To Americans, the surrender of sovereignty necessary to create the euro might appear unthinkable. The closely linked nations of Europe have been whipsawed for decades by their gyrating currency values. Every Italian lira devaluation sends cheaper Italian tomatoes to French produce markets. Every rise in the value of the German mark makes Mercedes-Benzes more expensive in Spanish car dealerships. The key to the euro is that Europeans are making this daring move not to suppress their sovereignty, but to enhance it.
European countries are all very dependent on each other.
The euro is the abandonment of theoretical national sovereignty for the benefit of regaining real shared sovereignty. There was the Scandinavian Monetary Union and the Latin Monetary Union in the last century, the post-World War II international gold standard of fixed exchange rates that lasted in one version or another until 1971. There have been two separate European exchange rate coordination mechanisms since then to keep currencies stable relative to each other. Both functioned for a while, then crashed disastrously. In fact, as Barre knows well, the economic history of postwar Europe is in large part a history of currency crises, of emergency meetings of leaders and of spectacular monetary collapses.