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Monetary union

Some of the history in ‘A plan to keep Germany down' (August/September 2012) is erroneous. You say that before the German re-unification talks, ‘monetary union was just another European grand project on the horizon'. Not true. The Berlin Wall came down in November 1989 and reunification happened a year later. Before the wall came down, the EU was moving steadily towards monetary union. The Hanover summit of June 1988 appointed the Delors committee to produce a plan for achieving economic and monetary union (EMU), which it did in April 1989. The Madrid summit of June 1989 agreed that the EU should move forward on the basis of that plan and that a conference would be held to revise the treaties.

Did German unification make much difference? It made it harder for Germany to backslide on its commitment to EMU. The French made sure that the Germans understood that EMU was the price they had to pay for unification.

But I think EMU would have happened anyway, partly because of the economic logic for it that the British tend to overlook. In 1987, a report by Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, the late, great Italian economist, appeared. It convinced Jacques Delors, the Commission president, that the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) - which linked most EU currencies and stabilized their exchange rates - could not survive the liberalization of capital controls within the EU that had been agreed but not at that stage implemented. Huge sums of money sloshing around the EU would tear the ERM apart - and in fact that is very nearly what happened during the ERM crises of 1992 and 1993. The logic of the Padoa-Schioppa report was that only a credible political commitment to move towards permanent exchange rates or a monetary union would secure the ERM.

By 1988, Delors had convinced Chancellor Kohl of the necessity of moving towards EMU. There were, of course, other political arguments in favour of EMU. But long before the wall came down, Kohl and most of the German leadership were committed to monetary union.

Charles Grant

Cyber-weapons

Your coverage of cyber security in the December/January issue showed excessive bias towards cyber-crime, involving commercial entities, rather than cyber-warfare, as waged by states.

There was no mention, for example, of the ‘Flame' cyber weapon which was described by Kaspersky Lab in May last year as ‘the world's largest and most complex attack toolkit to date.'

In fact, this distinction between cyber-crime and cyber warfare does not make much sense. But I note that it is important to the British government, which prefers to talk more of crime rather than warfare.

The government would perhaps not like overtly to discuss cyber-warfare because it is clear not only Russia and China have been engaging in it, but our ally, the US, has been doing so along with Israel, for several years.

Should The World Today accept the government's distinctions?

Elizabeth Young