Once again, Zero Hedge has an excellent article by Dylan Grice, marooned in Helsinki due to the flight ban,  on Europe, its currency and what the future may hold – as a taster :

It?s a good vantage point to think about the euro and the problems that currently blight it too. Sitting here writing in the extreme northeast of the eurozone reminds me just how diverse Europe is. I feel far from the eurozone and even farther from Greece, the current epicentre of its problems on many levels.

The geographical distance is huge. Helsinki is the eurozone?s most northerly city while Athens is its most southerly. But the ancestral distance is no less stark. Greece is the cradle of Western civilisation and Europe?s oldest nation, while Finland, colonised by the Swedes during the Northern Crusades of the thirteenth century and with no written history of its own until the sixteenth, is one of its youngest. While Athens is dominated by Mt Olympus from where Zeus was once thought to marshal the clouds, Helsinki is dominated by its cathedral, built in tribute to Tsar Nicholas I in 1852 and giving the city an echo of Romanov Russia.

These two nations even appear on opposite linguistic fringes: the Greeks still use the same distinct alphabet as their celebrated ancestors while the Finns?” ?Finno-Ugric?” tongue is one the few EU languages which isn?t a member of the Indo-European family.

Yet these countries share the same currency. In the cold light of day it?s difficult to understand why. What do they have in common – a shared ?”European-ness??” Possibly … but don?t Brazil and Angola have a shared ?”Portuguese-ness?”? Is anyone suggesting they get into monetary bed together?

Anyway, the more you wander around Helsinki and begin to understand it, the more you realise you don?t understand Europe or what ?’European-ness’? is. You might define it as consisting of three ancestral pillars: Graeco-Roman, Germanic and Christian. You might start with the Graeco-Roman tradition, from which comes the notion of centralised state power, of democracy, and in particular secular democracy, and from which the distinction between church and state is derived, in contrast to say, Islam, where there is no such distinction. Then there were the Germanic tribes outside and to the north of the old Roman empire. These tribes? members enjoyed equality in the eyes of the law long before the Magna Carta, and kings were elected according to merit rather than their blood line. They bequeathed Europe a flatter and more meritocratic structure, which tradition found lasting and significant expression in the success of Protestantism in Northern Europe following the Reformation. And you might conclude the final pillar of ?’European-ness’? to be Christianity, which gives its value system: respect for property rights, monogamy, etc. … but then you?d probably decide this was all a load of convoluted and unconvincing historical mumbo-jumbo and that you still didn?t know what it means to be a European.

And in any case, this “?European-ness?” hardly rolls off the tongue does it? If you ask an American what it means to be  American they?’ll instantly rattle off something about freedom and democracy; if you ask a Chinese what it means to be Chinese, you?ll instantly get something back about being a part of an ancient civilisation, not a country; if you ask a Brit what it means to be British they?ll mumble back something about fair play, bad food, and never winning at football.

Thoroughly recommended reading (as is Zero Hedge if it isn’t on your daily reading list).