A Europe Made of Money: The Emergence of the European Monetary System

A Note on Sources Cited in the Notes

285 A Note on Sources Cited in the Notes Because this book uses an extremely wide range of archival material—eighteen archives in six countries—it is necessary to clarify here how sources have been collected, used, and quoted. Most of the documents consulted are publicly accessible. Only a few required application for a derogation (Giscard papers, Banca d’Italia, HelmutSchmidt -Archiv). Given that the period studied is very close to the thirty-year rule applied in most European archives, some of the references given are to a temporary number (Zwischenarchiv,Intermédiaire),because the documents were not yet fully inventoried at the time of consultation. All the available sources of the EEC member states of the early to mid-1970s— with the exception of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Denmark, for reasons of availability and/or linguistic ability—have been used. Finance ministries , treasuries, central banks, foreign ministries, prime ministers/president papers , and, where available, some personal papers (Émile Noël, Otmar Emminger, Paolo Baffi) have been consulted. The documents consist of correspondence, internal notes, briefings, and most important, records of conversation (some official , some by a notetaker or a [prime] minister himself). For obvious reasons of space, not all documents seen could be referred to in the notes. Hence if only one source is given, it does not mean that others have not been consulted. Rather, it means that the others confirmed, in substance, the information contained in the only source quoted. This strategy helped me avoid multiple references, though it superficially gives the impression that the source is exclusively from one country. Where accounts differed, the difference is analyzed in the text or the note itself. Sometimes a document was located in an archive other than the one in which it was originally housed (e.g., a report of the Monetary Committee in The National Archives rather than in an EEC archive). This does not mean, of course, that the document consulted was not the original (e.g., the original report issued by the Monetary Committee). To this archival material that can only be seen on-site, I have added collections that are available online: the European Central Bank Archives (which contains the procès-verbaux of the Committee of Governors meetings), the Thatcher Archives, the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Digital Library, and the European Oral History Programme. English translations are mine unless otherwise noted. ...