Analyzes the roots of Europe's economic decline, examining institutions of the European Union and exploring possibilities for reform.

Europe’s financial crisis cannot be blamed on the Euro, Harold James contends in this probing exploration of the whys, whens, whos, and what-ifs of European monetary union. The current crisis goes deeper, to a series of problems that were debated but not resolved at the time of the Euro’s invention. Since the 1960s, Europeans had been looking for a way to address two conundrums simultaneously: the dollar’s privileged position in the international monetary system, and Germany’s persistent current account surpluses in Europe. The Euro was created under a politically independent central bank to meet the primary goal of price stability. But while the monetary side of union was clearly conceived, other prerequisites of stability were beyond the reach of technocratic central bankers. Issues such as fiscal rules and Europe-wide banking supervision and regulation were thoroughly discussed during planning in the late 1980s and 1990s, but remained in the hands of member states. That omission proved to be a cause of crisis decades later. Here is an account that helps readers understand the European monetary crisis in depth, by tracing behind-the-scenes negotiations using an array of sources unavailable until now, notably from the European Community’s Committee of Central Bank Governors and the Delors Committee of 1988–89, which set out the plan for how Europe could reach its goal of monetary union. As this foundational study makes clear, it was the constant friction between politicians and technocrats that shaped the Euro. And, Euro or no Euro, this clash will continue into the future.

Examines the domestic politics of European monetary integration

Presenting a sweeping analysis of the legal foundations, institutions, and substantive legal issues in EU monetary integration, The EU Law of Economic and Monetary Union serves as an authoritative reference on the legal framework of European economic and monetary union. The book opens by setting out the broader contexts for the European project - historical, economic, political, and regarding the international framework. It goes on to examine the constitutional architecture of EMU; the main institutions and their legal powers; the core legal provisions of monetary and economic union; and the relationship of EMU with EU financial market and banking regulation. The concluding section analyses the current EMU crisis and the main avenues of future reform.

This book provides a much-needed detailed analysis of the evolution of Europe over the last decade, as well as a discussion about the path of reform that has been trodden in the aftermath of the financial crisis. It offers a multidisciplinary view of the E(M)U and captures the main factors that induced the reform of the monetary union – a process that has not been linear and is far from being concluded. The author examines the policy responses designed throughout the development of the crisis and assesses the scale of the crisis in Europe, in comparison to other parts of the world, as well as its prolonged effects both in economic and financial terms. An update on the current ‘state of the art’ in the conception of risk-sharing mechanisms is provided. With its innovative approach, the book analyses the financing issues which need to be taken into consideration in the design of these instruments and highlights the main categories of governmental risk-sharing mechanisms – in particular, the ones to be used as ‘fiscal capacity’. This is a timely and topical book and will be of interest to a broad audience, including experts, scholars and students of European affairs, particularly those with economic, financial, legal and political science backgrounds.

A 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. The second 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.

Why have the states of Europe agreed to create an Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and a single European currency? What will decide the fate of this bold project? This book explains why monetary integration has deepened in Europe from the Bretton Woods era to the present day. McNamara argues that the development of a neoliberal economic policy consensus among European leaders in the years after the first oil crisis was crucial to stability in the European Monetary System and progress towards EMU. She identifies two factors, rising capital mobility and changing ideas about the government's proper role in monetary policymaking, as critical to the neoliberal consensus but warns that unresolved social tensions in this consensus may provoke a political backlash against EMU and its neoliberal reforms.McNamara's findings are relevant not only to European monetary integration, but to more general questions about the effects of international capital flows on states. Although this book delineates a range of constraints created by economic interdependence, McNamara rejects the notion that international market forces simply dictate government policy choice. She demonstrates that the process of neoliberal policy change is a historically dependent one, shaped by policymakers' shared beliefs and interpretations of their experiences in the global economy.