There are a lot of micro-currency in Western Europe. Personally I believe it's a step back because it reeks of protectionism but it's all the rage among my leftist friends (am a leftist too, but not pro micro-currency).
Europe is an old place, for better and worse. I question this stuff, but I won't judge it.
Isn't that called regionalism?
I don't know where academics put the bar, but in my mind any area that has its own non-dialect language or was once an independent entity for a good while can claim to be a nation. Though not sure what the claim would mean in practice.
That said, I'd rather see all these things die down and have a strong EU of federated states of whichever size helps democratic and economic progress. Tall order, I know.
Euskara is a language isolate. It is is unrelated to any other known living language.
>in my mind any area that has its own non-dialect language or was once an independent entity for a good while can claim to be a nation.
Dialect vs language is often a political decision, so even that criteria is subjective.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le%C3%B3n_(historical_region) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Le%C3%B3n
Sorry if I may seem pedantic, but there is no such thing as "Spanish" language (at least not inside Spain).
The language you are talking about is actually called "castellano" (Castilian).
The region took an economic hit during the 80s as the country transitioned to a tertiary-sector-heavy economy, which lumped together with the lack of investments from the new regional government and their inability to perform any sort of industrial restructuring quickly turned Leon from one of the most prosperous regions in the country to one of the least.
Basically the same issues and politics you see in coal country in the States.
These affinities have shifted many times in American political history. For example, Lincoln was a Republican.
The Fed can print 4 trillion dollars for Wall St and people don't care. That's getting pretty close to half of GDP for one year (at the time). Hundreds of millions of people's work product...
If they're going to print money like that at least inject it into the economy by buying stuff like free healthcare or education.
If you have a single currency over a single large economy then you have to do correct these imbalances manually via transfer payments that manually redistribute the wealth from the wealthiest regions to the poorest. There are a lot of things that can go wrong here. The size of the transfer payments may not be large enough to have any effect and it is not politically acceptable to increase it. (One of many small reasons for Brexit) Of course they are right because it is their wealth but this kind of solidarity is necessary to reduce inequality between countries that share the same currency. Then you need to make the decision which countries receive the transfer payments and which countries pay them. Again this is a problem that could be easily avoided by having multiple currencies.