A figure like Helmut Kohl certainly understood that this was not a one-country world, in the very telling phrase you’ve just used. Yes. He certainly did, as does Chancellor Merkel. So was this an institutional mindset or a national mindset? This mindset is the product of success.
You had a prestigious institution, the Bundesbank, with a successful monetary policy 20 to 50 years ago – when almost everyone else in the world was making one policy mistake after another. But with the euro we had entered a new world. And this world was changing fast.