The Currency of Ideas - (Cornell Studies in Political Economy) by Kathleen R McNamara (Paperback)

About the Book

Why have the states of Europe agreed to create an Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and a single European currency? What will decide the fate of this bold project? This book explains why monetary integration has deepened in Europe from the Bretton...

Book Synopsis

Why have the states of Europe agreed to create an Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and a single European currency? What will decide the fate of this bold project? This book explains why monetary integration has deepened in Europe from the Bretton Woods era to the present day. McNamara argues that the development of a neoliberal economic policy consensus among European leaders in the years after the first oil crisis was crucial to stability in the European Monetary System and progress towards EMU. She identifies two factors, rising capital mobility and changing ideas about the government's proper role in monetary policymaking, as critical to the neoliberal consensus but warns that unresolved social tensions in this consensus may provoke a political backlash against EMU and its neoliberal reforms.McNamara's findings are relevant not only to European monetary integration, but to more general questions about the effects of international capital flows on states. Although this book delineates a range of constraints created by economic interdependence, McNamara rejects the notion that international market forces simply dictate government policy choice. She demonstrates that the process of neoliberal policy change is a historically dependent one, shaped by policymakers' shared beliefs and interpretations of their experiences in the global economy.

Review Quotes

The Currency of Ideas has much to offer those desiring to learn more about the forces driving monetary integration in Europe.

A significant contribution to our understanding of the relationship between ideas and political and economic decisions.

An exhaustive case study.... McNamara's book provides a wealth of valuable detail on the path taken by European elites to develop a coordinated monetary policy and ultimately, a shared currency.

It is the prevailing wisdom that economic forces have driven Europe toward the adoption of its single currency, the euro, and that political forces have played a secondary role, if that. It is refreshing, therefore, to find a book that takes politics seriously in what is surely a political situation (as well as an economic one). McNamara considers not just politics but the ideas that condition political decisions and the environment in which those ideas are developed. An interesting book.... Well written with many useful references.

Kathleen McNamara's book is a welcome addition to the small but growing collection of scholarship which straddles the political/economic divide in order to understand contemporary developments in the global political economy.... Together with another recent Cornell publication, Louis Pauly's Who Elected the Bankers, McNamara's work provides a good example of both the strengths and limitations which a perspective anchored firmly in the scholarly mainstream can offer to our knowledge of how the global political economy is organized.

McNamara's book brings much good political and economic sense to bear on a subject where it is often lacking.

About the Author

Kathleen R. McNamara is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School.