Monetary union
Some of the history in ‘A plan to keep Germany down’ (August/September 2012) is erroneous. You say that before the German re-unification talks, ‘monetary union was just another European grand project on the horizon’. Not true. The Berlin Wall came down in November 1989 and reunification happened a year later. Before the wall came down, the EU was moving steadily towards monetary union. The Hanover summit of June 1988 appointed the Delors committee to produce a plan for achieving economic and monetary union (EMU), which it did in April 1989. The Madrid summit of June 1989 agreed that the EU should move forward on the basis of that plan and that a conference would be held to revise the treaties.
Did German unification make much difference? It made it harder for Germany to backslide on its commitment to EMU. The French made sure that the Germans understood that EMU was the price they had to pay for unification.
