Gekko

MY father, who spent half a lifetime successfully navigating the Foreign Service, once gave me the key to bureaucratic power: “Turn everything into a technical question.”

That’s the secret of the Maastricht Treaty, a blueprint for turning the European Community into a supreme state through, among other methods, a unified currency. The idea is to gloss over the roughly two thousand years of bad news that followed the defeat of the Romans by the Germans at the Battle of the Teutoburger Wald by making European integration a question of central-bank intervention in forex markets or, perhaps, repo-rate coordination.

JD

About the Author

John Dizard

MY father, who spent half a lifetime successfully navigating the Foreign Service, once gave me the key to bureaucratic power: “Turn everything into a technical question.”

That’s the secret of the Maastricht Treaty, a blueprint for turning the European Community into a supreme state through, among other methods, a unified currency. The idea is to gloss over the roughly two thousand years of bad news that followed the defeat of the Romans by the Germans at the Battle of the Teutoburger Wald by making European integration a question of central-bank intervention in forex markets or, perhaps, repo-rate coordination.