Requiring a digital identity as a condition for participating in economic life effectively eliminates economic freedom.

By definition, a central currency intrudes upon a nation’s sovereignty. In Croatia, we experienced this, at least those less cautious of us who advocated for and implemented the euro, when the Croatian kuna was replaced by the EU’s supranational currency. This placed the European Central Bank at the helm of the overarching monetary authority.

Introducing a central digital euro would further limit our country’s ability to independently manage its fiscal and monetary policies, rendering the Croatian National Bank effectively redundant. Currently, the bank serves as a kind of intermediary between European structures and Croatia, but its role has largely been symbolic. With the digital euro, even this symbolic role disappears.

Croatian citizens would then be directly dependent on decisions made by the European Union, receiving money directly from it. How much money there will be, how it will be managed, who will limit eurocratic power in the context of programmable money, and what monetary decisions will be made during future crises—all of these would fall under the jurisdiction of Ursula von der Leyen and Christine Lagarde.

Full digitalization of money, particularly through centralized digital currencies or private payment systems, shifts real power from democratically accountable institutions to technocratic, supranational, and corporate structures of questionable legitimacy.

Human dignity in a hyper-technologized world requires that individuals not be reduced to mere data points or manageable system resources. Subordinating humans to technology is a process of technocratic dehumanization. https://notesfromtechnopoly.substack.com/p/a-case-against-the-digital-euro