Monnet's Brandy and Europe's Fate
Monnet's Brandy and Europe's Fate: A Determined Frenchman's Vision of Integration Serves as a Guide to Ending the Eurozone Crisis
Strobe Talbott
Series: The Brookings Essay
Copyright Date: 2014
Edition: DGO - Digital original
Published by: Brookings Institution Press
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctt14qrxq7
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Book Info
Monnet's Brandy and Europe's Fate
Book Description:

The past five years have been turbulent for the eurozone. Yet leaders such as Angela Merkel and Fran�ois Hollande are determined to keep The European Project intact, and even among one-time critics there is a broad consensus that the eurozone will have to hang together.

Strobe Talbott introduces the extraordinary life and vision of Jean Monnet-the man credited as the architect of European unity. Monnet died in 1979, long before the euro went into circulation, and his relevance today is all the more striking in light of his idiosyncratic career. He was born in 1888 to a long line of brandy artisans. He had no formal training as an economist, yet he is ranked alongside Keynes. He was never elected to public office, and his fellow countrymen sometimes mocked him as "the great American." Ironically, some believed that Monnet's arguments were particularly effective with FDR, and later speculated that they might even have helped shorten World War II by a year.

In this essay, Talbott demonstrates how Monnet's vision of integration may serve as a guide to ending the current eurozone crisis. With minds in key capitals now focused on cobbling together institutional measures of the sort that Monnet believed necessary for monetary union, his vision of a united Europe may well survive and, over time, succeed.

eISBN: 978-0-8157-2607-4
Subjects: Economics, Political Science
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. 1-3)
  2. Monnet’s Brandy and Europe’s Fate A Determined Frenchman’s Vision of Integration Serves as a Guide to Ending the Eurozone Crisis
    Monnet’s Brandy and Europe’s Fate A Determined Frenchman’s Vision of Integration Serves as a Guide to Ending the Eurozone Crisis (pp. 4-31)

    MONEY IS AN INSTRUMENT of governance as well as commerce. It enables citizens to participate in the economic life of their societies while reminding them where political authority resides and where their loyalties belong. So it has been since ancient times, when visages of Nebuchadnezzar and Caesar were stamped on the coins of their realms, and so it is today. In almost all 195 countries on Earth, the change in people’s pockets and the banknotes in their wallets are an assertion of national sovereignty.

    But today there is an exception to that general principle: the euro, which is the common...

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