A Europe Made of Money: the Emergence of the European Monetary System
A Europe Made of Money is a new history of the making of the European Monetary System (EMS), based on extensive archive research. Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol highlights two long-term processes in the monetary and economic negotiations in the decade leading up to the founding of the EMS in 1979. The first is a transnational learning process involving a powerful, networked European monetary elite that shaped a habit of cooperation among technocrats. Thesecond stresses the importance of the European Council, which held regular meetings between heads of government beginning in 1974, giving EEC legitimacy to monetary initiatives that had previously involved semisecret and bilateral negotiations. The interaction of these two features changed the EMS from a fairly trivial piece of administrative business to a tremendously important political agreement.
The inception of the EMS was greeted as one of the landmark achievements of regional cooperation, a major leap forward in the creation of a unified Europe. Yet Mourlon-Druol’s account stresses that the EMS is much more than a success story of financial cooperation. The technical suggestions made by its architects reveal how state elites conceptualized the larger project of integration. And their monetary policy became a marker for the conception of European identity. The unveiling of the EMS, Mourlon-Druol concludes, represented the convergence of material interests and symbolic, identity-based concerns.
Reviews
Jerry Mushin, EH.net, November 2012
Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2013
Lucia Quaglia, Journal of European Integration History, July 2013
Aidan Regan, LSE Review of Books, February 2013
Laurent Warlouzet, Cold War History, February 2013
Review Choice, January 2013
Mathias Haeussler, Reviews in History, May 2013
Guido Thiemeyer, Francia, No. 4, 2012
Éric Monnet, La vie des idées, April 2013
Andrew Morriss, Cayman Financial Review, April 2013
Mauro Campus, Il Sole 24 Ore, August 2013
Ivo Maes, Financial History Review, April 2014
Mark Gilbert, Fernando Guirao, Yuichi Hosoya, Amy Verdun, introduction by Federico Romero, H-Diplo Roundtable Review, April 2014
Hubert Zimmermann, H-Soz-u-Kult, April 2014
“The Interdisciplinary Challenge in European Integration History,” Journal of Contemporary History, October 2014
Vincent Duchaussoy, Histoire, Économie & Société, n°3, 2014
Donatella Strangio, Journal of European Economic History, 2013
Anne-Caroline Hüser, Journal of Common Market Studies, 2015
Amy Verdun, European Union Studies Association EUSA Review, 27:2, 2014
Relations Internationales, n°162, 2015
Françoise Berger, Politique Européenne, 49:3, 2015