In 2019, a research paper in the journal Nature Human Behaviour empirically showed that many events that will one day be viewed as historic attract little attention at the time. It appears that this is true for the European monetary system as well.
When the concept of a common European currency gained traction in the 1990s, the central idea was to unite a continent that for centuries had been torn apart by war. The euro was part of a long-term European peace project. And it did unite in the beginning: the spreads between bonds from Italy, or other Mediterranean countries, and those from Germany, came down to zero.
