Federico Romero

Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol

This volume is the first detailed study of the emergence of regular and frequent heads of government meetings (summits), covering the period from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. Summit meetings of heads of government have become 'banal' in today's world. Yet they are a relatively recent practice that took off only in the mid-1970s. The aim of the book is to explore the origins of this new feature of global governance in its historical context. Why did heads of Western governments decide to regularly meet up in the European Council and the G7? What were they aiming at? How were these meetings run and what consequences did they have? How did other actors of international relations – states as well as non-state and/or transnational actors - react to this transformation? Based on newly released archival material, International Summitry and Global Governance investigates the rise of regular international summitry and its impact on international relations. The volume brings together the best specialists of this new field of historical enquiry in order to explore those features of global governance in their historical context, and open up an interdisciplinary dialogue with social scientists who have studied summits from their own disciplinary perspectives. This book will be of much interest to students of international history, Cold War studies, global governance, foreign policy and IR in general.

The rise of the G7 and the European Council, 1974-1991

International Summitry and Global Governance

A Europe Made of Money is a new history of the making of the European Monetary System (EMS), based on extensive archive research. Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol highlights two long-term processes in the monetary and economic negotiations in the decade leading up to the founding of the EMS in 1979. The first is a transnational learning process involving a powerful, networked European monetary elite that shaped a habit of cooperation among technocrats. The second stresses the importance of the European Council, which held regular meetings between heads of government beginning in 1974, giving EEC legitimacy to monetary initiatives that had previously involved semisecret and bilateral negotiations. The interaction of these two features changed the EMS from a fairly trivial piece of administrative business to a tremendously important political agreement. The inception of the EMS was greeted as one of the landmark achievements of regional cooperation, a major leap forward in the creation of a unified Europe. Yet Mourlon-Druol’s account stresses that the EMS is much more than a success story of financial cooperation. The technical suggestions made by its architects reveal how state elites conceptualized the larger project of integration. And their monetary policy became a marker for the conception of European identity. The unveiling of the EMS, Mourlon-Druol concludes, represented the convergence of material interests and symbolic, identity-based concerns.

Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol

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