The past and future of the EU: an interview with EurActiv
I talked to EurActiv Slovakia’s Chief Editor, Zuzana Gabrizova, on Monday 7 April.
The long and dwindling road to an incomplete banking union
It did not take just the past couple of years to create a European banking union, but at least 48. And it is still far from the fully-fledged European banking union that is now announced with great fanfare – running the risk of later disillusions. Taking a longer-term view on its emergence helps qualify the real nature of the Eurozone’s newest development.
Trade surpluses and the single currency
German trade surpluses are making once again the headlines. The European Commission decided yesterday to launch an investigation into Berlin’s “excessive” trade surplus. This surplus is so large, the Commission argues, that it saps the strength of the Eurozone economic balance (or, put differently, nurtures its imbalances). But is this concern really new?
The Euro Crisis: a Historical Perspective
This paper sheds light on the current euro crisis by looking at the debates preceding the conception of the euro. How can the early days of EU monetary cooperation help us understand today’s predicament? And what lessons can we draw from them for the euro?
[Book Review] Europe’s Unfinished Currency. The Political Economics of the Euro
Thomas Mayer s’intéresse dans ce livre aux origines et à l’évolution récente de la monnaie unique et propose une série de mesures pour restaurer la confiance dans l’euro.
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). This 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 negotiations which led to the creation of the European Monetary System thirty years ago can shed light on the Eurozone’s current crisis
The EMS, created in 1979, is part of the prehistory of the euro: it was a first concrete attempt at organising the European Union’s – that was still then the European Economic Community (EEC) – currency relations. And the discussions that took place then bear a striking resemblance to our current predicament.