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France and the Politics of European Economic and Monetary Union
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France has been widely acknowledged as the principal driving force behind European economic and monetary union (EMU). Every French president from Georges Pompidou onwards has placed the creation of EMU at the centre of France’s European policy. President François Mitterrand finally clinched the deal when, in December 1991, he secured German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s agreement at the Maastricht summit to a specific, irreversible timetable for the move to the euro by 1 January 1999.
In my first posting to the British Embassy, Paris, during 1988–92, as First Secretary for Internal Political Affairs, I witnessed the political events around this summit including, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mitterrand’s increasingly desperate struggle to hold together a domestic consensus behind his agenda for modernising the French economy and integrating Germany into Europe, culminating in a wafer-thin ‘yes’ vote in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty referendum. In 1997, I returned to the Paris Embassy, as Economic and Financial Counsellor, to report on the country’s recovery from the economic impact of German reunification and on the uneasy co-operation between a Gaullist President, Jacques Chirac, and a Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, that eventually took France into the single currency in 1999.
At a reception in 1997, soon after I arrived in Paris, the Daily Telegraph correspondent asked me what my job in the Embassy was. When I told him, he looked at me pityingly: ‘What a frightfully dry subject for a woman!’, he observed. In this book, I wanted to show why, to me, it didn’t seem dry at all. On the contrary, it seemed extraordinary that, for example, a decision in 1971 by President Nixon to de-link the US dollar from gold could ripple across the Atlantic and create political crises in Europe; or that a decision to peg one currency to another, or to let it float, could make the difference in how wealth was distributed across a society, or between countries. Yet, such ‘technical’ decisions rarely entered the political domain.
Valerie Caton - Personal Name
1st Edtion
978–1–137–40916–4
NONE
France and the Politics of European Economic and Monetary Union
Economics
English
Palgrave Macmillan
2015
USA
1-225
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