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G7

The international use of the euro: What can we learn from past examples of currency internationalisation?

The recent State of the Union speech by Jean-Claude Juncker sparked a discussion about the potential wider use of the euro on the international stage. Historically, it is not the first debate of this kind. I review four previous cases of debates on international currencies to reveal the different scenarios associated with their greater use, as well as the need to have a clear objective for a currency’s internationalisation.

Institutionalizing Trust? Regular Summitry in the 70s-80s (with N. Bonhomme)

This chapter argues that summits tried to foster trust both “internally” and “externally”: summitry aimed at developing not only trust among the leaders, but also crucially trust with regard to the Western (economic) system. These two ambitions represented a vital transformation of the international system in the 1970s and 1980s.

Assessing the Role of G7/8/20 Meetings in Global Governance

G7/8/20 summits are often accused of many ills: club of the rich, producers of pointless communiqués, unduly gigantic gatherings, over-prepared meetings and media-show events – in a word, useless. This chapter argues for a more qualified assessment of their added value to global governance. This chapter assesses multilateral summitry along three lines, examining respectively the process (the G7 as a diplomatic instrument), the outcome (what agreements G7s actually reached) and the counterfactual (what if the G7 did not exist?).

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?

International Summitry and Global Governance: the Rise of the European Council and the G7, 1974-1991

The volume investigates the rise of regular international summitry and its impact on international relations. It brings together the best specialists of this new field of historical enquiry in order to explore those features of global governance in their historical context, and open up an interdisciplinary dialogue with social scientists who have studied summits from their own disciplinary perspectives.

Less than a Permanent Secretariat, More than an Ad-hoc Preparatory Group: a Prosopography of the G7 Personal Representatives, 1975-1991

This chapter explores one of the very distinctive features of the organisation of G7 summits, namely the group of personal representatives, or ‘sherpas’. Following a prosopographical approach, the study highlights a number of common characteristics among sherpas, in spite of the potential heterogeneity of this group. It further underscores the ambiguity of the G7 as an institution as well as the web of complex relations in which the G7 has embedded itself over time.