A Europe Made of Money

Emmanuel Mourlon-DruolEmmanuel Mourlon-Druol is Research Associate in the Department of Economic and Social History, University of Glasgow, and Associate in the Transatlantic Programme of the IDEAS Centre, London School of Economics.

出版者:Cornell University Press

作者:Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol

页数:368

出版时间:2012-7-17

价格:USD 55.00

装帧:Hardcover

isbn号码:9780801450839

丛书系列:Cornell Studies in Money

图书标签:欧洲研究政治学国际政治经济学国际关系经济史世界史

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.