The European Union is on track towards a common currency for eleven of its fifteen member nations. The culmination of this currency merger will occur on 1 July 2002, when national currencies cease to be legal tender and all citizens of the participating nations switch over to the use of euro notes and coins. The main motivation behind the euro is, arguably, to boost European trade and challenge the US dollar's primacy as world currency.

Whatever the motivation, this is a more momentous event for the world than most people realize. The reason is that it points to the future. The current international monetary system is increasingly showing up as unviable for the emerging world economy. And my guess is that the euro is the start of a long process that will take us to a single-currency world. This was in fact a recommendation made in 1878 by the English economist Stanley Jevons. In outlining the advantage of an ‘international money’ he had to, it must be admitted, scrape the barrel's bottom. By the time a similar case was made again in 1984 by Harvard's Richard Cooper (who argued for one currency to be shared by all the industrialized nations of the world), the idea did not seem quite as far-fetched. Since then the structure of the world economy has changed even further; and the repeated crises of the 1990s—Sweden 1992; Mexico 1994; Thailand, Indonesia, Korea 1997; and Japan currently teetering on the brink-is evidence of this.