"So,” said Jörg Haider with a slightly unpleasant smile, “you like the new Esperanto money?” I was interviewing the leader of Austria’s Freedom Party in early 2003, at a time when he was also applauding Saddam Hussein and supporting the suicide bombers in Israel and Palestine. His sarcastic comment about the newly introduced euro notes made me want to believe in the new currency even more. On a long reporting trip to Europe, I had been rather affected to find myself using the same money in Paris one evening as I had used to pay a Berlin taxi driver in the morning. I remembered how the Franco-German coal and steel agreement that was the nucleus of the European project was designed to make war within continental Europe “materially impossible.” On New Year’s Day 2002, it suddenly became possible to employ the same currency in Finland as in Greece (which surrendered the world’s oldest surviving monetary denomination in the form of the drachma). Why should one listen to any sneering about that, especially from a man not fully reconciled to the outcome of the Second World War?

My internationalist prejudice is not something for which I feel like apologizing, even now. I remember how I twisted with embarrassment when Norman Lamont, British Prime Minister John Major’s chancellor of the exchequer, returned from Brussels with the grand news that he had won the right to keep the visage of Her Majesty the Queen on any British version of the euro bill. If the Germans could make the remarkable sacrifice of the deutsche mark, their greatest postwar achievement, then why quibble over the insignia of the House of Windsor? I looked forward to showing my children the old British currency, just as I had kept a sentimental box of the ancient British coinage that had been making holes in our...