Lis­ten now: One Seg­ment

With the com­ing of the Euro­pean Mon­e­tary Union, the nations of Europe will share the same cur­ren­cy for the first time since the Roman Empire. Dom­i­nat­ed by a Ger­many that is revert­ing to its Nazi past, this orga­ni­za­tion will join togeth­er 500 mil­lion con­sumers in a com­mon eco­nom­ic enti­ty stretch­ing from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea. With the estab­lish­ment of the “Euro” in 1999, the world’s polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic life will under­go a pro­found change. This seg­ment exam­ines the EMU as the ful­fill­ment of the the­o­ries of pan-Ger­man the­o­reti­cian Friedrich List, who for­mu­lat­ed the con­cept of an eco­nom­i­cal­ly and com­mer­cial­ly unit­ed Europe under Ger­man dom­i­na­tion. Set forth in the 1840s, List’s con­cept was designed as a vehi­cle to unseat Great Britain as the dom­i­nant pow­er in the world. This pro­gram the­o­rizes that the EU is an attempt to do the same thing to the Unit­ed States, the dom­i­nant pow­er in the world today. The pro­gram con­cludes with a dis­cus­sion of some of the pos­si­ble effects of the cre­ation of the Euro, includ­ing the dev­as­ta­tion of the Amer­i­can econ­o­my and the exac­er­ba­tion of the rise of fas­cism in Europe.