After Strasbourg: A different party than expected (1989-1992)

Abstract

Like the ECSC, the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) would never become a Dutch favourite. And like the ECSC, the EMU again made European integration a predominantly continental affair, centred around the Franco-German axis, with the Netherlands’ best allies the UK and Scandinavia at a distance. Unlike the ECSC, however, the EMU saw the Netherlands become a prominent engineer of this course of events in European integration. Dutch financial-economic and monetary technocrats were leading figures, launching far-reaching plans for monetary union from the mid-1970s and proposing ingenious interlinks between monetary union and the deepening of market integration. Tellingly, the treaties that created the EMU and the euro were both signed on Dutch soil, in Maastricht and Amsterdam.