Varieties of currency nationalization and denationalization

Friedrich Hayek conceived monetary nationalism as the antithesis to the gold standard regime, identifying it with monetary internationalism and looking for alternative possibilities of money denationalization. Connecting to the work of Eric Helleiner, a broader view of both monetary internationalism and monetary nationalism is presented, focused on the nationalist social engineering use of national currency as one of central symbols of national identity (one nation, one currency). In the long run, Keynesian policies of external devaluation undermined the position of national currency in the nationalist symbolic of most nation-states. However, it may be misleading to conceive the fading of monetary nationalism, recently challenged also by the rise of decentralized digital currencies, as the restoration of the monetary internationalism. The current international monetary regime can be described as monetary imperialism, marked by the dollarisation of the many peripheric economies, regional monetary unions, and the spread of the semi-colonial currency board arrangements.