The New York Times
March 9, 2010
PARIS — Ten years after the euro, it’s still all about Germany, which isn’t the way it was supposed to be. In the run-up to the common currency’s debut in 1999, the air was thick with talk about harnessing Germany’s economic power, then enshrined in the mark. A failure to move toward monetary union would lead only to “a preponderant influence of Germany,” Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former president of France, said in a 1997 interview in the French daily Le Monde.
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