Black Wednesday 1992 - 18 September 1992

America does not, like China, dedicate a year to some human quality or patron animal, though if you're in San Francisco at the beginning of the Chinese New Year you might think so watching the great brilliant floats gliding down Market Street and the great beast puffing out shafts of smoke if not fire – I'm thinking of the Year of the Dragon. And from time to time the secretary general of the United Nations has designated a coming year – I remember U Thant's poverty year, which was meant to quicken the world's interest and concern for the poor everywhere, a very large order – maybe because New York City is the Headquarters of the United Nations or from this country's long, at times, intimate cultural relationships with China, I don't know but somebody – I can't find out who – called this year in America the Year of the Woman.

That sounds odd especially in America where women have been around for some time and have been possibly more vocal about their presence and their rights than the women of any other country since, anyway, the immortal Christabel Pankhurst and her generation of freedom fighters marching in tune to Dame Ethel Smyth's rousing music, shoulder to shoulder.

I believe the phrase the "Year of the Woman" was invented by a politician and my guess would be a Democrat, a liberal Democrat acting on an existing prejudice and hoping to mobilise the women's vote against Mr Bush on several issues, most of all on the burning, the never-flickering issue of abortion. The Republican platform fell short only just of banning abortion except under the most testy and testing conditions. And Governor Clinton and the Democrats are, if not for abortion on demand close enough to it in the public mind as to make very little difference at the November polls. Because well over 70% of all adult Americans are in favour of liberal abortion rights and President Bush is so adamantly against it, the former Republican leader Senator Barry Goldwater, once their great presidential hope, believes that President Bush will lose the Election on the issue of abortion alone. But before we turn to the larger – and I must say more entertaining – picture of why the politicians are taking seriously the Year of the Woman, why after Tuesday election of primaries throughout the country they had better.

I ought to say something about the loud sound, which alarmed us all on Thursday morning, of the pound falling out of the European monetary system. As one money expert put it, himself a man who retains the most urbane demeanour but this time was as ruffled as the rest of us, a currency crisis is something that is not supposed to happen these days. The very idea evokes images from old news reels with grave statesmen in top hats emerging from limousines to urge calm in gravely voices. It reminded me of the vivid image of a prime minister, as vivid as only images can be that you yourself create when listening to the radio, it was the voice the very troubled Scots voice of Mr Ramsay MacDonald in, I believe, the summer of 1931 speaking to the people of Great Britain and reporting on the findings of an emergency committee appointed to say what Britain should do about great unemployment and about what till then had been hopefully called the American slump but which was, in fact, worldwide.

What I remember was Mr MacDonald's alarm over what he called the deficit – it was by the way piddling by today's lavish standards – and saying that "in this emergency, the first thing to do was to protect and maintain the pound", that's what the government did. I don't know that it made much difference to the Depression, which went on deepening, on and on into the pits by the end of 1932, by which time between a quarter and a third of all American able-bodied men – what we now call the male workforce – 13 millions were out of work. And the director of a foundation that was giving me a visiting university fellowship warned all the incoming fellows that they must be prepared through the winter of 1932/3 for the second American revolution. He was a conservative, mild level-headed man, not an alarmist by a mile; we were impressed and I have to say excited but it didn't happen. At the end of the year, a white knight came to the rescue in the very unlikely heroic guise of a gentle Hudson Valley landowner with a fluting tenor voice, his name Franklin Delano Roosevelt – but that's another story.

To the turmoil of the pound or, if you prefer another metaphor, the running aground of the European exchange rate machine. I'm sure you don't want to hear my personal opinion about a subject on which I have picked up half a dozen quite conflicting views from economists, each of whom swears that his is the only truly reliable analysis. I think the best I can do now until we see what happens in the days after the French vote on Sunday is to quote the gist of an editorial, a leader, not for the wisdom or folly of its views – I don't know how right or wrong it may be – but it is more than any other leader written in this country likely to be read and digested by the people in and out of government who will initiate or handle the American response. It's from the Wall Street Journal on Thursday morning.

On a second reading, I see its far more cheerful than I'd first gathered, I hope that's not why I picked it. Anyway, it says that if, as seems likely, Europe can't manage the degree of economic unity it has already undertaken, the Maastricht Treaty may be already a dead letter, but it goes on even if the French vote "non", we doubt that all the clocks in Europe will stop at 8pm Sunday leaving the continent frozen in time. It will only mean that well intended efforts further to dismantle national barriers overlooked one important factor, the people.

Now the Wall Street Journal you maybe sure does not chant the phrase "the people" in the celebrating sentimental vein of the poet Carl Sandburg – in the people, yes. If the Journal were in the habit of publishing poems as editorials it might have declaimed, the people damn some of them, recruit the rest, for the Journal sees as the principle foes of the treaty self-defeating nationalism and parochialism on the continent, the French farmers assertion of a god given right to a dole, the forceful wrongness of the protectionists, the clumsy appeals of various statesmen to national chauvinism.

The Journal sees even if Maastricht collapses, better and broader avenues towards European unity, but by ignoring the people, the Journal means that the constitution of Maastricht is based on technocracy not democracy and it has done something you cannot do when you set up a democratic nation. The actual invention of a nation is something the Americans have had over 200 years experience of, they're still at it. What you mustn't do is to take powers away from a legislature. What the first Americans did, what James Madison, you might say, imposed on an often sceptical and then incredulous convention was the idea of giving the separate states, 13 then, most of the powers of separate nations by way of banking, education, transport, crime.

To this day, every state has its own criminal code. See that the states in Europe, national legislatures have very considerable powers representing all the factions and interests of their people and keep them in a healthy friction. That way they will go on representing the real concerns of people. Only in absolutely vital matters that transcend the local states interests – war and peace, health, security, individual freedom – should the national government be superior.

The Journal condemns Maastricht because it chose to award itself indirectly the powers of both legislature and executive. The Journal appears to believe that the people in Denmark, in Germany, in Britain who protest that the powers of their own parliaments are being robbed are right, and that for that legitimate reason Maastricht may be dead anyway, but when it said that a "no" vote in France will shake the world's currency and security markets, the Journal believes that this has less to do with Maastricht than with remaining problems of the world economy. It goes on, the cries of doom are overblown, there are other existing institutions addressed to the larger and vital task of bringing East Europe including Russia into the community of Nations, NATO and the North Atlantic Cooperation Council and GATT and the Treaty of Rome of 1957 and the single European Act of 1986. All these says the Journal draw the framework for the much greater negotiations there will have to be to make the EC a real common market.

As for a single currency, look how much effort is required to hold together the existing monetary system. And those who blame the Germans for the crisis are reminded of the great costs of absorbing East Germans, the cost of reunification and the huge subsidies the Germans finally made to Russia, to Greece, Russian troop withdrawals from Germany. It winds up with the central flaw of Maastricht and response again to the people who say you couldn't begin to knit 12 nations together without creating a bureaucracy as the leader in the first place. Well, concludes the Journal – and I'd say this is likely for a long time to be the official and sincere American line – "there's something to that theory, but in Democratic countries theories have little meaning if people feel they are being denied a voice". Europe's politicians are learning that lesson the hard way.

Well, I see I have no time left to salute or go on about the Year of the Woman and what happened this week to give the splendid phrase a lot of practical meaning. Perhaps next week can be the week of the Year of the Woman.

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