) united their currencies in an agreement, the Latin Monetary Union, which provided for the uniformity of currency standards, ceilings on issuance and the free circulation of the different currencies in the different countries. After a progressive distortion due to nationalistic resistance, the Union definitively failed in 1927.
in 1872 Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden agreed on the use of common currencies, based on a gold crown, freely in circulation and having legal value in the three countries, forming the Scandinavian Monetary Union which did not resist the outbreak of war in 1914. Among the examples of monetary unions instead we have one successful one at home and it is the lira, the result of welding into a single currency with the formation of the unitary state of the various currencies circulating in the various small states of the Peninsula. Another is the German mark, which 40 years after the Zollverein, the customs union of the various German principalities, imposed itself on the florin, the thaler, the kronenthaler and the other marks of the Hanseatic cities in the wake of the creation of the federal state in 1874. Yet another example is the dollar which took a hundred years after the declaration of independence to establish itself and in reality only did so after it had agreed to federate the debt of the member states of the Union.
The lesson of history seems trivial, but not for this reason it can be avoided. The enemies of the euro are not so much Eurosceptics like Salvini or Le Pen, but how many are opposed to that European political integration which is written in all the treaties but which no political leader, both in France and in Germany, seems to want to take seriously. Without their defeat, the fate of the euro seems as sealed as that of the dollar would have been had the Southerners won the Civil War.
