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261 Conclusions THE EMERGENCE OF A EUROPEAN BLOC The salient feature of this enterprise [the EMS] . . . is no doubt the exchange rate system of fixed but adjustable parities. All the rest are flanking measures to support and embellish this exchange rate system . It is quite remarkable that exchange rate policy is the chosen instrument for a political demonstration of European unity and stability. —Otmar Emminger But there is, of course, much more to the idea of a European Monetary System than the immediate intervention arrangements. Over the long perspective it looks increasingly clear that the continuing relative shift in economic power between the United States on the one hand, and the EEC countries taken as a whole on the other, is being insufficiently reflected in political, institutional and monetary arrangements. —Gordon Richardson There is a striking contrast between the EMS’s lack of technical originality and its political, political-psychological, political-economy dimension and later influence . The political dimension of the EMS was indeed so strong that it managed to create the perception over the long run that the EMS was a truly new and innovative mechanism. Since the 1960s, the CAP had been the EEC’s flagship policy, although its influence was admittedly progressively diminishing.1 With the inception of the EMS, monetary cooperation and integration moved to the very top of the EEC’s political agenda, partly replacing the CAP as the EEC’s flagship endeavor, and becoming a privileged instrument of political affirmation of the EEC vis-à-vis the outside world. Monetary cooperation thus became the new focus the EEC had been looking for since the Hague summit in 1969. Yet, however significant this was for the 1970s—and in the decades to come—the conclusion of such a multilateral study cannot solely focus on the financial dimension of European cooperation,and I will instead try to examine its wider implications. In doing so, in this concluding chapter I will fulfill three main tasks. First, I will relate the book’s findings to wider historiographical issues. Second, I will place 262 CONCLUSIONS the book in the perspective of the various ways in which political scientists conceptualize European integration, with the hope that such a perspective will give some transdisciplinary value to this historical study. And third, I will outline the five main implications of the EMS creation. Based on these conclusions, I will provide an explanation of the creation of the EMS that is different from the existing historical literature and the literature on political science. The Interaction of Transnational, Supranational, and Intergovernmental Phenomena In contrast to the conventional accounts of the EMS negotiations, which focus solely on the year 1978, I have presented a different way of understanding the creation of the EMS by highlighting longer-term processes. The scholarship on the EMS inception primarily stresses the role of personalities (Schmidt, Giscard, and Jenkins), one institution (the Bundesbank), or specific meetings (the three European Councils of 1978, the Aachen summit, or the Group of Three). Of course, as I have shown, all these actors, institutions, and meetings mattered, to varying degrees, in the overall conception of the EMS. But from the longerterm view I have taken in the book, it is possible to advance another explanation of the creation of the EMS. In examining the prehistory of the negotiations, I have uncovered two important features: the transnational learning process amid a transnationally connected monetary elite and the impact of the emergence of the European Council in the EEC’s institutional setup. These constitute the intellectual and technical roots, as well as the political and institutional origins, of the monetary scheme that entered into force in March 1979. A Transnational Learning Process in a Transnationally Connected Monetary Elite It has been argued that the lack of technical originality of the EMS can largely be explained by the spread of a Bundesbank-inspired consensus on a snakelike system among a transnationally connected monetary elite. Regarding the transnational learning process idea, I have tried to go beyond a purely abstract, commonsensical, and overly theoretical approach of policy learning by providing some flesh to the claim that policymakers did have many competing ideas in mind while discussing European monetary cooperation in the mid- to late 1970s. As Emanuel Adler and Peter Haas put it, “‘failed ideas’ do not become extinct but are merely shelved for future reference.”2 It is relatively easy, however, to have such an intuition; it is much more difficult to find tangible, explicit, and THE EMERGENCE...

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