Roy Jenkins

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.

Beyond deus ex machina: Rethinking the EMS creation, 1974-1979

The traditional story of European monetary cooperation in the 1970s following the abandonment of the Werner Plan in 1974, most often told …

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.

“Managing from the Top”: Globalisation and the Rise of Regular Summmitry, mid-1970s–early 1980s

Regular meetings of heads of state and government seem, in 2012, a common feature of international affairs. About forty years ago, however, such meetings did not really exist: ad hoc summits were the rule. Comparing the emergence of the European Council in 1974 and the G7 in 1975, this article explains why and how summitry has become routine in international politics.

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.

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