ABSTRACT
The positions of national governments going into the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) conference were pretty well established. For France and most other European Community (EC) countries, the primary objective of EMU was to subsume German monetary power under the authority of European institutions. The German government also desired an agreement on EMU, mainly because it wanted to assuage the fears of other Europeans about a united Germany and demonstrate its continued commitment to European integration. The primary opponent of EMU among national governments was Britain, which viewed it as a gross infringement of national sovereignty and a step in the direction of a federal Europe. On the eve of the Maastricht summit, an EMU agreement was threatened by the demands of Spain and other poorer EC countries for economic and financial compensation as the price for their approval of a treaty.
