A Europe Apart? The EMU, the New Economic Governance and the Future of European Integration

This paper deals with the relationship between monetary integration and the rest of European integration. There are three questions to answer. The first is, “Did European integration cause monetary integration?” The second is, “Did European integration shape monetary integration, or it was monetary integration that shaped European integration, at least since Maastricht?” The third question is, “How did the crisis of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) impact European integration on the whole?” The key thesis of this paper is that monetary integration has its own logic, origins, and dynamics. All of them are different from those at work for other sectors under integration. Monetary, economic, and political integration are connected and influenced by each other. Nevertheless, they remain three separate pillars of a historical process that would be better to call “European integrations.” The convergence of these integrations allowed completing monetary integration, which, at that point, oriented the whole integration process.