ABSTRACT
The establishment of a full monetary union among twelve or more EU states in 2002 represents an historical development of real significance, perhaps a key turning point in European economic and political development. The nation-states that emerged from the Second World War as discrete economic and political entities, the ‘Europe of the nations’, are on the very verge of transferring important aspects of their systems of economic (and perhaps eventually political) governance to the supranational European level. Apart from the implications that this is having and will continue to have on the very fundamental issue of macroeconomic management, it will also further accelerate the development of a truly integrated and interdependent economy within the European economic space, which the EU has defined.
