Bill Whittle on Afterburner from PJTV, compares the Air France A-330 crash with the fate of the euro. The aircraft, he says, did not suffer from a catastrophic structural failure. Rather, its control system had different pilots pulling in opposite directions. The computer system averaged the values and flew the aircraft into the sea.
Then we have the euro. As with the Airbus, Whittle asserts, it didn't suffer a catastrophic failure. Simply different countries are pulling in opposite directions. It can't be pulled out of the crisis and is being flown into the sea.
This is an intriguing thesis, cleverly put. But I think it's wrong. Using the Airbus analogy, what we have in the euro is an aircraft without wings and engines. It is that way because the makers rightly judged that the shareholders wouldn't fund a complete aeroplane. So they built what they could afford. They filled it with passengers, gave it a piggy-back ride to the upper atmosphere and cast it loose.
The theory was that, as it hurtled to the ground, the shareholders would see disaster looming and appreciate the folly of their parsimony. They would thus shell out for the missing wings and engines â so making the aircraft whole, and flyable, whence it would calmly resume its journey, untroubled by gravity.
This is the theory of the beneficial crisis, one which we explored once again when Dominic Lawson attributed it to Jacques Delors, with the label "benign crisis". And since this one instrument has possibly done more damage to the economic system than any other, it was worth looking further into that claim.
No one knows more of this from direct experience than Ambrose Evans Pritchard, who was the Telegraph Europe correspondent during some of the formative years of the project. Therefore, I asked him whether he thought it likely that Delors, as claimed, had ever asserted that building the euro would rely on the beneficial crisis, and whether he would have called it a "benign" crisis.
Ambose recalled that he had been told of the "beneficial crisis" concept about ten years ago (2002-ish) by a Commission official who had worked with Delors pre-Maastricht. Whether Delors said it publicly, he could not remember, but the idea seemed to have wide currency in the early EMU days.
Then, said Ambrose, in an intriguing addition, "I think it was a Monnet term that lots of people used - mostly behind closed doors, though Prodi dropped his guard once famously". And the word he had been told was most definitely "beneficial", not "benign". It is a term, he said, that pre-dates this issue. Una Crisi Benefica is the old term from Papal doctrine.
This English translation may reflect the Latin, the form expediunt discrimine coming out as one of the options for "beneficial crisis". In modern Italian, though, it seems to have morphed into "crisi salutare" â translated literally as "healthy crisis". And here, not only is there a wealth of usage evident, it goes back well over a century.
In contemporary works, we have evidence of Prodi in 2007 using the term, when he was Italian prime minister. And then, we have Delors himself, using the tem 2004, where he is cited, in an Italian language report, claiming that a "no" in the constitution referendum would not be "una crisi salutare".
Interestingly, we find it in Il Fatto in March 1999, a headline quote describing the affairs of the French socialists, under a picture of Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin (above). And, in the same year, we see Corriere Della Sera talk of "una crisi salutare" in relation to the collapse of the Santer commission.
Thus, it would seem that the concept of a beneficial crisis is well and long-established in Italian politics, the term openly used. The same could be said of France, where the term "crise salutaire" is also no stranger to the print media.
In the French press, there are multiple references to Delors in this context, who was quite obviously very familiar with the term, even if he never seems to use it directly in relation to the euro. But, familiar as he was with Catholic doctrine â as author of the subsidarity principle â he would have known exactly how to exploit the beneficial crisis to advance his cherished economic and monetary union.
Ambrose, therefore, is right â the "beneficial crisis" goes way back, but it also seems to be a very continental phenomenon. It has not been clearly identified in Britain as an essential part of the political toolkit, but Christopher Booker recalls us discussing it with me as early as 1999, after he had been to Brussels.
Nevertheless, the term remained virtually unknown in the UK until I wrote about it in my book Death of British Agriculture in 2001 and in The Great Deception in 2003, with multiple references from Booker in the print media.
Ambrose is the next most frequent user of the term, having first used it in print in May 2005, when he wrote that, "EMU's architects always expected trouble, but counted on a 'beneficial crisis' that would help push Europe further towards full economic federalism".
He was to return to the theme on 27 November 2007, writing that:
The politicians were told that the euro would ultimately lead to a crisis. They did not care. Indeed, they saw the uses of pushing events to a head as Romano Prodi candidly admitted as Commission president hoping for a "beneficial crisis" that would then enable Brussels to push its agenda, taking over parts of fiscal policy and establishing the beginnings of a debt union.
"The euro", wrote Ambreose, "was to be the midwife of the federal state".
Since then, only a few other British journalists have used the term beneficial crisis, or appear aware of the concept. Yet, as Booker's former editor, Dominic Lawson, has at last discerned, it is the driving force behind the most important issue in British politics today. It dominates the European stage and is threatening the entire global economy.
And all because the "colleagues" thought they could build a currency without "wings" and glue them on later.
