Title: France and the politics of European Economic and Monetary Union∗
Abstract: ‘What a frightfully dry subject for a woman’ (p. viii) was the observation made in 1997 by the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Paris, of the issue that had driven French politics for almost three decades and was to lead to the adoption of the euro two years later. In fact Valerie Caton is very well placed to write about European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) from a French perspective, having started her career at the UK Representation to the European Communities in Brussels in 1982, before becoming First Secretary for Internal Political Affairs at the British Embassy in Paris from 1988 to 1992 and then Financial and Economic Counsellor in Paris from 1997 to 2001. She has combined the knowledge gained from her professional experience with some primary research in the archives of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the French National Archives and François Mitterrand's private papers, as well as from consulting a limited range of secondary sources to write a stimulating book. While not an academic monograph, her book nonetheless makes an important contribution to our knowledge of French policy-making, not only in the years leading up to the Treaty of Maastricht but, perhaps uniquely, also in the period between 1992 and the present day. Yet in doing so it raises almost as many questions as it answers.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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