Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol
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A Europe Made of Money: the Emergence of the European Monetary System

manu 29/10/2013 Books

 80140100879390LA 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

 
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Euro Euro crisis European Council European Currency Unit (ECU) European monetary cooperation fund (EMCF) European Monetary System (EMS) European Unit of Account fiscal union François-Xavier Ortoli Gerald Ford Helmut Schmidt Jacques de Larosière Jean-Pierre Fourcade Jimmy Carter Otmar Emminger Roy Jenkins Valéry Giscard d'Estaing Werner Plan

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4 Responses to "A Europe Made of Money: the Emergence of the European Monetary System"

  1. Trade surpluses and the single currency says:
    14/11/2013 at 12:33

    […] of their neighbour’s currency. The sharing of a common monetary system – the snake, or the European Monetary Sytem (EMS) – indeed forced currencies to remain within limited bands of […]

  2. Online digital sources in international economic history: a frustrated view says:
    22/01/2014 at 15:11

    […] hence my frustration. Two examples can help make sense of this paradoxical situation. When writing A Europe Made of Money, I was looking for precedents to the EMS. To cut a long story short: the standard way of presenting […]

  3. Clionauta: Blog de Historia – Historia y fuentes digitales : ejemplos y problemas says:
    19/02/2014 at 11:01

    […] frustración. Dos ejemplos pueden ayudar a dar sentido a esta situación paradójica. Al escribir A Europe Made of Money estaba buscando los precedentes del SME. Para no alargarme: la manera habitual de presentar la […]

  4. An exercise in text mining and distant reading: Helmut Schmidt’s visit to the Bundesbank in 1978 says:
    23/04/2014 at 08:40

    […] of my frustration coming from the little use I could make of online digital sources in writing A Europe Made of Money, here is an example of the sort of text mining I wish I could do more often. Why choosing this […]

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European University Institute 
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