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Europe's Hamilton Moment

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The United States came into existence through the success of the rebels in a war in which they -- the aforesaid rebels -- fought with the aid of inflated money ("not worth a continental") and potentially destabilizing debt.


The political compact we know as the U.S. Constitution came about largely because of that fiscal and monetary crisis. It came about because of the vision and energy of Alexander Hamilton, who brought Madison and Jay into the fold so together they could write magnificent advocacy known as The Federalist, and who was then charged by the first President with the gigantic task of getting the new Treasury underway.  


Today, many of the nations of Europe are heavily in debt. They have sought a higher degree of unity in part as a reaction to that indebtedness, and thus new unity includes a single currency, a European Central Bank., and closer cooperation among the finance ministers of the nations that share this currency.  This has led some Europeans to wonder whether they need, and whether they have on their bench somewhere, an Alexander Hamilton.


That is explicit in the February 2014 issue of HARPER'S, which features the transcript of a panel discussion about "the euro and its discontents" featuring, among others Ulrike Guérot and James K. Galbraith. [Guérot is a German woman who advocates a vision of Europe as a single Republic. Galbraith, the son of the more famous John Kenneth Galbraith, is a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin.] This exchange caught my eye:


 Guérot: Europe is facing its Hamiltonian moment. Either we make it or we don't. The United States was forged through a debt crisis after a war, and after a hundred years you made it and you have these automatic stabilizers in your system. So give us a hundred years' time and then we'll speak again.


Galbraith: I have sympathy for your project ... but you haven't go a hundred years to build it. You haven't got three years to build it. It's a question of steps that ... need to be taken in the next six months to prevent a very serious decline toward social disorder in certain parts of Europe.
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