Once Upon a Time there was a currency called euro

A century ago a gentleman argued that although there is a certain fear that a war could happen, this should not happen, because it didn't make economic sense in a globalized and interdependent world.


The costs of war would be so high for industrialized countries, so that war would not occur.

The first world war began five years later!


Any parallels with the current situation and the possible break-up of the euro zone is entirely coincidental. :)
 
Still, the man won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933!
 
---- from wikipedia:
The Great Illusion is a book by Norman Angell, first published in Britain in 1909 under the title Europe's Optical Illusion and republished in 1910 and subsequently in various enlarged and revised editions under the title The Great Illusion.

According to John Keegan "Europe in the summer of 1914 enjoyed a peaceful productivity so dependent on international exchange and co-operation that a belief in the impossibility of a general war seemed the most conventional of wisdoms. In 1910 an analysis of prevailing economic interdependence, The Great Illusion, had become a best-seller; its author Norman Angell had demonstrated, to the satisfaction of almost all informed opinion, that the disruption of international credit inevitably to be caused by war would either deter its outbreak or bring it speedily to an end."