The Future of EMU

As European integration continues, the future of EMU becomes ever more important. Can EMU help create an integrated European community, or will it prove a hindrance to the EU project? This book brings together the experts in the area to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the issues expected to face EMU over the next few decades.

No topic in European integration theory has raised so many questions
and provoked such a flourishing academic and intellectual debate as the
one concerning European monetary integration. The establishment of
a European currency union with the adoption of the euro as the single
currency for millions of EU citizens is arguably the single most important
accomplishment of the European Union. The European Monetary Union
(EMU) has massive economic, political and social consequences for the
European and international political economy.
This book does not attempt a comprehensive historical account of the
process leading to EMU, of its institutional setting and organization, its
economic characteristics and socio-political implications. The aim of
this book is more modest, although theoretically challenging. It seeks
to identify the underlying factors that made it possible to agree on such
a complicated and controversial matter, to explain why EMU occurred
within a particular time and institutional frame, and to identify the winners
and losers that resulted from EMU with an eye to distributional
politics and socio-economic interest groups. Above all the book will try
to assess the future of EMU in the context of the process of European integration.
The main question the book seeks to answer is whether EMU can
lead to the creation of the European supranational community or will
produce the disruption of the EU project.