But Europhoria aside, the hot new currency will not extract Europeans from the deep ditch they are in, which has no parallel in all history, and from which there is no apparent ready exit. I salute the Euro. But I do know that Euroland sits in Europe, one of the preeminent blood-stained land masses of the world, and now the site of one of the great and hopeful stories of our time. For centuries the ancestors of today's Eurolanders had an ugly habit of regularly killing each other. A common coin may well encourage further unity, diminishing any chance of renewed violent behavior.
Ongoing peace is good for America, period.
Principally because of wealth and size. But the reported size of Euroland is, at root, highly misleading. The United Nations has just published the 1998 edition of World Population Prospects , one of the great demographic reference works. At my request, the U.N. Population Division did a special run for the aggregate of the 11 nations of the Euro-zone. That is incredibly low, lower by far for a large group of countries than anything the world has seen since the advent of serious statistics.