EVER since it was created, the Eurozone’s mission has been to defy economic constraints in the name of politics. Whenever they were told by economists that the euro wasn’t an optimal currency zone, the Euro-establishment would simply shrug, rejecting technical economic arguments out of hand. Anything is possible with enough political will, they would say, in their hubristic folly. Currencies are a tool of politics, an instrument by which countries can be moulded together, they genuinely believed. To them, it was a case of get the politics “right” and the economics would follow; rather than seeing economics as a set of natural laws akin to those of physics, never to be defied, they saw it instead as something they could easily control, mould and manipulate. The euro was thus an anti-economic and anti-economics project. The French establishment were the worst: their aim always was to “tame” capitalism, “the law of the jungle” and to reorder the messy political map to create a more “logical, rational” system. Yet pushed too far, Cartesian logic becomes destructive; human beings begin to believe that they have total power over their environment. Inevitably, reality eventually reasserts itself – and the conceit ends in tears, unemployment, poverty and chaos.