Trouble For The Euro? Not In Estonia

[pampango]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129234136

In the European Union, with its glum economic news and struggles to halt a debt crisis, there is some good news: There is a country that's actually excited about adopting the euro. It is the small Baltic nation of Estonia, a former Soviet republic and now an EU member, scheduled to enter the eurozone in January 2011.

The kroon became Estonia's currency in 1992. It was a powerful symbol that the Soviet occupation was really over. "What belongs to an independent country? Your own country, with borders, with your own government, with your own money," Ryaek says.

But Ryaek feels like his country of roughly 1.4 million people is still on a journey. Joining the EU, then NATO, moved Estonia closer to the West. Adopting the euro, he says, is the next step. "Of course we would like to belong somewhere. Away from Russia," Ryaek says.

"Wishful thinking, first of all," says Ivar Raig, an economist at Tallinn University. As a member of the eurozone, Estonia may end up being too busy paying other countries' bills, Raig warns. "We have moved to the West already. We are in the West, under the umbrella of the European Union and especially NATO. We have a good relationship with the United States of America," Raig says.

[xchrom]

1. A part of the world I would really like.

If I remember right a DUer went there - had some
Great pictures.