ABSTRACT
The creation of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was a major step in the history of the European integration process. For decades after the Second World War, the European Community (EC) favoured economic integration with positive effects on growth, trade and welfare in Europe. However, the end of the Bretton Woods era and the international monetary and economic turbulence that dominated the 1970s made it clear that Europe should have gone further in the direction of tighter monetary, economic and political integration. At the end of the 1980s, the disintegration of the eastern European bloc and the transition of the former socialist states toward a market economy made the need for such a quantum leap even more compelling.
