To me, the Committee seemed to say “here’s the award, you’ve done well so far, now look into the future and don’t mess up”. It reminds me of the Obama prize which had been also very much forward-looking when conferred a few years back.

Peace is a fluid concept that cannot be captured at a point in time but whose temporal dimension spans both ex post and ex ante frames. The Nobel Committee is right to emphasize this.

Where I take issue with the author is in the intrinsic vs extrinsic importance of euro, the currency. “The actual use of the euro, as envisioned by those who preached its value, was seen as a bonding tool for European unity. Yet it was never only about the currency itself. The euro is a means, not an end. It was about the wide mix of European political and cultural priorities and perceptions behind it and the assumption that it would lead to shared policies and processes.”

Herein lies the crux of the euro malaise: the architects of the euro tried to solve a political goal with an economic toolbox. Monetary sovereignty serves to bond a banking system, acts as a fiscal agent to a government, and safeguards the flow of credit. A legal tender that bonds “European unity” is a false premise. The object of Hamilton’s First Bank of the United States or Montagu’s Bank of England was expressly to assure the flow of credit. Thomas Jefferson actually argued that the FBUS was unconstitutional (sic).

If the euro embodied a “wide mix of European political and cultural priorities and perceptions” then these pan-European political and cultural priorities and perceptions ought to come to the fore to solve the crisis now. But it’s so hard to do precisely because the politicians had reached for the wrong toolbox in the first place. They still cling to it.