ABSTRACT
Ever since Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) first emerged on the agenda of the European Community (EC) there have been analyses trying to explain why it happened. More often than not, however, the kinds of arguments provided by scholars offer only a partial explanation of the EMU process. This is totally understandable. Many analyses do not even set out to explain anything more than a particular part of the process, e.g. the role of the national governments, the Commission, the national and supranational experts, ‘globalisation’, policy learning, etc. In fact, the process itself is so complex that one cannot imagine a parsimonious explanation. Yet the explanations provided by scholars sometimes contradict each other. Some authors, for example, argue that the national executives are the core actors in the process of creating EMU. Others state that one cannot understand the outcome of the EMU process without looking at the process of policy learning that took place in the context of the European Monetary System (EMS). In other words, we find that scholars value the various factors that influenced the EMU process differently.
