| book details |

Ideas and Elites: The Social Construction of Economic and Monetary Union

By (author) Martin Marcussen

| enquire |

| book description |

Drastic changes in the way money is used create enormous direct and indirect changes in the societies affected. Martin Marcussen has studied the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in the light of the ideational developments that Maurice Allais and John Maynard Keynes experienced in their lifetimes. The author asks why it is that by the end of the 1980s, there seemed to be complete consensus about such politically contentious issues as central bank independence, low inflation, stable currencies and low public deficits. He analyses why the main EMU negotiators did not disagree about these crucial and highly central issues in macro-economic policy making and consequently decided to institutionalise these ideas in the formal organisations, rules and procedures of the EMU. He further examines why EU member states, once the treaty on EMU was formally ratified, were ready to undertake reforms to their domestic structures which earlier were considered illegitimate just a few years ago.