The launch of the euro is a success of historic proportions. It is also the ultimate vindication of the method first sketched out nearly fifty years ago in the Schuman memorandum.
In the recent history of Europe, from Jean Monnet's plan for a European Coal and Steel Community in1950 to today's European Union, one pattern seems clear: where economic integration leads, political integration will eventually follow.
It is the commonest of all the economic arguments against EMU, but also the most specious: that any country in the euro-zone which suffered an economic crisis that did not affect its neighbours (an "asymmetric shock"), deprived of the freedom to devalue, would be condemned to a massive rise in unemployment.
The creation of the euro will be the most important development in the evolution of the international monetary system since the widespread adoption of flexible exchange rates in the early 1970s.