Completing the Maastricht contract: Institutional handicraft and the transition to European monetary union

Abstract:

When the Maastricht Treaty on European Union was finally ratified in 1993, many EU observers and participants expressed serious doubts that economic and monetary union (EMU) would ever take place. Nevertheless, five years later EMU took flight, on 1 January 1999, as planned. It is this puzzle that this article seeks to explain. It does so by focusing on how EU institutions completed the incomplete contract agreed by the Member States at Maastricht.