The argument needs to be made, repeated and won.

As a territory having a common currency of its own, within a single continental market, it is natural that ideas will germinate within the euro zone to promote a strengthening of its economic, financial and administrative management. In practice this would assimilate such management with that of a politically unified state.

It is equally natural that when ideas are being expressed and then implemented, the perspectives which gain greatest traction will be those of the more important areas of the zone. Perhaps this should not justbe considered naturalbut also considered to be fair. After all, a majority of people live there. And it is fair that their interests get priority in any new arrangements being set up.

However those who live in other “less important” areas of the union, as in the smaller member states of the euro zone, must see that there is a problem here: new management rules could be introduced that might seem natural and fair in areas having significant endowments and where most people live. But they might be less fit for purpose elsewhere.

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Referendum

The referendum announced by Greek Prime Minister Tsipras about the agreement which had to be agreed with the country’s creditors, came as a surprise to everybody. Three and a half years ago a previous Prime Minister George Papandreou made the same move. Chancellor Merkel and then French President Sarkozy, soon raised huge trouble for him. He had to drop the proposal, resigned and lost the government.

Tsipras learnt the lesson and got the referendum proposal through Parliament in a day.

During this week, efforts were still being made to find a solution that would be acceptable to all parties.

If the referendumis still held as originally proposed, it is very probable that the yes vote in favour of the agreement being proposed by the European side would prevail, and contradict the line of the Tsipras administration.

A friend of mine from Greece, not a Tsipras supporter, told me that there is no time nor need to carry out a proper campaign. By staying closed, banks spread panic and become the best  campaignersneeded to mobilise the yes vote.

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Footfall

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote a number of long sci-fi novels which chronicle some global disaster. “Footfall” is another I’ve just read; it’s possibly their least satisfactory. It describes how aliens from outer space (they have a physical resemblance to elephants) arrive on an enormous space ship and attack our world by catapulting meteors down on our world from up high.

Millions, even billions of human beings are killed in the alien attacks, till from the earth a desperate multinuclear attack is mounted which successfully contains them. The novel lacks the tension that underpins “Lucifer’s Hammer” also by Niven and Pournelle, in which a huge asteroid crashes into the world and creates a disaster similar to the one which caused the total annihilation of dinosaurs millions of years ago.

Reading such stories, even as they spin out overwhelming disasters, does provide distraction, I find, from the monotony of air travel.