Check out this site for a compelling analysis on the current Eurozone crisis as it relates to Protestant and Roman Catholic legacies. Here's part of the essay from the BBC:
In Goethe's Faust, one of the most famous works in German culture, Mephistopheles persuades the Holy Roman Emperor to issue a new paper currency - despite one of his advisers warning that this is the counsel of Satan. Order duly breaks down as the Emperors' subjects go on a binge bearing no relation to their real wealth. Weimar Republic hyperinflation in the early 1920s - when "money went mad" and all moral as well as economic order was seen as collapsing - seemed a diabolical vision made real. Some in Germany suggest today's eurozone would be better dividing, with some kind of Latin Union on one side, and on the other a German-led group of like-minded countries including perhaps the (Calvinist) Dutch and the (Lutheran) Finns. The former head of the German industry association, Hans-Olaf Henkel, has said that "the euro is dividing Europe". He wants the Germans, Dutch and Finns to "seize the initiative and leave the euro", creating a separate northern euro. A new split along ancient lines? The government in Berlin has begun to plan for what it sees as a hugely significant anniversary in 2017 - 500 years since Luther began The Reformation. He was protesting against indulgences, a controversial attempt by the Papacy to solve its fiscal problems by persuading Europeans to buy absolution from their sins. One German commentator, Stephan Richter, has suggested mischievously that the eurozone's problems would have been prevented if only Luther had been one of the negotiators of the Maastricht treaty, deciding which countries could join the euro. "'Read my lips: No unreformed Catholic countries,' he would have chanted. The euro, as a result, would have been far more cohesive," says Richter. Richter is himself a Catholic, but an admirer of thrifty economics. "Too much Catholicism" he suggests, "is detrimental to a nation's fiscal health, even today in the 21st Century". But he believes some historically Catholic countries, such as Austria and Poland, may have come under more Germanic influence due to their geographical proximity. They are "Catholics perhaps, but with a healthy dose of fiscal Protestantism," he reasons. Commemorations in 2017 will doubtless try to stress that Reformation divisions between Protestants and other reformers and Catholicism were not too great. But the usually thrifty government under Chancellor Merkel has already promised 35 million euros to mark this birth of Protestantism. And where will the eurozone be in 2017? Still intact? Or coming to terms with a new historic divide between the Latins and the preachers of Protestant thrift?
