Member-only story
Had Britain Adopted The Euro, Would Brexit Ever Have Happened?
Read on…..
The 31st of December 1999 was a highly anticipated date for myriad reasons, not least because we were due to enter a new millennium, but because something revolutionary was about to happen in Europe.
The continent which had known so much carnage and destruction in the preceding years and exported its problems to the rest of the globe, sought to do things differently by fostering closer working relationships and borderless nations across board.
And at the heart of this thinking was the unifying currency — The Euro.
The Euro wasn’t just some pie in the sky concept, founded on idealism and little grasp of the finer points of economics; it was rooted in the fiscal discipline of the strongest economy in the geographical space — Germany.
Germany, at the start of the 20th century, was by the strongest economy in Europe. Its industrial competitiveness had outstripped Great Britain and American industrialists were bullish about its fortunes.
And out of nowhere, Serbian separatists murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand and chaos ensued with the Russians siding with the Serbians, while the Germans sided with the Austro-Hungarian empire whose monarch had been assassinated.