SINGLE CURRENCY

Date: 12/06/1997

UNLESS - as seems increasingly likely - the new French prime minister chooses to revisit old ground, the summit will be an occasion for rubber-stamping decisions made in other fora regarding the single currency.

EU leaders will be handed a series of legal texts by their experts detailing agreements on the conduct of policy in a monetary union reached at December's summit in Dublin and then modified at the Noordwijk finance ministers' meeting in April.

These texts translate into legal form the 'stability pact' for ensuring budgetary discipline in the euro-zone, and the framework for a new Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM II) to bind the non-euro EU currencies to the euro.

Two resolutions - one on ERM II and the other showing how strictly the stability pact should be applied - can be adopted by the summit. But two further regulations will have to go back to a ministerial meeting for formal agreement, perhaps at the 7 July gathering of EU finance ministers.

The first sets up an 'early-warning system' for monitoring budgetary policy in an errant member state, while the second establishes deadlines by which time certain measures must be carried out.

The heads of government are also due to approve the designs for the eight euro coins selected by a jury and an opinion poll.