Maybe not "imposes" , it's voluntary participation. But there is no easy , not even intermediate route out of the Euro. And as money, it's not much different from a hard currency you can't control for countries that can't catch up with the developed economies of the north.
The "liberal with the truth" bit isn't about the ability to exit; it's about the EU being "externally controlled". The EU is an organization of which each Eurozone member is, well, a member. They have votes in the EU Parliament and European Council (the latter is responsible for appointing the ECB president) and a say in deciding the membership of the Executive Board.
(Indeed, the German Constitutional Court generally rules on the constitutionality of power transfers to Brussels based on the degree to which the control of said powers is democratic.)
i meant that the Euro, as national currency of italy and greece, is "externally controlled", cannot be bent to the needs of those countries , but to the needs of germany. Eurozone is not the EU
The Eurozone is a subset of EU members; decisions about the governance of the Euro are made by the Euro-using subset of the European Council (the upper house of the EU legislature, representing member states directly). Germany has a voting share on the Council proportional to its population.
Germany's outsized influence came 25 years ago, when it had the dominant part in writing up the rules and powers of the ECB.
germany has outsize influence, whether it is by choice, and whether they like it or not. Their decisions have such effects as bank bail-ins and capital controls in other euro countries
Not really. Germany effectively controls the euro, and it's not a great thing for many of its member countries. It was entered into as a union, sure, but now it's effectively a prison.
The first poster compared a proposed digital currency--one that no one might ever even use--to Nazi-era fascism and an assault on democracy.
Buboard suggests that Germany exerts coercive monetary pressure over some other Eurozone countries. That crosses the line for you?
If Ireland had independent monetary policy maybe it could have lanced the bubble earlier and not been hit with 14% unemployment after the end of the Celtic tiger era. If Greece didn't have Merkel on the other side of every table, it could have attempted something similar to the Plano Real, rebasing its currency completely and restructuring its society through default.
Or maybe they would be way worse off without Germany. Who knows? A claim that Germany has an outsized impact on monetary policy, at times to the disadvantage of other negotiators, is certainly debatable! But it's not the sort of thing you can brush aside ad lapidem. Especially not in the context of this farcically hyperbolic thread.
