The rhetoric of European monetary union

The agreement on EMU included in the 1992 Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty) represents the most daring move towards fully-fledged integration undertaken by European leaders so far. However, the crisis of the euro zone, its origins and political and economic consequences, cannot be discussed only in terms of that fateful decision, but must be viewed as part of a more general crisis of the particular approach to European integration that has been followed since the 1950s. Piris (2011) distinguished three dimensions of this crisis: the risk of a collapse of monetary union; popular distrust in the European institutions and widespread disenchantment with the very idea of European integration; and dysfunctional institutions and ineffective decision processes in a Union of twenty-eight highly heterogeneous member states. The best way to understand the nature of the general crisis, I submit, is to start from EMU because monetary union, with all its gaps and fragilities, is a metaphor for the entire process of European integration as it has developed so far.

The essence of metaphor is ‘understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5). In particular, structural metaphors ‘allow us. . .to use one highly structured and clearly delineated concept to structure another’ (ibid.: 61). In the following pages and chapters I shall use EMU primarily as a structural metaphor.