France rediscovers the importance of sovereignty in response to Facebook’s cryptocurrency

The French Finance Minister has said he will block Facebook’s plans to launch a global cryptocurrency, citing its threat to monetary sovereignty.

Followers of the Brexit debate in Europe may be surprised to hear France suddenly leaping to the defence of national sovereignty since it’s among the keenest for a federalised European Union, in which nation states are entirely subservient to a trans-continental authority. But it looks like there is at least some residual national pride left among French politicians, it just takes the ambitions of US tech giants to awaken it.

Speaking at an OECD conference on virtual currencies, Bruno Le Maire said “I want to be absolutely clear: in these conditions, we cannot authorise the development of Libra on European soil,” according to AFP. “The monetary sovereignty of countries is at stake from a possible privatisation of money … by a sole actor with more than 2 billion users on the planet.”

Facebook announced its masterplan to revolutionise the global currency system back in June and was immediately met with startled resistance by various governments, including the US, which had assumed currency was their thing. Plenty of other people also expressed alarm at the prospect of a company with many question marks hanging over it suddenly deciding to reinvent money, and it was never likely that a continent that had only recently invented its own currency would tolerate the imposition of another.

It’s hard to see how Facebook will be able to persuade national governments to accept this threat to their currencies, even if they are supranational ones. The fact that France is being especially vocal on the matter is a great illustration of how subjective the matter of sovereignty is. When your opponents want greater independence they’re parochial, isolationist and xenophobic, but when your own interests are threatened, sovereignty becomes a matter of utmost importance.