A very interesting article written by The Irish Times Berlin correspondent, Derek Scally, in The Irish Times on April 8, quotes former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as saying that he had remained in office until his political defeat in 1998 to guarantee that his country would adopt the European single currency because he doubted whether anyone else in Germany had the political will to do so.

Scally refers to an interview he had with Kohl in 2002. In this interview, the former Chancellor said he did not dare hold a referendum on the single currency in Germany because “of course, I would have lost”.

Kohl had gone on to say that “we had lots of people in the CDU who spoke out” (against the euro). “No one said ‘I reject this’, but... (they would say) ‘we will do this but we will postpone things again for a few years’.”

According to Scally, Kohl had added that he linked his “political existence to the project” because “it was a question of the continuity, the irreversibility, of the European project”.

In the interview, Kohl also said that much of the resistance in Germany was with regard to the idea of a currency union without the foundation of a fiscal and economic union.

The final paragraph of Scally’s article in The Irish Times, in my view, says it all, when he quotes Kohl saying the following: “I am a power person. A Chancellor has to be if he’s to get something through and, if he is smart, he knows that now is the time to push something through. In one case I was like a dictator and that was with the euro”

These last few years have proved what Eurosceptics have always known: that the introduction of the single currency was much more of a political decision than an economic one. Many well-known European and international economists said this.

Without fiscal and economic union, the single currency does not make sense. And to have a successful fiscal and economic union of so many different and diverse countries and economies, is asking for a miracle. EU bureaucrats have no track record of miracles!