ECONOMIC THOUGHT AND THE MAKING OF EUROPEAN MONETARY UNIONMaes’s

A review essay on Ivo Maes, Economic Thought and the Making of European Monetary Union: Selected Essays of Ivo Maes, with forewords by Guy Quaden and A. W. Coats, Cheltenham, U.K., and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 1 84064 800 7, hardcover, 2002.European economic integration, leading to the Single Market and at the start of 1999 to the replacement of eleven national currencies by the euro, remains tumultuous, with France and Germany exempting themselves in November 2003 from the budget deficit limits of the Economic Growth and Stability Pact (the Maastricht Treaty), which had been binding on less politically powerful countries such as Portugal. Ivo Maes is ideally suited to provide insight and perspective on the economic thought underlying these developments. As Deputy Head of the Research Department of the National Bank of Belgium and formerly an administrator (that is, a generalist rather than a specialist economist) with the Commission of the European Communities, he is a central bank insider whose book carries a foreword by Guy Quaden, Governor of the National Bank of Belgium, and concludes with a long essay written with Jan Smets, Director of the Research Department of the National Bank of Belgium and Commissioner-General for the Euro, and Jan Michielsen, formerly Head of the Foreign and Financial Market Departments of the National Bank of Belgium. In Part 3, Maes, Smets, and Michielsen argue that Belgium played a leading role in shaping the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and especially in promoting Franco-German agreement. At the same time, Maes can view the monetary authorities as an academic outsider, a professor at the University of Leuven and at the ICHEC business school in Brussels, a sometime visiting professor at Texas Lutheran College and Duke University, and a respected historian of economics. His Brussels vantage point, in a city and country particularly closely engaged in the evolution of the European Community but not in one of the major powers within the Community, also contributes to an enlightening perspective. There has been a torrent of books on the politics and economics of the euro (e.g.Padoa-Schioppa, 1994), as well as specialist periodicals such as theJournal of Common Market Studies, but Maes stands out by considering the process as an historian of economics.