EURECON Outputs
This page presents the latest updates about the work-in-progress of the EURECON team, its publications and presentations.
Aurélie Andry, in Le Mouvement Social, n°275, 2021, pp.137-152
Abstract – This paper explores the forgotten history of the European labour movement’s struggle for a “workers’ Europe” during the 1970s and early 1980s, and in particular its efforts to build a European-wide trade unionism capable of supporting its proposals on employment and working time reduction. The paper first traces the emergence of the alternative project of European unity that the trade unions formulated in the 1970s, and the movement to build a unitary and combative trade unionism on a European scale. Secondly, the article reveals the struggle of the European trade union movement for a generalised reduction in working time in western Europe, through a twofold effort consisting of institutional lobbying and building a transnational mobilisation of workers – admittedly, on a fragile and limited basis. Thirdly, the paper sets out to examine the failure of this unprecedented struggle and to assess the main reasons for it in order to better understand the affirmation of another kind of Europe, that is, an increasingly neoliberal Europe in which full employment, economic solidarity, and the improvement in working and living conditions for the masses became, at best, a secondary objective.
Alexis Drach, An Early Form of European Champions? Banking Clubs between European Integration and Global Banking (1960s-1990s)
in Business History, published online 2022
Abstract – Between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s, most large European commercial banks created European banking clubs, which were hybrid cooperative organisations meant to respond to American competition and to the progress of European integration. Based on the archives of several commercial banks from France and the UK, this article examines how the three main European clubs (EBIC, Europartners, and ABECOR) emerged and developed in the 1960s and 1970s, and continued to exist despite increasing challenges in the 1980s. The article argues that banking clubs were an early attempt at creating truly ‘European’ banks, or European champions, even though their experience was abandoned. They also participated in European integration in a different way than the one the European Commission promoted. These clubs were an important institutional response of European banks to both globalisation and European integration.
Alexis Drach, Reluctant Europeans? British and French Commercial Banks and the Common Market in Banking (1977–1992)
in Enterprise & Society, n°3, vol. 21, 2020, pp.768-798
Abstract – More than ten years after the financial crisis, the challenges of European banking and of the eurozone highlight that the existence of a European common market in banking is at best partial. Examining how British and French commercial banks and banking associations responded to the plans for a European common market in banking between 1977 and 1992, this article contributes to explaining this partial character, and highlights that this project was primarily political. This challenges the widely held view that large companies tended to push for more integration. This article shows that until the mid-1980s, the banking sector was not necessarily calling for European financial integration in the form of a common market in banking for at least three reasons: they doubted the usefulness of such a move, they feared an increase in regulation, and they focused more on domestic or global matters than on European ones.
Alexis Drach, From Gentlemanly Capitalism to Lobbying Capitalism: the City and the EEC, 1972-1992
In Financial History Review, n°3, vol. 27, 2020, pp. 376-396
Abstract – The City of London has long attracted much academic and popular attention. However, little research has been done on the relationship between the City and the European Economic Community in the 1970s and 1980s, despite the accession of the United Kingdom in 1973. Based on archival material from central and commercial banks in the UK and France, this article explores the relationship between the City and the EEC, from the accession of the UK to the EEC in 1973 to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which was meant to be the year of the completion of the single financial market. The article explores two areas: the influence of the City on EEC financial regulation, and how this influence was exerted. It pays particular attention to two committees chaired by the Bank of England, the City Liaison Committee and the City EEC Liaison Committee, and to British banks. The article argues that if the EEC played a part in the formalisation of British banking regulation, the City also played a key role in shaping EEC plans for financial regulation.
Alexis Drach and Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, Les fabricants de la coopération économique et monétaire européenne: personnel et réseaux de la Direction générale des affaires économiques et financières de la Commission européenne, 1957-1992
in Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 2023
Résumé – L’Union économique et monétaire constitue l’un des plus grands chantiers de l’histoire de l’intégration européenne. Pourtant son histoire est encore mal connue, centrée sur les aspects monétaires plus qu’économiques, sur quelques acteurs très célèbres, sur les banques centrales ou, en économie, sur les grands mécanismes macro-économiques. Cet article propose d’aborder la question par l’étude de la Commission européenne et, plus particulièrement, par sa direction générale la plus importante pour les questions économiques et monétaires : la « DG » II, en charge des affaires économiques et financières. Surtout, l’article adopte une approche originale centrée délibérément sur les acteurs. Par une analyse de réseau et une analyse prosopographique, il étudie les liens de ces derniers avec les organismes clés des discussions monétaires européennes et explore leur trajectoire professionnelle. En plus de rendre visible des acteurs autrement largement passés sous silence, l’article montre l’existence d’une véritable nébuleuse de personnes impliquées dans les questions économiques et monétaires européennes, reliant des espaces nationaux, européens et, plus largement, internationaux.
Aleksandra Komornicka, Stable support, scant initiative: European business associations and Economic and Monetary union, 1946-1992
in Business History, published online 2024
Abstract – The article investigates the views of European business associations on the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) project between 1946 and 1992. In doing so, it places the campaign for EMU organised by the Association for the Monetary Union of Europe in the run-up to the Maastricht Treaty into its previously neglected historical context. The article argues that although European business associations supported EMU in general, their views concerning its construction evolved and differed. As a result of these divergences, they only responded to political proposals made by others, instead of pro-actively pushing a specific agenda forward.
Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, Adjusting an institutional framework to a globalising world: the creation of new institutions in the EEC, 1957-1992,
in Journal of Economic Policy Reform, n°3, vol. 23, 2020, pp.273-289
Abstract – This article explores the development of all new EEC institutions between 1957 and 1992 within policy areas relevant to the possible development of a European single currency. It argues that if most institutions created pre-1992 were not crisis management institutions as would be the case post-2008, some important institutions were created in response to the perception of a structural international banking/political/economic crisis, particularly in the 1970s. This comparison in time underlines the continuity of reflections about the missing elements of a functioning single currency area, the obstacles to reform, and sheds light on the radical institutional changes that occurred post-2008.
Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol and Enrico Bergamini, Economic union in the debates on the creation of the euro: new evidence from the tapes of the Delors Committee meetings
in Journal of Digital History, forthcoming 2024
Abstract – Economic union is often said to have been overlooked in the negotiations on the creation of the euro. While there are many accounts of the government and central bankers’ negotiations to create the European single currency, the discussions within the Delors Committee which drafted a report outlining how to create an Economic and Monetary Union provide unique insights into the debates. Through a mixed-method analysis combining several text mining and network analysis techniques with a close reading of the transcripts, and a listening of the tapes, the article explores the debates that took place within the Committee. We identify which, when, by whom, and to what extent were different topics raised in the Committee, and find that economic union was the second most discussed topic during the Committee’s meetings, after the design and functioning of the future European central bank. The article further shows that the real absence from the debates was the question of banking regulation and supervision.
Alexis Drach, Removing obstacles to integration: the European way to deregulation, in Alexis Drach and Youssef Cassis (eds), Financial Deregulation: A Historical Perspective, Oxford University Press, 2021
Alexis Drach, Economic and Monetary Union: from 1957 to the euro crisis, in Reinventing Europe: the History of the European Union from 1945 to the Present, Brigitte Leucht, Katja Seidel and Laurent Warlouzet (eds). Bloomsbury, 2023, pp.183-202
Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, History of an Incomplete EMU, In: Amtenbrink, F. and Herrmann, C. (eds.) EU Law of Economic and Monetary Union. Oxford University Press, 2020
Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, European monetary integration, In: Battilossi, S., Cassis, Y. and Yago, K. (eds.) Handbook of the History of Money and Currency. Springer: Singapore, 2020
Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, Debates about economic adjustment in Europe before the Euro. In: Gosh, A. R. and Qureshi, M. S. (eds.) From Great Depression to Great Recession: The Elusive Quest for International Policy Cooperation. International Monetary Fund: Washington, DC., 2017
Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, European Integration and globalisation since 1970. In: Segers, M. and Van Hecke, S. (eds) The Cambridge History of the European Union. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol and Roberto Ventresca (eds), “Economic thought and the making of the euro: intellectual patterns and policymaking in European integration, 1957-1992,” Contemporary European History, forthcoming
Aurélie Andry, Social Europe, the Road not Taken. The Left and European Integration in the Long 1970s, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Abstract – This book examines the European Left’s attempt to think and give shape to an alternative type of European integration-a ‘social Europe’-during the long 1970s. Based on fresh archival material, it shows that the western European Left-in particular social democratic parties, trade unions, and to a lesser extent ‘Eurocommunist’ parties-formulated a project to turn ‘capitalist Europe’ into a ‘workers’ Europe’. This project favoured coordinated measures for wealth redistribution, market regulation, a democratisation of the economy and of European institutions, upward harmonisation of social and fiscal systems, more inclusive welfare regimes, guaranteed employment, economic and social planning with greater consideration for the environment, increased public spending to meet collective needs, greater control of capital flows and multinational corporations, a reduction in working time, and a fairer international economic order favouring the global south. During the pivotal years following 1968, deeply marked by labour militancy, new social movements, economic crisis, and the unmaking of the ‘postwar compromise’, a window of opportunity opened in which European integration could have taken different roads. The defeat of ‘social Europe’ was a result of a decade-long social conflict which ended with the affirmation of a neoliberal Europe. Investigating this forgotten struggle and the reasons of its defeat can be useful not just to scholars and students eager to understand the historical evolution of European integration, the European Left, and European capitalism, but also to anyone interested in building alternative European and global futures.
Aurélie Andry, La battaglia dimenticata per un’Europa sociale. Zapruder, 51, pp. 54-72.
9 January 2024: participation in a roundtable on the history of EMU for the newly-created EMU Lab at the EUI (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol)
24 November 2023: “What archives can and cannot allow in historical research on social partners” at the event “ShaPE: EU Social Partners as Makers and Shapers of Social Europe: A new project funded by the European Commission” organized by the Alcide De Gasperi Research Centre and the Academy of European Law at the EUI (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol)
8-9 November 2023: “The value of reopening old quarrels” at the conference “Taking stock: 25 years of EMU” organized by the Dutch National Bank and Bruegel in Amsterdam (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol)
22 September 2023: ‘Enabling or Not Enabling: Negotiating Supranational Supervision at Maastricht,’ workshop ‘European Governance between Crises,’ Bocconi University (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol)
21 September 2023: ‘The impossible centralisation: the struggles of economic policy coordination in the EEC, 1957-1992,’ BLEST seminar, Bocconi University (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol)
5 July 2023: ‘Oral history as a source for prosopography and network analysis,’ Oral History Summer School, University of Luxembourg [Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, cancelled participation]
22 June 2023: ‘Women and gender in the making of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union: methodological and conceptual issues,’ workshop ‘Women and gender in international economic history,’ EUI (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol)
12 June 2023: roundtable on: “The Commission legislative proposal for the new Stability and Growth Pact: An interdisciplinary discussion co-organised with the REBUILD Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence” (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol)
15-16 May 2023: ‘A historical perspective on the study of European elites: the making of EMU through the lens of prosopography and network analysis,’ colloquium ‘EU staff and professionals’ studies’ at the College of Europe in Bruges [Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, cancelled participation]
16-18 March 2023: The private ECU, Business History Conference, Detroit (Aleksandra Komornicka)
July 2022: Panel ‘Non State Actors and EMU’ at the World Economic History Congress, Paris
April 2022: Conference ‘Banks, businesses and EMU,’ University of Glasgow
14-15 October 2021: [online]Workshop ‘Digital Methods in History and Economics,’ University of Hambourg (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol)
27 September 2021: Séminaire de sociologie politique de l’Europe, University of Strasbourg (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol)
5-10 July 2021: [online]Networks 2021 Conference (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol)
30 June-2 July 2021: [online] Historical Network Research Conference, Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol)
June 2021: [online] EURECON panel at the Council for European Studies (Aurélie Andry, Alexis Drach, Aleksandra Komornicka, Marvin Schnippering, Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol)
23 February 2021: [online] Between Internationalisation, Professionalisation, and Economic and Monetary Union: A Social and Network Analysis of the Development of the European Commission’s Directorate for Economic and Financial Affairs, 1957-1992 (Alexis Drach and Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol) – Joint IBE/EURECON Seminar, University of Glasgow
13 October 2020: International banking regulation in Europe and the world, 1970s-1980s (Alexis Drach) – “FinLux” Seminar, C²DH, University of Luxembourg
7-8 October 2020: A text mining approach to the records of the Delors Committee meetings (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol) – The Werner Report, 50 Years On, University of Luxembourg
22-24 June 2020: [cancelled] Non-state actors and the making of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union, 1957-1992 (Aurélie Andry, Alexis Drach, Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, Marvin Schnippering, Dorothea Todd) – Council for European Studies, University of Iceland, Reykjavik
23-25 April 2020: [cancelled] Germany and the question of the incompleteness of EMU (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol) – MatchPoints Seminar 2020, Aarhus University
23 January 2020: Presentation of the EURECON project (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol) – Workshop on European integration history, University of Tokyo
6 November 2019: Keynote of Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol at Journée d’études ‘Le goût de l’archive à l’ère numérique’/Workshop ‘The allure of the archives in the digital age’, Rennes, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme en Bretagne
17-19 October 2019: Non-state actors and EMU (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol) – Conference ‘Reshaping Europe. Towards a Political, Economic and Monetary Union 1984–1989’, Hildesheim
18-21 September 2019: The German DGB and the British TUC in the European Integration process: Side lined observers or active non-governmental actors? (Marvin Schnippering) – The European Labour History Network Conference, Amsterdam
18-21 September 2019: The European trade unions’ struggle for a ‘European New Deal’ during the late 1970s and early 1980s (Aurélie Andry) – The European Labour History Network Conference, Amsterdam
9-10 September 2019: Presentation of Aurélie Andry – Third Annual Graduate Conference on the History of European Integration, European University Institute, Florence
9 November 2018: Social Europe in the long 1970s: the road not taken (Aurélie Andry) – The European Construction in the 1980s-1990s and the Present Crisis, Gramsci Foundation, Rome
9 November 2018: Does one market need one money? Historicising the policy debate of the 1980s (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol) – The European Construction in the 1980s-1990s and the Present Crisis, Gramsci Foundation, Rome
10-11 October 2018: Workshop to present work-in-progress of EURECON project (Aurélie Andry, Alexis Drach, Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol), University of Copenhagen
10-11 September 2018: Presentation of Alexis Drach – Second Annual Graduate Conference on the History of European Integration, European University Institute, Florence
19 June 2018: Presentation of EURECON (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol) – Seminar at Bocconi University, Milan
7 June 2018: Competing visions of fiscal union: the question of resource transfers in the EEC, 1974-1992 (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol) – Workshop ‘Towards a European Fiscal Union: historical roots, economic foundations and constitutional challenges’, European Economic and Social Committee, Brussels
17-18 May 2018: Prosopography in international and economic history, EUI, Florence (organised in the framework of EURECON)
28 February 2018: Presentation of EURECON (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol) – Robert Schuman Centre’s Seminar Series
19 December 2017: Presentation of the EURECON project (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol) – C²DH, University of Luxembourg
6 September 2017: Presentation of the EURECON project (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol) – Department of Political Science, LUISS University, Rome
23 February 2017: Presentation of the EURECON project (Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol) – International Business and Enterprise Cluster Seminar, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow
27-28 April 2023: International economic thinking and the making of the euro: intellectual patterns and policymaking in European integration, 1950s-1990s, European University Institute
25-26 April 2022: Businesses, banks and the making of Economic and Monetary Union, 1957-1992, University of Glasgow
17-18 May 2018: Prosopography in International and Economic History, European University Institute