ion, Germany would be expected to exchange national monetary sovereignty--that is the deutsche mark--for a single European currency. The surrender of the deutsche mark was a huge political sacrifice for Germany. The deutsche mark was the symbol of postwar Germany's economic renaissance as well as its self-respect after the chaos of the Weimar Republic and the trauma of Nazism. Chancellor Kohl saw EMU as a means of anchoring a united Germany into a united Europe, one in which Germany would no longer be a front-line state but would fit alongside a newly democratic Poland and a more stable, democratic Eastern Europe liberated from the Soviet bear-hug.
President Mitterrand saw EMU as a strategic opening to break the monetary hegemony of the German Bundesbank through the creation of a supranational bank, the European System of Central Banks, in which France would have parity of influence with Germany.
Jacques DeLarosiere, former governor of the Bank of France and later head of the International Monetary Fund, is said to have remarked that EMU once an
...