Japan and the European Union have much in common concerning development, HDI and democracy. Yet in another way, their situations differ significantly. In retrospect, one realizes that with the relatively small population (compared to the US and the USSR of the 1980s), Japan could not continue its rise to become global economic No. 1 and while it "jumped" to second place as the population of its other competitor halved from Soviet Union to Russia, afterwards the real troubles for Japan began. The EU has global position No. 1 (both nominal and PPP, cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29 ) following continuous membership expansions to currently include a population of ca. 500 million.



Where the article goes wrong is concerning the exact conditions of the birth of the euro. While I am a defender of humanism, it is too simple an explanation to assume that the euro "happened" out of the citizens' free will and their lofty aspirations. Mr. Kohl and a majority of people who had voted for him i n i t i a l l y tended to be against the abolition of the D mark, an event that may have been was one reason for him losing to Mr. Schröder in 1998.



The more realistic (and structuralist) explanation is that the introduction of the euro had been a precondition of German reunification as agreed upon during the December 1989 meeting in Strasbourg (see "The euro" by David Marsh). In that way, three events (USSR break-down, German reunification, Strasbourg 1989 deal) came together (and you can actually add the beginning of the rise of China [post Tiananmen square] and the r e l a t i v e end of the rise of Japan as events #4 and #5). And while the euro dropped in the first year it exchanged hands, since 2002 when it became stronger than the dollar it never looked back and build up on its economic rather than military Keynesianist strength. And just like the reunification in the first years of the transition was not completely smooth, the same applied to the European integration project. More importantly, after Draghi's speech on July 26th, 2012 the irreversibility of the political consolidation has been clear.

