The launch of the single currency is profoundly different to any economic project previously undertaken by Europe, the President of the Bundesbank, Dr Hans Tietmeyer, warned last night. "Monetary union is a one-way road. You can't come back," he told a major Catholic conference in Brussels on the euro.
It was not a technical operation, or one like the exchange rate mechanism which left some room for marginal manoeuvre, he said. If monetary union exchange rates were to be locked together forever, that would also be true of monetary policy.
Before they sign up to the euro all had to realise and accept the implications of commitments to the "long-term rules of the game", Dr Tietmeyer insisted, and they had to realise "that you can't legally or politically stray from that road". Opening a conference organised by Europe's Catholic bishops, the Bishop of Hildesheim in Germany, Dr Josef Homeyer, said that the social and cultural implications of the euro had not been sufficiently debated. In addition to sound economic foundations, he said, the euro would need "a climate of hope".
"Man is entitled not only to be given information about the currency itself but the European vision which lay behind the euro," Dr Homeyer said. "A climate of hope is not the same as a general sense of optimism. A climate of hope must come from a fair balance between efficiency and justice in our society. A climate of hope must also testify to the placing of man at the centre of the European political order.
"A climate of hope must finally also give expression to the Christian concern for the poor and excluded."
Reflecting a Germanic as much as a Christian perspective, he insisted that the church needed to discuss what was required for the single currency to succeed and how its stability could be sustained. "We need that stability to fight mass unemployment. A market economy had not only to be efficient but just, and that is not possible without price stability," he said.
Speaking earlier to journalists Dr Homeyer and the Bishop of Rotterdam, Dr Adrianus van Luyn, said the church had a part to play in asking moral questions about the euro and in creating that climate of hope: how would it affect the poor and the European social model of society? How would the euro affect the EU's neighbours and those in the Third World? Who will be required to take on the burden of change? How about accountability?
The church, they said, could offer a platform for such a dialogue. The implications politically of monetary union were profound, not only for the euro countries, but for the enlargement process, Dr Tietmeyer argued, and that was why it was necessary to get it right from the start with a rigorous application of the Maastricht criteria.
Success, he said, depended on countries genuinely being able to meet the competitive challenges that monetary union would bring. "We must succeed, there is no second chance down the road." Dr Tietmeyer said that the euro was not a deus ex machina which could solve the problems of unemployment and poverty. Indeed there were substantial risks to the whole project if the fundamentals were not right - that was why the decisions to be taken in 1998 were so crucial.
Many member states had to do far more to prepare, France and Germany no less than the rest, he said.
The 200-strong weekend conference was organised by the Brussels office of the Commission of the Bishops Conferences of the European Communities.
