Introduction

The aim of this short volume is to provide a critical historical narrative of the evolution of the European Monetary Union (EMU). The current debt crisis that has engulfed the eurozone has its origins in the three-decade long struggle to create a zone of “monetary stability” in the wake of the demise of the international post-war Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s. The history of the EMU, culminating in the Maastricht blueprint in 1992, reveals that this deeply flawed monetary edifice was informed by the prevailing neoliberal/monetarist economic doctrines, favoured by Germany. These ideological preferences in the framing of EMU were deeply imbedded from the earliest experiments in the early 1970s. The final blueprint, embodied by the Maastricht design of the euro, witnessed the birth of an international currency that was devoid of a coherent sovereign power. As Eichengreen has quite succinctly argued, “But most fundamentally, the problem is that the euro is a currency without a state. It is the first major currency not backed by a major government, there being no euro-area government, only governments of the participating countries” (Eichengreen, 2011, p 130). A stateless currency is, indeed, akin to Pirandello’s character in search of an author.