rencies to move up and down within certain limits. Once again, an oil crisis intervened to put pressure on the system. Then came a further blow with the election of a Socialist French government in 1981 led by Francois Mitterrand. There is a view, shared widely among European political analysts, that the decisive moment for EMU arrived in 1983, a full eight years before the Maastricht Treaty negotiations, which set down a precise timetable for launching the single European currency.
             In 1983, France faced another devaluation of the franc. President Mitterrand had flirted with "Socialism in one country," refusing to accept that this was an out-of-date notion in an increasingly integrated European economy. Jacques Delors, his centrist finance minister, told him the hard truths of economic interdependence. The Socialist government resolved to pursue a franc fort policy based on a sound currency that would commit to preserve its value against the deutsche mark without engaging in competitive devaluations. Delors went on to be chosen as president of the European Commission in 1984 and took up the office in Brussels the next year. After a hesitant start, he launched the program for creating a single European market that would lead to the free circulation of capital, goods, and services by 1992. Alongside the 1992 program came the influential "Cecchini" report written by experts in the European Commission, which argued that a single currency would enhance the benefits of the single market because it would save transaction costs.
             In 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the single market project took on a new political dimension. Delors, supported by Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany, pressed for economic and monetary union, later the EMU, as the essential counterpart to the single market.
             In essence, Delors proposed a grand bargain: In return for Europe (especially France) giving its blessing to German unificat...