The euro was the product of more than a dozen committees and
governmental bodies that met hundreds of times over a period of
40 years. Each involved representatives of as many as 12
European nation-states, many of which had met each other in
battle not long before. A single currency wasn't the project's
original objective, as Harold James notes in his meticulous
account of their deliberations, and as Europe crept its way
toward the introduction of the euro in 1999, policy makers'
steely resolve to build a new continent ran up against their
inability to get along. Reading "Making the European Monetary
Union," it seems miraculous that anything came out of the
process at all. Mr. James, a historian at Princeton, begins with
the 1957 creation of the European Economic Community (EEC), a
customs union between six Western European states, and concludes
with the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which set the stage for a
common currency. But the impetus for European monetary
integration began earlier. Under the Bretton Woods s