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10 - From the Werner Report to the Start of EMU

from Money and Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2023

By
Hubert Zimmermann
Edited by
Mathieu Segers  and
Steven Van Hecke
Mathieu Segers
Affiliation:
Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands
Steven Van Hecke
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
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Summary

In November 1968, the finance ministers of the Group of Ten, comprised of the leading industrial nations, convened in Bonn for an emergency meeting. It focused on recent monetary turbulence in the markets, particularly the rampant speculation against the French franc and the British pound, but also on the weakness of the American dollar, a core issue of international monetary diplomacy throughout the 1960s. The finance ministers of France, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States, representing the major Western allies of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), exerted strong pressure on the Germans to revalue their currency so as to stop the speculative movements against the weaker currencies. (Throughout this chapter, unless specified otherwise, ‘Germany’ and ‘Germans’ refer to the FRG.) Their efforts were to no avail. The proceedings, humorously described in many ex-post accounts, soon bordered on the farcical and ended with complete disagreement.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the European Union , pp. 284 - 307
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Recommended Reading

Dyson, K. and Featherstone, K.. The Road to Maastricht: Negotiating Economic and Monetary Union (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnston, A. and Regan, A.. ‘European Monetary Integration and the Incompatibility of National Varieties of Capitalism’, Journal of Common Market Studies 54 (2016): 318–36.Google Scholar
Marsh, D. The Euro: The Politics of the New Global Currency (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2009).Google Scholar
McNamara, K. R. The Currency of Ideas: Monetary Politics in the European Union. (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Mourlon-Druol, E. A Europe Made of Money: The Emergence of the European Monetary System (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Mourlon-Druol, E. ‘European Monetary Integration’, in Battilossi, S., Cassis, Y. and Yago, K. (eds.), Handbook of the History of Money and Currency (Singapore, Springer, 2020), pp. 809–32.Google Scholar
Zimmermann, H. ‘The Fall of Bretton Woods and the First Attempt to Construct a European Monetary Order’, in Magnusson, L. and Stråth, B. (eds.), From the Werner Plan to the EMU: In Search of a Political Economy for Europe (Brussels, Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 49–72.Google Scholar

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